In my classroom, I like to impliment the Whole Brain Teaching rules and techniques. Each rule was created with hand gestures in order to help students remember the classroom rules throughout the day and have fun while doing so! 

 

The brain learns in five ways, by seeing, saying, hearing, doing and feeling.  When you teach the rules with the Whole Brain signs, the students' brains are maximally operative.  They see the signs, hear the rules, say the rules and make the gestures.

 

At the beginning of the year, we rehearse the rules first thing in the morning, after lunch and after recess. When I call out the rule number, the students respond with the rule itself and the correct gesture. I try to make the rehearsals as entertaining as possible; use a variety of voices (happy, robot, froggy) and tempos, fast, slow, super fast.  Later in the year we will only review the rules one time in the morning to begin our day correctly.  To encourage leadership, I will have the Teacher's Assistant for the day lead the class in rehearsing the rules.

 

I spend a lot of time teaching the rules at the beginning of the year, so later in the year when I see someone out of their seat without permission, then I just say Rule 3 and the whole class recites the rule and the person breaking the rule is reminded, not by me, but by their classmates.  Usually the student that was caught out of their seat smile and quickly sits down and raises their had for permission.  I love it.  It is positive and fun for students.