WHEW!!! I survived the first day and I am still here to blog about it! I LOVE my class. I had so much anxiety going in to the first day…there is always such an unknown until you really meet the kids and see them interact with each other. I think it’s safe to say we are in for a good year!
I posted about this behavior management tool this week on A Special Sparkle. I don’t normally like to double dip my posts, but I wanted to share this with you while it was still free! When I created these, I thought it would be clever to have the tag line for this behavior management system be “Give behavior a punch!”…but then I realized that was a bit of a contradiction with what I am trying to teach. Then I decided they’d be better off with a superhero theme because who doesn’t admire a superhero?!
I teach a kindergarten and first grade self-contained 12:1:1 class, so I have a wide range of behaviors and abilities. Some of my students are on the cusp of going into a mainstream general education room in 2nd grade, and others are still learning the ropes of self-contained and are fresh out of pre-K. They all come from different backgrounds and that is what makes our class unique and wonderful! We are one big happy family and we need to work together. I worked with a teacher in the past that used green and red beads as a behavior management tool. Each of her students carried a little tupperware container around that had a hole in it on top. When they made a good choice, they got a green bead. When they made a bad choice, they got a red bead. She had a system for figuring out how much free time or time out they had depending on the number of beads in each color at the end of the day. I loved how consistent and concrete this was for students that didn’t understand the abstract approach of a color chart.
One of the criticisms that special education teachers have for “traditional” behavior color charts is that sometimes you run out of colors! You want to praise and reprimand as often as possible, but you find yourself thinking, “This kid is going to be on red and it’s not even 9:30am!” Sometimes the praise and reminders that I give are not necessarily worthy of moving a color up and down our color chart, but my students need a concrete reinforcement for the good and bad choices. I have also used behavior charts in the past where the child had to bring me his chart after each subject and either got a smile or a frown. Even this seemed to fade after a while. There is something I love about that little bead or little click of a hole puncher making the kids understand that bad behavior has consequences and making good choice pays off!
Plan to use these with my son starting this week; thanks so much for sharing!