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 :)

First Few Days of School! And a Peek at My NEXT Week!

OMG! I keep thinking about posting about what we are doing but I am so crazy busy, I barely have time to even think about it! I am going to **TRY** to link up with Mrs. Wills Kindergarten for a Peek at my Week before the week starts, but we'll see how that goes :)

I finally have a break today, so I thought I would share with you some of the fun things I am doing with my kinders! I have to say that as a new K teacher this year, I wasn't sure how to start. I have gotten so many fun, engaging activity ideas from fellow bloggers and I will try my very hardest to make sure that they get credit for all their ideas!

I think as everyone knows, the first few days are a blur of routines and procedures, especially in K!
My main routines that I teach the first few days are:
-1, 2, 3 for question, bathroom, drink
-line up in number order (kinders CAN do it, and it makes life so easy!)
-safe body
-transitions

These are just a few highlights from the first few days:

**Buddy Building: Parents always talk to me about how important it is to them that their children make friends, and I wanted each child to go home on the first day and tell their parents they made a friend. So we did buddy building!

 

Literally, the easiest activity ever to set up. I just gave partners a bucket of snap cubes, and gave them a few ideas of things to talk about it. It was perfect! If I saw a group that was struggling a little with their conversation, I just gave them a few ideas!

**First Day of K Frame: I am SO happy how these turned out!

 

**My Name Is....: This was a perfect formative assessment for me! I already had the chart filled out and each child wrote their name. After they wrote it, we did a chant for them. "Hey, hey, what do you say? We're happy _____ is here today! Woo ______!" So silly, and so easy, but they loved it! Even on the first day of school I could keep them interested long enough to do everyone.

**Introducing the Rules: These are rules that my school has decided to use school-wide, but I think they could easily be used in any classroom. I use the tune from Dr. Jean's Rule song and use hand motions to go with each rule. My kiddos SO remember these. It's amazing. They already remind each other with the hand motions! What smarties :) You can get your copy of my rules here :)

**Pete the Cat School Tour: My kids LOVED this! We read Pete the Cat: Rocking in my School Shoes and talked about all the places we could go in our school. Then we had a special message from Pete in the back of the book and went on our school tour. In hindsight, my kiddos weren't quite procedurally ready for this, but in the end, at least they had fun!

After the tour, there is a top secret envelope waiting in the room. Each student gets to color their own school shoes and practice writing their name! We also played disappearing shoes (take one person's shoe in the circle with everyone's eyes closed and then name who they are!). This is great for learning friend's names.

You can get a copy of our Pete the Cat tour and activity here!

**Wemberly Worried craftivity: I got this wonderful idea from Mrs. T's First Grade Class. We read Wemberly Worried and talked about what we were worried about when we got to school. The exciting part was painting! We talked about what a circle looked like, and then painted circles on our papers with watercolors. I thought this was going to be a disaster, but they did a great job!

The next day, I modified the words for my kinders and they dictated to me what they worry about. Some of them were so cute!

**How To Lose All Your Friends and Friendship Salad: I think that reading this book is applicable for any elementary classroom! It is a great way for students to all laugh and gasp together at the way the kiddos act in the story and to truly see what a bad friend is. Then, we made friendship salad! I got this idea from Greg at Smedley's Smorgasboard. It was super fun and the kiddos loved that they got a snack!

Obviously, this is just a smattering of what we did, but we had a lot of fun. We're learning to listen and play together :)

Here is my attempt at visual lesson plans for next week! (Can you tell I like Mrs. Will's products?) I am trying really hard to be consistent and not introduce too much too fast. We have not started literacy stations and will not for at least 2 weeks. Right now, I am teaching the games whole group MULTIPLE times.

So here they are! Making this for myself is so helpful and hopefully it will help you too! I will post pictures of our week HOPEFULLY on Friday!

Have a great week!