All schools have these practices in place to a greater or lesser extent.
The recognition can come through positive referrals from staff and peers potentially leading to more formal methods of recognition.
Students’ success can be celebrated for contributions over a wide range of areas:
• Academic effort and achievement
• Attendance and punctuality
• Appearance
• Sports, Music and Drama achievements
• Holding positions of responsibility
• Services to the school and local community
• Behaviour and Attitude
Successes with older students can be celebrated in a variety of ways, ranging from verbal praise, meetings with parents/carers, praise postcards, letters, texts, awarding of honours or merit awards, emails and phone calls home, to more formal events such as celebration and weekly assemblies and end of term reward ceremonies. Parental and public recognition can also be achieved via the Student Planner.
Celebration of successes with younger children can take the form of visual signs – smile, nod, thumbs up, verbal praise, stickers/ stars/certificates/ team awards/trophies/praise postcards, photo copy work to take home/ invite parents in to see work, head teacher involvement, telling parents at the end of the day to the more formal celebration assemblies and whole class treats.
The use of reward stickers, merit certificates and praise postcards to be sent home is very popular with students and also their parents especially if the praise is unique and specific. There are many online stores where these products can be obtained, however at Stickers4Schools you can customise all of these products to be unique to the school and the achievement therefore increasing their positive effect many times over. Have a look at our stickers, postcards and certificates and decide for yourself
If you have not used stickers and postcards before you will be amazed at the positive effect they can have on the children. They love them! One of the success areas is the changing of the dynamic of home – school communication, which previously had possibly focused on sending parents bad news. This had the effect of improving relationships with parents who were tired of receiving letters and phone calls when things went wrong. It is also a good idea to change the focus of the reward from time to time to ensure that the widest possible number of students became eligible.
