Preferred Activity Time

This is something Bryce Hedstrom has talked about in great detail, and it actually comes from Fred Jones' book Tools for Teaching, which I highly recommend.

Preferred activity time is spent, as it sounds, doing activities your students prefer - but the catch is that they have to be activities you're happy to spend the time doing. I.e. they still need to have curricular value.

We manage our classrooms in a lot of ways - teaching our kids the daily routines so that you don't have to clean up your disaster of a classroom every day, because kids know where things go. Walking around your classroom while they're working to keep disruptions to a minimum. Individually speaking with kids who do cause disruptions. But so often we resort to punishment for behaviors contrary to what's expected. Why don't we reward them for behaviors we do want them to exhibit? Well, that can be hard. First, how do you reward them? Second, how do you choose which behaviors those are? You can't look at at kid and say, "I'm so proud of you for not throwing that pencil at Jasper today!" Who does that? So you identify the most important and most time-saving things, and you work with those. Here's how my kids earn preferred activity time:

1. If they're all in their seats when the bell rings, they earn a minute.
2. If they're all silent when the bell rings, they earn a minute.
3. For every three minutes the upper levels spend in the target language, they earn one minute of PAT. For the first years, we begin with every minute gets them a minute.
4. When they hustle, they get time. For example, I gave them three minutes to set up the chairs in pairs the other day. They used 48 seconds of that. The remaining 2 minutes and 12 seconds were added to their PAT.

They lose time when they choose to waste time. If it had taken, for example, 3 minutes and 15 seconds (which would have been egregiously unnecessary) to set up the chairs, they would have lost 15 seconds. If they choose to use time exhibiting inappropriate behaviors - we're telling a story, and they choose to constantly hold side conversations - they lose the amount of time they spend doing that, until they've done it three times. When it's happened three times, we take a different tack called omission training, and for that I refer you to Mr Jones, whose book is spectacular.

Imagine my second period has earned 29 minutes and 18 seconds. 30 minutes before the end of class (this gives us about a minute of buffer to set the classroom back up if necessary and follow leaving procedures) on Friday, we stop and select a game. These are games I offer them, so all of them are to my liking. None of them will waste time, and I'm happy to relinquish those thirty minutes to playing those games. We then spend the remainder of the class playing that game, and whatever didn't get done on the other portion of Friday will get finished Monday.

When they earn an entire class period - this is cumulative. Two weeks ago, they earned 27 minutes. I put this in my spreadsheet, and then I added the 31 minutes from this week. They've now got more than a class period in saved up time - we will spend it celebrating Kindergarten Day on the closest Monday. On Kindergarten Day, they can bring snugglies, we sit on the floor, if they want to bring a mug, they can use my electric kettle for hot water and can make tea or hot chocolate, and I will spend the period reading them a story in the target language. They love this because they feel like they're doing no work when in fact they're doing the best kind of work - being totally relaxed, utterly safe, and getting nothing but input.

(we're doing this Monday. we're reading Doomsday in Pompeii because it is Volcano Day - August 24th. Doomsday in Pompeii is a book in English, so although I will be looking at English words, I will read aloud in Latin. I am spending part of this weekend translating about 2 more pages than I think I'm actually going to need and taping over the English so it's not quite as stressful for me Monday. normally I'd read a book in Latin, but I don't have any kids' books in Latin about volcanoes. yet.)