Friday, September 21, 2012

Star Students

At Crestline, Janet and I are in the business of creating stars in our music classes. Okay...not THAT kind of star. The super-duper, cooperative, well-behaved kind of star students we all love to teach.

The first step in maintaining a cooperative class is to make sure the students know the behavior expectations. We have 5 simple guidelines for being a "Star Student" in music. We display the rules on our whiteboards and teach the students a chant with motions to help them remember the expectations.

When a student breaks a rule by doing something like blurting, we simply state the rule with the motion as it is performed during the chant. The student typically grins as if to say, "Oops!" and the behavior improves.

Here is a class performing the Star Student Chant:

These are the Star Student visuals we keep on our whiteboards:

I created the posters with fonts from Kevin & Amanda's blog. The fonts I used are Pea Mystic Caps and Elephants in Cherry Trees. Be sure to check out all the other amazing free fonts on Kevin and Amanda's web page.

I found the clip art by searching Google. The clip art is licensed from the Clip Art Gallery on DiscoverySchool.com.

If you would like a PDF of our 8 1/2 x 11 visuals, you can download it for free:


If you would like to create your own customized posters, you can use the resources listed above to create similar visuals.

I hope these ideas help you develop star students in your classroom!

6 comments :

  1. We are the All Stars at our school so I Love the Star student posters! Thanks

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  2. I can't access the video. Do you have a new link?

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    1. I'm not sure what is going on. I originally uploaded it straight to Blogger, and now I can't figure out how to access it. It appears to be hosted through YouTube and play through that now, but it's not on my YouTube channel. It works for me at the moment, so maybe you could try on a different device or browser. I looked for the original video on my computer, but I must have deleted it. If it continues to be a problem for people, I may need to make a new video. Sorry for the problem Keep me posted!

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  3. Thanks for sharing this - these are great! Do you do this with your primary students only or also junior?

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