Behavior and Parent Communication

I thought I would explain the behavior plan in place at kindergarten. It is very effective at our school. We are fortunate enough to have kids in our class with parents that actually stay up to date with what we are doing in class. I would love to implement this plan if I were to be teaching kindergarten my first year, but it is really only effective if you have good support from your parents.

Each child has a BEE binder that gets sent home everyday for the parents to check for any papers and their behavior chart. BEE stands for Bring Everything Everyday.
In the binder the first pocket is for "Important Information". Then the pencil bag has the label, "Money and parent notes" then there is a paper that has a chart. This is the behavior chart. It has 9 weeks on the chart and each day is divided into two boxes. Then there is a red folder in the binder rings. the pocket on the right is labeled, "Keep at Home" and the left pocket is going to be for homework.. which we have not started yet.








Back to the behavior chart. there are two boxes per day, one is for the morning and one for the afternoon. at the end of everyday, we put a specific color in each box. I really love this system now, even though I thought it was confusing at first.



We have a color strip on the side of the bookcase. it is very easy to make.. just scissors, construction paper, and laminate it!



So the color order as you see is Purple, Green, Yellow, Orange, Red, and Blue.

I was a little thrown off by this at first because it bothered me that the colors weren't in rainbow order.. it's a weird OCD thing I have... just like I hate it when red is touching green when it isn't christmas time.

Everybody starts off on a Green. We try to really encourage parents that they WANT their children to come home with a green that is the goal. (yes purple is on top but I will get to that in a minute)
If a student is making bad decisions, we always verbally warn them to stop the behavior and to make a better choice. If they continue to make bad choices, they have to walk up to the color strip, and physically touch the next color down. (yellow) if the behavior persists, they touch down to orange, keep it up, touch down to Red. If you get to blue.. that is usually an office referral, and the worse you could get. When a child touches down a color, we have these slips where we check off the misbehavior that was happening and add out own comments.



The parents have to send the slip back signed. (they also have to sign the behavior chart everyday so we know they are looking through the binder.) If the student refuses to walk up to the chart to touch down... we give them a choice, "John, if you don't want to go touch down to yellow, I'm going to go touch Orange for you." They usually do it, because they know we will remember and we are the ones that do the folders!

My mentor teacher has only given out 3 blues in her 7 years of teaching. One time a child had problems with temper tantrums, got mad, threw a chair across the room hitting a little girl in the face. That was an automatic office referral obviously.. even if he was on Green...

So back to Purple. Purple is reserved for those moments when a student is doing something extraordinary. When the entire class is being loud and disrespectful, and one child is still following directions, they will get to touch up to purple. When parents see a purple, they know that we want them to reward their child. They didn't have just a good day, it was a GREAT day. Take them out for ice cream, let them watch a little extra tv, do something special with them because they truly deserve it. This is where parents usually get too, "my child is perfect, they should strive for purple everyday" NO. they should not. You may see one purple in the whole entire year, or you may see a handful of purples. You want them to come home with GREEN.

We don't use this system for consequences ALL the time.. We have a desk that faces the wall, with a sign that reads, "Think time." it's basically time out.. we send them there if they are acting silly and need to get their act together.. and they come back to doing whatever they were doing when they want (when they have thought about a better choice.) And then we give out minutes. If you get 2 minutes, that means you have to go do "think track" at recess... walk around the playground.. which is quite large 2 times = 2 minutes. This is more for the smaller things one would expect from a 5 year old.. because we dont want to send home yellows all the time! If yellows and oranges are pretty consistent though, that child usually goes on their own individual behavior plan..

If the student gets a yellow, orange, red, or blue... we want parents to do something about it at home. if they don't then the system is really pointless. We talked about this a LOT at the kindergarten orientation. We explain that we WARN the child about the behavior before the touch down, so it is a problem that was repeated. My mentor teacher has only had one parent that had a problem with the system because they didn't want their child to be "humiliated" that way.

The parents are really good about talking with their kids about the problem, and give them a negative consequence at home. When the slips come back from home, there is usually a note from the parents on it saying something along the lines of, "We were not pleased with this, Johnny had to help clean the bathroom with us this weekend." or "I did not let sally go to any friends' house this weekend or let any friends come over to our house. We discussed that she is in control of the choices she makes" sometimes the kids write an apology note. It really is an awesome system!