March 27, 2007

Below is our newsletter for the week. Remember, we are not the end-all, be-all! We are just teachers sharing our thoughts and ideas with you. Feel free to modify strategies you receive from us to fit you and your classroom.

I've started an Inspiring Teachers Group on Facebook.com and encourage you to join! Having recently been introduced to the idea behind social groups like Facebook, I thought it would be a great idea to create a group for those of us who are, or at least continue to aspire to be, inspiring teachers! I hope you'll search for it on Facebook and join. If you don't have a Facebook page, it is very easy to create one and search for specific groups to join. I'd love to hear from all of you who are active on Facebook to share your thoughts, concerns, and ideas.

Click Here to go to Facebook.com

Weekly Tip: Teaching Life Skills

Teaching life-skills is an important part of building a classroom community. These skills/attitudes are ones that will follow our students throughout their school life and into adulthood. Unfortunately many are not taught these at home and it becomes part of our job as the teacher to impress upon our class the importance of these skills for having a successful and productive life. In school the lack of these skills can result in students who are constantly hurtful to one another, show little or no care in their work product, and have attitudes much like Machiavelli in thinking that the ends justify the means. These attitudes and actions result in tense classroom environments and behavior problems.

Let's review some of the more common positive life-skills:

honesty, integrity, cooperation, teamwork, friendship, dedication, perseverance, effort, caring, common sense, initiative, sense of humor, patience, responsibility, organization, flexibility, problem solving, curiosity, and courage.

Below are a few ways you might communicate the importance of life-skills to your students:

1)      Each one of these skills is necessary to have a successful happy life. Some of these life-skills reflect morals and values. Without strong morals and values such as honesty and integrity, we can often fall into the trap of harming ourselves and others emotionally, mentally, and physically with our lies and deceptions. Even little white lies can turn around and bite us later in life. Lack of honesty and integrity can hurt relationships of all kinds including family, friends, and loved-ones. When a person is not honest and lacks integrity (doing what is right), others begin to lose respect for that person. Once respect and trust are lost, they are extremely difficult to gain back again.

2)      Other life-skills reflect work habits such as effort, perseverance, organization, responsibility, problem solving, cooperation, etc. These are work habits which will lead a person to success in whatever field (job) they choose. These will also provide a person with the ability to become anything he/she wants to be. Without these skills, a person is very likely to stay unskilled and/or mediocre in anything they choose to do. This can affect us in terms of job choice, salary, and upward mobility. These skills can also affect our ability to get into college or vocational school.

3)      Other life skills include attitudes which affect our relationships with others around us. These skills include friendship, courage, caring, patience, sense of humor, and common sense. The more of these skills we have, the more likely we are to have long-lasting relationships with other people.  A positive attitude goes a long way towards success in life. When we think positively, good things tend to occur to us. When we think negatively all the time, it seems as though nothing goes right. There is research that shows how a person's thinking will determine what happens to them either positively or negatively. Reader's Digest has published several articles which correlates acts of kindness to longer life spans. This is definitely something to think about.

Breaking the life-skills into three different sections helps students internalize the information more easily. It also helps to apply each skill to a specific part of the student’s life. The more we talk about life-skills in terms of students' lives and their future, the better they will begin to understand why these skills are necessary. It is our job to encourage and foster these skills within the classroom so they become habit.

Begin thinking about how you can encourage your students to learn and use these positive life-skills each day.

·         Start a brainstorming list and keep it handy to add new ideas as you come across them.  

·         Focus on one set of skills at a time depending on what you feel would best help your students. Then, focus on one life-skill each week.

·         Have students create a skit, write a story, make a PowerPoint presentation, illustrate a poster, or some other activity to define and show examples of the life skill in action. What does it look like, sound like, feel like?

·         Encourage students to exhibit the skill throughout the week and future weeks.

·         You might hand out classroom coupons for a drawing, “I like what you did!” notes, or some other type of acknowledgement when you catch students using these skills. This continues to motivate them to use the skills both in the classroom and out.

·         Once you’ve taught a skill, let students know that you’ll be watching to “catch” them in the act of using that skill for the rest of the year.

·         Another good idea is to have a way for students to catch one another using these skills. One way to do this would be to post a manila folder on a bulletin board along with a catchy title and a list of the life-skills. Have strips of paper available nearby (or in a pocket next to the folder). Students use these strips to jot down when they’ve caught another student using one of the listed life-skills. At the end of the week you can read them aloud and applaud everyone who got caught. A bit of applause and the chance to stand up and bow is often the best kind of reward.

 I think you'll find that as you exhibit and foster these skills, your classroom will become a positive and fun place to be!

Do you have ideas for teaching and encouraging life skills in the classroom? Send an email to info(at)inspiringteachers.com and we'll add it to our Idea Share next week.

Newly updated, Survival Kit for New Teachers contains advice and tips from veteran teachers geared specifically for elementary teachers. This handy resource helps teachers organize ideas, maintain a positive classroom environment, motivate students, communicate with parents, and manage their classroom and students. New updates include information on learner differentiation and understanding/implementing Bloom's Taxonomy along with other tips and ideas for the classroom. Also includes a chapter with advice for obtaining a classroom teaching job. Click HERE to learn more about this book! Also Available as an eBook!