21 Days in...how we are using Class Dojo!

Well, friends, today was the 21st day of school for me!  It's hard to believe that we are practically half way through the first quarter of the school year.  Assessments will be done by the end of the week which I will be so happy about!  Anywho...once I got my kiddos into the groove of using Class Dojo, we added some new fun things and I let them have some say in how we are giving/taking points, so I wanted to share that with you. The first week - I stayed ALL POSITIVE on Class Dojo - my kiddos didn't even know what the negative point sound sounded like until the middle of the second week of school.  I really wanted to focus on the positive and teaching students the expectations of what they should and should not do.  I also used that week to say, "next time, we will lose a dojo point for that action".  The first couple week of school my positive and negative actions for points were pretty generic and somewhat matched our classroom rules, which are the WBT 5 classroom rules.  After about 2 and a half weeks of school, we had a Dojo work lunch (since we eat lunch in our classrooms) and we, as a class, adjusted the behaviors for positive and negative points.   Here is what we ended up with:

Now, you know working with 7-year-olds meant they wanted to get really specific, and sometimes silly on these behaviors.  I couldn't put all of their ideas or we would have 20+ positive and negatives each, so I had to convince them that we group a lot of their ideas under some of the ones we already had (like poor choice).  What silly behavior would a 7-year-old come up with - one of my sweet girls wanted a positive point for "being awesome"!!

After ClassDojo's release of the Groups Feature this year, it is so much easier for me to be able to give points to a group of students at one time.  So, now, we have Table of the Week!  I have 4 tables in my classroom, so I have one group for each table.  When we are transitioning or working on a project, I'll look around for a table that is doing what they should be, or see which table is done the quickest, and they earn a dojo point for their table.  At the end of the week, we look at the Group points and the table with the most gets this fancy sign in their table caddy for the next week.  We then reset the table group points and start over on Monday.

Click the picture for a free download!

Now that we are 4 weeks into school, my kiddos are beginning to rack up some points!  Friday afternoon, we had our first members join the 100 point Dojo club!  I used monster clipart from ClassDojo to make these little monsters to display student names.

And lastly, our Dojo Leader of the Week!  Each Friday afternoon, I look on the Class Dojo reports to see which student has the highest combined points for the week and that student is the Dojo Leader of the Week.  They get a brag tag, a certificate, and their name gets added to our Class Dojo bulletin board.  They start asking me on Monday who has the most points - but I make them wait until Friday!

The monsters off to the side are preview Dojo Leaders of the Week - they might be a leader again, so keeping their monster nearby is helpful!

Have you started school yet?  Are you going to Dojo!?!?!