End of Year Awards

Finished school a few days ago so will try to catch up on my postings. As I completed the grading for 4th quarter & entered grades, I gathered up the info needed for end-of-year awards.

Our school has an award assembly at the end of every grading period to present certificates for a variety of reasons: perfect attendance, good behavior, honor roll, etc. At the final assembly of the year, additional awards are given which include those bestowed from MAP (music, band, art, PE) teachers.

I have three categories that I work from: Young Artist, Outstanding Young Artist and Exceptional Young Artist.

A Young Artist certificate is awarded to students who have earned B’s (met the state standards in Art) in every grading period. An Outstanding Young Artist cert is awarded to students who earned a mix of A’s and B’s for all four quarters. The Exceptional Young Artist cert is reserved for those who earned A’s in every grading period.

I develop the text for the awards & print them out on ‘fancy’ certificate papers. This year I had only a handful of Exceptionals, so I used the money generated from selling braiding supplies before school to purchase a ‘Summer Sack’ of art supplies for each of them, in addition to the certificate. I was fortunate to find ‘pony bags’ (those drawstring backpack-like bags) in the dollar section of Target which were the perfect size to fit in a 9” x 12” sketchbook, same size pad of colored construction paper, drawing pencil, eraser, watercolor paint set, glue & scissors.

I teach in a low income, urban school so many students come from homes where these items are a luxury. When I presented the ‘sack’ to my Exceptional 3rd grader, he immediately sat down on the floor to pull everything out one at a time with an accompanying “Ooooh” or “Ahhh!” much to the admiration of his fellow classmates.

Made my day…