Accompanying the new seating, introducing the chair check challenge

"Chair Check 1, 2," when spoken by me, in my class means that students are seated in a way that they are close to their desk,their feet are on the floor, and their hands are folded on their desk.

On November 5th or so, I taught a grammar lesson. At one point in the lesson, I was extremely discouraged as I looked around the room. It was quiet... but I maybe had 5 kids attention. The rest were leaning back in their chairs, or were fiddling with something, or were otherwise not paying attention. After this lesson (where most kids didn't know what to do on the independent work, since they didn't pay attention to the instruction) I knew something had to be done.

Enter the chair check challenge.

The clock that I wear around my neck, with my school keys on it is also a stopwatch. I decided to put this to good use.

I told the class at the start of a lesson, that we were going to try to sit in chair check for 2 minutes. If we could do it, as a class, then we could earn a marble (10 marbles earns a party). If we could hold it for 1 minute, I would give them half a marble.

Our first attempts were very poor, with the average being about 33 seconds before someone would lean back, or fiddle etc. But I definitely had more of their attention. Over the course of last week, we made it to our 1 minute mark three times, and we made it past our 2 minute mark on Friday. So, I upped our goal to 3 minutes to earn a marble.

I will keep setting the bar higher, until gradually, hopefully I can phase this out.