End of the Year Awards

Hey y'all!

It's getting to that point in the year where I start thinking about the end of the school year.  This year I will be packing my room up again and I am anticipating that to be extremely undesirable.  So...what can I prepare now to make those last few weeks less stressful?  The first thing that came to mind was getting a head start on end-of-the-year awards.  I love handing these out because the kids love it BUT I find it to also be extremely difficult to decide who should receive what award.  Last year when I taught Kindergarten my assistant and I made the decisions and it was borderline exhausting.  Honestly, nobody should stress about classroom awards.  I decided that I have enough on my plate with the school year ending, planning a wedding, and moving into a new home so I am going to have my kiddos vote for their classmates this year.  How am I going to get easy data without reviewing tons of paperwork?  EASY PEASY LEMON SQUEEZY! Google Forms, silly!

Here is how I set it up.  First I went to Google Forms.  The first question on all of my forms for my kids is their name.  Make sure to check the box to make that a REQUIRED question.  Nobody likes a paper with no name.  Google Forms without a name are just as annoying.

For this particular Google Form I made the question title the award title.  My "help text" consisted of an explanation of the award.  The easiest way for students to select a winner for this type of form is by making the question type a list.  I typed each student's name into a box.  This will appear as a dropdown menu for your students to choose a classmate.  Since I have a lot of different options for awards I cut down on my time assembling this form by using the copy question function.  Just click the button that looks like two pages to repeat the question.  All you have to do is edit the question title and help text.  

When you're all done you will want to click "send form."  When you do so a code will be generated to copy and paste wherever you should choose.  I put mine into a Microsoft Word document and into our class shortcut file so all they have to do is open the document and click the link.  You can monitor the responses by clicking "View Responses."  It will take you to a wonderful spreadsheet filled with all the information you need.  How wonderfully easy is this?!  I swear the entire process took me about 10 minutes.  THAT'S IT!  

How do you do your classroom awards?