Happy 2nd WBT Birthday

It's my second WBT birthday. It was during the Easter holidays in 2011 that I began to explore WBT. I watched videos, downloaded material and read what I could. Before you know it the holidays were over and it was time for this new baby to venure out into the world. It is great to look back at the beginning and celebrate my 2nd WBT birthday.

 

Babies start with few skills and build on these over time. I started with class- yes. This is the WBT attention getter. How you say class, the class copies it but says yes instead. If I whisper it, they whisper back etc. Then I introduced hands and eyes. This is another attention getter used for when you need to make special points. I say hands and eyes and the children drop everything, clap their hands and keep them together and look directly at me. This strategy works a treat. So with these few skills WBT had began and now I was building on my skills.

 

Just like a baby I was keen to explore more.  I introduced the WBT scoreboard. This was another super effective strategy. I drew a smile face and frown face on the board and gave tally marks for positive things and not so positive things. When the smile side wins we celebrated and when the frown side wins we groaned. The more success I had the more I wanted to try. We then added gestures to our class rules. Our rules are set by the school so I just added gestures to them. Then I started adding in more and more. I was exploring WBT and so were the children.

 

Just like any two year old I have had many trips and falls along the way but just like a two year old I get up and keep working on my skills. I look forward to the year ahead and learning and growing some more. Perhaps there will be less trips as the days pass and my skills improve. One thing I know is that WBT works and I will not go back to the way I was teaching before.

2013 with wbt in Wise One

A new year and a new class name. After so much preparation and day one finally arrived. We had severe winds and heavy rain in the lead up days, some places have been flooded and some have experiences tornadoes.  This morning I woke to sunshine and blue sky.  What a relief and an answer to prayer!  A great start to the new school year.

The children and parents arrived and it was all systems go. I had a teacher assistant up until lunch time today.  I now have all the books labelled and on the correct shelf, the children have set up their own tidy trays and the tissue boxes are ready for those coughs and sneezes that come during the year. The parents left after a few quick words about no homework or parent helpers this week and it was time to launch into wbt. I had watched the Day one webinar last night just to make sure I had things clear in my mind before the day started.

We started with class, yes and the electronic scoreboard. For the first time I had a child say class back to me but I was not really surprised, as Coach B did say that may happen. The children love the scoreboard and so do I. In the past I was always looking for a whiteboard marker or on the wrong side of the room. Now I just get a child to tap the Ipad and they love it. We then moved onto rule 1 and used mirror words and gestures. Fun burst worked really well. They also really liked it when I demonstrated what follow directions, was not going to look like. The children were rewarded with some free play time when the happy faces won.

I was able to incorporate two lots of small group talks about different topics and already the children have the idea, that I expect them to be doing what is asked. They were not so thrilled when the odd sad face scored a point. Some other techniques used today were ‘’hands and eyes’’ and  ’’ it’s o.k.” I only taught the class up until lunch time so tomorrow will see us add in rule two, teach/o.k and our first power pix. My Super Improvers wall is on display but no child has made a comment about it yet.

In conclusion, day one was amazing and I know the children were using their whole brains. I am also amazed by what you can learn about a group of individuals in one morning. I look forward to day two. To the stars, hoot, hoot!