A few years ago we noticed there were these little tags called Brag Tags popping up all over the place. Basically, the premise is that you give students a little reward (a brag tag) when they accomplish something. So, like all teaching inspired things we gave it a try in our classroom. It flopped-big time. It turns out our classroom management strategy wasn’t working for the older students.
Check out what we did as an alternative.
Why Didn’t Brag Tags Work?
We teach grade four and five combined class. Our students didn’t like the little kid clip art that seems to be on most items we were finding online. To be honest, it’s part of the reason our products feature very little cutesy stuff on student pages-it’s based on student feedback from nine and ten-year-olds.
We needed an incentive that wasn’t too cute.
Our upper elementary students weren’t going to be caught dead wearing an award on a necklace. As one student said, “That’s like telling the world we’re nerds.”
So we asked our students what they wanted instead of wearing tags on a necklace. We still wanted to reward students for doing amazing things. Our students came up with a brilliant solution. They designed their own classroom management strategy.
They came up with trading cards and we discovered a classroom management strategy.
Our students had some requirements for what they wanted. If the cards were a little larger, like trading cards, students could collect them as the year went on. We didn’t think trading cards was the right name, but students didn’t plan on actually trading them. They wanted to earn them.
However, the name trading cards stuck.
We built a set of colour trading cards in a variety of styles asking our students for help with the designs. Everyone brainstormed a list of things that students could earn rewards for. We were very clear that we didn’t want to reward students for things they were expected to do. We wanted to reward excellence and students that went beyond the expectations in both academic ways and behaviour.
Instead of a necklace…
Our students were very clear they did not want to wear their tags like a necklace, but we tried out a few ideas to see what would work.
To Display Trading Cards
We used an old calendar pocket chart from our teaching in primary grades and gave each student an assigned slot. Our cards fit perfectly into the spaces.
Student each designed their own name card which we laminated. This would make a great activity for the first day of school if you were starting the cards right at the beginning of the year.
Are you looking for other ideas for the first day of school? Check out this blog post called 10 Things We Do on the First Day Back to School.
Key Rings
We hole punched one corner and put them on a binder ring so their cards were kind of like a ring of keys. These were kept in our students’ bins or desks. You can also purchase metal shower rings from the dollar store-they work just as well for a lot less cost. Students kept their collections for the whole year.
As students earned different cards throughout the year, they added them to their ring, but they kept one tag in the pocket chart to show it off. The pocket chart was displayed proudly in our classroom, but no students needed to feel left out because the rings with the number of cards were kept put away to avoid too many comparisons.
You can find the trading card sets in our Resource Library. We can also send you a copy when you sign up for our email list. Get the ink-saving version or the colour version.
An Unexpected Thing Happened
We gave out cards for lots of different special occasions, but some of our students started making cards for different school events. We made a simple template (lots of problem solving skills from students to get the sizes right) and kept it in our Google Classroom.
Students could then take the template to Google Drawings and make their own trading cards. Some of the designs were brilliant (best hair, tallest hat for hat day, school events. One student even made trading cards as her birthday invitations.
Prepping the Trading Cards
Printing
We found printing everything in colour ink was just a little too costly last year, so we now have ink-saving versions. These can printed on colour paper or cardstock. Some of the sets made great colouring activities for our students. Colouring their cards made them more personal. In fact, the whole year of trading cards costs much less than any other incentives you might purchase for the year. And, they aren’t candy or food-which lots of schools have policies against.
Stay Ahead
We learned to print out most of the cards over the summer and sent them home with volunteers to be prepped within the first week of school. It was easy to stay ahead from that point forward.
Get Some Help
We printed the cards directly from the PDF, but we sent the printed pages home with students or parent volunteers to cut them apart. Special ones were laminated by parent volunteers. If we did not have help prepping all these cards, we probably wouldn’t have used them at all because they take time to prepare.
If you have a smaller group, there can be a lot of fewer cards to prepare. Also, you don’t need to hand out every single card to every single student. That will make them even more special when students do earn them.
Storing and Handing Out the Cards
Storage
When there was a class set of a card, we kept these wrapped with an elastic band. Smaller amounts used a small alligator clip. All the cards were kept in chronological order for events through the school year and by subject area for the rest. We kept all of the cards in a basket inside a drawer and kept the leftovers to use for the next year.
Prepared cards were kept in a jar on our desk where students could see the fronts of the cards, but not the backs. Students were always curious when they saw a new card in the jar and wanted to know how it was earned. The buzz would spread through the classroom and students would work extra hard to try to get that card.
Here’s a Little Trick You Can Use
Sometimes we would put a card in the jar without anyone having earned it yet just to create a buzz. For example, when the classroom was getting a little messy we would drop the “Cleanest Desk” card into the jar and before long students would be tidying their desks without being asked.
We kept a class list in our planning book with the names of all the trading cards across the top. As students earned cards, we checked them off so we could keep track of which students earned which card.
With each week, we would prepare cards. As they were earned by students, we would write students’ names across the back and place them in the jar so they would be ready to present on Friday (or the last school day of the week).
We Created a Ceremony
We created a little ceremony for our trading cards. Each Friday at the end of the day, we would tidy up the classroom, get everything ready to go home and then we would turn off the lights and turn on the projector. Students would pull out their ring of trading cards and sit waiting quietly to see which cards would be handed out for the week. We would announce the title of the card, students would do a little drum roll and then we would announce all the winners of that card. Everyone would applaud and then those winners would come up and retrieve their cards.
Students learned to hole punch their own cards and put them on the ring or in their display pocket after the ceremony. This was also a great time for students to check out some of the new cards and try to figure out how they were earned so they could try to get it the next time. Students were so proud to share their cards any time parents visited the classroom.
What trading cards are available?
You can find the trading card sets in our Resource Library. We can also send you a copy when you sign up for our email list. Get the ink-saving version or the colour version.
We were genuinely surprised at how well these trading cards worked in our classroom. It was a pleasant surprise! Another unexpected result of the cards was that at the end of the year, everyone had a souvenir from the whole year, documenting all their accomplishments. It was lots of fun on the last day of school to look at everything everyone had earned.
Think about asking your students what they would like to do. Maybe they will love the idea and it will be worth the time. Or maybe it won’t be and you can save a lot of time before prepping them.
It changed our classroom community. Students were so supportive of each other and we found the next year was even better because we had streamlined the process.
Give them a try and leave us your story in the comments below! We want to know if you have a great system that works for your class, so be sure to tell us what grade it worked (or didn’t work) for.
