Classroom Management, Part 4

           

 

Hey friends. Welcome to Mr. Mark’s Classroom. My name is Mark Jones. I am excited to share with you another great tip about classroom management today, because I’ve got several of my own teachers who are really trying to make a great classroom even better. Sometimes we all need a little encouragement with some things to do. The first tip today that I want to tell you is, boys and girls need choices. They need choices.

Here’s what happened. This has been years ago. We had a fourth-grade class that did a lot of writing. Then they announced we’re going to have a great project, we’re going to build a newspaper. And the kids were like, “Oh, more writing. We always do writing.” Te sick of it, and complaining they didn’t want to go. 

I had had some different directors go in with those teachers, and try to help. They came back saying, “Those
women are impossible. They want to write everything.” So, I did what every good children’s minister does…he sends his wife…to be the director. She came back and she said, “You know, those ladies are very sweet and all,
but I can’t work with them.” I said, “Why not? I just don’t get it. Why can’t you work with them?” And she said, “Well, they don’t want to do anything, but write. Every activity we ever have has to be about writing, that’s a little gross. Where are the markers? Where’s the crayons? Where’s just the games?” She said, “They don’t do any of that. And I’ve tried and tried.”

So, I finally put it all together. These three ladies, retired school teachers, they loved writing. They thought all children should practice their writing, cursive, and they were all auditory learners. Reading and writing -it’s great stuff to them. It’s so much fun. The idea of having a newspaper that they built, you know, for a whole
month. Woo. That was great stuff. No, it was not. There are some children who like that, but not all. Because you’ve got children who are visual learners, and they want to be expressive with art, they want to draw. You have children who are just collaborators, and they want to work together in relationships, and you have children who want to work alone. You have some who want to work and do musical things or acting. I mean, there’s just so many different ways and methods that we can bring into this. So, I want to challenge you to provide choices, and the choices might not be the kind that you would like to do. 

 It seems like we rarely have drama with our methods in our classrooms. Anytime it comes along and there’s parts to read, and costumes to put on, I mean from first grade to pre-K, they love it. I challenge you to think about how you could bring into this, some choices for these kids. So, whenever we are working through our Bible study, they’re really getting to enjoy several things that they like. So maybe you don’t have the exact same thing at every table, b