Highlighting the best in your students is key to their success in your classroom. Encourage your students by identifying their best qualities then amplify them!
Try out these fun ideas for your classroom
- Verbal praise
- Display student work
- Bulletin board full of weekly good deeds
- Certificates of achievement
- A positive note home, phone call or e-mail to a parent
- Class celebrations for reaching classroom goals
- Recognition
- Postive affirmations
- Stickers
- Treasure box
Share praise!
One of the best ways to highlight success in your classroom is with praise. You can do this by talking to your students about how they did a great job staying quite during morning announcements, walking in the hall or playing during centers. Encourage your students to do their best on their assignments and talk to your students what you liked best about their work giving little compliments each day. Display their projects in the hallway or on a classroom bulletin board. These things will motivate students to do their best because they know their efforts are recognized!
Encouragement & motivation
As a parent or teacher, being a positive inspiration and encourager is extremely important. A great idea, to add a personal touch to your classroom, is to display motivational quotes on the bulletin board inside your classroom. These can be encouraging quotes from famous people or a special quote from you, their teacher! Writing positive affirmations on the chalkboard each week is a great way to connect with your students.
Highlight student interests
Highlight individual student learning by including topics students show an interest in learning about! For example, if the topic is mammals, have students choose their favorite mammal to research and share their findings with the class. Their passion for learning will show when they share about what they are most interested in!
Encouragement is key to success in the classroom.
A popular idea to motivate the younger grades is for students to earn a STAR sticker for good classroom behavior. If they fill up their own personal graph with stickers for each day of the week then they get to go to the treasure box at the end of the week. Students can also be recognized as a star student with a sticker for exceeding expectations for the week.
Promote teamwork
Promote teamwork, by creating class goals!
Set your goal, ‘100 books by Spring Break’… when the goal is successfully achieved… have a class celebration with pizza and cake!
In addition, give students time each week to highlight a classmate. They can do this by writing on a piece of paper the name of the peer they want to recognize and share how that student impacted their week.
Overall classroom activities should be engaging, have meaning and be unique. Set your expectations high, students will raise to your level!
