Yesterday was the last day of school.
Over the summer, I wrote in my classroom vision that I wanted to have a class where my students were collaborative and supportive and learning from each other. Come October, December, February, this felt like a silly, naive idea, totally irrelevant to the actual struggles I’ve had in my classroom all year.
All year, when a student doesn’t know the answer to a question, I’ve been saying “Can anyone help [student]?” Then, I tell that student to call on another student who has their hand raised.
Yesterday, I was reviewing trigraphs with my kids during our phonics lesson – I introduced the trigraphs, then I asked my kids to think of words that included that trigraph. For example, words like “light” “fight” “right” “tight” and “night” all include trigraph igh. The trigraph was dge, and I asked “Can anyone think of words with trigraph dge?” Z raised his hand, I called on him, then he spent a minute trying to think of a word. Then, J was sitting next to him and said “Z, do you need some help?” And suggested a word.
Totally unprompted.
It was this tiny glimpse of something I’ve tried in my classroom actually working. Like “Hey. I did that! I made that happen!”