More incentive tags and an October freebie

I'm going to talk more about these wonderful tags that work so well in my classroom. They have so many different names - Brag Tags, Behavior Tags, Behavior beads. Whatever they're called, I've found they are great for student motivation. This year I've decided to call them Incentive Tags because it sounds more positive than Behaviour Tags (which I used to call them).

I blogged about how I use them for Math and a freebie Math tag here.  

I used the tags last year together with my clip chart. Students got ONE point if they finished on GOOD CHOICES, TWO points for finishing on WAY TO GO, and THREE points if they ended on STAR STUDENT (I didn't dock them points for being in the red because I thought that might be too discouraging and have the opposite effect than I wanted).

I kept track of their points each day and a couple of times a month I'd give them chances to use their points to buy tags. I saw a great idea a couple of weeks ago from Elementary AMC that you can see here. She made classroom money to give out for the points. I am going to try giving out the money at the end of each day instead of juggling their points on a sheet, which was time consuming and could become confusing at times. This way each student can keep their own "money" and they'll know exactly how much they have to spend. With my tally system they were constantly asking how many points they had. 

I had some tags that were suitable for them to get for their points, but I needed more. I didn't want them to buy the reward tags that were for specific behaviours or accomplishments, so I decided to make monthly tags that they could buy. I couldn't believe how popular these became. The kids liked them so much that several months I ended up making two different tags. Here's a look at the October tags.

I made them in sheets of 20 tags. I'm going to put them in my TpT store soon, but if you'd like to get them free they're available  here for a short time. Just print, laminate, cut apart and hole punch and they're ready to distribute. 

I checked out the chains that I'd seen other teachers were using to hold the tags, but they're pretty expensive in Canada. So I made lanyards from parachute cord that I got from Michael's. 

Tie a loop in one end and tie a clip like this to the other and you're ready to go. 

I'm linking up with Joanne from at Head Over Heels for Teaching for 

To see more ideas for inspiring your students check out other blogs on this topic here.