SAVE YOUR SANITY!

Home

Chat

Blogs

Collection

Directory

Home : 2003 : October : 10

SAVE YOUR SANITY!
By HEIDI

I have two things going in my class, and they never cease to amaze me. One is that I have a packet of tiny happy face tickets. I fit about 4 across a page and maybe 6 or 8 down. These are rewards. Some say "Thank you
for listening" others say "Thank you for being prepared" and "Thank you for helping". IF I catch a kid doing something right, I give them a ticket. They write their name on it and drop it ina happy face bucket to be eligible for a Friday draw. The prize, if they are drawn is just a pen or funky eraser, trinkets kids love and I only have to give out one to the draw winner so it's pretty

cheap! IF a kid sits down when they come in from recess and gets their book out before I even say to, because they know what's coming, I zoom over with a Thank you for being prepared. IT's pretty quick that other kids start digging in their desks to get that book ready too! And I reward the first 5 or so. The positive power those tickets have over kids is amazing! Once they get a ticket in the draw, it stays all year (or until the bin is too full and we have to empty it).

Secondly, my class is set up for a monthly reward challenge. They are in groups of 4 or 5 on a chart. I reward them with 2 stickers for an A or A+ on their Friday homwork. A B gets 1 sticker. SOmetimes I reward them for other things during the week. I also can remove stickers for noise or other inappropriate behaviours.

The winning team is the one with the highest average number of stickers (a grade 4 outcome in math is learning to find average by balancing out the stickers, so if one team member has more than others, they borrow those to fill in the gaps. Wherever the line falls to show that all their team is balanced that indicates the average). I find that if a team has a frequent offender, theat kid starts to experience positive peer pressure to conform to the class expectations so the team can win.

Prizes are things like one month it was a DQ challenge and I bought a small sunday for the four kids who won. Another month was movie madness, and the group got to sit in the gym for an afternoon, watching a movie. I supplied pop and popcorn, even flavour shakes for them! A parent volunteer came in to supervise the reward team. It was a big hit! This month, the winners will get to decorate cupcakes for 66 kids to have for hallowe'en the next day. So the winning team gets sprung from class for an hour or two.

I still use behaviour contracts and remove priviledges, making kids write a thinking sheet that gets signed by their parents, but only for really outrageous things kids do. Overall, the rewards are good enough that the kids whip into shape quickly.

I also have a give me five rule that when I raise my hand and say give me five, I expect instrant quiet, hands-free, and eyes on me. Usually that's when I am about to provide instruction or directions. Other times, kids do seat work quietly and I let them help one another in a whisper. When it gets too noisy, I do a give me 5 again. Occasionally I do a count down from 7 to 1, and kids join in hollering each number. But we nevr say one. We are dead quiet by then and put a finger over our lips. It's an active way to gain attention and silence quickly. There's always a joker who blurts out one, but I just carry on and ignore it. Usually the kid's an attention seeker and I don't want to provide that attention, so ignoring it works.