Crick and Crack

Even if I am a teacher now officially, I still learn new things everyday. Well, most of the days. One of the teachers that I’ve been working with is very experienced one that the way she teach actually makes me jealous. She has a way with her students. I have seen those same students with me and boy, they are very different.

These kids are amazing. They are smart and very driven. However as you can imagine from 5th graders, they sometimes become naughty and yelling them with a loud and firm voice just don’t work. This situation is the exact one that I’ve been actually thinking about for my entire college life; “what would I do?”

Now this teacher I’ve been talking about… She has a secret trick that can immediately calm the kids down and make them listen to her. When she sees them misbehaving, she suddenly says “crick!” and the kids go “crack.”
When I first witnessed the moment, I was like… You can imagine how I was like. It worked and I was really surprised. Kids were quiet and looking at her directly waiting for her to talk.
It was amazing. I told myself that this was what I needed and found myself asking about the “Crick and Crack” method.

I don’t know if it is called by the name as “Crick and Crack” method but I’d like to call it that way since I couldn’t find anything about it online. She told me that she heard about it in a conference somewhere. First you tell them that every time you say “crick”, they should say “crack” in response. She kept using it only when they were noisy or misbehaving and that’s why some kids in the class were also saying “crick” when they see their friends talking. She warned them that only she could get to say “crick” and there it was. Now it’s working. We couldn’t find too much time to talk about it, maybe she could have told me the name that she has heard it from or the name of the method… maybe even how it works and why.

Anyway, maybe you can try it out with the kids between 1-5 grades, or maybe with even older ones. Or if you have tried it and you know about the method, maybe you can tell me about it.

Until next time…