Back To School Linky: Behavior Management

I was perusing Pinterest the other day and found this fun linky for Back School ideas. Mrs. D's Corner and Miss V's Busy Bees are hosting a Back to School Weekly Linky and it looks super fun!

So week 1 is all about behavior management! This is something that I am ALL ABOUT people. As a now 4th year teacher, there is a TON that I still have to learn about being a teacher, but my classroom management is something that I often get compliments on from parents, other teachers, and administrators.

I set HIGH expectations for my kiddos from the very first day of school. I find that it is much better to be stern and stick to the rules from the beginning to have a well behaved class all year long!

Hallway Management
I feel like hallway management is a huge part of behavior management. I make a HUGE deal out of the hallway being the pathway to the "learning zone" and we will not be distracting other students while they are learning. There are a few ways that I make this happen with my kinder babies!

Line-up Songs
I love line up songs! They are such a fun way to get your kiddos ready and quiet to enter the hallway. I change them up all the time so that they never get bored with what we are singing. These are a few of my favorites:

Get them for free here!!

Line Order
I am a big believer in having a line order. Butting in line, shoving to be first, crying about being last....I'm having none of that. My kindergartners start with line order the first day of school and they CAN do it. They need a lot of help in the beginning, with numbers/names on the floor to show them where to stand, but they catch on quick! 

(These are my feet from last year. They worked fine, but I'll definitely change to something smaller this year as these fell off pretty quickly!)

When I taught 1st/2nd grade, I would send the line leader to the end of the line each week. This gave everyone the chance to be first. But with my kinders, we just choose a new line leader each month and the rest of the line stays the same. These little guys don't know any different and they honestly DON'T CARE. Having the same spot all year keeps my behavior problems and talking in the hall to almost zero!

Mystery Walker
Mystery walkers are such a great way to encourage good hallway behavior! I have a box with each kiddos name on a stick in it that I carry with me. At the door, I choose a stick and cover it with my hand. If the kiddo shows good hallway behavior, they get a point (Class Dojo, I'll explain below). If not, I don't acknowledge them at all, and they go back in the box. I want to reward good behavior, not make a child feel bad!

I just make it a habit to carry the box wherever I go! As a special treat, I include a stick that says "whole class" and obviously, if the whole class has good behavior, we all get a point! This is the only time that I let them know if they did not earn it.

Behavior Management
These are the actual tools I use as behavior management in the classroom. I use a multitude of different things, all working together to create a wonderful, well behaved class. Obviously, not every management tool is going to work for every student, but there are what work best for me!

Class Dojo
I love love love Class Dojo! If you have never heard of it, Class Dojo is an online behavior management tool and it's FREE! You just have to sign up for an account, set up your class, and then you are good to go!!

 This is the set-up for my class for last year with no points. It displays the child's first name, their dojo and their points. This next screen shows the kiddos with some points. 

Students can get points for WHATEVER you want them to!  They are customizable! I made them according to school rules, character traits, or something I wanted the kiddos to work on (like superstar pictures)!

You can also make different awards worth different amounts. For example, kindness is a BIG deal to me. So if I catch a kiddo being kind, in addition to putting a ribbon on the kindness wreath, they also get 2 points! The possibilities are endless. There is also an option to add negative points, but I choose not to do this. I find this is much more successful when I keep it positive!

This website is also phenomenal because you can track your kiddos behavior!! This is a much more beneficial aspect of the website if you are using both positive and negative, but I like to reward my kiddos who are being extra kind or extra responsible.

The last wonderful part of this website is the ability to communicate with parents. You can send home reports daily, weekly, monthly, etc. They can see what behaviors their child was awarded what day and at what time.  It's a great tool for conferences! 

They way that I use Class Dojo in my classroom is for the students to reach a goal of 50 points. When they get 50 points, they get a reward (prize box, coupon, etc.). Then I reset their Dojo points to zero, and they start all over again. This way, NO ONE KNOWS if a certain special friend takes much longer to get to their reward than others. They just get super excited for whoever reaches their goal, whenever they reach it!

As you can tell, I'm a HUGE fan! I've used clip charts in the past and they have worked just fine for me. I just feel that this is a better fit for me as a teacher!

Kindness Wreath
Out of all of the traits that I instill in my kiddos throughout the year, kindness is the most important to me! I really praise my students when they are being kind! I use this kindness wreath as a symbol of each kind act a student has performed. We start with an empty wreath at the beginning of the year, and by the end, it is full of ribbons!! I make a HUGE deal out of getting to put a ribbon on the wreath, meaning maybe only once or twice a day. Thanks to Debbie Clement for the idea!



Turn-A-Letter
In addition to having an individualized behavior management system, I also have a whole-class management system. Using turn-a-letter, my kiddos are working together as a class to earn a party. Each time they receive a compliment, or are super-well behaved as a whole class, they get to turn a letter. In the end, the letters all spell out what type of party we have!

