When I taught kindergarten, I used to ring my little teacher bell every time I wanted my kids to change centers (one ding), clean up (two dings), or whatever. It was a quick way to let my kids know what I wanted them to do without yelling over them, and it made me look all in charge and awesome. Well, during my teacher evaluation I LOST my freakin’ bell. Seriously, I spent like fifteen minutes of the eval looking for the stupid thing and never found it.
Well, I wanted so badly to show off my rockin’ bell system that I actually ended up making “bong” sounds to try and get my kids to do their stuff. Of course it didn’t work. Instead, it was more like I just stood up in the front of the room like a crazy moron going, “Bong! Bong!” over and over again while my students just stared. They were used to me doing random weird things, because I’m ME for crying out loud, but they were not cool with my “bonging.”
Thank goodness the principal offered me a redo.
There was no way I was letting that little bell incident happen again, so I went on the search for something I could wear on my snazzy teacher lanyard that would accomplish the same thing as the bell did.
I searched and searched… then, when I was at the pet store–I found a dog clicker for 99 cents! It even had a keychain attachment and everything! So, what did I do?
After covering up the PetSmart logo with a snazzy sticker, I trained 22 five-year-olds to accomplish small tasks with a dog clicker.
Heck yeah, that’s what I did.
**For those of you wondering, I kicked that second evaluation’s booty. 🙂
