Student Behavior Motivation

Happy Thursday! It has been a VERY long week this week. We have had rain every.single.day. and rain means a lot of indoor recess and a lot of antsy kids! We have done our fair share of Just Dance Kids this week to keep their antsiness (like that word! it's totally made up!) to a minimum! 

Today I want to share with you how I manage behavior in my classroom. This is only my second year teaching but I feel behavior management is key to a successful year! Last year I began by using a behavior clip chart. It looks a little something like this

It's a typical clip chart where the kids all start their day on green (ready to learn) if they make good choices throughout the day, I'll ask them to move their clip up. However, anything they did that was not following the rules, they moved their clip down. It was very simple! If they reached the top of the clip chart any day they got to add a sparkly rhinestone to the clip. The only downside to last year was I only contacted parents if the students had their clip move down to red. I didn't have any way of sharing with parents their daily behavior. Over the summer I looked at different behavior calendars on Teachers Pay Teachers and found one that I thought would work well! This fabulous calendars are FREE from the wonderful Teri at A Cupcake for the Teacher. If you are interested in looking at them go here! The good news is she is going to be making these for the 2013-2014 school year so you can use these next year if you want! 

This is an example of one of my students behavior calendar. 

I really like these because at the top is a list of 10 behavior codes to give the parents even more information! I use bingo dabbers to stamp their calendar at the end of the day. In the beginning of the year it took a little big longer to do this but by now I can complete all their calendars in less than 5 minutes. If one of my kiddos ends the day on anything below green I simply write a number or numbers that tell why they had to move their clip down. As an incentive, any of my kids who have an all green or above with two freebie days (I know some days are more difficult than others!) get to eat lunch in the classroom at the end of the month! This has been one of the coolest things ever to them! They tell me that the lunch room is pretty crazy and it's much more fun eating in the classroom! So this is something they really work hard to earn!

In the beginning of the year I had a lot of parents tell me they were forgetting what the colors meant. To solve this problem I came up with these! 

I printed 18 of these off, laminated them and put a magnet on the back and ta-da! The home for these are usually on their refrigerator where it is less likely to get lost! The top has our Whole Brain Teaching classroom rules and a mini behavior clip-chart. This way the parents could reference it after looking at their child's calendar. At the end of each week the parents initial to show that they have looked over their behavior calendar. 

I recently found one of the greatest things ever on Teachers Pay Teachers. I am wanting to reward those students who continually make good, great and outstanding choices, so I purchased Laura's Classroom Coupons. You can click on the picture to take a look for yourself! 

Unfortunately because I discovered these at this point in the school year, I am going to use these during the month of May.I haven't decided exactly how I am going to work these but I am going to assign points to Good Choice, Great Choice and Outstanding. Probably 1 point for Good Choice, 2 points for Great Choice and 3 points for Outstanding. For every 10 points they earn they will get to pick out one of the classroom coupons! I am excited to see how this motivates my students!

How do you manage behavior in your classroom?