Motivating Students One Gumball Machine at a Time

Blog post written by Loni Jorgenson, Iowa Reading Corps AmeriCorps member at Hoover Elementary.

Loni Jorgenson (right) and
 her Internal Coach, Meredith.

During the Data-Based Decision Making and Great Leaps Intervention Training provided by Minnesota Reading Corps, we discussed a variety of strategies to motivate students. This was especially helpful, because I have several students who are not fans of reading and/or who would prefer not to be pulled from class for Reading Corps tutoring. After returning to my school, I decided to come up with a “game” and behavior reward system to help motivate these students.

To add an element of fun to our tutoring sessions, I created a gumball chart printable that holds 10 stickers. Once the chart is full, the student is rewarded with something simple, such as a bookmark or coloring page. There are several ways students are able to earn stickers for their chart.  A few examples include knowing all of their letter sounds, successfully playing the "tally game" (sitting like a reader and staying focused), leaping pages in the Great Leaps Intervention, finishing readings, and earning a higher progress monitoring score than the previous week.

At the beginning, I had one student who I was not quite sure how to motivate. Frank* loves sports and I was not sure if a gumball chart and coloring pages would motivate him, but I decided to give this strategy a try. I quickly found that the nice thing about using coloring pages is that they are completely customizable. Frank loves the Green Bay Packers, so I suggested that the first coloring page that he would work toward would be a Packers coloring page. He loved it! When his gumball chart was full, he was excited to show his Internal Coach his chart and coloring page that he had earned.

This motivational strategy has been working great for each of my students. My students are no longer hanging their heads when they see me pop in the door to pick them up; they’re all smiles and more than ready to go fill their gumball machines!

*To protect the privacy of our students, this student's name has been changed.