Bieber Fail!

I was so excited this morning to introduce my class to The Ultimate Battle: Bieber vs. Skywalker from the ladies over at What the Teacher Wants. I got the songs all cued up to get them fired up about choosing teams, but when it came time to get down to picking sides, we had one huge

BIEBER FAIL

Oh, my gosh. Only two of my kiddos were pumped about "the biebs" and I was in shock! I quickly had to take a poll to see what was cool... Am I really that out of it?!? Apparently so.

So our options were:

LMFAO

Um, NO.

Lady Gaga

Um, DOUBLE NO.

The Wanted

CHA-CHING!

So, here's what we ended up with:

I actually crossed out Justin Bieber's face and at recess printed the replacement picture.

They also changed their team tags.

And it worked magically! Team Wanted actually won today and we had an amazingly fun dance party for the last three minutes of the day. Sorry, no photos. I was too busy dancing!

Happy Monday,

UPDATE: Rachelle is amazing! She read my post and offered to send over a replacement sign and labels. WOW! Over the top service for a freebie.

Whole Brain Teaching

I've been on vacation this week and, like nearly every teacher I know, I have spent the past 7 days learning, reading, blog-hopping, pinning, planning, copying, laminating, and cutting.  Well, that and watching ridiculous television shows like Jerseylicious and Real Housewives of Wherever.  While pinning one evening, I came across this video:



I had not heard of Whole Brain Teaching before, but I was superficially introduced to Chris Biffle's "Class-Yes" technique by my superintendent.  As a new teacher, I am still trying to find classroom management routines that work for me.  We use Rick Morris' classroom sign language, music transitions, a behavior star chart, and few attention-getters.  After watching this video I was really excited.  I love how the kids are "teaching" each other and are super engaged.  After doing A LOT of reading (FREE on the website!) and watching many YouTube videos, I have decided that I am going to give a few of these techniques a try.  We'll be starting out slow with "Class-Yes," "The Five Rules," and "Teach-OK."

Have you heard of Whole Brain Teaching? Do you do anything similar?

If you are interested, there is a live webcast that you can receive Online Professional Development Credit with a seminar on WBT's student motivator "The Hidden Powers of the Scoreboard!" Tuesday, February 28th 5 PM Western, 6 PM Mountain, 7 PM Central, 8 PM Eastern.