12. Consequences for Behavior in the Kindergarten Classroom

What consequences can you use in kindergarten if you aren't allowed to take away recess?  In this episode, we talk about natural consequences, and I share a classroom management secret weapon. 

Free Glow & Grow Notes

Kindergarten Behavior Blueprint

Show Notes: 

Transcript

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Without taking away recess, what consequences are effective for modifying behavior in kindergarten? That's a big question, and we're going to tackle it today. Stick around. Welcome to the Kindergarten Toolbox Podcast. I'm your host, Amy Murray, here to help you simplify kindergarten with tools and strategies that actually work with real live five and six year olds. Let's dive into your shortcut to calmer days and more confident writers. Finding effective consequences that you can use consistently in kindergarten can be a challenge, especially when we're trying to avoid taking away recess. And before we dig too far into things, avoiding recess as a consequence is important because many of your students who you need consequences for need that recess time for so many reasons. They need the time to get that energy out of their system for regulation. They need to learn how to interact socially with other kids in an appropriate way. And recess is the time that we have to do that. There is very little social and downtime left in kindergarten. We push academics down their throats, they're not ready for it, and then we start taking away the only downtime that they do have. And it's just a recipe for more bad behavior that you don't want to deal with. So let's pause and try not to take away a recess, but use other natural consequences instead. And let's chat about what natural consequences might look like. In my classroom, natural consequences looked like if you make a mess, you clean it up. If you run to the carpet, you go back and try again with walking feet. If you were mean to a friend, maybe you need space away from other people to get your emotions back in check so that you can use kind words. And then when you're ready to join us and be kind, you can come back. Those types of things were natural consequences. Now, if you have a kiddo who absolutely refuses to do their work during work time, that work's gotta get done. So maybe instead of during the work time, that work now becomes a recess job. Or that work becomes a center's time. They have to do their independent work before they get to the fun stuff. There were years that I had a few students who struggled with different behaviors, including getting their work done. And so we build in 10 minutes, it wasn't much, of free play at the end of every other day, wasn't even every day. And so if your work wasn't finished, you didn't get that time. If you had trouble with your behavior during the day, you missed some of that time. That time that we build in at the end of the day could be used for reteaching social skills for the kids who were struggling that day, for making up missing work if you refuse to do your job, for cleaning up messes that we didn't get to earlier in the day, you get the idea. That time was built in so that we had time to properly address behavior with natural consequences. There are times that you have to get creative like that, building in extra things in your schedule in order to best meet the needs of your students. Now, I will caution you if I had kiddos who were not getting their work done routinely, like it was an everyday thing, then I didn't take recess away every single day because that's not effective either. If you're taking recess away and the work still isn't getting done, then it's not an effective consequence and you'll have to dig a little deeper. And there are always going to be some kids who are outliers to these rules who need extra support or individualized behavior plans. And for those kids, you got to pull out your documentation and keep track of what's happening, find out why they are doing whatever the behavior is that is driving you crazy, and try to get to the root of the problem there. And that's a whole nother podcast episode. The secret weapon of effective consequences is communicating the behavior to parents or families at home. Yeah, I know there are more families today that defend their kids instead of taking responsibility, but there are still parents and families out there who want to know if their child is misbehaving so they can help address it at home. And so the way we did this in my classroom was using grow notes. So you've probably heard me talk about glow and grow notes on the podcast before because, for good reason, they are my absolute favorite classroom management tool, the easiest to use, bar none, and the most effective at motivating positive behavior. So we gave out glow notes to celebrate positive things, easy for me to say, that are happening in the classroom. And we used grow notes sparingly, not daily, but we used grow notes to address behaviors of concern. If I had a kiddo who is constantly calling out and it's driving me crazy, then it's time for me to send a grow note home to parents to let them know, hey, this is an area that we are working on at school. Can you please address this at home as well? It's just a super simple form that has a checklist of behaviors. And at the top it says, today I disrupted the learning of myself and others because that's what these behaviors are doing. It's not meant to be mean or punitive. It's just this is what it is. I was disrupting the learning environment today. And then you check off whatever behavior it is, and then here was what my consequence was. A lot of times my consequence is a note home, right? That grow note is the consequence. Sometimes it's missing a couple minutes of free time. Sometimes it's I took some time in the calm down corner. Sometimes it's I conference with my teacher. You get the idea. And then you send that home and ask parents to sign it and bring it back. So then you have documentation that you communicated the behavior to families so that they can't come back and say at conference time when you're trying to address it again, you never told me about this. You can say, well, on this day and this day, I sent a grow note home to let you know. And of course, if it becomes a pervasive problem, you're gonna want to give a phone call too. Speaking of phone calls, another highly effective consequence is calling parents in front of the student, not in front of the whole class. That's embarrassment, that's rude, but pulling the student aside and making the phone call to mom and dad with the student sitting with you so that you can explain, hey, X, Y, and Z happened in class today, and Joey is gonna tell you about it. And Joey tells her about whatever happened in school that day. If a kiddo is having trouble keeping their hands to themselves and, you know, they hit somebody, like, okay, we're gonna go call mom and tell her what happened, or dad, or whoever. But you get the idea. It's highly effective to have the student take accountability for their behavior and have to communicate it to their families with you right there. There's no room for fibbing, lying, stretching, telling, you know, all of that kind of thing. It's just the truth. Here's what happened. And anytime I've done these phone calls home, I've followed up within the next day or two with an update about how their day went, either the following day or as soon as I had the opportunity to send a glow note home for that student to celebrate a positive behavior, I would do that because families need to know that you care about their kid, not that you're just looking to get them into trouble. So, yes, phone calls home, yes, grow notes home to address unwanted behaviors, but also make sure that you are still looking for the positives with that kiddo and their family and communicating it so that that way families don't lose trust in you. I hope that you were able to brainstorm some new consequence ideas to try out in your kindergarten classroom. If you'd like to try our glow and grow notes, we have a free set. I will link them down in the show notes, so be sure to grab those. They will transform your classroom. It is amazing how powerful two little notes can be at transforming classroom behavior. So please go give those a try. And if you need links to anything else, you'll find them down there. Have any other ideas for me about consequences or things you'd like to hear more about on the podcast? You can find me on Instagram at Teaching Exceptional Kinders. I'd love to hear from you. All right, until next time. Thanks for listening to the Kindergarten Toolbox. I'm Amy Murray and I'm so glad you're here. Be sure to check the show notes for all the links and resources from today's episode. For even more tips, tools, and support, head to teaching exceptionalkinders.com or connect with me on Instagram at Teaching Exceptional Kinders. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow along and subscribe to the show and take a minute to leave a review. It helps other kindergarten teachers to find us too. Teaching kindergarten is tough, but you're not alone. Here's to calmer days and more competent writers. You've got this