Community Building
So much of the success of a new school year depends upon the community building that we do during the first days. The ReadWriteThink site provides several lesson plans that can help you in your journey. The lesson Creating Class Rules: A Beginning to Creating Community focuses on a simple shared-writing activity to bring students together. Combine icebreakers with language arts with the Creating Classroom Community By Crafting Themed Poetry Collections lesson plan, which invites students to compose poems about themselves and others in the classroom. If you're looking for a way for students to share a more extended autobiography with the class, invite writers to chart memorable events from their lives with the Graphic Life Map lesson plan.

The Teaching in the Two-Year College article "Service Learning and First-Year Composition" explores how to build community inside the classroom by asking students to participate in the community outside the classroom.

To read more about community building, take a look at Looking Closely and Listening Carefully: Learning Literacy through Inquiry and see how one school builds a community of learners over the course of the school year.

Responding to Summer Reading
What do you do with those books that your students read over the summer? English Journal subscribers can check out the September 2003 issue which focuses on "Talking Literature" and includes over a dozen articles exploring ways to respond to readings.

Invite your students to share the books they have read during the summer months with the strategies in "Talking about Books Right from the Start: Literature Study in First, Second, and Third Grade" which expands the definition of reading to include all students as readers. The ReadWriteThink lesson Developing a Definition of Reading through Analysis in Middle School offers ideas that can extend this activity to the middle level.

For additional ideas, try Investigating Texts: Analyzing Fiction and Nonfiction in High School which offers scaffolded activities to help students explore what it means to behave like a reader, how ways of reading can change, and how a given text can be read in different ways.

Setting Policies to Avoid Plagiarism
By talking about plagiarism and structuring classroom practices early in the term, we can work to avoid the problems of plagiarism before they get started. For ways to discuss plagiarism with your students, the ReadWriteThink lesson plan Research Building Blocks: "Cite Those Sources!" discusses the importance of citing sources to give credit to the authors of their information as students participate in composing an interactive bibliography.

College Composition and Communication subscribers can explore the role of written institutional policies and examples of classroom practices to help teach a concept of plagiarism as situated in context in "Beyond 'Gotcha!': Situating Plagiarism in Policy and Pedagogy" by Margaret Price.

You can find more ideas on the Frequently Requested Topics page on Plagiarism which includes links to additional articles and other resources for all levels.

Back-to-School Continued . . .
For even more back-to-school ideas, visit the Classroom Notes Plus archive:
http://www.ncte.org/pubs/journals/cnp/back