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Kids achieve great things in the classroom, and it’s about time their brilliance is rewarded. When generic honor-student bumper stickers aren’t enough, it’s time to get creative. Give your star students the personalized recognition they deserve. PaperDirect has a plethora of award ideas, including certificates of recognition and awards for excellence, special achievements, and simply for going above and beyond the call of learning.

Unique students deserve unique awards. Simply choose a template, then tweak the layout, color scheme, fonts, and other design elements to bring out your child’s personality. Who says certificates of recognition have to be stuffy and serious? Change the title to something creative and whimsical. Toss in your student’s nickname. Reserve a special space for an inside joke. Add photos of your child and images of his or her favorite things to make it an award to remember.

What if you have a bunch of overachievers on your hands? Choose a template to foster group cohesion and team spirit, then give each award a unique finishing touch to boost your kids’ confidence as individuals. Whether your kids are eight or 18, they’ll be happy to have their accomplishments acknowledged.

Once you’re finished designing the award, you can choose to print straight from your desktop, or order a custom print. Pocket-sized or poster-sized, fridge or framed, PaperDirect has a variety of colors, sizes and textures to make your awards pop, all custom-designed and delivered straight to your school or home.

At PaperDirect, It’s as much of a joy to design student awards as it is to hand them out. Proper encouragement is crucial in any endeavor, at any age. A well-designed award tells students that they are appreciated and capable of great things, and inspires them to keep going above and beyond.

With the new school year quickly approaching, it’s time to start thinking about ordering top performer trophies for your star students. PaperDirect has a large selection of trophies of all shapes and sizes, and they can be engraved with whatever message you need. Being recognized for a job well done is a very good feeling, and it’s so very important that children of all ages receive some sort of recognition when they do well or even just put forth their best effort but don’t necessarily “win” top honors. Getting a trophy not only inspires the recipient but affects those around the recipient as well.

Even when a student tries to appear too “cool” to receive a trophy or acts like he doesn’treally want it, it’s a natural human emotion to feel pride when you’re rewarded for doing a good job. It’s normal to feel proud

of accomplishing something or being the best at something. Even the coolest kid will probably rush home to show off the trophy and display it in the living room or bedroom with a huge smile on his face. No one is too cool to get a trophy, no matter how hard they try to act like it’s no big deal.

Custom Engraved Top Performers’ Trophies (and Plaques)

With PaperDirect, after you choose the trophy or trophies you like, you can add an engraved logo and the text of your choice to our custom trophies and plaques. You can put the name of the recipient, the date, and the specific name of the award such as “Most Improved Student,” “Highest Math Grade,” “Best Attendance,” or “Most Helpful.” If you’re the mother (or father) of a senior in high school, you may be asked to help out on the graduation ceremony or what is called the Senior Superlatives Night. This is a fun ceremony in which senior are recognized for being the “Funniest,” “Most Likely to Succeed,” “Best Personality,” Prettiest Eyes,” “Best Couple,” “Most Athletic,” and “Best Friends.”

With PaperDirect’s custom engraving, the top performers in your school will have something they can keep forever–something that will become more meaningful to them with each passing year.

Check out these stylish top performer trophies and note the variety of styles and designs PaperDirect offers. With custom engraving on all trophies and plaques and easy online ordering, PaperDirect is your one-stop online shopping source for student recognition and motivation ideas that really work.

If trophies are a bit out of your budget range, there are creative, inexpensive ways to reward students. Check out these PaperDirect blogs for some ideas:

• Attendance Certificates for Your Star Students
• Thoughtful Student Recognition Ideas
• Great Ideas for Classroom Recognition
• Ideas for Student Classroom Rewards

If you’re a teacher and are looking for a meaningful, long-lasting way to reward students for good grades or exemplary behavior, you may want to consider plaque awards. PaperDirect has an extensive line of plaque awards from which to choose. You can have them custom engraved for a singular achievement, or you can order what is called a “Perpetual Award Plaque,” which includes the names of past recipients and additional space for future winners of the award.

