A Traffic Violation

Today we had a traffic violation.  It was the first violation of the school year, so this seems like a good day to tell you about our stop light.

We use a stop light to help monitor the discipline in the classroom.  Each child has a clothespin with their name on it.  The clothespins start on GREEN each morning. 

If there are any problems/incidents/infractions that cannot be corrected with some reminders or redirection, the child's clothespin moves to YELLOW.  From yellow the child is able to make better choices and move back to GREEN, which is frequently what happens.  If they don't move back to GREEN then we let the parents know what happened including the decision to not improve.

If the behavior is extreme they can go right from GREEN to RED.  Or if it escalates once they are on YELLOW, the clothespin goes to RED.  On RED, the child must go spend some "quality time" in the director's office and hopefully learn about making better choices.  The parent is notified.

For the most part this system works in our classroom of 3-year-olds.  Most of it depends on our consistency in enforcing the classroom rules.  The traffic light is very visual, very familiar and very easy.  Just the thought of getting on YELLOW is enough to keep most kids well behaved and that's what we want.