Your first week with a classroom noise monitor.

Introduce the cue on a low-stakes day, finish a short goal, and wait before you talk. The first week is for teaching the display, not for judging the class.

Do not debut this on test day

A noise monitor is a routine. Routines need a cheap rehearsal. Use a regular independent block or a think-pair-share, not a quiz, not a fire drill week, and not the first hour of the school year if everything else is also new. Students should have enough spare attention to look at the board and still do the work.

Day 1: show the three states

1. Project Quiet Garden in fullscreen so the class can rehearse a short Goal Challenge.
2. Name the activity and the voice you want.
3. Press Start, grant the microphone, and let the class see green during the correct volume.
4. Raise your own voice briefly so they see yellow, then recover.
5. Set a one-minute goal and try to finish it.

Stop talking while yellow is on the board unless the class does not respond. The whole point of day 1 is that the display can do a job your voice used to do. If you narrate every flicker, you have added a gadget without changing the room. Try Sleepy Cat later when you want an open-ended reaction instead of a goal.

Day 2: partner talk is the real test

Silent work is easy to fake for a minute. Partner talk is the volume most classrooms actually need. Use the partner preset and the 12-inch voice model from the partner talk guide. Finish a two-minute goal. If yellow is constant while pairs are doing it right, raise the threshold. Do not scold a correct room to protect a number.

Day 3: recovery

Plan a small spike. Maybe chairs, maybe a laugh. Let red or a hard yellow appear, then let the class bring it back. Point out that progress did not vanish. That is the RoomTone rule you want in their bodies: we pause, we return, we keep what we earned. If this turns into a contest to hit red, pause the tool and try garden instead of cat.

Day 4: change the activity, change the preset

Run silent work in the morning and group work later, and say the switch out loud. Students should hear that the meter belongs to the task. A tool that uses one threshold all day will be “too strict” or “too loose” by lunch, and they will be right.

Day 5: decide whether you even need it

If the class already holds volume, use the monitor less. The successful week is not a week of perfect green. It is a week after which you can put the tool away for a period and the agreement remains. Keep it for the blocks that still slip.

• Chime stays off all week unless students cannot see the board.
• No tallies, no names, no comparison charts.
• Reset goals between periods.
• If permission dialogs fail, fix hardware after school with the microphone guide. Do not debug in front of a restless class for long.

Common first-week failures

Too long a goal. Too exciting a theme. Thresholds copied from another room. A laptop on the loudest desk. A teacher voice that still jumps in at every yellow. Fix those before you decide “noise games do not work here.” Most of the time the routine was never actually installed.

What to tell families in week one

A short note is enough: we sometimes project a volume picture so the class can see when voices match the work. It does not record audio or keep student accounts. Students who try to wake the cat on purpose will lose the picture, not recess. That message prevents both privacy panic and the rumor that a website is grading their child for loudness.

If you have a co-teacher, watch one period together without talking over yellow. Debrief: did the class use the board, or only you? Did any student get named? Was the preset right? Adjust on day two from that debrief, not from a feeling that the gadget should already have transformed the culture. Routines take repetitions. This one is no different.

Keep a fallback. If the cart is missing or permission is blocked, you still need a volume cue: a hand signal, a posted voice-level chart, your own calm freeze. RoomTone is a projector helper. It is not the only adult in the room. Week one goes better when the backup is already in your body.

At the end of the week, decide three blocks where the monitor stays and two where it leaves. A tool that runs from bell to bell becomes wallpaper, then a joke. Scarcity keeps the cue meaningful. Write those blocks in your planner so you are not deciding in the doorway with twenty-eight people watching the cat.