Keeping Track of those Behaviors: Monday Made It Style

For behavior management in my classroom, I use a classroom economy. Students earn classroom dollars for doing their job as a student and they use those dollars to buy privileges in class or to pay fines that they have incurred for improper behavior. Usually, if a student is misbehaving, I ask them to pay the fine, they do, and it is done. However, if a student is having a particularly trying day, I ask them to start writing the infractions down on labels so that I can have a future record of the behaviors for report cards and parent conferences. I then keep these in a tabbed record book that can be pulled out whenever I need to refer back to it.

Today, I wanted to share with you how I made the record book :) I am linking up with Tara at 4th Grade Frolics for her weekly Monday Made It linky for the first time this summer! Yay!!

I like to keep the labels in a spiral notebook. It just makes things easier for me. But finding one with 34 sections just isn't going to happen. So I make one myself. You will need:

A spiral notebook with about 120 pages Post-it Tabs

I place the first tab on the first page of the notebook. Then I count about 3 pages, and place the second tab. Count 3 more pages and place the third tab. Count 3 more pages, place the fourth tab.....you get it.








Now that I have a nice little book, all organized, I can easily flip to the student's section when I need to recall certain behaviors.

And how do I know what the behavior was? Well, if a student is behaving in an unacceptable way, I have them record their behavior on a little label. They write the date and what they did to incur a fine. This takes about 2 minutes of their own classtime. At the end of the day, one of my classroom monitors has the job of peeling off the labels and putting them in the book. Done and done.

(these labels are a few years old, so they have a space for the card color. I used to use a flip a card system. I don't any longer but I used this same label system for both the flip a card and the classroom economy.)
So there you have it! My little behavior recorder. It cost me about $10 because I just *had* to have the fancy book. But the labels were $5 or so, and you can get a spiral notebook from the dollar store, which will cut down on the cost for sure.

How do you record the behaviors going on in your room? Please share your ideas!