Teaching Ideas

Thank you for your suggestions.
Listening skills have been explicitly taught and modelled many times. I am definitely going to try whisper morning or whisper day with my kids, I looked back over old posts regarding classroom management and am going to try a reward/consequence chart starting at go and going up to Awesome and down to time out, where the kids can move up and down.
I had registered at Class Dojo last term, however my old laptop at school wouldn't load the page. These holidays I got a new smartboard laptop and now it works well, so may use this later in the term.
Thanks again for taking the time to give your suggestions!!

Google "Whole Brain Teaching" - it's working for me with 3 Year 1 classes and 3 Year 2 classes with whom I work. I have modified it to suit my role as DOTT relief. I have used it with 'busy' Year 4 class too.

I can highly recommend a book called Discipline Without Stress Punishment or Reward by Dr Marvin Marshall. He also has a very useful website www.marvinmarshall.com with teaching resource posters and charts to help with the implementation. I have implemented the strategies from his book for Raising Responsibility for the past three years on a stage 1 (years 1 & 2) class with great success. I would never return to the old punishment reward system after reading this book. I have used many strategies over the past 10 years and found this method to be the least stressful, and most effective for long term sustainable results :) Good luck with it all :)

Sign up to ClassDojo. Google will find it. Put it up on your interactive white board - take off all the negative comments and only activate 4 comments to shape the behaviours that you need. ie Put up my hand to speak, Arms folded, Stay seated, Be polite to other people.... catch them being good. Have a weekly award for the student with the most points. Works a treat!!!

Have you tried a whisper day or whisper time of day? You can make it a fun game but you will find kids enjoy it and it has the bonus that they try extra hard to hear what others are saying. Start off with just a short time period though, then build up. My littlies always enjoyed this :) Good luck

WE have traffic lights. If a child does not follow an instruction their name moves to orange then red if it persists - works okay most of the time. Of course then you have to work out consequences when they hit orange and red.

The other thing I have tried is a noise meter - move the arrow to silent time, then classroom noise as appropriate to the task.

Also have tried a visual timetable with a noise symbol beside each task. If you do it for the whole day they get the idea that they will be able to talk just not while someone else is speaking or when it is DEAR time!!!

Hey there.

I have some suggestions, but they all depend on your current reward system.

In my friend's classroom the students earn money for different things. They also loose money, which makes the difference between what they can buy in the class shop each week.

One thing she recently implemented was a 'hands up' chart. It is just a laminated A3 sheet with simple instructions. Each student also has a laminated name. Any time a child calls out without putting their hand up, there name is blu-tacked to the chart. At the end of each session (before recess, lunch and the end of the day) she takes some money off their money wall. (50c for each 'offence' I think).

She also has a listening chart which works in a similar principle. Each student's name is listed on the left hand side, then they have 3 columns next to their name, one for each session of the day. Every time they call out, not follow an instruction or break a class rule, they get a listening dot (counter) put up next to their name. More than 3 in a session results in a time-out. Again, it works like the 'hands up' chart where students loose money at the end of the day for each listening dot they have next to their name.

I will try to get some photos when I get back to school.

Hopefully you find something that works for you. Good luck!

This sounds like my yr one and two class last year- it is hard and very draining. Some things that worked for my class were:

Using a noise monitor red: silent, orange whisper and green talking but inside voices.

We also did lots of discussion about good listeners and rules and the kids put their name on our rule poster to show they would follow them. We use a whole class gem jar and when someone does the right thing they earn a gem for the class and if they are all working and being quiet I would put a handful in :) there is about 100 gems and when it's full we have a whole class reward such as early recess or 10 minute on the playground or making milo or something special.

The first time they need to earn it really fast then get slower. Also at the beginning of the new term is the right time to get really tough it will only take a week of you being really strict about talking and using hands up and they will hopefully pull into line. Hope something works for you :)

This is really tricky, because if it's a really chatty class it can often be really difficult to improve and maintain over time.

My first course of action would be getting them to listen to you. My trick to focus a class of noisy young students is to play Silent Nursery Rhymes. This is where you mime a nursery rhyme like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star or Incy Wincy Spider, mouthing the words for students to copy.

They have to stay completely silent and they generally want to join in. You then hold the mood by speaking at a whisper or just above (unless you have a child with hearing problems).

Another trick I use for quietening classes is to put my hand in the air and say "Eyes and ears in 5 (show five fingers)...4 (four fingers) etc" and students have to put their hands in the air as well (so there's nothing in their hands to fiddle with). By 1 all students should be watching and not speaking. You could award house points/prizes/game time based on which table was all watching and listening first.

Maybe also play some 'games' where they have to be concentrating REALLY hard, and the act of concentrating should be enough to keep them from talking.

Hi there,
It sounds like your kids need some explicit teaching about the social skills needed for working with others/ being a part of a team etc.

Maybe you could try reading some social stories / texts about friends who don't listen to each other and use a Y chart or the thinking hats to dissect why it's important to listen attentively to instructions and other people in the classroom.

You could then role play what both good listeners/ taking turns to speak etc looks like and doesn't look like. There's also lots of co-operative learning activities that focus specifically on developing these skills eg. think, pair, share with a focus question, 3 way conversations/ interviews where one person is the observer and reports back about the type of 'good listening skills' that were demonstrated.

The 'tribes' program is fantastic for developing these types of skills! I've also used voice recorders and video cameras to capture chn's 'team work' or interview sessions before and then the chn involved have used a checklist to analyze how well they listened (or whatever your focus skill might be) during the activity.

Barrier games are fantastic, and there's hundreds of games that are devoted to teaching chn to actively listen ... easy ones like Chinese whispers and music and movement activities that can be used as 5 minute fillers.

After lots of explicit teaching about what good listening and sharing looks/ sounds/ feels like, I would then introduce a class goal which focuses on 'catching' chn being an active listener; one which both you and the chn could contribute their observations to. For example a community 'listening' tree where chn's names are written on leaves and added? Or maybe even something that incorporates Dr Seuss' Horton character?? - He was meant to be a good listener right? :)

Hope that helps? Good luck!!

I had exactly the same type of Year 2 class last year. I created a jar of "quiet critters". These were the colourful pompoms you can find at cheap shops. I stuck googly eyes on each one, some were on large pompoms others on small ones. They all seemed to be a little different, which the kids loved. I created a poster with the rules and put clip art from the "Club Penguin Puffles" in it as they looked like these little creatures. The rule was that you received a quiet critter for quiet work, listening well, using manners. The quiet critter stayed on desks and would only stay there if the child worked quietly. If they were loud or talked out of turn the quiet critter would need to go back in the jar with his friends where it was quiet. If the children collected 5 or more on their desk in a day the reward was to choose one to take home and the rest went back in the jar. If a child had less that 5 the critters were put back in the jar for the night and the challenge would start again the next day. The kids really loved this and aimed to collect various quiet critters which stared at them from the jar each day, eg the one with only one eye (which I said was winking at them, but he had actually lost an eye somewhere in the jar!!!) They understood that all of the quiet critters out of the jar needed quiet! They began bringing little boxes to school as houses for their quiet critters if they won them. Hope this is useful! Cheers, Melissa.