Bernadine Sevy

My motto is make it fun, I love incentives and so I use them a lot in school. Some people may call them bribery but I think that they are rewards. I use different programs for different times of the year, or if we’re studying a particular subject I’ll base my incentive program on it.

This works well, especially if you have a child who is stuck on a series and you can’t get them to read something else. You will need an ice-cream cone for each child, drawn onto cardstock. Then different color scoops of ice-cream based on the different categories of books that you want them to read. For example: Mystery - green scoop, biography - blue scoop, historical - yellow scoop, science fiction - lavender scoop etc. Each child receives a scoop each time he completes a book in that category and he is not allowed to get 2 scoops of the same color or category. When every one has one of each scoop, have a sundae party or as each child reaches his goal, take the opportunity for one on one, and take him or her to the ice-cream parlor.

This idea can work if you’re doing a Solar System unit study, or reading "Number the stars" and so on.

Take a piece of dark blue poster paper, I like to laminate so that I can reuse it. Then I used a star punch to punch out dozens of yellow paper stars (little gold stars would work as well). Depending on the age of the children, when they read for a certain length on time, they earned stars to tape onto the "sky". To make it more fun, they had to pick a constellation and tape their stars in that form. When they had reached a pre-determined goal we went on a field-trip. A planetarium is a fitting reward, but so is a sleep out on the trampoline under a summer sky.

A glass fish bowl works well for this idea and can also help if you’re studying ecosystems or oceanography. Have your child write the name, author and his name on a piece of paper and place it in the bowl, every time that he reads a book, then have a drawing at a predetermined time for a reward. If you have a fish tank maybe that individual can pick out a new tank-mate, that way all the children can enjoy it too. A field trip to a fish hatchery is fitting too.

I cut, out of brown poster paper, a tree with a trunk and branches, and glued it to the background paper. On the other side of the poster I glued an evergreen tree shape cut out of green poster paper. Then I laminated the poster. When the children read books in September we taped "apple" die cuts to the tree, always writing the name of the child, author and book name onto the die cut, in October we glued "fall" leaves onto the tree. You can actually pick up real fall leaves and write on then with a marker, afterwards taping them to the tree. The evergreen was decorated with ornaments, in December, that the children made, or you can use pre-cut shapes.