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.