I'm excited to try out WBT this year for the first time with my 4th graders, but I'm confused about when to use scoreboard rewards. Does your class earn a few minutes of extra free time or whatever the reward may be & you save it for Friday or are rewards given daily? Are points on the scoreboard carried over or begun every day? And what are some other reward ideas?
Thanks for all the inspiration!

I like to give out points (I use smilies and frownies) on the scoreboard regularly. Sometimes I don't so the kids get used to behaving appropriately even if they don't receive a smiley. Also, I always want to keep the score very close so as to keep the kids trying. I like to use extra free time at the end of every day as the reward so I do erase the smilies and frownies earned at the end of each day. You may want to do this or if they have more smilies at the end of each day they may earn a star for that day. On Friday if they have so many stars they may earn a reward. You have to find what works for you:)

Rewards can be a music, free time, a small prize from the prize box, playground time, extra gym time, extra recess, etc. Hope this helps!! Have fun!!!!

Liann

Great answer Liann!
To add to that, if you use the points for more or less recess minutes, you erase the points when you come back in for recess. Basically you are going to erase and restart any time you give a reward or consequence. Some other ideas are:

a couple minutes of PAT time (preferred activity time: this is where students get to do their own preferred activity, within your preset limits of course), choose your own seat in the class for this period of time, minutes to play mind soccer (gotta check it out! awesome review game!) or even more or less homework pages (keep in mind it's rigged. so say you were giving out 5 pages of homework. students have two extra smilies. you say "Oh I WAS going to give you 7 pages of homework but now I'm only going to give five" or if they have two frownies you say "well I was going to give three pages of homework tonight but there are two frownies, so three pages plus two extra is 5). Change up the rewards to make it more fun. But keep in mind the plus/minus three rule. You should never have the difference of more than plus or minus three. too much reward and they get lazy. To much punishment and they give up. As far as when you use the scoreboard? I would say anytime you get a lull in the classroom and you want to bring the engagement and enthusiasm up (so....often:)

Hope this helps:)
Andrea

I love reading the other ideas!

At the beginning of the year I have the kids earn 5 minutes of free time at the end of the day if they have more smileys. After about a month they start earning tallies for each day they have more smileys. The tallies are cashed in for extra recess minutes.

We switch classes for Math in fourth grade, so I keep my Math kids separate from my homeroom. I use the same tally system after a month or so, but they're working toward earning computer math review time. I was going to do it for 15 minutes, but last year's Math class wanted to earn a whole free period of game time. It took them about 45 days to earn it, but they were thrilled!

Nicole