The One With the Bonus Points

I am not a big fan of extra credit in the classroom. I believe if students are doing what they are supposed to in the classroom on a regular basis, there will not be a need for it.

However, every once in awhile I will give my students an opportunity to earn a few bonus points. Today was one of those days. They had a particularly hard TLI test today. I can't tell you how many students were struggling with it. I really believe it was the wording of the questions that stumped them. I know they know this stuff. All that to say that today was the perfect day for what I had planned.

I do several things in my classroom that I learned from my 4th grade teacher. Those things I remember doing and loving in her class. Every once in awhile she would randomly put post-its on a few test. These post-its had little things for us to do to earn some bonus points on our test.


So today I randomly planted 8 (I have about 85 students) post-it notes on my students' math test. Each post-it activity was worth five points. They say things like "do 5 jumping jacks for 5 bonus points", "hop like a frog while saying ribbit", or "sing your abc's backwards". Lots of fun things to make us laugh in the middle of what is a stressful moment for some students.

Out of the 8 students who received post-its, only 4 were willing to perform for us today. The rules are that it is completely their choice rather or not they do the activity. I won't make anyone stand up and doing something like that. However, if they choose not to do it, they can't pass it to someone else. It's theirs to take or leave.

The students loved it. It was definitely a little fun that was much needed today.