Winner and A Great Book...

First of all, congratulations to Jen Jenkins Vukosic on winning Michelle's awesome Dental Health Craftivity!  Jen - you should have an e-mail already!  :)

A couple weeks ago I received this book in my Amazon order.

Let me just tell you, it has REALLY made me reflect a lot on my classroom.  I am SO excited about the things I'm learning.  I read just a few pages a night, which helps with trying to apply it.  Every single day, I think about what I read and implement some of the techniques she mentions.  For example, last night I read about how to respond when kids give silly answers to questions.  Today when some of my kiddos gave silly responses just to get attention and laughs from the class, I went with it.  Just like Debbie said, if you show them you're serious, they'll be serious as well!  It was pretty funny neat to see their faces just drop as I turned the tables on them.  ;)  Here's an example of the conversation we had:

Me: "What do you think might be something scary about moving to a new place?"

Class Clown Student:  "All the creepy, scary spiders!" (It wasn't a for real answer...he had a goofy grin on his face and started laughing...then the other kids STARTED to laugh, BUT....)

Me (without missing a beat or giving him a look): "What makes you think your new house would have spiders?  Why would that be something that would scare you?"

TOTAL change.  My kids just stopped.  And he tried to continue thinking, trying to justify his answer. This happened a couple of times throughout the day.  My normal reaction would've been to say something like, "Ok, it's not time to be silly," and then give them the death stare.  But usually they just keep cracking the jokes here and there.  You probably know that your class clowns will always be class clowns.  And for some reason, your stare-downs and "stop it" comments only seem to fuel the fire.  Oh sure, they might back off for a minute, but these students thrive off the negative attention sometimes.  So if you let them know you're serious and turn it around on them, you might just notice that it really does put an end to it!  And then they're roped into a serious discussion about books and therefore LEARNING!  Amazing how that works.  ;)

Anyways, I hope you all had a great Hump Day!  Only 2 days left before a long weekend!

P.S. Stay tuned for my first big solo giveaway!  I have some FUN plans for this, friends!!!!  Coming this weekend.... ;)  You won't want to miss it!