Classroom Management Before Break? No Problem! Use Incentives!

The time between Halloween and Winter Break can be so difficult!  Build in positive reinforcement incentives to keep lessons moving forward and classroom management under control.

What's the problem?

You don't really need me to answer that do you?!  There might not be a more frustrating period of time to teach content than November and December.  Students are distracted by school programs, secret Santas, decorations, countdown to break, social events, more school programs, time off for Thanksgiving.... Okay, we know what the problem is!

What's a teacher to do?

Build incentives into your teaching that will motivate students to stay on track and work for you.  Incentives also provide students with a positive reward that will help improve your classroom management.

1.  Find what they like

By this time of year, you know your students.  You know what activities they've delighted in and have begged for more of.  Maybe you had a cool art project that went with a novel study.  Maybe your students loved the "pass back" story activity or had a blast with your bingo vocab game.

Choose an activity you think your class will work for.  It can be a bit of a trial and error process, but that's the great thing -- you can do something different every time.

2.  How can you incentivize it?

Take you idea to your students.  I wanted to have a "game day" every other Friday.  I proposed the idea to my students.  What if we had a "game day" if we finished all of our scheduled work?  My students loved that idea.

3.  Get organized

My students formed groups and chose what game they wanted to play.  I discovered that many of my students had board games at home that they have never played!    I made sure I had information from each group:  who was in the group (making sure it was a reasonable number for the game and that everyone was in a group), what game they were playing, who was bringing in the game, and if they knew how to play the game or not.

4.  Working toward a goal

I let my students know what we needed to complete before we were eligible for the game day.  For ELA, it included writing goals that I posted on my board each week and broke down for each day.  

The daily goals for the class helped reduce student talking and off-task behavior that wasted class time -- students used peer pressure to work for their goal.

While I originally wanted to stretch out the goal for two weeks, the first time we tried this, I had the game day at the end of the week.  This gave students a taste of what game day looked like and why they wanted to earn it.

5.  Keeping it fresh

Having a game day every Friday would quickly lose its novelty for middle schoolers -- no matter how much they try to convince you it wouldn't!  

After the first week, I stretched the reward out two weeks.  I also asked students to change games and groups.  

I also kept a few games in my closet.  Students would forget to bring in a game, or they became bored with the one they brought.  You could also have a whole-class game day to play that Bingo game you have stashed in your cabinet.

6.  Kicking it up a notch

My original game day evolved into an annual Scrabble Tournament.  Even my principal was impressed!  Words!  What could possibly go wrong?!!

If you're interested in hosting a Scrabble Tournament, here's how I did it Scrabble Tournament.

Give it a try!  Lots of fun!

What do you think?

What incentives would work for your students?  Share your ideas in the comments below!  

Happiness always!

Teaching Vocabulary with Games

This month, the Mob is focusing on vocabulary. There's no doubt that introducing, teaching, and reinforcing vocabulary is vital, but what is the best way to do it?

Umm, Don't Try This

Yes, you guessed it.    Giving students word lists, vocabulary word finds, and even crossword puzzles are not going to build their vocabulary.  Rote memorization doesn't work -- not in any real, meaningful way.

But What Works?

I'm not sure there is one perfect way to teach vocabulary.  (That's the good news!)

Since students all learn in different ways and at different rates, it's important to practice vocabulary in a variety of ways.  We know that repeated, meaningful interaction with words helps students learn, understand, and use them.

Try This:  Generate Word Interest

Help raise your students' awareness of the importance of word use by getting them out of their seats to play games!  Gather up your Scrabble board and borrow several others and play scrabble.  Even though your students aren't technically studying content vocabulary, they are searching their minds for words that contain high value letters and words that will fit on the board. 

Make a word wall -- or at least an "Interesting Words" wall.  Encourage students to add words to a blank piece of butcher paper on your classroom wall.  What words do they notice from their reading?  Allowing students to illustrate the word's meaning or initial their word finds can help generate interest and enthusiasm for word collections.

