I found this super cute idea to help with motivating students to read more on the Teacher Wife’s blog which lead me down a bunny trail of great ideas to help motivate students to read! I know homeschoolers are supposed to be book worms, but my kiddos aren’t always that interested in reading outside of class time. But with these cute reading incentive brag tags and some cheap beads…problem solved at the Confessions home!
I immediately visited ImageStuff and ordered a variety of reading incentive brag tags! (Select “reading” from the drop down menu.) I set up our bulletin board right away, and shared all of our new exciting reading rewards with the kiddos! By the way, I emailed them and they’re working on a more homeschooling friendly packet of tags! Yipee!! And don’t tell anyone, but I’m pretty sure we’ll be doing a giveaway for these later on too!
For every 20 minutes of reading time, my children earn 1 bead. For every 10 beads they earn, then can exchange them in for 1 cool Reading Incentive Brag Tag! Of course you can set up your own reading times based on the ages/grade levels of our kiddos.
Here is our whole bulletin board set up. I already had this smaller 2×3 wooden framed cork board. Then I just added some cute Tropical Fish bulletin borders and letters to make it more fun. You can see the whole list of supplies below.
Create your own reading incentive board:
- 2×3 Cork Bulletin Board
- Reading incentive brag tags
- 24” Neck Chains
- Colorful assortment of pony beads (I purchased mine at Michael’s craft store)
- Star Smiles Classic Accents Variety Pack (For Name Tags, optional)
- Colorful Push Pins
- Reading Log Download
- Tropical Fish bulletin borders (optional)
- Bulletin Board Letters (optional, mine are metallic blue)
To organize all of my cute little tags I found this storage case from my local Michael’s hobby store. It had the exact right sized sections, along with enough spots for all of my tags and some beads too!
Everyone was super excited and ready to read for beads. I was actually a little surprised at their enthusiasm, but they’ve kept it up! Reading whenever they get the chance! For now, I don’t restrict what books they read, as long as they are taking time to read. We have gathered several readers over the years, and so they’re free to pick anything they want from our stacks. I try to keep them sorted by reading level, but you know how that goes…
Here are our beads up close, you can see that they are earning beads as well as a couple of them have earned tags too! Since the Teeny Tot is too small to read herself, the older kids can earn a bead if they are found reading a story to her. I also give her a bead if she sits down and looks through picture books on her own. She usually makes up stories to go with the pictures, and it’s really cute, so I just couldn’t say no!
Just to make it a little easier to keep track of, they each track their reading outside of school time with these cute reading logs!
–> Download the Reading Log Printable here! <–
And just so you know I’m not lying here…it suddenly got really quiet in our house. So, naturally I started looking around for the noisemakers that live here, and I found this…
…and this…
…and this…
Hope you enjoy our reading incentive board. If you have other fun reading incentive ideas, make sure to comment below to share your ideas with others!
Hi Erica
Great idea, just for motivation for the company. I will implement once I can purchase the packet they are throwing together for homeschoolers. I would love to see that before committing to such a project. Neat idea again, thank you for sharing.
Next year, if you so desire, you ca utilize the Book it program from pizza hut http://www.bookitprogram.com/enrollment/homeschool.asp
In my house, we just implemented an ice cream party. It is really a delayed gratification project. Each week we are working on filling in our response journals, which require a bit more work than just a reading log. Then on Fridays, if they have done the response logs all week, I pull out part of the ice cream sundae components onto a special part of the counter. 4th friday of reading all week we have a sundae party…. My explanation probably isn’t very clear…. I will probably have to modify. But it’s what we re trying this month.
Hello Erica,
I love this idea. My girls like to read but they don’t love it. I’m hoping that this idea will encourage them to read more on their own. How many dog tags did you order? I only have three kids and wondering how many to get. Thanks for your help.
Molly
I just came across this through pinterest. I follow your blog but somehow missed this post. I LOVE this idea, however the shipping is crazy! Do you know if they have come up with the homeschooling package you mentioned? Thanks in advance.
love the skateboard tags! love this idea for my dyslexic and my early reader. my 7th grader asked if she could do it too… 🙂
I think this a very good idea for my son whom love to read and is jest learning.
I just love all of your ideas. Inspirational.
Thanks for this post! Just printed out the reading log for my kiddos. Love it!
I love this idea Erica! We don’t quite have the space right now. We have a small school room, which doubles as a playroom (believe it or not! – it’s only 7’10” x 9’3″ and we lose a couple of inches on the shorter wall because of our heaters). I am going to attempt something similar, but have to figure out where to put it 😉 By the way, I love your new school room and the birds 🙂
This is Brilliant!