Sticker Charts are Overrated

So many teachers do sticker charts and they're just SO overrated....sure the concept works and the students love it. But there is so much waste in this style of a reward program....so what did I decide to do? Make something a little more re-usable that sparked a little more creative process. Instead of a sticker, the students earn a "step" from the village toward the castle and when they reach the castle they earn a prize and then they start all over at the village again. The kids love it and the fun images that appear along the way (wishing well, unicorn, dragon, and mermaid [not pictured]). I just googled images online for the moving characters (2 styles of princesses [one more feminine and one more ranger style] and 2 styles of princes). The kids love it and I'm not wasting paper and stickers. 

These are the guidelines I use:

find it on my TPT site here

Meal Manners

I don't know about you, but we seem to have quite a bit of troubles (sometimes) controlling and promoting proper table manners. So I compiled a short list of basic manners that should be observed by even the youngest of my students. While this poster didn't magically fix all our problems, it did help provide the visual that many of our students need. Often times we till take a few minutes during meals to review the poster just as a simple reminder. It took some work to find all the images online, print them, colour them, paste them above the letters that I tried to so neatly write, and then I used contact paper over the whole thing to help ensure longevity. 

Anti-Tattling

Working in an all day preschool with sixteen 3-5 year olds can be tough, especially when it comes to the topic of tattling on friends, in our efforts to fight this behaviour we tried to encourage our children to tell us when they saw their friends doing especially good things. I believe it was a great idea, however, it didn't work as well as we had hoped it would. The children would often say things along the lines of, "Suzie and I played together and she's my best friend" etc., which is great and all, but we were trying to encourage things like, "I saw Jonny share his toy with Luke because he didn't bring one to school today" etc. We even tried giving the children examples and recording the things that we saw through-out the day, but it never really caught on and we moved on to different means of encouraging positive behaviour and not tattling.