Positive Pledge

This year one of our many "lofty" goals is to be more positive with our students. Stop and water the flowers instead of always pulling the weeds - if you know what I mean. We have tried many things in the past years like Class Dojo, classroom ticket reward system, secret student, etc. each with some success. New year and fresh start we are looking into incorporating brag tags, but with a more upper elementary feel.
On a side note, we are in love with all things watercolors and the current cactus, pineapple, tropical craze. So we created something that is not only functional, but super cute called Positive Notes. If you would like to see the product in our TpT store, click HERE!

We have never used brag tags before, but we were planning on giving them out to students for various reasons.  Definitely giving them out a lot at the beginning of the year to establish their value. For example, keeping their desks tidy, showing great character, helping out with jobs around the classroom, and staying on task.  However, last year learning goals were added to our curriculum.  We are planning on using them as an incentive for meeting their personal learning goals too.  Our fourth graders struggled to come up with learning goals last year.  Let's face it reflecting on one's learning is not something that we naturally do.  It needs to be taught.  However, it is a powerful tool to help empower students to set goals and celebrate them.  Here are a few examples for reading goals for our 4th graders:

• Jotting down important details to help retell the beginning, middle, end of a story or chapter to help participate in book talks.
• Jotting down thick questions when reading to help me understand my topic better.
• Reading a new genre to I am not familiar with.
• Jotting down unfamiliar words as I read and using context clues to help me better understand my reading.
• Using all the text features to help me understand my topic better.

On another note, this summer as part of our campus' PD, we are encouraged to read the book, What's Under Your Cape? by Barbara Gruener. It is a great read on being positive, building relationships with your students, and encouraging great character from your students. It also has some wonderful simple ideas to incorporate in your classroom.

One of our favorite ideas from the book is to write thank you letters to former teachers. We are planning on using that idea the first week of school. Teachers love affirmations from previous students, and it gets our students writing for a purpose right off the bat. So we created these Positive Thank You notes and uploaded them to our store as a FREEBIE. I mean what teacher doesn't love a good freebie?! To download it from our TpT store, click HERE!