[chokosaki]

Recently, I've discovered this works very well for my classes. I teach 6 classes a week (from preschool to middle school). I write my lesson plan on the board. Everything's covered: warm up, lesson, songs, etc. At the end of the class I always have a spot for 'student's choice'. After the lesson I use a game to practice the day's lesson. I have many games that I've introduced to the students. However, some students like certain games more. During the class, I give out symbols on the board (stars or something pertaining to the lesson). Symbols are given for participation and being good when others are naughty. When it comes to game time, I count the symbols of each student. Whichever student has the most symbols can choose their favorite game for us to play. My older students become very competitive now. They always try their hardest and do a great job. I'll award 2 symbols also if they are especially creative with their responses. This works very well for me now.

Recently, my school has introduced small notebooks for each student. At the end of class, I must write performance notes and comments for the parents (which I think is kind of lame because most parents don't even speak English). Also, I give them stamps. How many stamps the student gets is totally up to me. During the year, the students can trade their stamps for prizes (school supplies and even some electronics for many, many, many stamps). Students like this and cooperate more. However, there are still some problem students every now and then. I think, for this, I will implement what jellybean suggested. Divide the class into teams and do the red dot method. I've also had some fun with doing something similar. I divided the class into teams and drew a face for each team. The face had ears, eyes, mouth, nose, eyebrows. When a team did very well or when the other team was misbehaving, a member from the good team could come up to the board and erase a part from the other team. The students liked this but it doesn't work for every lesson. Sometimes my classes will have a mere 2 students (during national holidays...which China has a lot of) and other times they could have 10. I actually find it harder to manage only 2 students as opposed to 10. Weird....