Chapter 11: The Scoreboard

From the 15+ variations of the Scoreboard in Chapter 11, pick five you will use in the school year. Explain why you picked each one and estimate how long you will use your selection before going on to the next.

In using the Scoreboard, I will start out the year with smilies and frownies because they make it clear to the students that a smilie means that they made the teacher happy through making smart choices and following the classroom rules. A frownie means that they have not followed the classroom rules. I will use this for the first month of school.

The second scoreboard I will be using is girls and boys. There are times that the boys need a bit more correction than the girls or visa versa. When they are on two separate teams, they certainly want to earn more recess time. They also very much want to compete against the other team for positive behavior points. This leads me to teacher heaven! I use this scoreboard as needed depending on the behavior and competitiveness in the classroom. I usually only use it for a few days at time.

When it's a rough and challenging behavior day, I definitely use the Ping-Pong variation. I reward for negative behavior and then quickly follow up with a positive behavior point when I see a student or group of students making smart choices. I use Ping-Pong as needed.

For the Boombox variation, I would like to substitute in GoNoodle, an online kinesthetic brain break. I could write GoNoodle on a piece of paper and move it closer to the smilie side of the Scoreboard when I'm seeing positive behavior. When there is negative behavior, the magnet moves farther from the smilie side. When the GoNoodle reward is won, they get a one minute brain break. As the year progresses, the students can work toward a two or three minute brain break. The students love brain breaks, so I will use this variation at least a few weeks a month.

Double points day is always a benefit for later in the year. This totally gets the students, especially the boys excited. To make it even more appealing, I like to couple double points day with the boys/girls scoreboard. They boys find it very exhilarating and the girls find it enjoyable too. They want to "conquer the boys."

Beat the Clock and Horizontal Morphin' would both also be great scoreboard variations to correct class problem behavior in a positive way.  Last year, I only tried the smilie/frownie and girl/boy variations. I am excited to try the above variations this coming year.