The Tales of John

John's kindergarten teacher works on a stop light system for behavior.  Every child starts on green and gets one verbal warning a day before moving to yellow.  Once a child has had his verbal warning and still proceeds with the violating offense , he is moved to yellow.  If the behavior still continues, the child is moved to red.  For both yellow and red the child looses free time for the day and for red the child also gets a trip to the principals office.  John has a take-home folder that contains a baggie in which a colored piece of paper resides.  I check the folder everyday after he gets off of the bus to make sure the paper is green.  One day last week the paper was yellow and on it was written "John was talking LOUDLY while the teacher was trying to teach."  I took one look at the paper and told John that this wasn't good.  The poor kid burst into tears.  He went on and on about how he hated the color yellow now and that he felt so bad for talking.  He also tried the old "it wasn't my fault" excuse.  An excuse that did not get him anywhere.  We talked about how he didn't need to talk all the time and how he should get better about that.  He was still feeling pretty bad about the whole situation so I suggested he apologize to his teacher the next morning.  John decided to take it a step further and write his teacher a note.  He wanted to do it all by himself.

His teacher was kind enough to write back. She also informed us in an email later that John is a sweet boy who makes lots of friends.  In fact, a few of his friends wanted to give him their green ticket and take his yellow one because they felt so bad for him.  Sweet, sweet kids.

I found out through all of this that John had been getting verbal warnings almost everyday for talking.  I told him I was proud that he was able to control himself and stop after the warning...but that he shouldn't be getting daily warnings for talking.  Since the yellow card incident he has come home everyday excited that he didn't get a warning.  He was even 'Race Car Winner' of the week for staying quiet and raising his hand to talk.  I don't think I've seen the last of the yellow card, but it should be a long while before it makes its way to our house again.