Term 2 Week 4

This term is already flying by......

I have one child in my classroom that is on a behaviour management plan and she has lots of other people who are supporting her. One thing I have been thinking about is changing her reward scheme.

Last year she loved Barbies and she would earn 'Barbie time.' She had to earn 4 barbie stickers to get this. Barbie time would be to play a game with a friend for 10 minutes. This also helped her social skills.

I adopted the exact same plan as this was working for her and it was familiar for her. Now into Term 2 I am finding the Barbie slightly frustrating. It can take her time to choose a game, she can be quite noisy and distracting when the game is being played and more time is taken up when it is time to pack up. I found it was taking up a lot of my time to preempt her when it was time to pack up and to constantly check if she was cleaning up the game.

We are very fortunate to have a school dog and she loves him to bits. So instead of earning Barbie time she now earns Benji time. This means that after she has earned 5 pictures of him she can go and pat him with a buddy 5 times. This takes less time and there is no mess to pack up. She then said that she would rather walk him. So to compromise I said that every fifth time she earns 'Benji time" she could take him for a walk with a buddy and an adult.

So far this is working really well. She is excited to go and see Benji and it is less time consuming for me :)!

Movement Breaks - Fitness

Teaching Year 2's it is very important to give them regular movement breaks and release some energy.

Each morning just before writing the children and I do a Jump Jam song. I usually have this music on my phone and I use my speaker. The children watch and copy me as they dance. The children have really enjoyed this as their teacher is getting involved and dancing too. I am constantly calling out positive praise and reinforcing those children who are doing the right thing and are making good choices.

One negative is that if there are children down the back of the room who are not making good choices and aren't keeping their hands and feet to themselves, I can't stop and go sort the problem straight away as the children are copying me. It is not as effective sorting the problem later as it is sorting it straight away. I have set up more boundaries, e.g. have the children all in places in the room where I can see them, repeating songs so that the children are familiar with them and do not need to rely on watching me, spotting a top girl and boy who are giving it their all, having those children who struggle to manage themselves to dance near me.

I have recently trialed using the data projector and the children watch the dances on here. This means the children are not watching me and this frees me up to dance near those children who struggle to manage themselves. Once negative about this is that it takes longer to set up and sometimes it doesn't work. But this is great when it all goes to plan!

Reinforcing Positive Behaviour

This term I have noticed that many of my children are somewhat aware of the rules and expectations of the classroom but they are still breaking these rules. One boy in particular seems to constantly by talking while I'm talking and distracting his peers.

Therefore, instead of telling him what he is doing wrong, Incredible Years has constantly reinforced the idea to be positive and praise the children for doing the right thing. This has helped develop a more positive relationship with this child.

I have been focusing on catching this child out and praising him whenever he does the right thing and ignoring when he doesn't. I have noticed this working so I emailed home to his parents and commented on how impressed I was with his attitude towards his learning and how much he had improved. I found that this further reinforced this positive behaviour and since this email I have not had to focus on his behaviour so much.

Behaviour management strategies

As noted in older comments I have kept similiar behaviour management strategies from last and continued to use them for my class this year. In reflecting on these it is amazing to notice just how differently they are working. In all honesty they are not working as well as they were. The classroom dynamics this year is so different and the children are not as competitive this year. As these strategies are well imbedded into my programme I am reluctant to change all this yet. I am thinking of ways to change it subtly as first but this is proving to be more of a challenge as some of these children are not interested in earning a reward.

Is a little bit of a head scratcher at this point but I will continue to think of possible changes that will benefit these children.