Discouraging Encouragement

These last two weeks my third graders have been learning family members: father, mother, brother, sister, grandfather, and grandmother. As well as how to ask "Who's that man/woman/boy/girl?" and answer "She's/He's my _____." It's a lot to learn and they do pretty well with the individual words, the question, and the answer separately. But give them a slip of paper with a family member on it (written in Chinese) and ask them to figure out with their deskmate how to ask and answer the question...and they look at me stymied.

In an effort to make the words more concrete for them, I thought today I would show them pictures of my family, using English to introduce them. Then they could draw pictures of their own family and label them while listening to English songs that included words like "girl", "sister", etc. I was really excited for this because I thought it would be both fun and useful.

In class this week I explained that this was my plan for the last ten minutes of class, but we had to get through everything else first. They were so excited (more so to see pictures of you all than to draw their own families). I told them that if they wasted time talking or playing or otherwise misbehaving we wouldn't have time. Every time I waited for them to quiet down, classmates would shush each other saying "Don't waste time!"

On the one hand, this encourages me to work more class-wide (as opposed to individual or group-based) rewards into my classes. On the other hand, I find it instructive to see how even something they were that excited about (many students, and not just the "good" ones begged me to show them after class), still didn't really contain their behavior. In two of the four classes we were able to squeeze in a couple minutes of family pictures, but that was it. This was partly because I didn't realize how difficult they would find the material--and should therefore have broken it up into even small pieces--but also because they kept talking and not paying attention. Maybe my consequences themselves aren't so very ineffective. The students just have really poor impulse control. That's not to say I can't do better at managing them and planning classes that will keep them engaged, but I also need to cut myself some slack. It's really hard to keep 50 third-graders engaged for 40 minutes-straight, even when they want to pay attention!