Come Together

February and early March are notorious in the elementary classroom. We all get a bit of cabin fever. We all are comfortable enough with each other to get grumpy. And, as the spring approaches, many students begin to look toward their next transition whether it's to a new school or a new grade. At several faculty meetings, we reflected on how it was a good time to revisit the class guidelines we set a the beginning of the year.

But as we thought a little more, we wanted to go farther than reminding kids of the rules. We begin the year with guided recess and it seemed that many of our kids could benefit from more support at recess. The fourth and fifth graders took on a lot of leadership then through game leaders, woods leaders and bird watchers. We asked for volunteers to lead games again and had an enthusiastic response.

The Cranes helped us out by conducting a school-wide survey about preferred recess games. Nancy reported that they were very excited to be doing "real" research that another class needed and our class eagerly pored over the data they collected.

The result has been lively recess games that often involve fifty kids. These are student led and initiated and are always multi-age. It's really wonderful to see.