Throwback Thursday

Happy 4th, everyone! I'm linking up today with the fabulous Cara Carroll from The First Grade Parade for her Throwback Thursday party!

I want to share something I used at the beginning of the school year last year that my kids LOVED! I even had parents ask me about it because their kids would talk about it at home! One parent told me she wanted to use it to motivate her kid to do chores around the house :)

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originally posted August 26, 2012

School has been in session for a week now and I am T-I-R-E-D. Those firsties are dang cute, but man do they know how to suck the energy right out of me!

The first few weeks are filled with practicing routines/procedures over and over and over again. I try to stay upbeat and excited, but really...I get bored! Which is probably why I never have my class practice as much as I should in the first month of school. Oops! Well, I am SUPER excited about this new, fun idea!

One of the awesome 2nd grade teachers at our school had the idea of doing an olympic theme with the classroom procedures since a lot of kids watched them over the summer. *LOVE!* So I made this poster for my classroom...

I'm NOT the best artist....please don't judge! :)

We started off briefly talking about the olympics and how the olympians were nearly perfect at the sport they were competing in. I asked them how long they thought those olympians had to practice to get so good. One replied "Probably 2 whole years!" Haha, precious :)

We then talked about how there are things we do in our classroom that we practice LOTS at the beginning of the year because we wanted to be able to do those things perfectly...just like the olympians! Because...if we do, then we will get to spend more time doing fun things!

Well, they totally bought it. Hook, line, and sinker. Right now we are in the Olympics 'prelims.' This gives me an excuse to make them practice over and over and over again :) I'm watching to see who will qualify to compete in the Classroom Procedure Olympics Games (all of them will, but shh! Don't tell!) When we have our olympics games, I will watch and see who performs the best at each event and they will get THIS...

I will be printing these babies off and hanging them onto a string or ribbon. I found this at my favorite clipart site Melonheadz Illustrating. You can click the picture to take you to her site! This one happens to be a freebie :)

I will be choosing a few gold medalists for each event so that all of my students receive one. Hopefully after all of this they will be well trained and the rest of the year will be a breeze! :) Depending on how the year goes, I may need to give out some gold medals randomly throughout the year to keep the kiddos motivated. We'll see :)

 

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Just in case you were wondering...this worked so stinkin' well! I found that my hardest kids were really motivated by the gold medals so I ended up giving 3 out at the end of every day to people that worked really hard to follow our rules/procedures.

Be sure to visit Cara's blog to link up and/or see who else has linked up!