The 5 Ways to Be

This summer I learned all about Whole Brain Teaching and I absolutely love it!  The one thing that I just couldn’t bring myself to do though was to give up my classroom “rules” to switch over to the WBT ones.  For the past 8 years, I have used The 5 Ways to Be.

There they are hanging from the ribbon in my classroom.  I love the 5 Ways to Be because they aren’t really “rules,” but more of a way of living life every day.  They cover pretty much any classroom or playground scenario a kiddo could think of.  We spend a lot of time at the beginning of the school year learning about the 5 Ways.  On the first day we do a carousel cooperative learning activity and make looks like, sounds like charts.  We talk about what each of the 5 ways would look like and sound like in our classroom and other places around school.  These charts then hang in a high profile area (near the drinking fountain) part of the room all year.  We spend a lot of time talking about them and getting gentle reminders throughout the year about being the 5 Ways. 
I have been playing around trying out some new things on my new laptop and created these colorful polka dot posters for the 5 Ways. 

You can grab them by clicking on the picture or downloading them for free at my TpT store!