28. Do Kindergarten Teachers Need to use a Daily Behavior Report?

Should kindergarten teachers send home a daily behavior report for every student?

It's one of the most common classroom management questions I see every summer, especially from teachers preparing for a new school year. While many classrooms use daily behavior calendars, clip charts, or behavior reports to communicate with families, are they really the most effective way to talk about kindergarten behavior?

In this episode, I'm sharing why I stopped using daily behavior calendars in my kindergarten classroom, what I use instead, and how a simple shift in communication helped create more meaningful conversations with families while saving me time.

If you're looking for kindergarten behavior strategies, classroom management ideas, or a better way to communicate student behavior with families, this episode is for you.

Resources Mentioned:

🔗 First Week of Kindergarten Blueprint

🔗 Kindergarten Behavior Blueprint

🔗 Shop Glow and Grow Behavior Notes

Show Notes: https://kindergartentoolbox.com/should-kindergarten-teachers-use-a-daily-behavior-report/

Transcript

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Do you need to communicate about behavior for every student every day in your kindergarten classroom? This is one of the most common classroom management questions I see popping up in Facebook groups all over the kindergarten space these days, and I understand why you want to be sure that you're communicating behavior to families. But is sending home a daily behavior report with every single child the best way to do that? That's exactly what we're going to talk about in today's episode. So let's dig in. 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. Before we dig into the effective communication that I used in my kindergarten classroom, I want to chat about what a behavior calendar is and acknowledge why I think most teachers use them. So behavior calendar, for the purposes of this podcast episode, are like a chart that you would put in your students' communication folder that told parents how behavior was that day. I've seen them that match the colors of the clip. So you would color whatever color your clip landed on that day. I've seen them with happy face, um, like straight face and sad faces and varying degrees of those faces, which feels even more complicated to me. But you get the picture. Something in their daily communication folder that lets parents know how their behavior was at school that day. I understand why so many teachers use these tools because you want families to be informed. You want to keep communication open. I think if we really dig into why these behavior tools came about, it's because this is the student's first time away from mom and dad where mom and dad aren't picking them up directly from the teacher, right? In preschool, at least where my girls went to preschool, we would walk into school and pick them up, and I could talk to the teacher, hey, did you have a good day? And it's just a quick check-in. So I think because in kindergarten, most cases we're sending them home on the bus or in the car rider line, and we are not face to face with whatever grown-up is picking them up. So we're not giving them a direct update every day. And I think that's where these behavior calendars were born. The problem is, just like in email or text messaging, sometimes when we're giving just a quick little symbol for the entire day, it doesn't convey exactly what happened. Or if it was a hard day and you're just sending home a frown face or a red mark, does that really tell parents what happened? Are we actually communicating with families in an effective way? So basically, is your behavior calendar doing what you hoped it would do? And for me, that absolutely was not the case. You see, I at the beginning of my career was using a clip chart. And I didn't necessarily use a daily behavior calendar, but kids would go home and tell their parents what color they ended the day on. And parents and grown-ups would hone in on that color, and the child became that color. Or it wasn't tell me about how your day is, it's what clip, where was your clip at the end of the day? And I don't know about you, but I wanted my students to go home and share what we learned about, what they did in centers, what we did in math class that day, who they played with at recess, not what color their clip was on, or if they earned a smile or a frown that day. Because here's the thing I noticed. One difficult moment started to define the entire day. A child could spend their day helping a friend, cleaning up, participating, being kind, but then during transitions absolutely fall apart and suddenly they were yellow or they didn't earn that smiley face, it was just the middle. And how does that define their whole day? And if I just circle the smile, it sort of negates that transitions were difficult that day, right? It didn't really effectively communicate what behavior I was seeing in the classroom. And I didn't want my students to be defined by their behavior. And listen, if I had a student who was struggling to make positive behavior choices throughout the day or on a consistent basis, then my communication with those families needed to be far more than a red mark or a frown face. We needed to chat about how we were going to improve behavior. And those students often had their own different communication tools, like a behavior uh journal or something like that, where I would send home a quick sentence or two about how the day went to keep the