Weekly Highs and Lows

I had lots of highs this week, or at least that is how I try to look at. 

I'm not officially back to work, but there have meetings and prep going on, so I was at school Monday through Thursday. I felt so awful about leaving the pups home alone all day, every day, somewhat "unnecessarily". On Thursday, my teammate and I brought our dogs to work with us. We were able to work guilt free in our rooms all day! Granted, my principal wasn't too keen on the idea, but easier to ask for forgiveness than permission sometimes. (:

I also got to share my back to school flipbook at our K-1-2 meeting. It is such an easy and cute way to present a lot of information, without it appearing overwhelming.

In regards to a low, I am a battling to save my behavior clip chart. I know it is a hot topic in education right now, but I love mine! When I first started teaching, I was against the idea. I had memories from elementary school about moving cards, and there was no coming back from a poor choice and no positives. My first principal insisted that I have one, so I found a way to tweak it into something more meaningful. Keep in mind that every student is held to their own standards and isn't black and white. What is clip change for one student isn't the same for another. You have to reward the student who has self control issues for remaining on task for longer than usual.

My clip chart technically has 9 levels, but only 7 are visible. Everyone starts the day on green.

Clips are moved down if a student receives redirection for a behavior, and continues to do that behavior anyway. Students can move down to yellow (warning), orange (loss of privileges) or red (parent contact). Last year, I also implemented "the write up cup"--if a student was on red and needed to move their clip down again, it would go into the write up cup and they would receive an office referral regardless of what the behavior was. 

On the flip side, clips can be moved up for making positive choices. Students can move up to blue, purple, rainbow and off-the-charts. If a student is off-the-charts, I wear their clip on my shirt for the rest of the day so that everyone on campus can see how awesome they were. The positive aspect is the reason why I love my clip chart. Students would strive to get to rainbow and off-the-charts. My class last year would often tell me that I needed to wear a scarf the next day because everyone was going to make it off-the-charts. 

My school began implementing Conscious Discipline last year. I love the idea, and I feel that if properly implemented, a clip chart doesn't have to go against their principles. The battle continues. I just hope I can convince my principal next week.