After spring break, your students are restless because summer is quickly approaching. So, what do you do? Try these spring classroom management tips.
Reconnect
Review
Relax
Reconnect with Community Building Games
After spring break, take time for everyone to reconnect. Play community building games and celebrate the positive culture that you’vecreated
- 4 corners– Label 4 corners of your room-option 1, option 2 neither or both. Ask Would You rather questions such as “Would You Rather go to the beach or go to the mountains?” Option 1 is go to the beach and Option 2 is go to the mountains. After you ask the question, tell students to go one of the 4 corners for their answer. Give them time to discuss their reasons for their answers. Using would you rather questions is a fun and easy way to practice opinions. Grab some free would you rather questions to do this activity.
- Sharing-Take time to share fun and imaginative prompts during morning meeting. Students can find out what they have in common by sharing their opinions and thoughts. Grab sharing prompts here.
- Tic Tac Toe– Split your class into 2 teams (X’s and O’s) and draw a tic tac toe game on board. Create content based review questions. One member of each team comes up to answer a question. If the team gets the question correct, they put their X or O on the gameboard. Working together helps build a community.
- Spiderweb-Grab a ball of string and have students sit in a circle. Give the string to the first person and he/she shares her favorite part of spring or something fun she did over spring break. Then she tosses the string to someone else. This continues until everyone has a chance to share and everyone is connected by the web of string. Before this activity, provide students time to write using these spring writing prompts.
Review Classroom Routines and Procedures
After a break, students often need to review classroom expectations. Your routines are in place but your students just need a few reminders. For a new twist, utilize the strong community you’ve built and have students lead these strategies:
- Students can create charts or other visuals for the class to use as reminders.
- One student can lead your expectation review from an anchor chart or other visual and have the class echo read with them.
- PIck 3-4 students to role play certain expectations-such as transitions-the correct way, the incorrect way and then the correct way again.
- Ask the class to reflect on specific expectations such as independent work time. Refer to an anchor chart and have students ask “What went well?” and “What could we improve?” Write down the ideas and use them.
- Students can lead a discussion on why it’s important to follow expectations. When students discover the reasons “why” it improves their effort.
Finally review the basic rules such as be safe, be respectful and be responsible.
Use this resource and play a classroom game of scoot to practice classroom expectations.
Need more?
Grab this bundle to review different school and classroom expectations
Relax and Play Games
Have fun and play games to review content-this is perfect for engaging your students! As spring fever hits, keep students busy with games. As students play games, you can connect, observe and gather informal assessment data.
Scoot
One of the easiest games is scoot. This engaging game can be used with any content and can be differentiated for all students. All you need is task cards, an answer key and a scoot procedure. You can use scoot anytime you want to review content and you need your students to be moving around. Grab a FREEBIE and Read this blog post about how to play scoot.
One final thought
As the year comes to a close, remember to celebrate all that your students have accomplished this year! Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up on the craziness that springtime can bring, but celebrate too!
Here are some easy ideas for celebrating with your students!
Supporting you always!
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