What's Fair Anyway?

Content & Language Objectives

2nd grade students have been exploring fairness in rules. First they needed to understand what it means to be fair. They  jotted down examples of something they thought was fair. Then we looked at the words they used on their examples to determine what it meant to be fair.

First they said fair meant that you get the same thing. When asked for clarification, one student said “like at Christmas, you get the same number of presents. That’s fair.” I asked “So if you get a pencil and your brother gets a toy car, is that fair because you both got 1 present.” As you can imagine, that led to quite a discussion about fairness. Eventually, they concluded that fairness is getting the same thing or something equal. Fair enough…

The discussion moved onto school rules. Students brainstormed school rules by sharing using a Round Robin structure. This allowed them to hear some ideas and learn from each other before being called on to share with the teacher.

This was the first time we did a T-chart in our small group so I typed the student generated list of school rules and they glued them into their journals. Then they went around and shared their opinions with a partner.