Talking stick classroom

Native American Talking Stick! Explain to kids that Native Americans used this to tell stories to their friends and families and whoever had the stick is the story teller and everyone else must listen!

The talking stick is used in many Native American traditions. Whoever holds the stick has the right to talk. The talking stick is used to make sure that each person in a group has a chance to express his or her own thoughts. Everyone else has to show respect and remain silent. When the speaker is finished talking, he or she passes the stick. My 2nd graders created beautiful sticks with wire, chenille stems, beads, feathers and paint to be used as … Read more... →

Our "talking stick" microphone. They love this- foam ball painted black, paper towel roll stuffed with paper towels, hot glued the foam ball on there and covered it with zebra print duct-tape.

Our oldest son talks ALL. THE. TIME. Even in his sleep. I kid you not. So when our younger son wasn’t developing language skills and hitting all the “normal” milestones, I worried. His daycare teachers did too. They suggested some help from a free speech pathology service through our area education agency. I jumped at the opportunity. What we found is not that my precious youngest son couldn’t talk, but rather that he needed to be encouraged to and we need to provide him the opportunity to…

"I decided to bring the idea of the Sharing Circle into our family – as a way to share what is on our minds, to solve problems and to come to decisions. In order for everyone to have equal opportunity in being heard, I felt we would all need representation on our Talking Stick."

Okay, so I'm doing another post for Monday Wednesday Made It! I have little tool that could be useful in many classrooms, and now that Monday Made It is making it's move for the school year to just monthly, I don't want to wait to share. I call them Think–Talk Sticks. These can be used lots of ways This idea has two sources. I found it through Betsy Hubbard's post at Two Writing Teachers and she gives credit to Kathy Collins from The Educator Collaborative. Kathy originally used her sticks…

Native American Talking Stick The Talking Stick is a tool traditionally used by Native Americans when a council is called. It was a visual queue as to who had the right to talk during the gathering. The talking stick would be passed from person to person as their turn came to speak. Only one person was allowed to speak at once. This method encouraged other council members to listen to the speaker and be respectful of the person’s viewpoint during their turn with the talking stick. The idea…

Michelle Garcia Winner, creator of the Social Thinking framework, writes, “effective social thinking and related social skills are those that can be applied across situations so that our stud…

Is a tool used by traditionally by Aboriginal people, but lots of people use them today. ONLY the person who holds the Talking Stick has the right to speak at that time. The Talking Stick is a symbol of how important it is to listen to the person who is speaking. The Talking Stick is passed around the circle from one person to the next until everyone who wants to speak has had a chance to.

Flip Sticks are an amazing participation tool for calling on students at random! The idea of using name sticks is nothing new. In fact, this classroom management strategy has been around for a long time. Unfortunately, what I didn’t learn until a few years into teaching, was how to keep track of which students had […]