Teaching Rules and Expectations Can Be FUN!

Hi!  Hope you all had an amazing start to the school year!  Even though my kiddos learn school-wide expectations in their regular ed classrooms, they also need to learn my classroom expectations.  Many also need it explicitly taught - especially the students that struggle with social skills.  As important as it is - expectations can be super boring, especially when they have heard and reviewed it often.  A few years ago, I came across an amazing resource from Growing Kinders!  It is a freebie and perfect for younger students K-3!

download this amazing freebie at Growing Kinders!

I printed it out the materials and put them all in a binder with sheet protectors like this:

 

I introduced the story by telling the students that I'm going to read them a story about a monster that came to school.  I did not mention anything about expectations or rules just yet...I wanted it to spark their interest!  I read the story to them, and towards the end, we spoke about the ways that the monster did not follow expectations and the rules that he needed to learn.  

After the story, we reviewed these adorable posters:

There also were posters for listening with your eyes, mouth, hands, feet, body, and brain!  I showed them each of these posters and we discussed how we could listen with each of these body parts.  Then, we practiced giving both examples and non-examples.  

After reviewing the cards, we did a fun game to demonstrate the examples and non-examples.  Here's our non-example of our bodies not listening:

We played the game going through each one (hands not listening, hands listening, etc.) . I told the class, "When I say go, show me feet not listening.  Go!"  Then, I would silently count to 3, then say, "When I say go, show me feet listening.  Go!"  The kids LOVED doing this and it was a great way to show what expectations should look like, as well as what they shouldn't look like!

After this, we did a sorting activity to our expected and unexpected behaviors.  In the package, they use "above the line" and "below the line".  I chose to sort them by "expected" and "unexpected", because our district using the Social Thinking curriculum for social skills, so I wanted to make sure to use the same language.  

I forgot to take pictures of the card sort 😳.  After the word sort, the students worked on an independent activity based on their IEP goals, while I called around 2 students at a time to help create a poster.  Each student drew their own monster and picked a school rule/expectation to write next to/above/below their monster.

After our poster was finished, we hung it outside in the hallway.  The students loved creating this and displaying it for the school to see!

This was a super fun lesson to teach, and the students loved it!  Please comment and let me know if you have any fun ideas to teach rules and expectations!

Ciao!