Dear Families,
In sharing about each component of Eagle Community Building (ECB), today we focus on SHARING as part of the process. As laid out in The Morning Meeting Book by Roxann Kriete, there are three main categories of sharing:
- Around-the-circle: Everyone shares on a topic
- Partner: Students pair up for a short conversation
- Dialogue: A few students share and the rest of the class responds with questions or comments
Sharing can focus on academic or social topics. Sharing with each other builds a strong class community, and can offer content reinforcement and social skills. Additionally, the purposes of sharing are to allow students to know each other, to teach and practice listening & thinking, and to strengthen language development. In brief, sharing helps students to be known. A teacher may guide students to move beyond their usual circle of friends by saying: “We don’t have time for more comments right now, but maybe the three of you can have lunch together and talk more about your favorite _____.” A teacher may reinforce a current lesson by saying, “Today we’ll have partner chats about something interesting we learned from the biographies we’re reading.” On a different day, a more social prompt may be, “Our sharing will be an around-the-circle sharing on something you’re looking forward to this week.”
No matter the information being shared, the goals are the same: to provide an arena for sharing viewpoints and information, to learn about one another, to practice speaking and listening, and to engage students in empathizing and considering other perspectives. Try any of these sharing techniques at your family dinner table to continue this development within your children!
In joyful service,
Mrs. Dolan
Read the full newsletter here: https://stjlutheranschool.org/eagle-connection-11-12-2020/