I Love My Pink Tickets!

Student Motivation is getting more tricky this time of year.  

Today I'm linking up with Joanne to share what been working lately. 

Tickets

A while back I mentioned doing tickets for my class.  I have always done tickets - usually they act just like money, the kids are rewarded for outstanding behavior, or for trying their best, etc...on the flip side the tickets earned could be traded in for prizes.  It has always worked.

 Then this year my clever 13th year of teaching children decided to have ticket wars - they decided to combine their tickets with each other to see what group of kids could get the most.  It would have been a great math game, but as for motivation it was severely lacking - since the kids that hardly ever got tickets started bullying the kids for more tickets to be part of the group, friends, etc...

So I pulled the tickets - all the tickets in the entire classroom - for about 3 weeks.  Then I couldn't handle it anymore.  I needed my tickets, and the kids needed to be individually rewarded.  This was right before testing, so we were in the midst of major test prep.  

I decided to do a raffle with it instead.  The kids were back to getting tickets, but instead of trading them in for prizes they wrote their name on the back and they were put into a basket.  During test prep and testing I would choose 3 names every afternoon for some random prizes in the classroom - the most coveted being a homework pass.  

Even though I still miss the trading station, I also enjoy NOT having to remember to fit it in on a Friday afternoon.  I enjoy now changing it up and rolling a dice to determine the amount of names I choose every afternoon.  I enjoy the kids knowing that if they try really hard their names will still be on all those tickets in the basket from the past days.

Next year I'm thinking of keeping the raffle instead of going back to trading.  I'm thinking of every month starting fresh - just like the team points.   

These kids have taught me a lot this year! 

FYI - in case you didn't hear about it yesterday...

Hope you have a great day - we are in the midst of full on potty training...

Five for Friday and SALE time!!!

Single Digits!!!  I made it to SINGLE DIGITS!!!

Can you sense my excitement?  Can you imagine me doing my happy dance?

It's been a very long long year :)  

But we have NINE more school days until summer.

Link up time with Doodlebugs Teaching to share what we have been up to this week. 

First up - I'm hosting a sale over at my TPT store this weekend Saturday and Sunday.  :)  

This week we did a ton of different projects in math to review.  I know I already mentioned the Array-Bots, and the Evaluative: What's my name worth?   You see, I bought a lot of stuff the other week and need to do it!

Yesterday the kiddos worked on this Line Graph project by Elementary Lesson Plans.  It was a great review.  I shrunk the 2 main pages down to sharing a page so the kids had the information handy.  

We have also been having the issue lately of the kids forgetting their manners... so we reviewed our Character Counts Pillars.  The kids chose one of the 6 pillars, and used these templates from The Peanut Gallery to create an example.  They were so creative - then they especially enjoyed me sticking them under the ladibug (document camera) so everyone could see them up close.  

I also have this prepped for next week - the plan is to start doing one or two activities per day.  

I'm looking forward to it since there is 32 low prep activities that we can complete together.  Team building, complement sharing, smile giving activities to have some fun as we count down the remaining days of school.  

Last up - my #5 for this week is that I am almost done with REPORT CARDS.  

I did nothing else in the classroom during prep, recess, and lunch except work on them today.  I'm just pretty impressed with myself how this might be the only time this year that I'm ahead of the game...

Hope you have a wonderful weekend!