Quick Tip: Managing Kid Flow

Often times the sheer number of bodies in your room will make you realize your power is all an illusion. An illusion you must keep up at all costs. Thus, sending these bodies to do things like return to their desks or work areas, line up, or retrieve materials can become a running of the bulls type situation. This is especially true with kindergarteners and fifth graders. I posit these solutions (I'm using getting in line just for the example's sake, but you can substitute any other similar situations):

• Call students by what they are wearing. If you're wearing green, you may line up. 
• Side note: Kids who camp out by the door in an effort to be first bother me. I will intentionally avoid calling something which includes them because of it. This is part of maintaining that illusion of power and control.
• Also, this is a good opportunity to discuss things like what a collar is and give some inverse examples like, "If you're NOT wearing your hair in a ponytail, line up.
• My favorite is when only a couple kids are remaining and I say, "If you're wearing clothes, line up." Inevitably, at least one kid just looks at you with a blank stare.
• Call them by the first letter of their name.
• Call them by their job title. I posted here about classroom economy and classroom jobs. Even if you're not using the economy portion, the jobs would still apply.
• In the same vein, use their numbers. If you have your class assigned to numbers make it a mini math lesson. Call all people whose numbers are prime or divisible by three. It makes lining up a little more challenging.
• Avoid using things that are not factual. For example, do NOT say, "Line up if you like Justin Bieber." There's no way to prove this and even though you're positive not every boy in your fifth grade class is a Belieber, you will find yourself on the losing end of a stupid argument if you try to say any of them can't line up.
• Call them by who is following directions. I always say, "Criss cross, applesauce, hands are in your lap, voices are off." It's to the point where the kids will finish it I say it so often.
• Use a ticket out the door. Use this as an opportunity to reinforce your objectives or I Can statements for the day. Have them solve a math problem or tell you a way to say eight. For example, one plus seven or two to the power of three. They can tell you a fact from the reading or answer a question about the material. This could even be written down on a literal ticket and they can line up when you approve it.

What are your favorite ways to manage the flow of your kids to prevent them from becoming an educational mosh pit? 

Classroom Economy including Jobs

Classroom economy seems to be a love/hate thing. Either you love it or you hate it, but I think it depends a lot on how you manage it. I liked the lessons my kids learned and the black markets that popped up along the way. Just like many successful classroom management ideas, this one is very front loaded. Setting it up and getting good practices going might take some time and you have to know it can always be tweaked, but I believe the pay off is worth it because your students become invested in being members of your classroom society.

What is a society?
I started with a discussion of what society is and what people do in a society. I led the conversation to point out that if everyone made their own clothes, took their own trash to the dumb, manufactured their own cars, and had to grow and harvest their own foods, raise cows, chickens, etc., it would be very costly and people wouldn't have time to do fun things because they would always be working on something. So, we each take on a job. One person makes cars for everyone. One person takes out everyone's trash. One person makes all the food. This way, everyone has a job so we all share the work. However, some jobs are ickier than others. Some job require more expertise and therefore, those people get a little extra money because of that.

Jobs
This naturally leads into the question: What jobs do we need done in our classroom? By putting the responsibility on the students to create the jobs, it creates investment and dedication from the beginning. They've chosen what needs to be done. It also gets them thinking critically. Be sure to point out that kids will be absent and someone needs to take care of that. Some jobs might require two people. Delegating will make your life easier too. While you can't delegate your gradebook, you can delegate checking papers like I mentioned in my post A Whole New View on Math Practice. Really take a look at what things in the classroom you CAN delegate to your students and give them that responsibility. It takes a lot off your plate and gets them further invested in your microcosm. Avoid giving students anything that has sensitive information about other students. Checking papers isn't usually an issue because students in the same class tend to know where one another stand. However, always ask yourself if it is infringing on the student's educational time. If you're using your higher level students to check papers every day and they aren't getting enrichment time from you, that's a bad thing.

Once we had a list of jobs, we would write a description for each one and evaluate, informally, if the jobs were extremely out of balance or didn't make sense. Each job was assigned an A, B, or C and that was the pay grade. A was $40 per week, B was $35 per week, and C was $30 per week. The C grade jobs were a little lighter than the A grade jobs. Next, each student was assigned a job. All of my students had numbers and I kept a jar full of popsicle sticks with their numbers so I could pick a kid actually at random. I used numbers instead of names so I could reuse the popsicle sticks each year. Drawing at random, each kid would choose a job. The following week, the students with C level jobs would pick first. Basically, I would reverse the list. I kept an Excel document so that if I needed to see who was assigned to which job or if I needed to see which jobs kids had already had in the past.

Credits & Debits

Just like the jobs, the kids mostly generate the credits and debits, but the teacher is an equal member of the classroom society so, he/she can contribute ideas as well. As the teacher, you can usually use reasoning to guide the discussion. To the left are some examples of things my third grade class from my third year of teaching chose. From my experience, the kids are actually pretty harsh on themselves. This is one particular area where you have to re-evaluate these every week to make sure the fees and credits are extreme. As students earn credits and debits, make a note on their credit/debit sheets immediately. If you wait until the end of the day, you'll forget.

