All-American Teacher Tools: Summer Badge Album

Sunday, July 10, 2011

Summer Badge Album

Remember how much fun you had collecting badges for Girl Scouts or Boy Scouts?  Or maybe you currently enjoy collecting POGO badges for games. (If you have young children, though, who has time for online gaming?) Anyway, the bottom line is that kids love to collect things - bugs, leaves, even stamps and coins.  With the easy way to print your own badges using the Avery round stickers, think about creating your own sticker album, individualized for each child.  Have them decorate the cover of their album made from construction paper, then add plain pieces of computer paper folded in half for the pages of the album.  Connect them with yarn and you instantly have a sticker album.  Consider adding a photograph of the completed project and a written description with the badge for a summer keepsake.

Here are some ideas for stickers:
  1. Reading badges (One for each book completed and summarized on an album page)
  2. Chores completed badge
  3. Helper badge
  4. Wildlife badge (found and identified a new bug, leaf, or other wild thing!)
  5. Astronomy badge (identified five different constellations)
  6. Cooking badge (made muffins from the ubiquitous zucchini crop!)
  7. Mechanics badge (fixed a broken toy with or without adult supervision)
  8. Math badge (practiced five pages of age-appropriate math problems - easy to get online)
  9. Veggie badge (finished all veggies on the plate)
  10. Craft badge (completed a craft kit)
The idea behind these badges is to encourage completion of activities.  So often, kids begin something, find a new activity, and abandon the old activity without completing it.  The badge system helps children see the value of seeing a project through to completion.

What badges can you think of that will be good for your children?  Encourage your children to develop their own badges, too!

No comments:

Post a Comment

Shelfari: Book reviews on your book blog