Details, Details, Details...

The first few days of school are always filled with going over our daily routine, classroom rules, handing out materials and tending to the dreaded paperwork.  No matter how prepared you think you are, there is always something (aka a million things) that come out of nowhere and appear on your "to do list."  You honestly want to take a massive sharpie marker and put a big X over all of it, unfortunately this wouldn't be efficient ;)  This is such a better idea than our 50,000 post it notes all over our desks...

On the first day, we went over all the basics with our new class...how to unpack, where to put our lunches/lunch money, what to do if you get finished your work early, classroom rules & expectations, etc...  

As far as behavior plans go, we use a "stoplight behavior chart."  Each magnet has a student's name on it.  If they break the rules they have to move their magnet from green to yellow and then, if it continues, from yellow to red.  We always give them a warning before they move their magnet.  If they move their magnet to yellow they have to sit out of recess for five minutes.  Moving their magnet to red causes them to lose recess completely and we send a note, or call, home to let the parents know.  

We printed these yellow and red cards to send home in the event any of the students have to move their magnets just to keep the parents up to date.  We used to have them color their stop light at the end of each day, but we found that it took up a lot of time and wasted a lot of paper so we're sampling out sending home pre-printed yellow & red behavior cards.

This has worked for us in the past so hopefully we won't have to change it this year.  They really, really like their recess so usually it's a good motivator!  

This is such a cute book, I think we will definitely be reading this in the next week or so to review, and to have a few laughs of course! :)

We are already starting our Back to School Night projects, I can't believe how fast September is going!  We will be sure to take many pictures so that you can get a better idea of what our classroom looks like, the activities and projects we are doing throughout the year!