This year we had: ice cream party, popcorn party, movie party, glow in the dark party, Frozen party, popsicle party, no shoes party, etc. I'm so frustrated I don't have a picture to show it to you in action. I'll find one soon!!

Character Education
I am so into character education it's not even funny. I integrate character ed. into pretty much any teaching situation. That's how important I think it is! I teach it all year long because I feel that it is  a pivotal part of behavior management.

I'm working on a character education pack that will hopefully be finished by the school year! Depends on how much of my pool time I want to squander :)

(Coming SOON!!!!!)

Happy summer! I don't know about you all, but as much as I love talking about school, I still value my precious summertime.

Link up for next week!

Book Talk Tuesday! Want your kids to be kind at recess? (with a FREEBIE!)

Blogging two days in a row? WHAT? I'm definitely going to try to blog more often and since I'm on a roll, I'm going to share one of my favorite books with you for Book Talk Tuesday!! I thought for the next couple of weeks, I would share some of my favorite character education books with you!

These are my favorite books to use when teaching students to be kind. I teach kindness hand in hand with teaching about friendship. The books below are just a few of the books I read to my kinders each year. These books are ESPECIALLY helpful when teaching kindness at recess, which at least for my kiddos, was a really difficult task!

I'm sure that this is not a new find for many of you, but one of my FAVORITE books to read to teach about kindness/friendship is The Recess Queen!

What better kindergarten experience could there be for kiddos to relate to than RECESS? Through this story, Mean Jean, the Recess Queen, learns to be a kind friend when someone asks her to play. The other kiddos realize that she is only mean because she is lonely and wanted a friend.  

It gives them tons of examples of what not to do at recess, especially being physical (which I strongly stress is VERY WRONG while reading). I often read this on the first day of school, right before we go out to our first recess. It is a great way to introduce your recess rules and the importance of being a kind friend! 

Through this book I also make sure that I give my kiddos the language they need to ask someone to play. Some of them are so shy/non-verbal in the beginning of the school year, they use inappropriate language/actions because they don't know how else to ask someone to play!

Another favorite of mine is Chrysanthemum. Poor Chrysanthemum gets made fun of because her name is so different from anyone else's. We see throughout the story how horrible it makes Chrysanthemum feel. In the end, a teacher makes her feel good about herself and proud of her name.



This is also a perfect book to read when teaching kindness at recess, because recess is often a time where kiddos think they can get away with being unkind since they are out of earshot of the teacher. Since in the story, the students never actually apologize to Chrysanthemum for making fun of her, this book is when I introduce our special strategy. You can get get a copy of the language I use with my kiddos for FREE here :)

The students "act out" the apology of the other kiddos to Chrysanthemum and practice our apology strategy this way. Practicing as another "person" gives them the language and tools to use in a non-threatening way.

I also often read Hey Little Ant! This is also a perfect book to read to teach kindness at recess. I cannot tell you how many times I see my little ones ripping branches off of trees or stomping on spiders. They just don't understand that they are hurting another living thing. Hey Little Ant lets kids hear the perspective of the little ant and I find that many of them "see the light."



I often use the motto "Keep nature in nature" when we are out at recess and encourage the kiddos to not only be kind to one another, but kind to nature as well. 

These ideas, read-alouds, and resources are just a smidgen of what is included in my Because I'm Happy! Character Education pack. It's a YEARS worth of read-alouds, posters, activities, emergent readers, craftivities, and more to help teach your primary kiddos the importance of having good character.

It's not done yet, but my goal is to have it finished by summer! We'll see how that goes :)

Character Education, Classroom Rules and Beginning of School Fun!

The first two weeks of school have just flown by! My little second graders have done all kinds of work. We have been doing a lot of getting to know you activities and a lot of character/team building stuff.

My favorite story to read at the beginning of the school year is First Day Jitters! I think sometimes the kiddos feel like they are the only ones who are nervous, and the kids that have never heard the story before have their mouths hanging open when they find out its a teacher in the end!

I also use this really cute writing page where the students get to write what they have first day jitters about from Crazy for First Grade! (This link also has a bunch of other cute first day ideas!)

We also made some All About Me posters. This was a really great way for me to assess my students on their idea recall and their drawing. Some were definitely surprising :) It was very simple: what I did this summer, favorite foods, what I like to do, and my family! It allowed me and all of the other students to learn about each second grader. They are hung on the wall in my classroom and periodically I catch the kids checking them out still!

We also did a quite a few teamwork activities (which are my favorite!).

We made a class puzzle. I took a posterboard and cut it up into 20 pieces (I have 18 kids, I made one, and we made one as a class together). Make sure you make a bunch of black lines/black dots on one side so the kids know which side to color, because if they color the wrong side, the puzzle won't fit together! It turned out really cute, and I made this little poster to go with it from a cute saying my teammate found!

