What kind of class do we want to have? - Our First Inquiry

For our first inquiry, we asked the children the following question:  What kind of class do we want to have?  We wanted to explore the topic as a way to establish our class rules/norms.

Here are the responses that the students gave us:
We want to have a good class.
We want to have a nice class.
We want to have a polite class.
We want to have a kind class.
We want to have a clean class.
Everyone agreed that if we had a nice, polite, kind and clean class, it would be a good class.

Then we began exploring the various concepts that the students listed.  Each day, we read and talked about books that highlighted the various characteristics of a 'good class'.  Here are some of the books we read:

We discussed how we are in charge of making good choices.  We can choose to make good choices every day to avoid problems, and we can choose to react in better ways to solve problems.

           Being polite means using your manners.  We learned that even dinosaurs can make good choices and behave appropriately at school.

The opposite of being kind is being mean.   Lily Jean learns a lesson:  you won't keep friends if you are mean to them.

What does kindness look like?  Big Al is kind and helpful, and he doesn't give up.  (We also discussed how you can't tell what a person will be like by the way he/she looks.  Big Al didn't look nice, but he was very nice and kind to all the other fish in the ocean.)

Why is it a good idea to have a clean class?  It is helpful to keep our class tidy and organized so we can easily find things.  That way, we can spend more time playing and learning.  

In additon, to reading and discussing the various books, we also acted out and modelled what the various behaviours looked like and sounded like.  Also, we highlighted students' positive behaviours and choices as we noticed them in the classroom and on the playground.

At the end of the two weeks, we came up with our class promise:

As you can see, everyone signed the promise.  The promise is posted in our room, and we will refer to it everyday as a reminder about the kind of good choices we should be making so we can have a nice class.