In each classroom I have been in I have had a chance to see different types of behavioral monitoring systems. I have taught with a clip system where students move their name up or down if they do well or misbehave and with a bear system where students move them down for negative behaviors. I have also seen a lot of extrinsic verbal cues and rewards systems as well. In all, I feel that you have to find the method that works best for you, but my hope will be that I can use the beginning of the year to set community learning expectations as a team with my students. I intend to pair this with constantly developing new instructional methods and techniques to create a desire in the students to use classroom time for learning, and this will hopefully decrease behaviors as well. The above image shows the reward system for a "froggie" currency for a 1st grade class.
Something that I like to use in my classroom environment often is music. From classical to the newest soundtracks from the current cartoons, I feel it adds something to our work time, and also helps students to regulate their own sound level. If they can't hear the music, they know they're being too loud. Music is very stimulating, and can also be a soothing way to help students work and learn. The programs I enjoy using the most to add music are Pandora and GoNoodle which help students by providing a baseline of music in the background or a timely brain break that can even relate to the lesson we are working on at the time. This can really help with transitions as well.
A big part of every classroom is movement for students. Attention spans can only last so long, and as we learned in Educational Psychology at The College of Idaho, the latest brain research shows that students need to move in order to learn. For our 100's day rotation in the 1st grade team I found a great activity page that students could do for 100 seconds each. It varied between academic and physical challenges, and students had to count and do their best in the 100 seconds and then record how many times they wrote their name or how many push-ups they could do. The great thing about this was, I had the chance to teach an impromptu lesson on the next place value students would need to be familiar with for 2nd grade, the 100's place. Merely an introduction, but a valuable first exposure to 100 in a really fun way! Here is an image of the activity we did.