5 Stars for Behavior

I’ve talked about behavior management in this post, but today I’m sharing the tip that has seemed to work really well for my more challenging groups.

In this post, I talked about how I use slime as my incentive. It’s amazing that preschool-6th grade kids are eager to work for it. For some groups, just telling them in the beginning of the session that they can have 3 minutes at the end of the session to play with it is enough. For other groups, it’s not. This is how I started the 5 star system. I write each child’s first initial on the board with 5 stars next to his/her name, as seen below (initials are not real students):

During the session, if I need to redirect a child or the he/she needs refocusing, I just turn around and erase a star. It’s nonverbal, and gives the child a visual reminder to stay on task. It also doesn’t interrupt my session too much, which I love. They know that they need to have at least 1 star at the end of the session to get to play with slime. If they don’t, they don’t get to play. I rarely have this happen though to be honest.

What behavior management system do you use?