Dear parents,
Like all teachers, I'm always thinking of what I want to do differently, or improve upon. One of my goals for this year is to try to help my students develop even better relationships with their peers by organizing some activities where the main focus is on promoting social skills. Depending on the task, we will focus on skills such as listening, participating, problem solving, sharing, compromising, turn taking, or using kind words.
After each activity, students will complete a short self-evaluation to help them reflect on how well they used the 3 particular skills we discussed before-hand. I will also give my opinion of how everyone did.
Getting along with others and working together is a focus at school every day, but we will do a dedicated social skills activity with self-evaluation in the second week of every month. I will send the evaluation home so that you can talk with your child about the activity - what it involved, how they feel it went, what they did really well or would like to work on. It is my hope that this extra bit of communication between school and home will allow us to work together to encourage the continued development of great social skills and relationships!
Last week we played a guessing game where we relied on others to help us guess a word. For this activity, we discussed the importance of listening, participating and staying on task. It was a fun game, and I think everyone took the self-evaluation seriously. This first evaluation is coming home today.
Thanks for your support!
Tamara