Procedure Olympics!

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 of school 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 fun, new 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 the 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 want 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, link, and sinker. Right now we are in the Olympic '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 Procedures Olympic Games (all of them will, but shh! Don't tell!) When we have our olympic 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 a ribbon. I found this from 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'll 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 :)

xoxo,
Jackie