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This year, I have had the awesome opportunity to work with some first year teachers. It's been great to share some of the tips and tricks I've learned during my nine years of teaching with them. A few weeks ago, one of them asked, "So just how do you keep these big kids quiet in the hall? They always want to talk."
Yes, they do always want to talk. Intermediate kiddos are extremely social beings by nature. Our fourth grade classroom is louder than most, because we do a LOT of cooperative learning structures and brain breaks throughout the day. Which is fine, because it's in OUR room. I do, however, want to be courteous to my fellow teachers when we are walking in the hallway, because I know how frustrating it can be to be in the middle of a lesson and be interrupted by a herd of elephants, I mean students, walking past your room. At our school, we also have lots of students who are receive interventions in the hallway, and they don't need to be interrupted from their hard work every time my students walk down the hall either. :)
Although, hallway behavior with the bigger kids can be difficult, I have learned a few tips and tricks along that way that typically keep my fourth graders quiet in the hall. You'd think by fourth grade they'd have it down, but that's not always the case. My kids get "senoritis", fourth grade is their last year of elementary school, and they think they rule the school. Below are some of my tired and true hallway management tips. I'd love to hear some of your favorite tips in the comments! :)
The biggest piece of advice that I can offer ANY teacher when it comes to walking in the hall, is line order. Give each student each a spot in line, and set them up for success. Does every class really need this? No. However, it's just a nice system to have, because it makes lining up so much easier! I feel my kids out for the few days of school, and then I assign our line order spots. I change up our spots throughout the year as necessary.
After you give your students a line order spot, then it's time to practice. This might seem crazy to some of you, but you don't always know what their previous teachers/schools allowed. Take the time to practice, practice, and practice YOUR expectations in the hall. I promise you'll get that time back when it doesn't take you ten minutes to get back to your room after specials, lunch, or recess.
I do this more so at the beginning of the year, and ease off towards the end of first quarter, but one trick that typically keeps my big kids quiet is our quiet person game. I secretly pick a student before we leave the room, and if they are quiet on the way to and on the way back from our destination, I give the class a bingo number. It helps my class buy into being quiet and respectful in the hallway, and it also helps to develop a good habit that usually follows us all year long.
Finally, BE CONSISTENT! Don't just stress the importance of good hallway behavior at the beginning of the year, and never bring it up again.
Remind students often just how important their behavior in the hallway is to you. Your students learn what's valued/acceptable in your classroom by what you allow. If you ease up on what you expect, with anything in the classroom, then be prepared for inevitable downfall.
Sometimes we get to our destination early, and my class has to wait in the hallway quietly. By fourth grade, they get pretty tired of the quiet game. I play a fun game called "statue" at the end of the day,while we wait for the buses, and it's a hallway favorite too.
To play, I call out "statue" and my students strike a frozen pose. We do have expectations, such as: statues don't talk, touch another statue, or make inappropriate gestures. ;) I pick the best "statue" and they become the judge. I call out "statue" again and my next student judge picks the best statue to be the judge for the next round.
My fourth graders love this game, and it really keeps them quiet in the hallway. You do need to really reinforce what's allowed before you play and do a fair amount of modeling, but once they've got it, they've got it.
Another game we play at the end of the day, and while we are waiting in the hallway is the twenty questions game. I think of an object and allow my students to ask me yes or no questions about the object. They LOVE this game, and it's great inferencing practice. No matter how many times we play it throughout the year, they always get excited when the mystery object is revealed!
When I taught third grade, I'd carry Brain Quest cards around with me every where, and I'd use those when we got somewhere early. My students always loved them, and I need to pick up a fourth grade set! They are great time fillers!
What about you, what are your favorite hallway management tips? Share them below!
Happy Teaching,
Hello, sweet friends! This post is going to be short and sweet because graded papers and progress reports go home tomorrow and I have to grade our spelling tests. :)
Lately, my kiddos have really struggled with making good choices at specials. Which makes me really sad, because they are a good group of kids. They are just a wee bit implusive and need lots and lots of structure and don't always thrive in more unstructured settings.
