Stop Light to Behaviour

 I wanted to share the stop light system we use in our classroom. We started with the traditional Red Light, Yellow Light, Green light at the beginning of the year. We also chose to put our stop light upside down so children understood that moving up is good, moving down is bad. It was a very basic model with just coloured circles. It worked well but Mrs. K and I both agreed that we needed to support and celebrate our students who go above and beyond just as much as we need to encourage those students who need reminders to make better choices. So I hunted pinterest and combined a few different ideas to come up with this one:

All of the students have a clothes peg with their name on it on both sides. They all start their day on green because they are all "ready to learn". We give reminders throughout the day of what that looks like (sitting criss cross, quiet, eyes forward, listening, doing our jobs etc.). Children get a warning first and then their peg is moved down. At this stage children are also reminded to tell us what yellow means. They always say "think about it" and we encourage them to think about the choices they made that got them there. We usually end our conversations with "Can you get back up to green? YES! How can we do that?" If we have to intervene again, then the child gets moved to red. Again, we keep things on a more positive note by calling it "Make better choices" and we talk about what those choices could be. Our goal is to get those kids to green.

On the positive side of our chart children can be moved up to blue (great choices) and purple (star student). These are just above and beyond things like helping out a friend, great problem solving skills, great cleaning, etc.

At the end of the day we give out stickers to the children on Green, Blue, and Purple.

I picked up this cute little drawer unit at walmart. It holds our stickers perfectly. There is even a spot at the top for our work stickers, stars and jewel stickers.

In the top drawer are our stickers for the children on Green. They get wonderful stickers but tiny little guys. 

In the middle drawer we keep our blue stickers. These are bigger stickers or cooler stickers. At first we let the children on blue or purple choose their own stickers but that got too time consuming so now we choose the sheet for the day but they choose the sticker they want off of that sheet. 

In the bottom drawer are our stickers for the children on Purple. These stickers are our fancy stickers. They are big, or fuzzy, or smelly.

 I also bout a sheet of sticky back little jewels from dollarama and the children on Purple get to choose a jewel to put on their clothespeg. Once their clothespeg is full then they will get to take it home and we will get them a new one.

This behaviour chart has worked so well in our class!