Do Your Students Not Follow Directions? Try this!
To increase efficiency, when I am teaching very young children such as in kindergarten, I do this. After my lesson, I say, “okay, step one think.” I elaborate on what I want them to think about. I hold my finger up to my temple and tap it like I am thinking. I see the children imitating this when they go back to their seats from sitting at the carpet.
Then I say, “Step two glue.” (or whatever I want step two to be.) I hold my hand out in front of me and lightly slap the back of my hand like I am gluing something down. The children do this with me.
Then I say, “Step 3. add details.” I hold up both of my index fingers like I am making little dots everywhere with my fingers. After I have explained everything I want the students to do, I have the students repeat the whole process with me. It sounds something like this…
“Okay, what is step one?” The students tell me with hand motions.
“What is step two? The students tell me with hand motions.
“What is step three? Again the students tell me with hand motions.
Then I send them to their seats and they sometimes get the directions out of order, but it is easy to refer to the step one, step two, or step three because they remember when they are listed succinctly like that. I have had a lot of success with students following directions in this step one, step two, and step three fashion. Most children can hold three things in their minds to work towards. I hope this helps improve your classroom management!
Marker Heaven
Now, you all know you have markers that dry up. We have a community supply of markers in my room so, when one dries up, I have been asking students to put them in “marker heaven”…aka the trash can. The students find it amusing and it still makes me smile under my breath.
More recently, I thought I might should save the almost dried up markers that don’t color so well. I remembered the “marker bots” we had made a few years ago realized I had saved the almost dried up markers for this. I exclaimed, “Oh no!” during one class and told children we needed to save them somewhere. One child said, “Marker Jail, ” and so there it was, marker jail was born. Maybe marker purgatory would have been more appropriate, but I loved the child’s idea. Children who weren’t in the same class began inquiring about the marker jail. I love the curiosity it has generated. I used a random box top lid for marker jail because it was what I had nearby. Use whatever container you like. I hope this idea spreads a little fun in your classroom.
The Results are In!
I promised you results from the strawberry jars a while back. While the strawberry jars did not stink near as badly as the rice jar experiment I did previously, they didn’t reveal quite as important a message in my opinion. You could again definitely tell a difference in the scent of the jars, but the inside of the jars looked very similar. When I started this experiment all of the jars had fresh strawberries, so it is certainly possible there could have been a difference in bacteria etc. on the strawberries. If I were to do this again, I would have used frozen strawberries to make sure this wasn’t a factor. What surprised me the most is that the love jar smelled worse, in my opinion than the hate jar. There is probably some explanation for this. If I were to use fruit again, I would have used the blueberries. Also, if it was the first time for the experiment, I would have used the rice because they all smelled different and looked different reflective of the words love and hate.
Here are the backs of the jars pictured in the same order.
Get Student Attention with These!
I wore these today. As I walked down the hallway, I had multiple kindergarteners tell me they liked my glasses. Looking at them makes me smile, too! I got the glasses from Amazon and the eyelashes from the Dollar Tree. These work great for a lesson on being original!
Is Your Brain Sweating? You need this.
I had listened to Ian Byrd over at byrdseed.com wh’llenging to do. I have borrowed his idea when I give my students difficult puzzles etc. I tell the students they are going to need brain deodorant because I am going to make their brain sweat so bad. Well this year, for humor’s sake I actually brought in a tube of brain deodorant. This is actually a tube of deodorant that I don’t use. I just added a label that says brain deodorant. The students actually rub their head with it (haha!) when I ask them to do something hard. I kind of love this. :). When I am not so teacher busy, I will make a better label for it, but you get the idea.
Even My Principal Remarked How Calming My Room Smelled
Like many of you I have been cleaning my room. Because of the last two years of germ hyper vigilance, I wanted to make sure everything was dust and germ free. With that, I used a Norwex cloth AND my Thieves household cleaner. Both of them knock germs out! The Norwex cloth is rather amazing because it sucks dust up and doesn’t just push it around. I’ve never seen anything like a Norwex cloth, and I keep one at school. Right before the first day of school, my principal came by and remarked how calming my room smelled!
The great thing about Thieves cleaner is that you only need about an ounce to mix with water. I use a Dollar Tree spray bottle and keep it in my classroom for any cleaning needs. The BONUS is that it freshens the air while you clean without any toxic cleaners.
I Want to Be Kind
I rarely leave kindergarten without a story to tell about the events that happened while I was there. The story I am about to relate is probably my favorite one from the whole year.
