Rewards

The best thing about teaching younger students is that any type of reward is a big deal for them. At my school we employ housepoints. These magical stickers are gold and the students treat them like currency. They are especially awesome for Year 3s because it is their first experience getting rewarded in this manner.
The lowdown on HPs (housepoints):

• Students can get housepoints for demonstrating correct behaviour.
• Housepoints are also given for work they do, for me it is for students that can manage to make their work legible and demonstrate an ability to apply the learning objective.
• The gold mine of housepoints is for their reading diaries. All students are required to read 15 mins/day at least 5x a week, I give HPs for at least 5 parent signatures and more for extra reading.

The last reason has been a godsend because my class has become a classroom of readers. All my parents have commented on how eager their students are to read and how much their reading fluency has improved in 7 weeks. Win, win, win!
All staff give out HPs and students receive them from anyone throughout the day.

Attempted close up of housepoints

The reason for the housepoints (this next bit is soooo English) is for the coveted house cup.
When students arrive at school they are put in 1 of 4 houses. At our school houses are named after royal homes.
green = Buckingham
yellow = Sandringham
red = Windsor
blue = Balmoral

Housepoint charts in my class. Each house gets their own sheet and my class total is added to the other classes for each house. New sheets are put up weekly.

FYI - I'm in Sandringham. Back to my original point. So each student gets a house and their housepoints go towards their house totals. So every week some older kids go to every classroom and count the housepoints for each house. They are totalled for the school and each week the housepoint winners get the house cup (a big gold trophy). At the end of the year we have House matches and all the children compete with their houses to earn points in different sports. The sport totals are added onto the housepoint totals to make a house winner at the end of the year.
I'm pleased to say Sandringham has won the house of the year for the last 3 years and this is put onto a massive plaque.
Another long-winded blog post. I've been excited to share this because it is the one reward system that has made a huge impact at our school. What types of ideas do you have for rewards? Does your school have a rewards system?
Cheers!
Becky