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Issue 6 I Winter 2025

Ways to Extend Your Classroom Community and Engage Visitors

Teachers work hard to foster connections and build a sense of community among classmates. With that strong classroom community as a foundation, you can extend the work further to help students feel connected to and valued by others throughout your physical school building, its families, the district, and the neighborhood.

Here are some ideas we love that promote connections inside the school building and also with families and neighbors. This broadening of community helps students see the relevance of their efforts in the classroom and know they belong and matter—both in school and beyond.

Reading Party

Many teachers who use The Superkids Reading Program reach out to us each year to share images of the various reading parties they host in their classrooms to celebrate students’ reading achievement.

Some invite community members, school staff members, parents, and caregivers to the classroom. Students demonstrate their fluency and decoding skills by reading to an encouraging adult on the special day.

Others celebrate by inviting an upper grade classroom to their reading party. Many of the older students fondly remember participating as the readers when they were younger!

Virtual Mystery Readers

You may be familiar with the concept of a Mystery Reader series. In these popular elementary classroom events, a special guest visits the classroom to read to students, but the special guest’s identity remains a secret until read-aloud time!

The pandemic inspired Ms. Gray to re-imagine the Mystery Reader series as an opportunity to engage families and guests who aren’t able to physically come to the classroom during the school day. Now she invites families and community members to submit a voice recording for Mystery Reader day.

Ms. Gray loves that the class can still gather on the carpet around a book while she is able to point to details in the illustrations or text features she wants students to notice while the recorded guest reads.

Publication Celebration

Mr. Henderson teaches his K/1 students that “publishing” your writing means sharing it with others. At the end of one unit of study each year, his class hosts an evening event in their classroom to celebrate the release of their latest books.

Students’ book projects are thoughtfully arranged throughout the classroom on tables and bookshelves. Guests are encouraged to view them all like in an art gallery—at their own pace and in any order. The proud authors host the event, staying near their books to answer questions about how they got their ideas and to make sure guests don’t miss the best parts of the stories!

Lunch Trivia

A field trip that included lunch in a food court inspired Ms. Wallman to imagine her students’ work on display in the school cafeteria! During the field trip, students discovered—and became engaged in reading—health statistics and facts displayed in acrylic frames on tables.

When she introduced a research project a few weeks later, Ms. Wallman reminded students about the “table tents” that had piqued their curiosity. Students enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to create something similar to showcase their research findings. Other classes quickly began imagining research they could do and display on cafeteria table tents as well.

Math Club

Volunteer opportunities are always a great way to engage families and neighbors in your classroom. Parent volunteer Beth Dittman led an after-school math club for students who needed extra support with first-grade skills and whole number concepts.

Because Beth used her school’s Kickstart: Number Sense kit, students remained active and engaged in physical movement, songs, games, and discussions—a tough feat to accomplish at the end of a school day!

But even more important, Beth explained, was that the program was scripted so that any adult could lead math club, regardless of their level of math or teaching experience. In fact, she quickly trained two bilingual sixth-grade students to lead math club groups in Spanish while adults in the room led groups in English!

Tell Us About Your Community!

What do you and your students do to build community both inside and beyond the classroom? Your stories can support and inspire other K–6 teachers. Reach out to us for a chance to be featured in other upcoming articles!