Spark Student Motivation Saturdays with Scented Stickers!

Better late than never, but it is time to link up with the wonderful Joanne from Head Over Heels for Teaching for Spark Student Motivation Saturday! 

Well I left school in a rush on Friday and I wasn't prepared for this post, but I figured I'd post about it now and update with a picture later. 

I think I remember getting stickers in school starting all the way back in Kindergarten. It's no surprise to hear kids love stickers, even in 4th grade. This year I splurged a few dollars more and bought smelly smiley face stickers! Talk about motivating, the kids will do just about anything for them! My favorite way to give them out is in writing. We write "Quick Writes" daily in our writing journals from our Writing Calender. We read the topic of the day out loud, set the timer for ten minutes, and students just write. The goal is not to put the pencil down and to build up your writing stamina. 

When the timer goes off, each student counts the number of words that were written and record the number at the top of their notebook page. I give a sticker to everyone that wrote their highest amount of words so far. Of course this depends on the topic of the day and the students motivation for the day, but these stickers really do help out. We share many of the responses and sometimes students want to turn these ideas into stories. I like that the students are always building their writing stamina, being supportive to everyone who earns a sticker, and creating a classroom community by challenging each other and working on their listening skills when listening to journal entries read aloud. When I give these to the students to take home at the end of the year the journals are almost completely full. The students love to look back at their first entries and see how far they have come in writing throughout their fourth grade year. I definitely see myself buying more scented stickers in the future! :)


Have you heard? One of my BBB, Jivey, is having a giveaway! In celebration of reaching 1,000 followers she is giving away a few (actually, a TON) of her favorite things! I'm excited that one of those things is my poster pack of Creative Synonyms for OVERUSED words. 

Be sure to go over and enter for a chance to win in a bunch of different raffles! Lots of chances to win, not just one!