One of the best compliments I received at the end of this past school year was when a parent told me that because of me, her child would no longer eat at McDonalds and that I have motivated her and her husband to start eating healthier. Well this got me thinking. This past year, I only allowed students to bring in healthy snacks to eat during snack time. If they brought in something unhealthy, I would simply write a note home and return the snack. I then would give them one of my “extra” snacks I had to eat in place of it. (This rarely happened because my parents were pretty good about sending their child to school with something healthy!! )I think that it is SO important to stress the importance of eating healthy at a young age. It was actually pretty refreshing to have my students check with me to make sure their snack was a “good choice” and then be proud of it and talk about it with their friends. It was also pretty funny because they knew when someone brought in something “not so healthy”. It wasn’t that they laughed or made fun of each other, they just had actual conversations about it which I thought was great!
So as you know, I have been spending a lot of time up at school trying to get my room ready for the new year! One of the things I decided to tackle was my “prize box”. I decided that since I am pretty strict about healthy snacks, I wanted to go through my prize boxes (as you can see I had 4!!?!!?!) and take out all of the candy and only keep the “goodies”. Now don’t get me wrong, we still have “parties” when we can and I do allow cupcakes and sweets but I always try to balance it out with something healthy as well. 
Now back to my 4 prize boxes. I have NO idea why I had 4 of them. (I think I just kept adding stuff and they just kept growing). I did go through them and after about 10 minutes of sorting, I ended up with ONE box full of erasers, pencils, stencils, markers, stickers and more.
Before:
After:
Ahh… much better!!
Now, I do not just give away prizes all the time. (Only on Fridays to the table that has the most points and maybe here and there for something special) I actually switched over to using this last year after finding it on Pinterest!! I absolutely LOVE it!! Students are given a punch card and after they get 10 punches they get to choose something from the catalog! My kiddos loved it too! (Especially lunch with a friend when I let them come eat in the classroom) If you used this you technically wouldn’t even need another “prize box”!
Head on over to First Grade Fever to grab these for free!! Yes FREE!! (Can you even believe it??)
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