A Promise is a Promise

I've been struggling to find a good way to teach about promises in my kindergarten room.

DRK.1 Explore examples of promises made through actions and words, and why it is important to keep promises.

So, after brainstorming with a few colleagues, I came up with a few ideas to try.  It ended up working well and improved classroom beahviour as a result.

We started by reading A Promise is a Promise by Robert Munch.  We discussed the promises that Allashua made and the results.  We talked about why it is important to keep promises that you make.  We also talked about when it is ok to break a promise (I wanted them to know that if someone made them promise something that made them uncomfortable that they should tell a trusted adult).

After our discussion, we decided to come up with a class promise that we could all commit to.  We decided our promise would be

We promise to be respectful to the people in our class.

I typed this up on large paper and we all signed it.  We then put this on our hallway bulletin board.  I will now be watching for examples of students fullfilling our promise and take pictures of them to add to the bulletin board.  In addition, we are also making small promises and taking pictures of us doing it to add to the bulletin board (We promise to work quietly, we promise to take back the recycling, etc).