Social Skills and Classroom Expectations

Hi all!  It's Emma from Clever Classroom. 

Are you looking for quality books and resources to help model desired behaviors as you start a new school year? 

I have previewed and selected 30 books to help your students learn a range of social skills. 

Each book contains a message that you can turn into explicit instruction within your classroom on a daily basis. 

To help you teach explicit social skills and expectations, I move on to using our posters.  I laminate and display one copy and bind another. 

I use these posters to focus on what I expect of students. We break each skill down using our social skills flippy books.  Students notice when others are doing the right thing and congratulate each other. The posters are ideal for introducing and revisiting expected behaviours. 

Having the books organized in one area, will make it easier for you to grab for them, when needed. 

Click through to see each book listed in this collection. 

Classroom Management Legos Style!

Hi all, my name is Emma Farrell and I blog over at Clever Classroom.  I am so excited because this is my first time blogging here at the Primary Chalkboard and the first time ever on a collaborative blog.  I sure am honored to be in such fine company.

I am here to share with you this exciting and very simple classroom management strategy I cooked up. I hope you find it useful. 

It's so simple to implement and your students will love it.

You will need:

1 x legos board

Colored lego rectangles or squares

That's it!

If you don't have legos, you could use any other construction toys you have like duplo or wooden blocks (the smaller ones).

Each table group (or any other group) will be allocated a color.  If you already use color names for your tables and they don't match your legos, just allocate colors that are close. 

When a table is working towards their goal, on task, helpful, display great manners, working in a team, in pairs or whatever your goal, a student places one piece of lego on the board and each time students add the same colored legos to their tower. 

The team with the highest legos tower is the winning table/group at the end of the day or week, depending on how you want to implement it. 

You can even add half bricks instead of a full brick, depending on what you are rewarding. 

It's ideal if you can outline your expectations and social skills at the beginning of the year to revisit them and have them as your success criteria. 

You could also create an anchor chart with your students about expectations of tables or table work.  Use  such frameworks us; students look like, sound like, have. 

Or students at tables; are, have, can, will. 

I hope this helps your classroom management program this year.

Font in images by Kimberly Geswein Fonts. 

Emma