The following is an adapted excerpt from The Artful Approach by Rebecca Bellingham and Veronica Scott.
Our favorite activities, rituals, and read-alouds for starting off the year and the way we develop and lead these activities are crucial to helping students feel safe, supported, and seen. As every classroom teacher knows, the first few weeks of school are crucial to setting the tone, establishing community, and forming authentic connections with students. Setting aside time to intentionally explore and celebrate identity is essential to fostering belonging all year long.
1: Start with Low Stakes
Starting the year with a book like Your Name Is a Song is one way to invite all students to share their names and feel affirmed in hearing their names said back to them with love. This book, a “celebration to remind all of us about the beauty, history, and magic behind names,” (Thompkins-Bigelow 2024) does not lean too heavily into the pain or microaggression of having one’s name mispronounced or spotlight one identity. Instead, this book spends most of its pages celebrating the musicality of a diverse array of beautiful names that sing like songs. The author has also provided a helpful video guide that you can watch beforehand, in addition to phonetic spelling throughout the book, that will help you honor the names featured throughout the story. After reading the book with a group of third graders, we invited them to each say their name (either by simply saying it or singing it as a song or rapping it to a beat) and then hear their classmates repeat it back to them. This was a wonderful chance for students to feel affirmed and it didn’t spotlight students whose names the teacher found hard to pronounce because everyone was invited to participate. We also made participating optional which is key for an activity like this that might bring up past negative feelings for students who have experienced microaggressions around their names.
2: Look for Small, Meaningful Opportunities to Make a Big Impact
You’re probably exploring identity without naming it as such. Even something simple like inviting children to decorate things like their name plates, writing journals, or folders is an opportunity to incorporate aspects of identity. It could be as simple as shifting from inviting students to decorate however they like to introducing aspects of identity (hometown, family foods, languages spoken at home, community connections) that might inspire their artful expression.
Expanding your repertoire around any number of things is also an opportunity to create a more inclusive classroom. Whether it’s singing a variety of birthday songs or incorporating different family greetings in your morning meetings, we can always take inventory of our rituals to ensure we’re making space for all students to feel seen and valued. Culture certainly shows up in curriculum, but it also shows up in all the smaller, in-between moments that have been so normalized that many don’t even notice them as culture. You might pause next time you hear the words normal, American, or regular being used to describe ways of being that align with one specific sect of dominant culture.
3: Take Time to Build Community and Trust
Just like number sense and grammar, identity work is a skill you’re teaching students, and it takes time to build identity awareness, confidence, and vulnerability. Finding time for this ongoing work might seem overwhelming, which is why we rely heavily on the power of the check-in! Check-ins don’t have to take long, especially if you continue to model both brevity and bravery in ways that make sense for the moment. Even with just 5–7 minutes each morning, you can create opportunities for students to share important aspects of their identity. We encourage you to establish a routine around checking-in so that students become accustomed to listening generously, reflecting on themselves, and sharing with one another. Check-in moments, however, are only as powerful as the questions you ask. The timing of when you ask questions matters too. Remember to start with low stakes and ease students into sharing more about themselves. When we introduce the check-in question, we usually model one or two possibilities to give students an idea for what they might share and a feel for how the sharing should go (just a reminder: make these brief!).
4: Establish Short, Kid-Friendly Community Agreements
It is essential to establish community agreements at the beginning of the school year, especially as we want our classroom to be spaces where identity is centered and honored. After years of facilitating this work in classrooms we’ve found these five agreements (see figure below) have served us well. You might start with these and invite your students to think about what resonates with them and what they might like to add or change. Keep your final agreements short and sweet with language that is kid friendly.
5: Think Outside the Box!
Poetry is another way to create opportunities for students to share about who they are at the beginning of the year and “I am” poems can be perfect for launching that work. Some of the templates available for the poems, however, can feel more like mad libs or include simplistic options that limit possibilities for students to share who they are. To open these poems up for all students to share about what they love and who they are, we encourage you to allow them to make their own choices around design, order, and content as much as possible.
Tip 6: Design Like the Fab Five (Do It as a Team!)
Setting up a classroom is a lot of work and involves many decisions, both big and small. What will your color palette be? Will there be a unifying theme for the room? Where will student work go? Where will we gather for community conversations? While we can’t enlist the actual Fab Five, the Emmy-award winning Queer Eye’s team of advisors, to weigh in on decisions ranging from organization to color palette, at least we can take a page from their playbook, and remember the power of collective action! As you begin to create the vibe for your classroom, you might consider leaving some of the fun for the students. Or you might ask yourself how much of the room has already been decided before students even arrive. Leaving one wall or corner or element for them to decorate, arrange, or name (what will we call our classroom library or reading nook?) is just one way to make a space that is truly inclusive for your students. We both love a theme, and once we get behind an idea, we are all in! But deciding a theme for an entire year might also limit other possibilities for what goes on the walls or in the space. With a little extra planning and intentionality, students can contribute to your shared space and be surrounded by their own hopes and loves and stories as they learn.
