It's Piglet Time!

It is now Monday. My second week in school. Things are, for the most part, going rather well. I guess. I mean, who knows at this point?

I have decided to do a "Circle Up" on Mondays in all of my classrooms. Of course, this means that each class will only get to Circle Up once every other week, which is fine.

For those of you who don't know what "Circle Up" is, I learned this tool/technique in Project Promise. It is essentially a circle in which we discuss things pertinent to the group. I have the kids circle up on the floor near the door, the only space available in the room. We only circled up for about 8-10 minutes today. The idea of Circle Up is that in the Circle, kids can say what they would like to say. There is an artifact involved. At Project Promise, we had this weird stick that we all made together. I decided to incorporate the Circle Up this morning and was looking for a good artifact to use in the Circle. Fortunately, my stuffed Classic Piglet was sitting right there on the shelf.

The idea is that when you have the Talking Piece (aka Piglet) you have the floor and you can speak. Everyone else listens. When you are done, you can pass Piglet to somebody else and they can talk. This is a way to help develop community in the classroom, get kids talking and listening to each other and allow kids voices to be heard. Today was rather simple, all we talked about was "How was your weekend?" I also threwn in a little "Who had a crappy weekend?" For the most part, kids seemed to enjoy the exercise and laughed some when appropriate. Using Piglet seems to help, as well, as kids can laugh and throw him around abit.

Down the line, we will use Circle Up/Piglet Time to talk about issues in the classroom, in the school or personal issues as they might arise.

I think that it will go well.