Rutherford,+Cindy,+Classroom+Community+Building

**Cindy Rutherford ** 

My name is Cindy Rutherford. I graduated from SOU in 2011 with a B.S. in Health and Physical Education. I am currently enrolled in the MAT program at SOU to pursuit a teaching license. I hope to obtain a career teaching health and physical education at the middle school level. I hope my students and I can learn something new everyday.

When I graduated from high school in 1991, I wanted to be a p.e. teacher, but I wanted to take a year off from school. That break turned into far more than one year. I got a job in cable television construction as a lineman/splicer, and have been employed doing that as well as installs for most of my adult life. I have lived and worked in Washington, California, Idaho, Montana, and Oklahoma. After a life changing accident in 2004, and a long recovery, I decided I needed to make a career change. In a lot of ways, I wish I had decided to go to college right out of high school, but I wouldn't have met all of the amazing friends I have made along the way.

What brings me joy? So many things, my friends, my family, my two bratty dogs, and coaching, to name a few. I love pretty much any outdoor activity. I especially love hunting, fishing, camping, and dirt bike riding.

My greatest fear about being a teacher is not being able to make connections with the kids that need it the most. I try my best to find common ground with all of my students, but it is not always easy.

I don't necessarily remember a time when something was extremely difficult to learn, but I did have a time when I had difficulty with memory and comprehension after a traumatic brain injury. I felt incredibly incompetent.When people spoke to me, the most simple sentences didn't make sense in my head, and I couldn't put sentences together to speak that made sense. It got better with time, but took about nine months to overcome. I still have a few long term memory issues now, but the speech and comprehension problems have resolved themselves. I think this experience will help me to have patience with my students who face learning difficulties. I have an incredible amount of patience and understanding for these issues, and I believe I can help them through my own understanding of their feelings of frustration.

I hope to gain a deeper understanding of how IEP's can be carried out, and can be used in curriculum without making students stand out as different in my classroom.  ** Classroom Community Building **  The topic I chose is Classroom Community Building. I chose this topic because I believe if the teacher can create a safe, comfortable classroom community where everyone feels important, there is a greater potential for learning to take place.  The top five things I learned while completing this research project were: <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande','Lucida Sans Unicode',sans-serif; text-align: left;">1. One of the most important things a teacher can do in their classroom is to make their students feel safe and comfortable so that they feel they can take certain risks in the classroom and not feel persecuted by their peers. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande','Lucida Sans Unicode',sans-serif; text-align: left;"> <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande','Lucida Sans Unicode',sans-serif; text-align: left;">2. There are many small but fun activities that teachers can use to help their students get to know each other. These activities are used to make the classroom more personal and welcoming. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande','Lucida Sans Unicode',sans-serif; text-align: left;"> <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande','Lucida Sans Unicode',sans-serif; text-align: left;">3. A classroom that has built a close community atmosphere will carry that atmosphere outside of the individual classroom and help prevent bullying. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande','Lucida Sans Unicode',sans-serif; text-align: left;"> <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande','Lucida Sans Unicode',sans-serif; text-align: left;">4. Classroom community building exercises can help showcase student strengths and interests that may be otherwise invisible. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande','Lucida Sans Unicode',sans-serif; text-align: left;"> <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande','Lucida Sans Unicode',sans-serif; text-align: left;">5. Classroom community building can help students with disabilities by helping them contribute to the classroom and making physical disabilities less scary to other students and showing other students how they can help those students succeed in and outside the classroom. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande','Lucida Sans Unicode',sans-serif; text-align: left;"> **Resources** The best resource I found was**[| www.teachablemoment.org] 5 out of 5** This website provides everything you need to create a great classroom environment. This website is designed for all classrooms; elementary, middle school, and high school. There are many great getting to know you activities for the first few days of class.This website provides lesson plans for discrimination, world events reflections, affirmations, feelings charades, cooperating activities, and problem solving skills for students. This website inspires critical thinking ideas about issues of the day, and can be used in any classroom to help create a safe space to talk about current issues that affect students as well as the world around them. I thought this website was incredibly helpful because it can help create a positive environment where students feel safe and get to know each other, and then help a teacher bring in current issues both on and off of campus to into their classroom so that students have a forum to explore those issues. **teachingtolerance.org 5 out of 5** This website provides many resources to help build a positive classroom community. This website provides activities and lesson plans for all grade levels and provides a list of topics that a teacher can use to choose their activities including bullying and exclusion, disabilities, social justice, religion, and sexual orientation. This website provides lists of books and movies that can be used in the classroom to help open students mind to how intolerance makes other students feel. This document provides examples of how a teacher can go about creating a positive classroom community, and its importance. This document can be very helpful teachers because it addresses everyday needs in the classroom such as procedures, transitions, and how teacher modeling can help create a cohesive classroom where all students have responsibility to the effectiveness of the classroom.
 * [] 4 out of 5**

