Your student sounds good for coming to ask for advice. They need to try a range of ways and see what best suits them best. We are all so different.

Thinking about what I do ....

I often use my hands while in full throws of teaching or a look often does the trick.

However if there behaviour doesn't get better then the lesson has to stop, remind said child of the rules and get back to lesson.

Are they talking for too long on the carpet or have you a fidgety class??

xx

Thank you, she is a good student, I think she feels a bit silly doing certain things which she needs to over come.  My class are nursery so young and fidgety all the time!

 I use a few different strategies. Firstly I have carpet rules, I have taken photos of the children to demonstrate 'sitting quietly', 'legs crossed', 'good listening' and 'hands up to speak'. These are stuck to my board and the children all know what each one means.

When a child is talking I might say their name point to the rule and tell them "remember" if they continue they will get warnings. They know after 2 warnings their photo comes off of the class 'sun' and goes on the 'cloud', if a child is on the cloud they will have 5 mins time out, so it would be 5 mins extra on the carpet once everyone else goes to activities.  I have never got past the 2nd warning.

Other strategies I use are praising children who are sitting quietly, saying "I wonder who will be the Star of the Day? It has to be someone who remembers the carpet rules", I have rows of children and a chart on my board, the best sitting row gets a tick on the chart and the row with the most ticks on a Friday gets their row number written on a trophy.

I often find pausing saying nothing and giving a child 'the look' works well. 

If the children are restless, I will do some 'copy me' actions with the last one being calm and quiet. 

 Sometimes when they come in from lunchtime play all excited I play relaxing classical music put on the windows media player screen on the IWB and they watch the swirling graphics....hypnotising!!

 I use the reminders as suggested, I ask children to move away from each other if they consistently talk/ fidget/ are not concentrating when sat next to each other, actions work well, but also remember children are children, some will fidget .. let's not get ourselves worked up too much, let them fidget if it is not a huge problem. Better to get on with it assuming everybody else is on task, rather than stop/ interrupt for just one child. Also, at times, if I have seen lots of children fidget, I just accept it's not working, let them do something else and come back to thew carpet once they've had 5/10 minutes to get it out their system ...