Our Reward System for 5-11s

About a year ago we realised that it would be good to get some consistency in how leaders and children approached behaviour management.   As most leaders are on the rota once a month, it proved a little bit tricky to keep boundaries the same from week to week!  No one wants the children to feel that they are back in school on a Sunday morning, but behaviour boundaries need to be respected and children actually seem to feel much happier when they know how far they can go!


As the best reward systems are positive and let the children have some ownership, we put it to out 8-11s to come up with a plan.  This is what they came up with!


Rules:

·         Respect others

·         Always be sensible

·         Speak kindly and positively

·         Only one person speaks at a time

·         Always listen to instructions

·         Take God seriously

·         Have fun!

They then suggested a coloured card system (like the traffic lights!) for those who choose to keep disrupting:

Yellow- warning

Red- you've lost a point

Green- you've earned the point back

Points are awarded for positive behaviour and contributions and a counter is moved along a hundred square.  The points are gained for the group as a whole and when 100 points are achieved, everyone gets a small prize from the prize bag.  The whole group system works really well when someone is disrupting things because peer pressure comes into play.  The disrupter is losing a point for the whole group, not just themselves!

This system has had a really positive effect on our behaviour management both for the children and the leaders and the children themselves are happy to follow something they had a hand in creating.