After a week away, it can be hard for students to transition back to the classroom and remember the expected behavior. To make sure you have a smooth end of the year, it’s important to revisit your classroom expectations and rules. Here are five tips for revisiting classroom expectations with your students to help create a safe, productive learning environment.
1. Take Time to Connect
When your students come back from spring break, it’s important to re-connect with them and let them know that you’re happy to see them. Instead of spending time prepping last minute things for the day, take a few minutes to greet students as they come in. Welcoming your students back to the classroom will re-establish feelings of trust and safety, and will help ease the transition back to the classroom setting.
You can also use morning meeting as a time to welcome students back and help them re-establish those connections with peers and adults. Use a familiar greeting that your students enjoy and take some time to just have fun.
Important note: While it’s important to take time to connect with your students individually and let them share what they want to tell you about their break, remember that for some students, spring break was not relaxing and fun. For this reason, try to stay away from focusing your morning meeting on having students go around the circle and share what they did over break. This activity can be very anxiety producing for some, and they might not feel comfortable sharing.
2. Do Community Building Activities
Even though the school year is winding down, your classroom community is still an essential part of your classroom environment. Set aside time to rebuild your classroom community with some fun community building activities. Doing this will help ease your students back into the learning environment by strengthening their SEL skills and relationships with one another.
3. Revisit Classroom Expectations
When your students come back after spring break, don’t just pick up where you left off with curriculum. Your students have been out of the classroom routine for several days, and you need to re-establish expectations before you can dive back into your lessons. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself constantly stopping your lesson to remind students of the expectations.
Take time to review classroom expectations (aka classroom rules) with your students by talking about what the expectation is, why it’s important, and how to meet the expectation. Have a few students model the expectations for the class and let students practice. Give specific, positive feedback to students so they know exactly what they’re doing well and will continue to display that behavior.
Bonus- If you have anchor charts with visuals, make sure you’re referring back to those too!
4. Review and Practice Classroom Procedures
Remember all of those procedures you taught at the beginning of the year (how to line up, how to get supplies, etc.)? Well, it’s time to review those too.
Just like classroom expectations, choose a few students to model each classroom procedure BEFORE your students need to do it. This will keep you from having to give tons of reminders and redirection. Pull out any anchor charts you created with the steps of the procedure and visuals. Give your students time to practice in small groups and make sure you give them feedback!
5. Review and Practice Using Materials
Last, but not least, you need to review how to use materials correctly. Don’t dive into an exciting, new activity or lesson without explicitly reviewing how to use each material. If you skip this step, you’ll find yourself taking materials away from students because they’re not using them correctly.
Have a student volunteer model how to use the material and discuss with the class what they notice. What does it look like? What does it sound like? Then, give students a chance to practice using the materials with a familiar activity. Make sure to give feedback to your students to let them know exactly what they’re doing correctly and remind them if something needs to be fixed.
Conclusion
Although you might be able to hit the ground running after a relaxing and rejuvenating spring break, your students need a little more time to re-acclimate to the classroom environment. Spending time reconnecting with your students and reviewing expectations, routines, and procedures will help set you up for a successful end of the year.
