behavior

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Home : 2002 : January : 12

behavior
By Carolyn

I do what Brenda does. I hate straining my voice to get kids quiet when they begin to get chatty. All I do is walk to the board and erase a letter off of the word RECESS. They know from experience that if I erase all of
the letters they have lost 5 minutes of recess. I figure that 5 minutes have been lost of class time by the time I have erased all letters. If I am serving outside recess duty, I make my kids stand on the sidewalk watching the other kids play. They don't like that. I tell them that if they talk while they are waiting, they have to continue serving time.
There are days where I have

erased RECESS and they continue to talk. That's when I tell them that if anyone continues to talk, I will take them to the phone and call their parents. I did have a problem with this one day this past week when I removed the entire word and they continued to talk when I was trying to teach them writing. I threatened them with the phone, and it stopped. They don't like me to to call their parents, and the phone is just a short walk away from my room. It's effective medicine if the noise and commotion just won't stop. I figure that it's a waste of class time to call parents, but if you're not accomplishing anything anyway, it's something you just have to do.