My mentor teacher suggested that I could build relationships with my students by bringing more humor and joy into our classroom. On Wednesday, July 12, I designed a morning meeting with some specifically silly activities to create an atmosphere of fun and togetherness in our classroom. Our ET greeting ended up being a very fun and funny start to our morning. Some students had seen the movie ET and knew what he looked like, while others did not and laughed at the descriptions that their classmates gave of the friendly little alien. The students also enjoyed the actual greeting and touched fingertips around the circle with lots of smiles. During our sharing time after our greeting, we reminded students that they can agree with one another using the American Sign Language for “same” or “me too”. I saw many of our students using the silent form of agreement as we shared our favorite subjects. Some of the top choices were math, reading, and art. After sharing, I introduced a new way of singing the Hey, Neighbor song that we had learned the week before. Students were comfortable with the words and hand motions, so I asked them sing the song again in an exaggerated, slow voice and again with a silly voice of their own choosing. The whole class really enjoyed the new twist on our song and we finished morning meeting on a high note, which was a perfect segue into the morning lesson: drafting a poem.

Bringing a joyful tone into the classroom is very important to me because I think students learn best when they are excited and feeling camaraderie with their classmates. In practice I notice that I tend to be a little bit reserved however. Since the students often take their tone from the teacher, I know that being myself and finding joy in the classroom is an important skill that I can build upon in the future. When my students were having fun, I was able to have fun with them and we strengthened our relationship with those positive memories. Now that I have seen the success of a joy-filled morning meeting, I am eager to find other ways to bring fun into the classroom environment.