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This site has many different links to help you with your first classroom. Links include ideas for new teachers, how to create and introduce classroom rules, classroom management strategies for new teachers, how to create an interactive word wall, how to be prepared for student absences, and many more useful links.

This could be pretty handy for your assignment!! Good find!

Regain control AND keep everyone entertained! Perhaps not appropriate in every school or classroom, but this teacher seemed to have fun with it. And his students even got in on the action by supplying more powerful 'weapons'. Apparently, it's not only good for cats. Who knew?

We have been discussing cyberbullying in a few of our classes and what to do when an incident occurs, but what about prevention? This website offers great ideas, complete lesson plans, and activity sheets categorized by grade. Each lesson/idea is developmentally appropriate and provides great ideas to get students thinking about proper use of the internet. The world is becomming increasingly technological and I think it's up to parents and teachers to take the time to teach children how to use the internet responsibly and safely.

Part 4 of this free online resourse dealves deeper into the need for students to feel empowered and using praise and encouragement to help meet this need and in turn prevent classroom management issues. It offers specific strategies to improve praise including how to structure it and when it is appropriate.

You cannot ignore bad behaviour or it will just get worse. Here are some basic rules to dealing with bad behaviour: 1-bad behavior, not bad person 2-act but do not react 3-analyze, then respond 4-be consistent and fair The article continues to discuss other issues like inattention, side conversations, heckling, threatening and fighting. In the extreme case of students fighting one another, you should never put yourself between the fighters unless you are certain you can end it with little harm to anyone. The article is from changingminds.org and contains many other great articles.

This website has different categories for stages in a teaching career. There are links for beginning teachers, substitute teachers, mentor teachers and students. They have teaching tips, articles, and blogs and you can also join an email discussion list. I like that you can connect to different aspects of education from one location.

Whether or not you move on from Laurier to go teach in other countries it is important to keep in mind that the culture your students have come from may have an impact on the effectiveness of your chosen strategies. This article examines some of the techniques used in countries around the world.

A neat way to make a visual representation of desired class volume levels that can be placed somewhere where all students can see it and be reminded of what is expected of them in terms of their volume. Probably a good strategy for primary/junior level

This article talks about what they are doing in California to help new teachers with classroom management. Schools will pay for a supply teacher for the day while the new teacher observes a veteran teacher in the classroom. The best piece of advice that the article gives is a quote from a student. Take a quick read to find out what she says....

Beth Lewis outlines her ideas around class meetings and community circles. Practical, useful and definitely applicable to multiple grade levels. Try it out if you want to work on character development or building community in your classroom.

The article by Gary Maclean discusses the importance of management in the classroom. He defines management as "designed to bring students to their ultimate objective". Gary briefly outlines five elements of classroom management: organization, simplify, cleaning, standardize and sustain. Most of the article was fairly self explanatory, but the one element I found interesting and very useful that I had not thought of before was cleaning. A busy classroom gets messy, therefore cleaning should be a daily activity. This is not an occasional activity and should be done at the end of the school day. In conclusion, Gary presents us with a great article on classroom management and includes five important elements.

The following video includes very helpful suggestions on classroom management. These suggestions include: creating structure in the classroom, what to do if interrupted during a lesson, and the importance of promoting student independence and responsibility.

This is a good, in-depth read about how to effectively run classroom meetings in your own class. It talks about what classroom meetings promote amongst your students, some objectives you can address, ways to deal with challenging situations, and how to set it up for different age groups, and some questions you can use to start communication. If you're interested in implementing classroom meetings in your next practicum (or later on as a teacher), this document will give you everything you need to get started.

A lot of my looking around has resulted in seeing the book, "Reluctant Disciplinarian: Advice on Classroom Management from a Softy Who Became (Eventually) A Successful Teacher" by Gary Rubinstein. I have not had a chance to read the book, but this is a good review that highlights some key points. There don't seem to be any grounbreaking information, but I feel like it is nice to get classroom management advice from people that are currently teaching and going through what we will soon be. I really like the part on developing a teacher persona, as I think you need to have an identity that students understand and can know to expect.