Our school uses a reward system in which students earn Golden Tickets for Showing Respect, Observing Safety, Accepting Responsibility, or Resolving Conflict.  Students may trade these tickets for rewards at once they have accumulated 15, 30, or 45.

In our classroom, there is an added incentive.  Once a student has 60 Golden Tickets, he or she chooses a friend from our grade level, and the two will eat lunch in the classroom and play Wii games on the SMART Board.

As an educator, I hope to instill passion in my students, usually in the form of developing them with a hardened passion for reading or math.  I believe, however, that writing is an art.  Writing is something we teach, but it's also a subject that I think students only develop with...passion.  Many would replace that word with another - practice - but while practice is important, and while the basics of writing are necessary (grammar rules, punctuation, capitalization), I believe an individual only feels like a writer if s/he is getting something in return for the effort.  Namely, that something is satisfaction, accomplishment, pride, and a bottomless desire for more.

Hoggatteers felt a bit of this when we used music to inspire scenes in our minds, last week.  The first step was simply to draw a scene or a character inspired  by the  selected  piece  of  music.  Simple.     I  played  an instrumental version of the song "Bring Him Home" from the musical Les Miserables, performed by The Piano Guys.  This piece has an amazingly mournful, regretful sound to it, setting the mood for some unique drawings by my students.

The next day, after a quick discussion about the process - with me point out that the writing they were about to do was based on their own visions and not on a picture prompt provided by me - students sat silently and wrote about the scene they depicted.  I played the audio from "Bring Him Home" once again as they wrote.

And students could not get the words out fast enough!  When time was up, many students simply could not get their pencils to stop.  They wanted to keep writing. 

They wanted to get all of their thoughts out.  In short, they were passionate.  In the end, I expressed to them my own passion and that I was pleased they were able to get a taste for themselves.

After some edits, rewrites, and reproducing their drawings (this time with color), their finished products looked better than anything they have written during the entire year.  We will display these for others to read.