Pictures

Here are some pictures of the new classroom management aspects that I added during my solo. 

This is a picture of the group point system that I added onto our regular PAT points which is for the whole class. This allowed me to reward individual groups for doing the right thing even if the entire class didn't do it so well as to warrant a point for the whole class. It also worked the other way around, in that if only one group was being consistently noisy I could take point away from just them rather than the whole class. I think I only had to do that 3 times over the course of 2 and a half weeks, and it was extremely effective each time.

At the beginning of each day before school, I would put the number of tickets each group earned onto their desk, erase the tally marks and add them to the week sum in the right corner of each group. The group that earned the most points for the week was then rewarded by being allowed to both eat with me in the classroom as well as play regular games as well as some SmartBoard games. The kids loved it!

And here is a picture of the prizes students could buy. As you can see, students aren't told how many tickets each thing costs, and they must do the math themselves.

The kids love the prizes and so do I, because they don't cost me anything. I have since raised the prices on the Teacher's Chair and P.E. Activity because they were being bought too frequently and too easily (for the P.E. activity students are allowed to combine tickets). When the kids protested, I had a really fruitful discussion about Supply and Demand with them ;-)

The Teacher's Rolly Chair is definitely the hot commodity prize. My resident teacher and I have not had access to our nice cushy chair in weeks! We even have a week long waiting list on it!

Here is a picture of the Word of the Day, which I used for transitions especially. I always made sure to have really kid friendly definitions. One of my pet-peeves in education is that vocabulary is frequently taught with really hard to understand definitions! Just today, as I was passing out the pre-made textbook vocabulary list I noticed one of the words listed as "submit: to yield". If a kid doesn't know what submit means, I will bet you 100 bucks they also won't know what yield means! Is it really that hard to define it as "to give up or give in", which is actually something kids will understand?

Finally, and I don't remember if I talked about these, here is my stack of Interactive Journals for writing. This is something I learned and did in my UC Davis Teaching Literacy class. Basically, students are given the freedom to write about whatever they wish, and the teacher then reads and responds to every single entry. This gives students a purpose and an audience to write to, which really increases their motivation and output. I have kids writing me pages upon pages, and I have students who supposedly "hate writing" who eagerly ask me when the next time will be for interactive journals. They LOVE reading my responses to their writing, and I love reading what they have to say. I have noticed that it is a great tool for building relationships with my students. They feel valued and appreciated and are eager to tell me things about their lives. I have had students teach me about important customs in their culture, talk about a recent divorce, and other really deep things that I do not think would surface in the classroom otherwise. Really valuable!

Although they have free choice, every day that I do this (probably two times a week as other days we focus on actual writing lessons) I also talk about and introduce a new genre of writing, usually supplemented with sharing some of my own writing in that genre. I have shared a poem by Shel Silverstein and then shared my own rendition in a similar style, shared my own funny personal narrative, etc. This has really been helpful for helping my kids academic vocabulary in writing. Students are now freely using the words genre, nonfiction, personal narrative etc. in class discussion. Having a genre theme every day has also been beneficial for my "I don't know what to write" students, because then they just write in the genre that I shared that day.

Let me tell you though, Interactive Journals are a LOT of work!!! The first night, it took me about two hours to respond to every single student! Since then, I have modified a bit, and I only respond to 1/3 of the class each time, but then cycle through so everyone is responded to the same amount.