Positive Behavior Intervention Systems

Hello again, somehow the past two weeks have gotten away from me. I've sat down with great intentions to blog, and then life happened. Can't win um all right? In my defense, I've been working my booty off getting every last bit of next week planned, and in my file folders, so at 2:30 on Friday I could walk out with a clear conscience; and think of nothing but this guy all weekend. 

There really is nothing better that starting off the weekend snuggling my Squish while he naps and I read Gone Girl (so good!). Now that I've included the obligatory photo of my favorite boy, let's talk positive behavior intervention systems! If I end that with an expiation point you'll all be as excited as I am right?! 

The truth is, having a positive behavior system in my classroom has saved my sanity and spirit for teaching. To explain this, we have to go back to my first year of teaching where the behavior in my classroom, to put it lightly, was not exactly peaches and cream. I had a lot of students with major behavior issues individually, and when put together it was a recipient for disaster... and it was. I had six different behavior plans going at once, my principal on speed dial, and I was drowning. I put so much energy everyday just into getting my class to semi behave, it took every ounce of everything I had left just to teach. I felt defeated, and I felt like a huge failure; BUT I was also determined that I would make some changes, and I would NEVER have a year like that again.

Enter a positive behavior intervention system. It all started with a clip system. My first year, I only used a system where students moved down for misbehavior. There was no warnings in place, and no incentive for students to turn their behavior around. Basically my students weren't motivated to behave, so they didn't. Thus, I adopted a clip chart where my students were rewarded and noticed for positive behavior, they received a warning before a consequence AND they had the opportunity to turn their behavior around and move their clip back up. Once I had the basics of a positive system in place, the rest snowballed from there.

I could talk about the PBIS in my classroom for days, so I will! I'm going to be making a weekly series on my blog about the positive behavior intervention systems that I use in my classroom. I feel so passionately about having a classroom that runs on love and positivity, and I want to share how I've come from a classroom management system where I was drowning to a system that is fun, happy and encouraging. I hope you enjoy taking this journey with me!

I Mustache You a Question

I feel that I should preface this post by sharing that I am always a year or two behind the trends - as in, I purchased my first maxi skirt this summer (why did I wait so long!?). ANYWAYS... it took me a little while to embrace the whole chevron / mustache trend, but now I must have chevron and mustaches on all. the. things.!

Obviously, I needed to make my first unit of the year a chevron and mustache masterpiece - you know, because I'm such a trendsetter and all. For our scope and sequence, we always start the year out with asking and answering questions. It just seems like a good fit for the beginning of the year, and it really is the basis of all comprehension in reading. Thus, extremely important that students master this concept early! That being said, asking and answering questions can get a little... how do we put this... redundant? after a few days.

While I love reading, and I am constantly asking myself questions while I am reading, I can tell that my students just want to read the book; and don't necessarily want to stop to think about their thinking or ask questions. I knew I needed something that would be entertaining, and convince them that stopping every so often while they are reading to ask themselves questions is actually fun.

I decided to hook them with mustaches, because who doesn't love giving themselves a pretend mustache?

Handlebar mustaches make everything more fun! 

First, I read the book Help! by Holly Keller to my students, then I busted out some mustaches and had the students buddy read the story (we have this story in our reading textbooks) with their partner. I gave each student a mustache, and as they were reading they were allowed to hold the mustache up only if they were pausing to ask a question. Needless to say, lots of questions were being asked ;-).

After the students finished buddy reading the story, they grabbed a questioning tic-tac-toe game to continue the questioning fun!

I loved how they would look back in the book to find answers to their questions! 

Working on mastering a standard before breakfast was even finished!

The students LOVED the tic-tac-toe game, and they were so engaged while they were playing. I loved that this activity was really easy to differentiate, and it allowed me to work one on one with kiddos who I knew were struggling; while the other kiddos had a very meaningful activity that they were able to do independently. I originally thought we would only do questioning tic-tac-toe once, but the students loved it so much that I worked it into a couple more lessons throughout the week; and I put a copy (with mustaches of course) in our buddy reading station.

You can get a copy of questioning tic-tac-toe for FREE! here on my TpT store, and if you would like to grab my whole questioning unit (which include several other fun games and activities - as well as the mustache cutouts) you can purchase it here on TpT.

Tell me...

1. What is the first standard you usually work on with your students
2. How to you jazz up those standards that just seem redundant?

We're Back!!

Sorry for the hiatus on the blog, I was busy having one of these...

My husband and I welcomed a beautiful baby boy (I call him "The Squish") in early May, and I spent all summer cuddling and smooching my sweet boy - and trying not to think about leaving him in the fall :-(.

Alas, the school year came around and through many many tears, I kissed my sweet boy goodbye and embarked on my third year of teaching second grade. I must say, there has been some divine intervention with my class this year (someone must have known I was in a fragile state this year!), and my class is seriously the class you dream about having. They are absolutely fantastic, and they make leaving my baby boy each morning a little less hard.

That being said, lets get down to business! I'm going to backtrack a little here - seeing as it's the third week of school, and I'm just now sitting down to blog! The first week we started off with several get to know you games.

Starting the year out right with a snowball fight! 

One of the biggest hits of the first week was a class snowball fight. I had the students write three things that were true about themselves, and one lie on a piece of paper. Then they crumbled up the piece of paper, and I put the song "happy" on and we had a three minute snowball fight. When the song ended, the students grabbed the piece of paper that was nearest to them and tried to guess who it belonged  to. The kiddos LOVED this activity, and are still asking me when we are going to do it again.

