Before you speak…

Hello, families!  We are in our home stretch with only 2.5 days left.  Today, we enjoyed a wonderful town meeting in which the fourth graders performed their song 50 Nifty United States, and a terrific pizza party and summer birthday celebration.  We ended the day with a series of water balloon games.  All in all, it was a terrific day!

Yesterday, we had a small issue of gossiping in our class.  Students felt that other classmates were talking about who they supposedly “liked” (yes, that kind of “liked”) and were embarrassed.  We had a great conversation about stopping to think before sharing information (whether it’s real or not) about another person.  I wanted to take a moment and share with you one resource you can use:

What I like about this graphic is that it outlines specific questions kids can ask themselves before starting to talk about their classmates.  As your students get older and older, this will end up being a bigger and bigger issue they face, so I wanted to start the conversation now.  We discussed how gossip about others is particularly hard to control, because it can feel fun.  It’s fun to share “news” with others, and people love hearing the scoop on others they know.  There are plenty of reinforcements to perpetuate gossip among kids: people like talking with you, people laugh or get excited by your “news”, etc.  So our conversation focused more on identifying those obvious positives to gossiping, and especially on finding the often unseen negatives (it’s hurtful to others, it’s not your business, and it’s often untrue.)  We all agreed that the negatives outweigh the positives.  Feel free to refer to this THINK tool when speaking with your kids.  It’s particularly good for discussing what should be written online.

Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss