Bathroom Breaks
Bathroom breaks during instruction can be disruptive and also cause the student who has to go to miss out on the instruction. Also, bathroom breaks can become abusive. Students may say they need to use the restroom just to take a break or have their own mini vacation. So how do you solve this problem. This link highlights several different ideas on how to handle bathroom breaks. Some ideas I like better than others. In particular, "go quietly" I think is a great tool to use with older elementary students. However, this would not work for kindergarteners as they would not be able to handle the responsiblities assosicated with the system.
Classroom Rules
Leah Davies & Mrs. Debra Lawler
Leah Davies' rule system is very simple and consists of four rules. Mrs. Lawler's rule system consists of seven rules. As we have learned that it is best to keep our rules to five or less. Too many rules and the students will not remember them and it also becomes overwhelming. In addition to the rules, Leah Davies lists procedures and routines to be practiced with the students frequently. The students are not expected to know how to do these perfectly, but through repitition and modeling they will grasp the concepts. When we look at Mrs. Lawler's additional information provided we can see that she has about ten subcategory rules and goes on to talk about additional rules. There seems to be countless rules and keep in mind that this is for a kindergarten class. Overall, Leah's classroom rules seem to fall more within the line of what is suggested for teachers to employ in their classrooms than what Mrs. Lawler is chosing to do.
Behavior Systems
Laura Candler's System & Kelly's Kindergarten System
Laura Candler has a tremendous amount of ideas for how to encourage good behavior in her classroom. Her focus seems to be on highlighting the positives of what students are doing, rather than focusing on what they are not doing. Kelly's behavior system is based on one primary system. She has colors that are assigned to the students based on their behavoir. If they have to change their color for misbehaving, they then have a consequence based on why they had to change their color. For example, if a student had to change their color because she/he decided to not do their work, then their consequence might be miss part of recess to makeup that work.
Desk Layout
Betsy Weigle's Model & Patti Barker's Model
Betsy's model seem to lean more towards small clusters/groups of students. On the first day of school she talks about having the students in groups. She thinks it is nice for students to join a peer group and to learn to handle and assosciate with different types of personalities. Patti on the other hand discusses in her blog that she plans to place the students into rows rather than groups. She says she has some chatty students and others that need her special attention. She creates elbow partners with some students. For example an IEP student with another student of her choosing.