You can choose from walnut, oak or slide-in plaques to honor your deserving students. Our wall plaques have beautiful wood or acrylic frames with foil accents that can be engraved with your special message. Some of our best sellers are the Cherry Piano Wood Wall Plaque Kit and the Laminated Finish Wall Plaque Kits. Matted plaques and plaques with photos are also available from PaperDirect.

If you are looking for a less expensive way to reward deserving students, PaperDirect has a vast selection of award certificates that can also be custom designed exactly to your liking. To learn more about how plaque awards can be used to reward excellence, check out this PaperDirect blog, “Plaque Awards Your Employees Will Appreciate.”

If you have a musically-talented student or child that you’d like to reward for a job well done, music award certificates are a great way to reward your future rock star with a professional-looking reward that will last forever.

PaperDirect has desktop printable award certificates that are standard size and can be made with full-color designs. Our desktop printable music award certificates are laser and inkjet compatible and allow you to design and print right from your very own home, classroom or office.

Another option for creating music award certificates is to have PaperDirect print them for you, just design the certificates online, it’s that easy.  You can choose from seven different colors, choose the font and ink color, and in no time at all, you will have professionally printed and boxed 8.5″ X 11″ music award certificates to present to deserving recipients. PaperDirect prints and ships most orders in just 1-2 days!

We also have certificate accessories including certificate seals and certificate jackets to keep the music award certificate looking brand new for years.

To learn more about making your own award certificates, please read “Make Certificates at Home: Save Money and Time” to get step-by-step instructions for DIY certificates.

Motivate your student to do their very best in all they do, use certificates to congratulate for special accomplishments, reward good behavior or citizenship with gift certificates, and motivate with motivational gifts.

Teachers have one of the most important jobs in the world today–educating and molding our youth to be tomorrow’s heroes, leaders and innovators. For this reason, it’s important to put as much effort into the affective part of education as the technical part of education. Affective education is values-based and deals with nurturing the child, rewarding him, and providing incentive to continue to do well. Affective education is the “good job,” or “keep up the great work,” or “you have improved so much this month!” Affective education is the intangible part of teaching that makes kids want to be in your class.

One important part of affective education is student recognition. If you think recognizing and rewarding students is time-consuming and expensive, then let us tell you about some inexpensive (or totally free) student recognition ideas that really work!

1. Spotlight student achievement with a specialized award certificate. Some of the most popular student achievement certificates are Student of the Week, Student of the Month, Most Improved Student, Hardest Working Student, Most Helpful Student, and Highest Grade in the Class.
2. Allow privileges. One simple, free student recognition idea is to allow the student special privileges for the week. If class is right before lunch, you can excuse the deserving student one minute before the bell rings, and if it’s the last period of the day, allow him to leave a minute early to avoid the rush to the bus line or parking lot.
3. Homework pass. Kids love this student recognition idea because it allows them to take a pass on one homework assignment. Be careful with this one, however, as the privileged student may choose to pass on a homework assignment that is a significant part of the  semester grade. Set clear ground rules, and make sure the homework pass is only used on an assignment that won’t make or break the class grade. Math teachers, who often give daily homework, may allow a deserving student to skip out on ten homework problems if he has done well on that particular skill.
4. Treat your deserving student to lunch or breakfast. If the school allows, you could have lunch delivered to your star student, or you can stop and get him/her a healthy breakfast on the way to school. Buying a meal for your over-achiever is a fairly inexpensive way to recognize the hard work he’s done lately.

5. Thank-you cards are a great way to recognize that a student has gone above and beyond the call of duty. Hand writing a note shows you are committed to acknowledging good behavior and hard work, and the student will treasure your thank you note for years to come. You will be amazed at how much such a small gesture like a hand-written thank you card will mean to your student–regardless of his/her age.

6. A phone call home is a student recognition idea that really works. Too often, a teacher calling home only means one thing–the kid is in trouble. By calling parents with positive news such as good grades and improved behavior, your students will see that a teacher phone call home is not always a bad thing. The parents will be probably be shocked that you took the time to call them to report something positive, and other students will work harder to get the same type of recognition.

These low-cost, sometimes free student recognition ideas that work will provide your students with an incentive to do well in your class, and the acknowledgments will help them realize that you really do appreciate their great work. Here are some more Ideas for Student Classroom Rewards to get you started.