Subscribe and use Merriam Webster's "Word of the Day."  While I wouldn't recommend trying to keep up with a new word a day, you could choose a word of the week.  I love this resource because it provides an audio pronunciation and a bit of etymology for the word.

Try This:  Vocabulary Collector

When your students are reading, provide them with a vocabulary collector.  It can be as simple as a sheet of paper folded into thirds.  Ask students to jot down words and phrases that they come along in their reading.  These words could go on your "Interesting Words" wall or into a Vocabulary Catcher (see below).  Again, you are encouraging your students to become more aware of words and how they are used.

Vocabulary collectors are also helpful in practicing using context clues.

Try This:  "Vocabulary Catcher" Games

Remember fortune tellers? Cootie catchers?  Use them for vocabulary.  The great thing is that students can create several throughout the school year and use them for impromptu games.  I also like them because each one only has eight spots for words -- a manageable amount of words to gather and understand.

I have a Vocabulary Catcher freebie on my Teachers Pay Teachers store.  Be sure to check it out!

The Bottom Line

Vocabulary, whether it's content vocabulary or not, is important.  Getting students interested and engaged with new words is the first step!

So, what innovative ideas do you use to teach vocabulary?  Share your ideas below!

Happiness always♥

Back to School Activities: Getting to Know Your Students with Google Forms & Kahoot!

Hi all, It's Shana from Hello, Teacher Lady here. Today I'm going to share with you one of my favorite back to school activities -- it combines my trusty Google Forms/Sheets with everyone's favorite techie game, Kahoot!

In the past, I've had students fill out short little "inventories" at the beginning of the year -- which have been helpful to a certain extent, but I found that I didn't look at them as closely or as often as I should have. Stacks of paper usually don't survive long with me and ultimately end up tucked away in the filing cabinet of doom.

Since I started drinking the digital Kool-Aid and had been using Google Apps for Education for just about everything else in my classroom, last year I decided to nix the paper and create a Google Form for my students to fill out instead. That was a pretty good idea on its own, but then I had a lightbulb moment: why not turn the obligatory getting-to-know-you form into a class game! And that's where Kahoot! came in.

On the Google Form, I asked students to list three "fun facts" about themselves and made sure to note that some or all of the information collected would be shared with the class. I also mentioned that we will have to guess who's who during a Kahoot! game in a later class period, so I encouraged students to be creative and try to list things that aren't super obvious or that others might not know about them.

The results of the Google Form were then displayed nice and neatly in a Google Sheet, and it was a lot of fun reading through these facts and seeing what each student wanted to share about themselves. It also provided some unexpected insight, as I had one student write that he was a "good liar" who is "very lazy" -- yeah, definitely expect that one; we had an interesting year together. Anyway...

This next part was a little time consuming, but totally worth it. I took the information shared and compiled them into statements about each person (without using their name, of course) in a Kahoot! game for each class period. Sometimes I used all three facts, sometimes I only used one or two; it just depended on the type of information. For my smaller classes, I created extra statements based on some of the unused information, so some students' names appeared more than once.

Below are a few screenshots of statements from one of my classes last year:

In the answer section, I included the correct student's name and then chose three other names at random. I also included a statement for myself and sprinkled my name in some of the choices throughout the game as well. So not only was I getting to know my students, but they were getting to know me too! Pretty sure no one expected to learn that their teacher is a Star Trek nerd who played Rugby for 5 years. :)

Guys... we had SO. MUCH. FUN. playing this game!  I can't wait to play it again this year with my new students. It can get a little rambunctious, but again -- so worth it. 

For the record, since I'm an ELA teacher, I also gave students a separate reading/writing interest survey, which was crucial in getting to know their interests and habits on a more academic level. However, this year I am going to utilize Google Forms for that as well. I just don't seem to get along with paper, and Google Sheets can be accessed from anywhere! 

Tomorrow's post by Lyndsey from Lit with Lyns will go into more detail about using digital student interest surveys, so stay tuned!

Psssst -- there's a giveaway happening on my blog right now. Come on over to check it out. :)