Mathsational

This is week three of the Sunday Funday blogging initiative.  It's never too late to join in!  You can read more about the challenge  here  if you like.  This week's challenge is to write about classroom management. I'm about to start my 14th year in the classroom and classroom management is something that I still strive to improve.  When I first started teaching I felt the need to have lots of rules and procedures along with consequences, all in writing.  My go to resources were Harry Wong's The First Days of School  and Lee Canter's Assertive Discipline .   Both books have some great ideas for new teachers, but you need to wade through other ideas that won't work for you to find the ones that will.  I even took Sarah Carter's idea of using a few of Harry's quotes to put up in my room.  Unfortunately, my kids just laughed at his name :(  Within a few years, I found that the many rules and consequences were ...

Classroom culture seems pretty hit or miss for me.  My kids are typically respectful of me, but some years I have kids that are wonderful to each other and other years they are a bit mean to each other.  One of my goals this year will be to try to get my students to be kind. I have really liked Love and Logic for this.  I have never gone through the official training for this, but would like to.  As with anything, I really like some of the ideas and sort of hate others, so I only use the pieces that I love. Here is a pdf on " How to Create a Love and Logic Classroom ."  I love their classroom rules of  "Feel free to do anything that does not cause a problem for anyone."   and  "If you find yourself with a problem, you may solve it by any means which does not cause a problem for anyone else in the world." This would include the student, the teacher, and any other people in the room.  I think these could easily be your...