Another activity that my teammates introduced me to that is so cool is what I'll call the "Elephant activity." You start by reading the story Seven Blind Mice by Ed Young, and you discuss with your students how the mice are working together to try to figure out that they are actually seeing parts of an elephant, and without all the mice seeing the parts, they would not know it was an elephant in the end.

So you group your students in teams (I use my table teams) and give them all the same gray size piece of paper.

Each team is in charge of making one part of the elephant, without seeing what the other teams are making: head, body, tusks and trunk, legs, tail, etc. (depending on your # of teams). In addition, each member of their team has to play a part in making their elephant part: drawing, coloring, cutting, gluing, etc. Some friends need more help deciding on jobs than others :)

After they are finished, I hid the parts and quickly put the elephant together. These elephants look so goofy, but that's part of the fun! I then talk to my students about how we all worked as a team to create this elephant, and that we all played a part in making it. Our team worked together, and if one person chose not to, our elephant wouldn't be complete! Here are my kiddos finished product for this year (check out that trunk!)

Once again another wonderful idea from my teammates (can you tell how thrilled and lucky I am to be at this school with this fabulous team!!!) is an activity called tear-down. This is am example for the students of what happens when you do not work as a team, and start putting each other down.

Each child gets a body shape (mine looked like a gingerbread cookie) and color it to look like them, and then cut it out. My kiddos were VERY proud of them and showed them off to their friends. Then, they brought them to the carpet and we read Stand Tall, Molly Lou Melon which is a phenomenal book about a little girl who gets picked on and how she responds to the put-downs.

We talk about how Molly Lou Melon knew that none of the things that those mean kids said was true, and she loved herself for who she was. However, she will never forget what those kids said about her. You will always remember how you felt when someone made fun of you or made you feel self-conscious. So the students take their dolls, and tear off arms and legs, once for a time they can remember feeling that way.

Then we tape them back on by telling ourselves things about how wonderful we are! But we see by looking at our paper person, that we are not the same as we were before. We have tape on us and tear marks. I ask the kids to remember this before they made someone feel "torn-down" in my classroom. These are a few of the paper people my kiddos made!

Another activity to teach about how put-downs are always with students is the toothpaste to teach respect activity. Gather the students in a circle with a small tube of toothpaste. I read Oliver Button is a Sissy, to show students how you can be better than bullying and if you are doing what you love, it doesn't matter what others say.

Give each of your teams a small tube of toothpaste. Tell them to squeeze it out on a paper plate, and then try to put it back into the tube iwth toothpicks.

Well, it won't work. I talked to my students about how the toothpaste is like the words we speak to others. Once we say an unkind thing, we cannot put it back into our mouth or un-say it. We need to always be respectful towards one another and only say kind words to our friends. 

My kiddos (even the boys!) also really like our friendship bracelet making. I randomly (or not so randomly unbeknowst to the kids!) paired them up with a new friend, and they made friendship bracelets for each other. While they were making each other bracelets, they were to talk to each other and find 3 things they had in common and 1 interesting thing about the other person they didn't know. If they were having trouble, I gave them some question prompts (also on the Crazy for First Grade link above!)

Then, I had them each lunch together that day to celebrate their new friendship!

Lastly, another really cute (any easy) idea is the Friendship dance. I am actually planning on using this throughout the year for some especially wiggly times!

Play any kind of moderately intensive music, and tell the kids they are going to play freeze dance, except when the music stops they must find the amount of friends I say! So it might stop and I say "2 friends," and then they get in groups of 2. In the beginning, I try to make it so no one is left out. Then as it progresses and they start to get sillier, I start having people get "out" if they cannot get into a group fast enough. You could just leave the kids in the whole time though!

I have also been using two wonderful TPT products that I bought during the Back to School sale and they are both AWESOME!

I bought Amy Lemon's Classroom Promise pack and My School Rules pack. I have used both and they are wonderful :)

In My School Rules pack, it has an awesome activity that you can personalize for your own classroom rules. I have read in numerous places that if you want rules to be effective in your classroom, you shouldn't have more than 5 and they should be worded simply.

My rules are:

1. Be respectful.

2. Be responsible.

3. Follow directions.

4. Listen carefully.

5. Always do your best.

Amy's pack has an awesome book the kids can make of your classroom rules. I really like it because it's an awesome assessment of whether or not your kids really understand your rules, because they have to give an example. Here are a few of my kids pages:

We are going to make them into books for the kids to keep in their book boxes the first few weeks. I am trying to build REALLY strong routines at the beginning of the year! We are going to write our classroom promise tomorrow and I can post a picture of that after we've done it!

TGI(almost)F! Woo :)

Sarah