Art Is Important

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Class Cards

another Great Classroom Mgmt from Cheryl at:

http://www.teachkidsart.net/class-cards-for-class-management/

Using “Class Cards” as a man­age­ment tool is an idea I picked up from class man­age­ment guru, Rick Mor­ris. (If you’re not already famil­iar with Rick’s many teach­ing tools and tech­niques, be sure to visit his web­site, www.newmanagement.com for a gold mine of ideas!) While this isn’t a tool spe­cific to art edu­ca­tors, I’ve found it help­ful in such a vari­ety of ways that I use it every day, with every class I teach.
“Class Cards” is a sim­ple and inex­pen­sive idea you can eas­ily add to your bag of tricks and see results right away.… noth­ing I’ve tried has worked bet­ter to pro­mote total class par­tic­i­pa­tion and involve­ment. All you do is take a deck of play­ing cards and write each student’s first and last name on one of the cards with a Sharpie. I sep­a­rate my cards by class, and hold them together with a rub­ber band, labeled with the teacher name and grade on a piece of col­ored card stock. Then I keep the cards for the class I’m teach­ing in my back pocket so I can quickly pull them out as I need them.
There are so many ways you can use “Class Cards” in the Art Room. Sim­ply shuf­fle the deck and turn over some cards when you need to ran­domly select stu­dents to…

• answer ques­tions
• par­tic­i­pate in class discussions
• pass out supplies
• col­lect supplies
• “vol­un­teer” for an activity
• be a “teacher’s helper”
• form groups
• go to their seats after car­pet time (Kindergarten)
• line up after class

Using “Class Cards” with 40+ new Kinder­garten­ers each fall helps me learn these new names in record time as I can call on them and instantly put faces with names.
It’s also fun to see how just tak­ing the cards out of my pocket and start­ing to shuf­fle them will get stu­dents’ atten­tion, as they antic­i­pate what I may be choos­ing some­one to do!
One of the best things about “Class Cards” is that you only have to make a card for each stu­dent one time. Just save your cards from year to year, then as stu­dents move to a new grade level you sim­ply re-group your last year’s cards into new classes. When stu­dents grad­u­ate or leave your school, they enjoy get­ting “their card” as a sou­venir of their time with you!
If you ever have the chance to take a work­shop with Rick Mor­ris, do it! You’ll come away inspired and infused with prac­ti­cal ideas that will make a dif­fer­ence in your class­room, no mat­ter what grade or sub­ject you teach. But, if that isn’t in the pic­ture for you, his books are a fan­tas­tic resource for many of the ideas he shares in his workshops .

Teach Kids Art...Cheryl
http://www.teachkidsart.net/mona-lisa-attention-signal/

Great Classroom Management Idea....

I’m excited to share the best class­room man­age­ment tech­nique I’ve tried in years.… the “Mona! Lisa!” atten­tion sig­nal. I used this new tech­nique in all my K-8 classes this week, and it was even more suc­cess­ful than I had hoped for!

Kudos go to Tri­cia Fuglestad of Dry­den Art Fugle­blog for shar­ing this fan­tas­tic idea, which she learned from Scott Rus­sell. It’s a sim­ple call and response.… you say, “Mona!” and your stu­dents respond with “Lisa!”, and show you their best Mona Lisa pose: eyes on the teacher, mouths quiet, and hands still. (Yes, “mouths quiet”.… it really works — woo hoo!!!)

I announced to each of my classes that the Mona Lisa, by Leonardo Da Vinci, would be our class mas­cot this year. I have a small Mona Lisa print mounted on card­board which I placed on the white board tray. After prac­tic­ing our best Mona Lisa poses, we ran through the “Mona! Lisa!” call and response.

Then we prac­ticed. Through­out our class time, when­ever stu­dents got a lit­tle too loud, or I needed to get their atten­tion to give more instruc­tions, I used the “Mona! Lisa!” atten­tion sig­nal. Some­times I had to repeat “Mona!” a few times until I had everyone’s atten­tion, but it got bet­ter the more we prac­ticed. In the past, I tried every­thing from flick­ing the lights, to count­ing down from five, to clap­ping rhythms, to using chimes. But none of those tech­niques even came close to “Mona! Lisa!” for quickly get­ting stu­dents’ atten­tion. It was so easy — remark­able, really, in how well it worked.

Check out the Dry­den Art Fugle­blog for a down­load­able “How to be Mona-ificient” poster as well as a great poster for “Art Room Voice Lev­els”. And be sure to fol­low this cre­ative blog if you use an iPad or other tech­nol­ogy in your Art Room.… tons of inno­v­a­tive ideas here!

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