Teaching behavior expectations in kindergarten is important, especially in the first few weeks of school. This often sets the stage for your class for the entire year. For students to fully understand what is expected of them, it is important that teachers address and teach these expectation.
I usually spend a lot of time during the first weeks of school teaching student expectations and classroom behaviors. We complete sorts of good choices and bad choices in the classroom and discuss what makes them good and bad choices.
We complete these sorts whole group and students also complete individual behavior reflection sheets. These work great during the first few weeks of school or when students may need a review.
These include different levels of difficulty beginning with students simply deciding if an actions is a good or bad choice, to a student sort of good and bad choices (this is a freebie at the end of the blog post) to finally illustrating or writing good or bad choices.
Also we color an emergent reader reviewing some of the classroom expectations.
In your classroom, you may want to challenge your students to focus on a certain expectation for a week. Included are posters that would work great for this:
These provide a visual and focus for students when expectations are being taught. You can make it a game and provide an incentive if students can meet this expectation a certain amount of times in a week.
Once these expectations are taught it is important to keep students accountable to their actions. I have been using a visual think sheet in my classroom that is perfect for this. It is very appropriate for your early learners in pre-k or kindergarten or special ed because it includes pictures for students to show what they did. Students simply color in the choice they made and a better choice they can make.
These are great reflections for students, communication for parents and documentation if necessary.
You may also want to post these cool down methods where students can reflect on strategies to cool down, instead of getting upset.
You can find this entire Behavior Think Sheets and Activities in my TPT store
and the Free Good and Bad Choices Student Sort here:
