Silencing the Chatter: A Teacher’s Strategy for Managing a Talkative Third Grade Class

This is year 11 teaching for me and my very first year in third grade. And when I tell you that this is the chattiest class I’ve had in my entire 11 years, I really, really mean it. So I came across a video here on TikTok, and I will tag the creator in the caption, because it was such a great strategy for, um, helping with your chatty class by actually collecting data that the kids can see. And I really believe that this strategy would work even in kindergarten. And it involves just simply picking a block of time. And I would watch her video cause she explains it way better, um, but very quickly. It involves just picking a chunk of time in your day and just quietly tallying. Every time your kids interrupt, you have to stop teaching for some kind of interruption and then, um, present it to your kids in some kind of visual way. I literally just showed my kids the tally marks today. I decided to try it. We have 30 minutes before lunch, and my kids were getting really nervous because they are so chatty. They’re having side conversations, doing, you know, flips on the carpet, not joking, um, making noises and, um, shouting out just every little thought that comes to their head, blurting answers. And every time, I just stop. But today I would stop and make a tally Mark, and they were getting so nervous. They’re like, what Is she doing. Where are you asking me, like, why. Why are you tally marking? And I just said, I’ll tell you later. And it was really bugging them. And by the end of the 30 minutes, I finally told them what I was doing. We counted the tallys together, and, y’all, we had 92 tally marks. What in the world? Even the kids had enough sense to be shocked by that number. So we’re gonna keep trying this. Um, every day, I’m gonna take a 30 minute chunk and see if that number gets any better. And I’ll keep you guys posted, because, like, we’re gonna have to get a grip on this in order for me to not lose my mind and for me to be able to actually teach them.