December Behavior Management

Teachers are throwing back Ventis like shots. Students are lit up like trees made of tinsel.  We are grinching, polar expressing, ornament making, celebrating, {assessing}, and crafting.   For some reason, we love it and wouldn’t change it!

BUT…

Here’s three easy and free ideas to stop your students from jingling your bells in the month of December! 

Because there are three ideas, ideally you would introduce one a week for the three week school month of December.  Before your left pinky is permanently glue gunned to the felt and the glitter has scratched your right cornea, you can have you control, peace, joy, love, and all that goodness that is 20+ little bodies in the confines of your 4 walls.

 Create a class icon such as a tree and have students work to add their names through their kindness and good choices.  I chose to make a class tree on our door.  Mostly because my smart team came up with the entire idea and I stole it. 

On Monday morning I had each student’s name spelled out on ornaments that I made by putting two circles together.  #nailedit   All of their letters were sitting on their desk as they came into the room in the morning.  Get the ornaments HERE.

The students were intrigued about their names when they came in.  I explained that as we worked through our day they would be able to color a letter in their name as I saw good choices and kindness.  Then I quickly found someone being awesome that got to get up and go color a letter.  The entire class sat up straight and quiet from that moment and I knew I HAD them!

I kept a small class list by my side to make tallies or checks by students that I had already noticed being good.  It just helps you catch everyone being awesome.   Realizing I needed to catch students up or get everyone to earn a letter,  I would say things like, “Let’s see who can earn a letter as we walk to the library.”  Then, upon our return everyone would color a letter.

If students have very short names or very long names I explained that we had a goal to meet.  Once we met that goal, our name could go on the tree regardless of the number of letters in our name.  This evens the playing field!

I shared a version of this idea last year, but have since changed how I handle it.  Here’s last year’s idea.  Each student has a snowball and the snowball moved to the different hat colors based on behavior. We tried to stay near our green hat snowman by making good choices.  This year we no longer focus our time or attention on the mistakes we make, but rather on how we improve. 

We use the super improver wall.  The idea comes from whole brain teaching.
An incentive or reward for super improvers this month is to move your snowball to the daily drawing!  I like to make it tie into something we will be learning.

 Every student has their snowball on the board, but they can move it for making an improvement or a good choice throughout the day.  Wow I see that you are trying to use your manners by staying quiet while working, you may go move your snowball! 

The day we made our sock snowmen, students earned their way onto the snowman.  #exciting

This was not my original idea.  A teamie shared her light ’em up with kindness ideas and we all used this in our own way to teach our students about kindness. I had each student make a kindness tree that they could use to gift each other with light bulbs when they noticed that person lighting someone else up with kindness!  It helps students to pay attention to kindness and to appreciate those around them!

 Students gave a kindness light bulb to someone when they saw an act of kindness and could verbalize what they saw.  Rather than students saying they were kind themselves, they had to notice others being kind.

Each act of kindness that was noticed, earned the kind person a light bulb.  This was slow at first, because students weren’t used to looking for kindness.  Giving students a daily kindness focus helped.  We began with let’s work on saying the person’s name and thanking them for something specific.  For example.  If I drop my pencil and Sara picks it up, I will say, “Sara, thank you for picking up my pencil.”  Students were saying, “Gracie, thank you for getting my jacket for me when I forgot it”  Then they knew that someone had just been kind!

Each student made their own kindness tree using my tree craft in my December art and writing pack. 

The kindness light bulbs were placed on the tree to light up our hallway with kindness!

I hope these ideas will help create a less hectic December not only for this last week before break, but next year too!