I taught my normal lesson, and at some point during the time, I needed children to pull out a glue stick. It rarely fails that at least one child is without a glue stick when I ask them to pull one out. When one child let me know he didn’t have a glue stick another child readily volunteered his. I spoke to the one who lent the glue stick and said, “Thank you Johnny for being kind.” Immediately after this tears erupted from close by. Why the tears, you ask? The tears were accompanied by these words. ” I wanted to be kind…I wanted to be kind.”
I love the rawness of kindergarten–raw emotion. There is no holding back as with adults or grown up children. In fact, I think most adult behaviors could be explained with a trip to kindergarten.
In all honesty, don’t we all want to be recognized for being kind? In many cases, we as adults aren’t kind because it helps someone or because it is the right thing to do. We do it because in our pride we selfishly want accolades for our kindness.
Are YOU ready…Freddy?
Every time I enter a K-2 classroom to teach enrichment, I bring Freddy. Freddy is one of my classroom management posters. I bought some clipart and added a “Ready” title to the bottom of this page. The “Freddy” part kind of evolved with the children’s input. What is great about Freddy is that he looks exactly like I want the children to look when I am teaching. At the beginning of the year, we talk about what it looks like to listen and pay attention. Then as I am teaching, I walk around with Freddy and point to him when I see children not acting appropriately. Freddy and his friends are in page protectors in a binder that I carry with me when I am teaching an enrichment class, which lasts about 30-40 minutes.
Freddy has friends, too. With the children’s help I also have named a “Ready Betty”. As time has progressed, Freddy has made friends and I have included them in the binder, too. In addition, I have included a “lip sandwich” poster. I must give credit to a teacher friend for a lip sandwich idea. We discuss what a lip sandwich is at the beginning of the year so that children know the expectation. More than anything, showing them what Ready Freddy looks like gets results whether on the carpet in “criss cross applesauce” style or when children are at their seat. My principal even noticed how effective the posters were and commented on this, and I have had teachers ask their students to get in the Ready Freddy position.
Sometimes I am able to make a story about how Freddy is watching the children and I cover my eyes for five seconds and count and say that I know they will be ready when I open my eyes. I have also told children that Freddy is friends with Elf or Santa at Christmas. There are a myriad of fun imaginative stories you can make up where Freddy is involved especially since children thrive on imagination.
Here is the poster set I made for use at my school. There are most multicultural groups represented in this set.
What Will Become of Our Children?
I am starting to see my students grow up. At times they wait on me in a grocery store or they are a waiter etc. Looking at the struggles our current students are having in school and the push of education in a direction that leaves out common sense concerns me.
- I had a cashier struggle to count a mix of bills at the checkout. I mean maybe he was stressed from the long line and thereby flustered, but maybe not. With the dependence on a debit card, will children be able to count money? It seems at least in my district that the money standards are pushed all the way to the end of the year. We all know what happens when a topic is pushed to the end…it often gets left out.
- I teach some of the brightest students, yet some struggled to tell time. Is this becoming the norm? I had a teacher friend tell me that her grown daughter has to think a minute when looking at an analog clock. The school secretary mentioned that a parent couldn’t tell time from the analog clock in the office. Has our dependence on the digital clock on the cell phone crimped our brain?
- I am all about critical thinking and math, but I am hearing teachers comment that children in grades 3-5 struggle with multiplication facts. The leaders of the math department are insisting that it is okay that children arrive at the answer by reasoning from a known fact. That is great that children can do that…but what happens with just knowing it in a second is important. Clogging up your brain with reasoning to get to the answer slows down your reasoning when you arrive at more difficult problems.
- This one is unrelated to math. Has Google broken our critical thinking minds? Please say it isn’t so! I assigned a research project recently about planets. I asked some questions such as what kind of clothing would you need on this planet? What kind of food would you need? I had a child tell me they would bring Sonic and hibachi. I asked them if they thought there were drive thru windows in space and if that would sustain them for the years that it would take them to travel to their planet. I had children literally type these questions in on Google expecting that the answer would be there. In other words, they didn’t think I was going to make them think. I gave them a lecture about how Google doesn’t know everything, and that I expected them to reason about the questions.
Maybe I just needed to rant about these things, but I really am quite concerned. Public education needs an overhaul of common sense, but these are areas (especially the research one I am going to work on with my students).
Below are some resources to teach time, money, and multiplication.
