Student Contributor: E Hinshaw-Rasmussen
This tool is helpful when you want to praise your students for being kind and staying engaged. This tool helps bring together a classroom community.
A laminated piggy bank is displayed accessible to students hung up in the classroom. Next to the laminated piggy bank is coins or tokens. When a student is caught being kind or staying engaged to another student; whoever notices will write what was “caught” on the token and stick it on the piggy bank. Every Friday, the teacher pulls down the tokens for the week and reads them aloud to the whole class. Reading these tokens aloud is giving praise and acknowledgment to the life skills of being kind and following procedures we see happening in our classroom.
This tool I used in the supportive phase. I believe this tool is best used in the supportive phase because it happens during student learning. Students are noticing and praising each other for life skills that they see happening during student learning. This tool helps my elementary students learn prosocial choices needed for their own benefit and their peers. Students are recognizing behaviors that are intended to help other people within their own classroom community. Students are receiving praise and encouragement every week which helps students want to learn because they know others are wanting to “catch” them. I believe this tool is student-centered collaborative side because the responsibility of this tool is on the students and not the teacher.
More Information –
Tool Source: Mentor teacher and I
I tried this strategy in a 6th grade classroom. It’s a small class of 12 kids total in a semi-rural area. This management tool was very easy to explain and use with the students. I explained how it worked and what they would need to do in order to participate. As soon as I was done explaining, they were eager and ready. One thing that I did change was that I made each student their own “basket” rather than having one big one. I found this made it more individualized to each student. Since the class is so small it was an easy alteration to make. One main success that I noticed from this activity was that students would purposefully look for things to write down and place in the baskets. They wanted to participate in this tool thus making it very engaging and successful. I would highly recommend this tool because it’s easy, fun, and engaging for all.