Margo's Math And More

 Don't you just love to go shopping around holiday time about 2 weeks before the holiday? I think that's the best time to pick up decorative holiday items for school or  home at a discounted price while you stiil have quite a bit of merchadise left on the shelves for you to choose from. Sometimes I use them right away or for the current holiday. Other times I may save the items for the following year. 

I found these Halloween fingernail stickers at Walgreens. They were marked down and they sparked an idea for behavior management. 

For some reason, the acoustics in our cafeteria are ear-splitting! It's difficult to have the students keep their voices down when it's their free time and time to let off some steam . However, the combination of loud voices and bad acoutics make for a super noisy environment, and I'm always afraid that we won't hear the fire alarm or shelter in place announcement while in the cafeteria. 

I thought we could start with one classroom at a time to help alleviate this problem. Of course, I started with mine. I told the teachers on lunch duty about my plan. I told them about the plan for 2 reasons: First, the plan could never work without them monitoring the situation and telling me what transpired. Second, if it really did work, maybe they would employ the same kind of thing with their own classrooms.

So, here's what I told my students. For the next 2 weeks prior to Halloween, they will be monitored closely by the person on lunch duty. The student's job is to set an example for the rest of the classes in their lunch wave. The monitor will see if they are setting the appropriate example by entering and exiting in a calm, orderly way, being polite in the lunch line, and speaking in a talking voice to their neighbors on either side of them at their lunch table (no shouting/screaming to others further away at other tables or otherwise).

If the teacher  on duty gives me a good report, then each student in my class gets a glow in the dark fingernail sticker.

They may want to stick them on the moment they are given a sticker, but I tell the students to wait until they accumulate enough to wear them on at least 5 fingers. I draw a ring around each sticker face and cut out on the line I've drawn.

There are 90 stickers in a pack. One pack would cover 5 fingers for 18 students. Two packs would cover 5 fingers of 36 students. Now, you may be thinking "BOYS?" Will boys like these fingernail stickers? All of the boys in my third grade class LOVED this idea...I don't know if it was the glow in the dark thing or that the stick on "faces" of jack-o-lanterns and skeletons are pretty unisex, but they liked it.

We started this 2 days ago, and so far, so good. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

I'm curious....what would you do with these stickers? Teachers? Parents? I would love to hear from you!

If all works well, I may do this the last 2 weeks of every month going forward. Why only the last 2 weeks? Welll...it saves me money. AND if the students are told that the next reward system will occur contingent upon their behavior in the first 2 weeks of each month, they should demonstrate their "model behavior" even in the times between "reward system" days. Also, doing this sporadically lessens the chance of the students becoming bored with it and the reward system maintains some semblence of novelty.