Friday raffle

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Friday raffle
By Dawn

I tried a raffle system this spring to reward students for turning in homework--complete and on time. (I got the idea from a Mailbox magazine--Homework On Time tickets or HOT tickets). I teach 5 periods, and each period
had its own plastic hippo to store the tickets.
I chose 2 students each day, 1 to hand out the tickets to those who had earned one, and 1 to collect the tickets (with names written on them) back in the hippo. They did this while I took roll, so it saved time. This is also pencil sharpening and assignment pad-writing time, so it all got done within the first 2 minutes.
Each Friday

I drew 2 ( or more, as mentioned in an above post) tickets. Winners could choose from 2 prizes--candy or prize box. The prize box has junk from the dollar store and Oriental Trading Company. Other teachers I know also let them choose homework passes and/or extra credit certificates.

To answer your question, yes--this works for middle school kids. The rate of homework completed definitely increased. Yes, it costs money. But if you split a large order from Oriental Trading company with 1 or 2 other teachers, you can keep the cost down. I still have most of my box of prizes left, so I won't have to buy more for this year.

Popular prizes were: disappearing ink, fuzzy pens, skateboard keyrings, inflatable smiley face beachballs, gel pens. If you get free posters or trading cards from Scholastic, like Brittney Spears or NSync, they love those too.

I'll probably do this again. (Mostly because I still have the prizes!!) I'm thinking of incorporating a whole-class award too. The class with the highest number of students turning in HW each week, gets a class reward of some sort. Why not use the very strong peer pressure of middle school to my advantage, right?