Just a bit of behavior management

We are officially done with our first full week of school! We still have some road bumps during the week, but overall, these first graders are really sliding into our routine. Everything is new and different, and it is hard to remember all the different rules and procedures we have to follow. I have faith that by Chistmas the end of September we will be running full steam ahead!

 We have really been focusing on some of the challenging behaviors that are occuring in our classroom. Behavior #1 for us to focus on has been our absolute love of blurting out and talking whenever we feel like it! We have been keeping track of some data on blurting at the carpet and it is astounding how many times it happens!

Last week we read and did an activity on a book called Interrupting Chicken by David Ezra Stein.This story was really funny! It highlighted the behavior of interrupting when someone else is talking and how it can really ruin things. We were able to get into partners and discuss some behaviors that were interrupting chicken behaviors and which were respectful student behaviors. Then we got up and drew up some examples of both. Students did such a great job on this, but I forgot to take pictures. Ah man!

This week I was more prepared! I pulled out my new copy of My Mouth is a Volcano by Julia Cook. I really liked this book too because it also talked about blurting out, but showed that sometimes our bodies can't help it! We read and discussed what solutions could help make this better. Afterwards, we created some int-erupter volcanos. This was a fun activity. I found the activity on Pinterest and headed over to Speech Room News's blog to check out the activity. Students make volcanos and on their lava pieces, they told me one strategy they could try to not blurt out and how it makes them feel when someone blurts out on them.

I had a wonderful captive audience. I think we are less erupting only when our eyes are glued to a story. 

Here we are making our wonderful interrupting volcanoes. I hope everyone got to see these creations when they came home last week. 

This book was a great help on our journey to being better listeners. I like that I can refer to our interrupting chicken and erupting volcanos when these behaviors do come up because students make truly memorable connections to books, and I hope that they use these connections to think about their choice. Be sure to check out all the photos for this lesson on our photos page.