"Old Fashioned Day" and Teaching Life Skills

This morning, I arrived at school, after not going in over Spring Break. Due to ridiculous amounts of sleepy this morning, I only had about half an hour before the kids arrived... And right about then, I realized that my kids would be bringing in leprechaun traps. I not only needed to make sure I had room for 22 projects, but I also knew at least a couple of parents would be coming in with the projects, so I had to straighten up a bit.

I also had to adjust my plans a little. Monday mornings are usually quite simple. Someone on my team found these terrific SmartBoard files with just about all of the reading series (Treasures) lessons for the week, and Monday is usually a day of introducing new vocab, spelling, background knowledge, and a skill.

Well, unfortunately, we got word that last night's power outage had knocked out our servers. No access to anything on the server, the Internet, email, or even printing. So my plans of "Oh, I'll just print this out tomorrow from Google Docs," or "Oh, I'll just pull that up on Pinterest in the morning," just couldn't happen. The principal dubbed it "Old Fashioned Day," and we just made do until it all came back.

As a note, I could've done a day without technology... It's just that a little notice would've helped! Oh well- we made it work! And surprisingly, the kids were pretty good, even on the day back after break.

Anyway... I'm slowly but surely showing you bits of my classroom.

This particular item is simple. My mom picked it up at a garage sale for a couple of dollars (yes, really). At the beginning of the year, I put it up to cover a blank section of the wall, but I eventually came up with a use for it!

Our administration chooses a life skill each month and the principal introduces it with a read-aloud. I write the month's life skill above the pocket chart, and I keep frogs with each student's name on them. As I see students especially using that life skill, we put the frogs on the chart. The goal is to get every frog on the chart, and in a month, it can usually happen!

(Can you tell I like frogs a little bit? :)

Anyway, that's all there is to it. Just a super-easy way to encourage using life skills! How do you teach life skills in your room?