1st Grade

Recently I've decided to incorporate a ticket system into my grade 1 classes. Students are given two tickets before they enter the classroom. These two tickets are to help them monitor their behavior. They are to remind them that they need to behave appropriately. If a students isn't following the things we have discussed as a group then I ask for a ticket, and generally the child corrects the behavior. They get two chances. If a student has any number of tickets at the end of class they are rewarded with a sticker. Before I have the students enter the art room I usually talk to them in the hallway. Since the computer lab is through the same area sometimes there is another class entering the same time that my art class is. Today Mrs. Farley's class was waiting to stop in, and Mrs. Burbank had been asking me a question about finding a picasso print, so we were all in the hallway. Once I finished talking to Mrs. Burbank, she started speaking to Mrs. Farley. I asked my class if they could look at me so I knew they were listening. After most of the students were not looking at me I asked them again to look at me. One student, who was near the end of the line, then proceeded to explain that since Mrs. Farley and Mrs. Burbank were talking he was having trouble hearing. Now there is no way that this could be true, because both teachers were about as far away from me as they were from him, and I couldn't hear what they were saying, but this student knew that they were talking, so he took it upon himself to inform them that they shouldn't be. Mrs. Farley said that they were whispering, and that she was sure they weren't talking too loudly. I wouldn't have cared even if they were, because we were in the hallway. Mrs. Farley laughed about it later, saying how it was funny that a first grader had no problem standing up to a teacher, not that he was being mean or rude, but just that he would let them know if they were doing something they shouldn't be. It was very cute.