Friday Awards

I had a lovely new teacher friend e-mail to ask me for more info about my Friday Awards and I thought others might be interested too!

So, every Friday at the end of the day my kiddos get to do the free choice that they have earned for the week and right before free choice, I pass out awards.

Every week, 2 kids get a "Buggy for Books" award for good choices during Daily Five and one student gets my "Cowpoke of the Week" award which is essentially student of the week. I also give out three to four other awards which vary from week to week. Sometimes I will see a student being a good friend during the week and I will award them or a student might do a great job of picking up the floor at the end of the day so they get a citizenship award for keeping our classroom beautiful. I also may give an academic award to someone who struggles with spelling but got all the words right on the test or did an awesome job on the math test for the week. I also have a collection of award bracelets from Really Good Stuff and their "Be a Star With Good Manners" set which is on clearance right now and super cute! So, I give those out as well. If a kid earns the "Be a Star..." they keep it on their desk for a week and return it to me the following Friday.

When I pass out awards, I am quite wordy (imagine that!) with the explanation of why the particular student is receiving the award and then I reveal who the award goes to. Everyone claps and cheers while that student comes up, gives me a good handshake, and accepts their award.

It probably takes 5 minutes each week and the kids SOOOOO look forward to it. When they come in on Friday, they always look to see if the "awards" card is on the schedule for the day and on the rare weeks when I don't do awards (short week, I've been absent for a few days), they are always super bummed.To keep track of the awards, I have them in a binder inside sheet protectors. Each sheet protector is numbered and I have a tracking sheet with each kids' name across the side and each awards' number across the top. Then I just write in the date that the student receives whichever award. This year I will be printing out a variety of the awards at my TpT store just to add some variety and keep them excited to see what the awards will look like from week to week!

I also have a "MEGA Pack of Awards" for sale at Teacher's Notebook- this file is $8.00 and has over 30 different awards inside!  It's at TpT too!

Each week some of my awards are truly based on merit from the week, but I always go down my list and look for one or two students who haven't received an award in the past few weeks and make sure I come up with something for them.This has been an extremely positive thing in my classroom. It gives us something to look forward to on Friday and the kids get so jazzed to try and think about who I might be talking about. It's really cool to be explaining why I'm about to give an award and have them figuring out who I'm talking about!

Below I've attached my tracking form for the awards. I've left it fillable for you too so be sure to download it in Adobe! If you download it, please leave a comment! :)