We just finished a box top contest in December/January and had great success. We were going to do a pizza lunch party for the winning class but a 1/2 day kindergarten class won so we switched to ice cream! We also award a gift card for $10 to the winning student who brings in the most box tops.
I am planning another for April/may before school lets out.
We are thinking about doing an ice cream party during lunch where the classroom that wins gets to have their choice of ice cream on the stage. It's a good way of not interrupting the regular school schedule. I would like to know what other schools are doing to award the winners.
Our school is supposed to wear uniforms. Once a month the principal holds a free dress day. For every student who turns in Box Tops for that month they will receive a free dress coupon. It seems to be working better this year.
In the past years, the coordinators would give small prizes but I decided this year not to do that because of the cost.
I do have a competition among all the classes and every month I send out a flyer to let the kids and parents know which class has collected the most Box Tops for the year. At the end of the year, the top collecting class will have an ice cream party!!!!!
We are doing our contest this year room vs room. Most of our rooms are close in size but we do have a few smaller classes with special ed students.
I just count labels. I personally thought about doing it by 'cash value' but could not think of an easy way to explain that to kids. I would stay away from the math problems unless the students can figure it out also.
Talk to the smaller classrooms teachers. Maybe you could do a contest for the larger classes and one for the few classes. Maybe they are like mine and would prefer not to have a contest.
Our special ed teachers do not want class parties or anything out of the norm; since its really hard on the teachers and students. We include them in the contest and appreciate all that is contributed by each student. I give them a school raffle ticket for turning some in with a sticker for the teacher to send home so I will be able to sleep at night thinking its fair!
When your contests are classroom against classroom how do you measure the winner? Simply by the class that brings in the most regardless of how many students are in the class? Or are you taking into consideration each classroom size and doing it based on average number per student (number collected divided by # of students in class). We have a few smaller pre-k classes as well as special needs classes within our community of pre-k thru 6th grade.
We don't want to over-engineer our contests but do want to run them fairly.