Managing Their Money

While I think all the parts of a classroom economy benefit students and reinforce standards-based skills as well as real-life and character-building skills, managing their credits and debits has a direct connection to math. I usually just kept a general eye on my students, maybe a little closer on kids who might have the tendency toward shadiness. At the end of the day, as part of the closing routine, students would balance their accounts for the day. At the end of the week, students would get paid and be able to buy things from my store. The store was comprised of random things from around my house and things I found in clearance bins at Office Max. Folders, game books, erasers, pencils, books, and other useful things as well as some fun things. It gave students who came from low income families an opportunity to buy things for themselves as well as siblings. This was a big confidence builder for a lot of students. I just put post-it notes on items as "price tags."

Credit/Debit Log: Students had to write how many 1s, 5s, & 10s they would get/lose.

A Word on Black Markets

While your first reaction might be to quash black markets, you might want to think twice. Maybe you're thinking, "What do you mean 'black market'?" I had a student in my third grade class who saw the other kids needed a way of keeping their money safe, so she started making wallets out of duct tape. She made designs on them and made them in different colors and soon, she had a fat wad of cash. She was quite the little entrepreneur. On the other hand, I heard tell of a class where another young girl started requiring students to pay her protection money otherwise she "wouldn't be their friend." As long as the black market goods are within the guidelines of the classroom rules and promote positive, helping behaviors, I'd let the free market reign.

A Whole New View on Math Practice

You know how it goes: You teach the lesson then assign 30 problems for the kids to practice out of the book. Maybe it's a worksheet that came with your teacher's manual. The kids are dreading 30 of the same problem over and over for myriad reasons. The smart kids find it redundant. The middle of the road kids find it boring and the struggling kids want to give up before they start because you've pretty much asked them to climb Mt. Everest without oxygen.

Rather than assigning 30 problems they'll never finish, I started running my math practice as such. This idea is stolen from another teacher and I don't even remember who at this point, so thank you. Once the direct teaching portion of the lesson concluded, I would ask would was still completely lost (usually those Mt. Everest kids). They would meet me at a separate table for a small group reteaching and practice with teacher support. Everyone else would start practice. However, I would not give them 30 problems. They had two choices: they could do 6 problems I selected which encompassed the concepts from the lesson at low, medium, and high levels or they could do all 15ish problems (usually I would assign 1-30 even or odd). I would then put out my teacher edition answers with a marking pen. The kid who finished first with 100% correct answers would be in charge of the pen and grade everyone else's work.

I know what you're thinking: Why wouldn't every kid just do the 6 problems? Well, here's the catch. If a kid chose to do those 6 problems, he/she would have to get 100% on the first try or he/she would have to do all the problems, not just the evens or odds, but ALL the problems 1-30. So a kid had to have some serious confidence to give that a shot. As for cheating, when that first kid got 100%, he/she would have to bring it to the teacher to double check to make sure cheating wasn't going on. However, that is the only interruption during that small group time because once you have a kid who is checking work, he/she is the person the kids go to for checking. If someone turns in a paper and gets a certain number wrong, let's say 5, that kid gets sent over to the teacher to get help in small group.

As a side note, when it came to homework, I'd assign A, B, & C homework. If a kid wanted an A, he/she had to attempt both sides of the homework page. If he/she wanted a B, it would be side 1 of the homework and a C would be side 2 of the homework only. You could adjust this by grouping your kids and just assigning them A, B, or C instead of letting them choose.

Ones & Tens Chart: Earned Reward

This is more my kind of marble jar.

I'm sure a lot of teachers use or have heard of the marble jar. Personally, I never cared for the marble jar probably because I'm very qualitative and a stickler for guidelines and rules in a lot of ways. I never knew what warranted how many marbles. Johnny helped Joey clean up. Is that a two-marble job? Does every kid get to put in one marble? Should I just throw in an arbitrary handful? Really I needed a marble jar with individual spaces for each and eveg paint dry to fill up the marble jar and you know that if I felt that way, the kids probably felt like it was eternal torture. Thus, the marble jar is not for me. Maybe it'll suit you better, feel free to google it.

Really I needed a marble jar with individual spaces for each and every marble so we knew exactly what kind of progress we were making. Then, one day, I came across the ones and tens chart. It was something I read on a website and I thought I'd give it a try. I decided that numbers could never be taken away. It was just an exciting ritual that began each math session.

Here's how it went. The ones and tens chart was simply a piece of laminated posterboard that was divided into 100 squares from 00 to 99. I had a jar with scraps of paper in it from 0-9 and a jar with all the kid's numbers (every kid in your class should have a number, it makes your life SO much easier). I would draw three numbers from the jar with all the students' numbers in it and those kids would get to pick a number for the ones place and a number for the tens place out of the jar with numbers 0-9.

Mine was like this but with 00 before 1
and it stopped at 99

The kid would then have to figure out what number he/she drew and we would cross it out using a Vis-a-vis marker. We would do this everyday until the whole chart was crossed out at which point the kids earned something. It might be cookies or pizza. Sometimes, if a kid was doing something really nice or helpful, I would say he/she could pull an extra turn from the ones and tens jar.

A couple of things, if they drew the same number, it counts and they just would cross anything out for that turn. For example, if 67 is already crossed out and a kid pulls a 6 for the tens place and a 7 for the ones place, it's just too bad; they don't get to redraw. This might seem kind of rough, but let me tell you, the explosion that happens when that last kid gets that last number is like Vesuvius.

The benefits are numerous. The kids practice place value everyday which, from my experience, is a constant struggle. They learn delayed gratification. It's practically free depending on what reward for which they're working and it sets a wonderful tone for your math lesson each day. For me, I enjoyed that we could see the progress as the squares were crossed out. It far exceeds the marble jar, but that is just my opinion. You have to figure out what works for you.