Classroom Management Ideas for Upper Elementary

Classroom management is one of the hardest things in teaching. You can know all the content in the world, but if your students aren’t focused on you and ready to pay attention, they will do nothing for you. Some classes are better than others and some  years are definitely easier.

I am stuck with a pretty challenging group of students to be with during COVID and all the masks and shields and hoops we have to run through, that I am pulling out anything and everything from my back pockets to get them to pay attention to me.

This easy to manage classroom tactic is my GO TO and it’s pretty fun for them! As you get to the upper elementary grades, it gets harder and harder to find things that motivate them. They either think you’re too weird or they’re too cool for anything you throw at them. Except for this. My students love it.

It’s called SuperImprovers but I don’t even tell the students that, I just say it’s a level system for them to work their way up to complete.

The gist of it is this : they get stickers when you hand them out, and once they have 10 stickers on their level, they ‘level up’ to the next one.

They continue doing this until they reach the hall of fame at the top. Once they fill in all of their 10 hall of fame stickers, they get their picture taken and put up on my wall for eternity.

The goal is really that only 1-2 students should reach that hall of fame spot by the end of the year. You may even have some years where nobody makes it and that’s okay! It takes a pretty special student to get that many stickers in one year!

Because of COVID and hybrid then distance learning, I will not have any students reach the top, but they like to level up just as much. I don’t think many of them even care about the Hall of Fame spot this year lol.

Every time they level up in my classroom, they get to put up their new color card, and they get a prize out of our prize bin. Should I make a separate post about the prizes they all love?!

Anyways, I keep this chart & their cards at the front of the room so every day they can see it! I give out stickers for lots of random things : when I notice kids on task, when they do something really well on an assignment / in class, when they’re a good friend to someone, etc. I try to give out a couple stickers a day because it truly does help them stay motivated to be a student who gets a sticker!

Here’s a link the ones I got over on Teachers Pay Teachers for the big SuperImprover cards.

And here’s a link to an editable doc to write down your students names. I just choose different colors to make each level for them when I print them.

What classroom management tools have you found work for your upper elementary students? Let me know below!