grown-ups informed. But for a kiddo who is struggling with behavior, just putting red day after day after day or that frowny face over and over again, it's not helping anybody. And actually, it's probably really doing a number on their self-esteem in the long run. So we need to remember that kindergartners are five and six-year-olds, sometimes four-year-olds, and this is often their first experience with formal school. They're learning how to be students, how to regulate emotions, how to solve problems, how to get along with other people. Behavior is a skill, not a grade, not a mark on a lock. Behavior should be something we teach, not something we score in a grade book. And I could go back to my elementary school days where we actually got graded in conduct, which is insane to me, like a letter grade, but I digress. In kindergarten, we cannot make it that way. And I really do think that these daily and monthly behavior calendars start to feel that way. Imagine if you had to mark your behavior on a calendar for the month and stare at it all month long, even if your behavior was 99% great, but you had one day that was, you know, not perfect. For a perfectionist kiddo in your classroom, that's going to cause major anxiety every time they have to pull that paper out. It's just another thing to consider as you think about how you want to communicate behavior with families. If you've been listening to this podcast or been around teaching exceptional kinders for any length of time, then you know that I am all about open communication and building positive relationships with students and their families. So this podcast episode is not all about why we shouldn't use behavior calendars because we absolutely positively need to be communicating about behaviors. It's very important. So what can you use instead of a daily chart that doesn't really tell them anything? Well, in my classroom, we use Glow and Grow Notes. It was a really simple system. Glow notes celebrate success, and Grow Notes address skills we are working on. This lets parents or families immediately know what went well, what we're practicing, and ways they can support at home. Then if we need to address these behaviors of concern, there's a trail. There's actual real information, not just a color or a sad face on the calendar. And Glow and Grow Notes deserve their very own episode, but briefly, I would send home one or two glow notes a day, and I tried to rotate through the whole class, and I would send home grow notes sparingly as needed to address unwanted or difficult behavior or areas that I thought parents needed to know something happened during that day. Parents signed them, sent them back, so I had a record of everything that went home and a recording of those communications, and it was an easy, simple way to communicate these behaviors. It did not take as much time as filling out a behavior calendar did for every single student, and it kept parents informed as needed throughout the school year. It was the perfect solution for our classroom. This system worked so much better because instead of parents asking, what color did you get or what mark is on your calendar, the conversation becomes, wow, you earned a glow note today, or hmm, your teacher says that we're working on remembering to raise your hand. What does that look like in the classroom? It really transforms those conversations and makes it about the whole child or a specific issue that we're solving, not colors or frown faces. So does every child need daily communication? No, absolutely not. Most students don't need a daily behavior report. If something significant happens, absolutely you need to communicate it. If you're working on a specific goal, like constantly calling out, yes, communicate it. If you have something to celebrate, send home a positive note so parents know. But most students do not need daily color chart or behavior communication at home. It's often a time suck for you, and it doesn't really effectively communicate what you're trying to do anyway. So instead, I would encourage you to tell parents no news is good news, use some glow and grow notes or some similar system, and communicate when needed, not every single day. Now, one of the reasons that our glow and grow note system works so well is because it was just one piece of a bigger classroom management plan. And inside the first week of kindergarten blueprint, we start to lay out that plan and it includes a set of glow and grow notes that you can use right away in your classroom. And we dig even deeper into this plan and how you can make it work with whole class systems and all the things you need for successful classroom management all year long inside of the kindergarten behavior blueprint. So I will drop links to both of those down in the show notes. Um, the first week blueprint is happening right now, and we will be live the end of July. If you can join us for that, it will be so much fun to collaborate with other kindergarten teachers who are in the exact same boat as you. We are not alone in this world of kindergarten, and it's so much better when we can all collaborate together. So please remember families don't need to know what mark represents the behavior for the day. They need to know how to celebrate their child's successes and support their growth in all areas, especially in behavior. All right, thanks for listening. See you next week. 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 teachingexceptionalkinders.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 confident writers. You've got this.