This website provides some simple ice breaker activities that any teacher can use to help students get to know each other and open the floor up to discussions about self disclosure, discrimination, setting group goals, and trust. I thought these fun activities could be extremely useful in any classroom as "getting to know you" activities for not only the first days of class, but throughout the school year.
 * [] 4 out of 5**

This website is a linked I decided to include, although the website is not necessarily as helpful as the workshop itself. The only reason this resource received a 3 out of 5 rating is because the workshop is not free. However, I have been in a classroom where this workshop was used, and found it to be highly effective. The workshop called Choicepoint, and is an anti-bullying campaign for students. Mediation Works comes into the classroom for three days, and provides activities and lessons for students that create a no bullying environment. Mediation Works then returns throughout the school year to remind students of their training. I feel this program works well because it gives students resources and actions they can use to become an ally for someone who is being bullied, and to help remove themselves from situations where they are being bullied.
 * mediation-works.org** **3 out of 5**

This website provides a lot of useful activities for teachers. It provides first days activities for getting to know each other, new teacher resources for building classroom community, classroom management strategies, suggests books for teaching tolerance, lesson plans, and printables. The reason this website only receives a three star rating is that many of its resources are free, but for full access there is an annual membership fee of $39.95.
 * [|www.teachervision.fen.com] 3 out of 5**

This pdf contains complete lesson plans for classroom community building activities for middle school. These lesson plans include standards and learning objectives that are quite helpful for teachers. This document also provides videos, books and professional development resources for teachers.
 * [|www.partnersagainsthate.org/educators/middle_school_lesson_plans.pdf] 5 out of 5**

This website provides links to resources for classroom community building. The site provides information for whole school community building as well as classroom community building. The only reason this source receives a four star rating is because when clicking links and being routed to other sites, it can be hard to get back to the main source.
 * [|www.wholeschooling.net/WS/Links/WSCLX4Comm.html] 4 out of 5**

This website provides activities for building classroom community through teacher strategy and preparation, ice breakers, and introspectives. The activities are based on multiculturalism, gender, inclusion and exclusion, and gives examples of materials included in each lesson. This website provides resources such as social justices speeches that can be used in the classroom, equity and diversity quizzes, humane education, and many teacher resources.
 * [|www.edchange.org/multicultural/activityarch.html] 4 out of 5**

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande','Lucida Sans Unicode',sans-serif; text-align: left;"> <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande','Lucida Sans Unicode',sans-serif; text-align: left;">**CBL Project: Write a Lesson for a Student with an IEP.** My IEP student is a 13 year old boy who has only learned to read last year. He uses sight recognition for new words, and benefits from pictures for memory recall. This lesson uses both pictures and word lists to help him recall information and recognize words he may not immediately remember and know how to spell. The review sessions are beneficial to him to help with prior learned material to keep it fresh in his mind.


 * [|www.allkindsofminds.org]**


 * [|www.readingrockets.org]**


 * [|www.rif.org]**