Time for a Rooster Booster!

I've been talking up the Rooster Games all year with my fourth graders, and a lot of the kids are super excited about reading their books and qualifying!  A handful of them, however, are letting an awful lot of time slip by without earning many stars on our book tracking poster.  I've seen students procrastinate and then panic as the deadline draws closer, so this year I held a "Rooster Booster mini-games" in the hopes of providing some motivation!

I prepared mini versions of rounds that we play at the real Rooster Games so the students get the chance to experience the fun of the games, just on a smaller scale!  We did an Objects Round, Questions Round, Illustrations Round, and a Settings/Characters Round. 

This year's games will also feature some "games of chance" in honor of RICBA nominee Fortune Falls.  The characters in this story actually have to take a test to determine if they are "lucky" or "unlucky", and this determines which school they will attend!  I thought it would be fun to see who was the Luckiest Kid in Fourth Grade.  One of the games we'll play at the Rooster Games is Egg Hunt.  Each students reaches into a bag full of plastic eggs and selects one to open.  Most of the eggs are empty, but some of them have a cotton ball inside.  Students who found the piece of cotton inside were declared to be "lucky"!  There weren't any prizes, but the kids were excited to see what was inside their eggs!

My goal was for our "Rooster Book" shelf to be empty before the students left on Friday for vacation, and I'm thrilled to report: mission accomplished!  Every single copy of the RICBA nominees were signed out before the end of the day.  We had some rainy days this week, so I'm hopeful that those book borrowers enjoyed some time curled up with a good story.  I'm excited to see how many more stars will be going up on the poster next week! 

At the actual Rooster Games I award medals to the students who read all of the books on the list that I bought for Ashaway School.  To conclude the Rooster Booster event I awarded MVP bookmarks to the student on each team who had read the most books! 

Rooster Booster MVPs!

While I created the "Rooster Booster" games to help motivate the students who needed to read books to qualify for the Rooster Games, I'm hopeful that they also encouraged students who already qualified to keep reading!  I always tell them that the games are even more fun when they recognize more of the books during each round.  Considering how many eager book borrowers I encountered afterward I'm optimistic that it worked!  YAY!