Classroom Management
First Week of School
- Effective Teaching Your First Day - Harry and Rosemary Wong offer advice on greeting students at the door, introducing yourself to your class, teaching procedures for arriving and leaving class, explaining rules, and assigning student numbers, portfolios and workbooks. This site also contains a lot of links to other articles on effective classroom management
- Ice Breakers - Fourteen teachers from around the world submitted their favorite first day of school activities to Education World. Here they are.
- Actividades Para Realizar Los Primeros Días de Clases - This Spanish language website, Educar Chile, offers teachers lots of tips for the first day of school. It also includes instructions for several ice breakers.
- King and Queen Ice Breaker - Amanda Posterik describes an activity she uses at the beginning of the school year that not only builds her students' self-esteem but facilitates beginning writing skills.
- Education World - Back to School Templates - This site contains templates for creating and printing many useful forms and handouts for the first week of school. Contents include an Open House Invitation, Name Tags, Calendars, Student Profiles, Volunteer Questionnaires, and a Welcome Letter.
- Pre-Kinders First Days of Pre-K - This site offers plenty of practical advice on the following topics: Things to Do Before the First Day, Parents Packet, First Day Fears, Orientation, Daily Folders, First Day of School Arrival, Tips for Beginning Centers, First Day Lesson Plans, and First Day Awards. The site also includes several printables for use on the first day.
- Pre-Kinders Wish List - This site includes a picture and a description of a hallway bulletin board called the Pick an Apple Wish List which solicits every day objects and materials needed for the classroom.
- Pre-Kinders Back to School - This site contains a handy beginning of the year check list.
- First Week of Pre-School Activities - Lesson and activities centered around learning classroom rules and procedures.
- Mrs. Fischer's Beginning of the Year Songs - Songs for teaching rules and routines. Suitable for Pre-K, Kindergarten, and First Grade.
Behavior Management
- Fifty Tips, Tricks, and Ideas for Kindergarten - A collection of some of the best ideas I have seen for not only managing your classroom but for making it more welcoming and for making learning fun. All of these ideas can be applied to Pre-K and many of them are useful for first and second grade classrooms as well.
- To Improve School Climate Examine Recess - This Edutopia article not only examines the positive impact recess has on teaching and learning, it also provides five steps for developing a recess-friendly playground.
- Kelly's Kindergarten Songs - Use the Rules Rap and the Hallway Song to help children remember the rules.
- Teachers Start Your Engines - Here are twenty classroom management tips from Education World.
- Quiet Your Students Without Saying a Word - A dozen teachers share their methods for quieting children in the classroom.
- Classroom Management - Ten Teacher Tested Tips - This site contains many useful strategies for quieting down and controlling a class. Best of all is the detailed script for holding hall conferences.
- Social Contract - Ms. DePinto shares the social contract she uses with her kindergarteners.
- Six Classroom Management Tips Every Teacher Can Use - National Education Association tips for maintaining order in the classroom.
- Intervention Central - Behavior interventions and strategies for managing and rewarding students, dealing with non-compliant, defiant students, dealing with bullying, and working with special needs students.
- Pre-Kinders Pre-K Classroom Rules - These four pages of colorfully illustrated rules (one rule per page) are ideal for posting on your classroom wall.
- The Most Successful Leaders Do Fifteen Things Automatically Every Day - This Forbes article describing fifteen behaviors exhibited by successful business leaders could easily apply to teachers. Read it for ideas on how to best lead and motivate your students to do their best work.
Classroom Layout
- Your Teacher's Aide - Using Floor Tape in Your Classroom - Several ingenious ideas for using duct tape to organize, label, and decorate your classroom. Colorful, inexpensive solutions to problems teachers commonly face (like desks which migrate, over the course of a school day, from straight rows into an anarchy of crooked lines). This page is enhanced by ideas contributed by other teachers who have used duct tape in their own classrooms.
- Virtual Vine Classroom Tour - Take a photo tour of a superbly organized classroom.