The Ongoing Classroom Management

My lead teacher has so many great ideas and tricks in her bag but one of the most valuable one is her ongoing classroom management. She uses a book titled Have You Filled A Bucket Today, by Carol McCloud. It's a book for children that helps them understand when you're nice to others (filling) then it makes you feel good but also shows children that when we are mean to someone (dipping) then it doesn't make you feel very good. I noticed that it helps the students because they now have something tangible to see, the bucket. When students are being mean, disrespectful, or not behaving my lead teacher simply says, "Are you filling a bucket or are you dipping?".

One day the children were struggling to keep it all together. We noticed that there were some mean comments and bad attitudes, it was just before our one week break so students were starting to "loose it". She sat the students on the carpet and re-read them the book. I like the idea of the book and how it is so simple to just have to students sit down and re-read the book to refresh their memories. This is something I plan on using in my classroom!

Valentine's Day Poetry

The first grade poetry section falls right around Valentine's Day so I thought it would be fun to combine the two. The first day we read poetry from the language arts book. The next day I introduced the idea of creating shape poems. The students favorite poem from the text book was about ducks, so as a class we created a duck shape poem. Later that day, in ELA centers the students were asked to create a heart shape poem. The picture below shows their work and also acted as a great decoration for our Valentine's Day party!