We also had a find a friend scavenger hunt, and made an adorable Scaredy Squirrel craftivity that I found here on TpT.

I love how you can see each student's personality! 

Well, this post is getting quite lengthy and wordy, so I think I will end here today - but I will be back tomorrow with a fun questioning unit and a freebie!

Don't forget to leave a comment and tell me...

1. What did you do / what are your plans for the first week of school?
2. What was your favorite activity in the first few days when you were at school?

Measurement Olympics

This past week my class has been getting into the Olympic spirit by hosting our own Olympics in our classroom. We are currently working on the common core measurement standards in math, so I thought what better way to learn and practice our measurement than to make it an Olympic event!

We started out by meeting the different types of measurement tools, and hosting a mini Olympics to determine which tool was the best for each measurement job. We used my Measurement Olympics unit on TpT to record our answers. After we became familiar with the various measurement tools (we learned about a ruler, yardstick and measuring tape), we started to learn about the various units of measurement.

We learned about inches, feet, yards, centimeters and meters. The students went around the room, and categorized various objects from the room into different units of measurement.

 I allowed the students to pick the objects out around the room for themselves, but I challenged them to find at least 2 objects in the room that would fit into each unit of measurement category. They were also able to carry around a ruler to help them check their estimates. This activity really helped the students get a concrete idea of about how big each unit of measurement really was.

After we had a good idea of the units of measurement we moved on to the fun stuff... using our rulers to measure! We did several practice activities measuring with our rulers before the Olympics started.

 First we measured ourselves, and traced our bodies onto butcher paper. The students measured the length of their partners leg, foot, arm, hand and face. After the students traced their bodies onto butcher paper we added their measurements onto their official Olympian Card, and hung their cutouts around the room to decorate for the Olympics.

Next, we practiced our measurement one more time before the big day by measuring the arenas.

I made half of the arena spaces into straight lines, and half of the arena spaces into squares or triangles. I taped down yarn on the floor to be our arena spaces, but duck tape would have worked well also. One of the advantages of having squares and triangles, was it allowed students to practice addition with regrouping using three and four two digit numbers (always a win when you can review other standards as well)! Have straight lines and shapes also helped with differentiation. I was able to send my students who had mastered the skill of measuring to work on the harder shapes first, while I worked on measuring the straight lines with the students who were struggling.

Finally, after all of our hard work preparing it was time for the Olympics!

Trying to set a record at the half pipe!

Measuring their cotton ball's distance at the cotton puck shoot out.

Measuring his speed skating distance.

Measuring and comparing the bobsled tracks.

Measuring the distance his ball traveled at alpine skiing. 

 The students competed in six different Olympic events, and at each event they were actively involved in a competition which required them to measure. The favorites were the half pipe jump where I marked the wall with tape in 1 foot increments, and challenged the students to see how many feet they could jump off the ground. There was some very heavy competition here! Another favorite was the speed skate race. Students stepped on paper plates, and had 5 seconds to "skate" across the carpet as far as they could.

Overall the students loved the Measurement Olympics, and it was an awesome was for us to get up and moving after being stuck inside for months on end with this awful winter.

Moon Walking

Last week my class braved the unusually cold weather we've been having here (seriously colder than Alaska here in Indiana!), and studied the moon. My students observed and charted the moon each night for two weeks for homework as part of our moon unit. Unfortunately, the extremely cold temps and cloudy skies caused the moon to only really be visible 3 out of our 14 nights... womp womp.

Not to be discouraged, however, we got a few packages of Oreos and recreated the phases of the moon our own way!

Clearly some of us were more excited than others ;-).

To start we used a diagram to point out and order the different phases of the moon.

After we reviewed and discussed our schema of the moon phases we moved on to the fun part... Oreos!

I gave each student 8 Oreos, and had them carefully break the Oreo's in half. Then, they put the cream side down on their phases of the moon diagram in their moon book.

Some of us opted to eat our tops while we were waiting :-)

 After we had all of our Oreo's put down (note: some of the Oreos cracked in half / the cream didn't come off smoothly - we just did our best the smoosh those Oreos back together). we began creating our diagram of the moon phases. At each phase we came up to the board and identified the shape of the moon according to our diagram, then we removed the cream on our Oreos to create the phase. When we finished we had all eight phases of the moon.

Delicious Moon Phases!

 In the interest of transparency this activity was really difficult for some of my kiddos. Some of them had a hard time removing the cream from their Oreos, or grew frustrated when their diagram didn't perfectly match the picture diagram. In the future I think I would buddy up some of my students who struggle with fine motor issues with students who excel in that area, and I think that would help ease some of the frustration. Either way - it was a perfect opportunity to talk about trying our personal best rather than being perfect!

In the end the students really enjoyed this activity, and it was a great way to learn about the phases of the moon both visually and physically.

 In the end, who doesn't love Oreo's for breakfast on a Friday?!

If you liked this activity please download for free on TpT as part of my Moon Unit.

Leave a comment and tell me...

What activities have you done for the moon?

If you've done the Oreo activity before, what did you do for those kiddos who had trouble getting their cream off?

Welcome

Hello and welcome to my blog! I have been an avid reading of teaching blogs since I started teaching a year ago, and have always felt  so inspired by the creative and engaging activities I read about. Thus, I decided to start my own teaching blog to share my adventures with the rest of you. I hope that I can inspire others to create and innovate as I have been inspired. I'm so excited to take you on this journey with me!