Behavior Management Strategies

1. Behavior Chart

· In front of the room is what we call our behavior chart. This chart is color coded: Blue – doing great!; Yellow – warning; Orange – loss of recess privilege for 10 minutes; Green – loss of entire recess time, send home a letter to parents. Each pocket on the behavior chart has each student’s number written on it.

· Every Monday the students all have blue cards in their pockets. If during the day a student misbehaves by not playing safe and not being responsible, he or she will be told by the teacher to turn his or her card to the next color listed above. At the end of the day if a student is on green, he or she would fill out a letter explaining to his or her parents/guardian the reasons why he or she got to that color, bring the letter home and have his or her parents sign it, and the next day show it to the teacher. 3 Parental letters would equal a parent conference.

· The next morning, students who stayed on blue during the previous day would receive a ticket as a reward for behaving properly and being responsible in and out of the classroom.

2. Bathroom Procedure

· Beside the door is a string with 26 clothespins attached to it. Each clothespin has the student’s name and number on it. For each day, a student is given a privilege of one restroom break during class time. If a student would like to use that privilege, he or she would have to put his or her pin down on a small basket and cannot put it back up until the following day when the bathroom pins manager has put the pins back up again.

3. Drinking Water Procedure

· Students are given time to drink after the tardy bell, after recess, and after lunch, but only as tribes. On Monday, tribe 1 has the privilege to drink first. Tuesday – tribe 2; Wednesday – tribe 3; Thursday – tribe 4; Friday – tribe 5.

4. Homework Sticks

· Every morning the class homework managers would check if all the students have turned in their homework. If a student does not bring in his homework or does not complete it, the homework managers will write down their names and the reason why they didn’t do it or complete it. On the behavior chart, the homework managers will place the homework sticks only for those students who have completed and turned in their homework. On Friday, if a student has 5 homework sticks, he or she will be given a healthy treat before recess.

5. Quiet Please

· Instead of the usual Give Me Five hand signal, we use a wooden mask with a sign that says “Quiet Please” to grab everyone’s attention. When the students see the teacher holding up this mask, they immediately drop everything and give their “full” attention.