Once again, I find myself a few weeks from the start of school and I’m not finished with my summer stuff and definitely am not finished with my back-to-school stuff.
I finally found my notes from the WBT conference and was able to create some categories for my Super Improver Wall. If you are new to Whole Brain Teaching, we strive to make all our students successful. They are not competing against each other but are competing against themselves. Teach them to strive to do better than they did last time and then reward them.
Since I have so many classes, (27 this year) there was no way for me to have a place for all those charts in my classroom. I decided to have the categories on the wall next to the SmartBoard but use the SmartBoard to display the different classes.
My classroom theme is musical with my 45rpm’s-themed posters so I decided to go with a music theme here, too.
These will be printed on cardstock, cut apart, and attached to a strip of poster paper. The chalkboard graphics came from
www.teachingsuperpower.blogspot.com/ and I love how the circles came with different color choices.
That helps when I change the colors of the stars for each level. My levels are 1. listener, 2. garage band, 3. 1,000 views on YouTube, 4. US Tour, 5. Platinum album, 6. World Tour, and 7. Grammy Award.
Each student star begins with white. WBT usually has 10 levels of improvement, but since I only see my students once a week, I’ve opted for 7 for now.
The Smart Notebook slides include the classroom teacher’s name on the bottom and the stars will have the students’ names as soon as I receive the rosters. The color of the star can change and the students can “decorate” their star with the magic pen. 5 “stickers” puts them up to the next level. Photos may be included as they improve at certain levels.
Next project: mini-books for their lapbooks.
Happy planning!
