Student Motivators - Traffic cones

Joanne over at Head over Heels puts on this great linky party about motivating your students. She's got a great idea about how to engage students in complementing each other!

This fits in so perfectly with my theme for this year. I want them to pay more attention to what others are doing. This skill is going to help build that Common Core ideal of deeper thinking. Conversations are going to be different in my room this year as well. Instead of everyone just shouting out their connections to a book or a topic, they are going to practice listening to others and responding to their thoughts as well as incorporating their own.

So for my student motivating idea to share, I have my student of the week be in charge of putting out these fun traffic cones with encouraging phrases on them. I get them at the Dollar Store.  As we are working on a lesson I might tap the student of the week to search for someone showing off exemplary skills and they would place the cone on that person's desk. The cones are turned in later for reward points. They like the attention and I get to reward those that are doing good more.

Yay!