March Madness: College and Conflict

                           *ottavern.com

March Madness is such an appropriate title for this time of year. Of course, I love the NCAA basketball games, the "bracketology", and the friendly rivalries, but it is also kind of a crazy time of year with its own madness:  student behavior issues, tired teachers, lots of meetings, and long days!

Lately I have been dusting off some of my behavior interventions in preparation for the friendship spring fever that inevitably crops up at this time of year.  I have my Problem Solving card ready that I wrote about in my "Free Fish" post here.  I also created a Rumor Blocker reminder card for my upper grade students as a follow up to my Steps to Respect lessons in third, fourth, and fifth grades.

I use these cards to give as student resources following individual counseling sessions, mediations, or small group sessions dealing with friendship issues.  I will be adding both freebies to the Life on the Fly Store.

In addition, our school recently implemented a STAR ticket program as a positive reinforcement system (PBIS) to motivate students to make good choices.

I am the lucky TV personality that gets to call winning tickets on the news broadcast each Wednesday and monitor prize patrol outside of my office.  In addition, I started a new small group behavior intervention where students earn points for doing homework, earning STAR tickets, earning verbal compliments, attending daily check-ins with me, and making it throughout the day with no tallies.  They can then redeem them for one of the fun activities on my reinforcement prize menu (token economy system, anyone?!), which mainly consists of group activities we do together such as an iPad game lunch, recess games, or working on a technology project together.

I also decided to kick up the fun factor related to March Madness and created this bulletin board linking future college choices and geography with the basketball tournament. When you scan the QR code, it takes you to an updated NCAA tournament bracket.

  

I also found these great mascot sheets and shared them with my upper grade teachers so they could do a map search with their students on a rainy day during recess or as a filler activity before lunch or specials.  Happy Counseling! ~ Angela