Have you ever wondered how classroom “rules” are made? Read on to find out!

In our room, these rules are called expectations, and we decide on them together. It has been a process, and kids were involved all along the way. Let me show you!

We started in what may be a surprising way–with questions. I put 6 charts around the room, and kiddos spent time answering them with post-its as they walked around.

Now, not all of these questions will help us create our expectations, but they definitely help me get a feel for what they want, who they are and how they need things to be.

We mostly zoned in on the question that asked “What do you want our classroom to be like?” The answers to that question are KEY to the next step. Check out what they said: like home, family friendly, calm, kind, quiet, fun, respectful and following directions. Sounds like a great place to learn, right? WELL…if that’s what they want, then we have to figure out HOW we will make it that way.

The next step is to have crews brainstorm what our expectations we would need in order for our class to be (or become) those things we mentioned. Teams worked together to suggest what they thought good rules would be.

Can you guess what happened next?

I took the most popular suggestions and put them together on a new sheet, then crews had to choose the most important five expectations.

Once we made crew choices, then we compared those and made the final decisions as a class. Some of them we combined, and ended up with this:

I’m excited to see what happens now that we have our collective expectations and can helped each other to them. Our plan is that following these expectations will help us have all of those things we put on our list. :).