A sweet friend of mine shared with me a behavior management system she used in the past for specials called "Eleven, Elevens." We've been doing doing it this week, and I've been loving the positive reports from our specials teachers!
Basically, I tell my kiddos their behavior should be better than a ten on a zero to scale at specials, it should be an eleven! This is because they only see those teachers a few times a week. We keep track of the 11s in our room and once we get eleven elevens, we brainstorm a small treat to celebrate...like gym day, slipper day, etc.
They are so jazzed about this system because they are so competitive. As well as smart, because they realized that eleven great specials in a row earns them a reward! :)
I had been keeping my elevens on notecards in my classroom {not pretty}, but spent some time making some cuter ones tonight to use.
Just click {here} to download them from Google Drive. Please remember that I don't need to share the document, I already have by sharing them with you in the Google World. :)
I've been really good at documenting our study on inferencing this week, I can't wait to share the fun with you this weekend! :)
Happy almost Friday!
Today I spent a little quality time with my computer drafting up my lesson plans/behavior communication sheets for next year.
Back in my third grade days, my awesome team and I shared the same lesson plan template. It was great because we often shared lesson plan writing duties for certain subjects and could just email the template back and forth. This worked really well, because it was back in the days before I discovered dafont.com and downloaded a bajillion fonts on my computer that that others don't have at school and word documents could be shared easily. Now that I hoard all kinds of fonts from all over the web, not so much. ;) It looked like this.
Loved seeing the week at glance. Hated Times New Roman and the tables in Word if you need more space in one column. Only the good Lord knows how many times I wanted to scream, yell, and throw my keyboard out the window when my table went onto the next page.
Last year, I went through lots of different templates, but I never quite found one that worked for me. You can read more about that, here. One of the things I really liked about using a whole page for a day template last year was that it was much easier to write sub plans, as I tended to be a little bit more detailed, and I could just leave the lesson plan page in a pinch, like a meeting, etc.
I played around today and came up with this. At the beginning of the week, I have this Week in a Peek sheet where I can list our overall scope and sequence for the week. Plus spaces for my intervention focus skills/groups. This is the first time we've done ELA intervention groups as a grade level at the same time, so I'm sure this template will change, but I really like having a rough map of the week and a place to list my centers/intervention groups for math.
This is my actual lesson plan template draft. What I like about it all the boxes lay out my day in sequence, I've seen a lot that don't, and the lesson break down in math. I do a lot of group rotations in math, and I like having a place to put the structure of that day's lesson. Plus it was created in Powerpoint, meaning formatting is a little bit easier!
I'm fortunate that we don't have to submit our plans weekly and we have the freedom to create plan templates that work best for us. Our plans are reviewed twice a year though by our administration. Again this is very much a draft. I'm not sure I'm crazy about it yet, but at least it's a start.
I also created a VERY rough draft of my grade level's daily behavior check in.
I'm not sure how I feel about this one yet. I like the color coding and number coding, but I'm still playing around with the words. I've never really had success with a daily check in sheet like this, so I'm hoping the coloring and number coding makes it more manageable and hoping that fourth graders are responsible/independent enough to color their calendar on their own. My second graders NEVER got the hang of it and I kinda just gave up! I am continuing my clip chart again, but modifying a bit to fit my needs a little more since I will be doing ED full inclusion, so I just picked colors for the color coding at the top.
I plan on copying this on the back for days that just need a little bit more communication than just a number code.
Any thoughts? Are either one of these something you be interested in seeing in my TpT store? Friends who have used behavior calendars, any tips for me? Behavior calendars are a tool that my grade level has found very helpful in the past for informing parents of behavior and for documentation for conferences/meetings, so I'm hoping to finally find something that works for me! :)
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