Scholar Dollars

This past school year I created a classroom economy for the whole group, the first time in my young career. The students I worked with had a variety of personalities and ability levels and had difficulties adapting to a consistent routine. The beginning of the year was rough. I was desperate for something to motivate the students, nurture responsibility AND have the students practice independence. I toyed with a few ideas and created my version of a classroom economy. I wanted some cute name that went with my last name but decided "Scholar Dollars" was the best, as I wanted these kids to become scholars. 
The fantastic paraprofessional I inherited when I came into the position was so excited about the new economy and was a major help. We decided on "dollar" amounts that coincide with jobs: 
coming to class prepared, doing work, etc. Students earned bonuses for meeting their weekly Accelerated Reader and Accelerated Math goals (school wide goals that were individualized for our students), mastering weekly goals (I'll post on that some time in the future), displaying citizenship traits, etc. We printed each dollar amount on a different color of paper, which helped us all stay organized. There were also fines in our economy, such as not coming to class prepared, choosing not to work and disrupting the learning of others. The more severe the offense, the higher the fine. 
We had a class store where students could spend their dollars. Our para knitted hats and made jewelry that sold like hotcakes. Our store also included food items (I am not a fan of junk food at school but settled on Pirate's Booty and some sort of organic fruit rope from Costco and my beloved Trader Joe's lollipops) as well as fun novelty toys from Oriental Trading Company . We also had root beer float, taco and pizza parties and dance parties. Those were my favorite because students had to work together to count up money, keep a record of who contributed what, and when, and had to work together. It brought the different groups within the resource room together and that thrilled me to pieces.
The students took to this economy like fish to water. They loved it! It really helped them build stamina with becoming a scholar. The change in our classroom environment was pretty fantastic and we started being able to do work. It's challenging to work with multi age groups in the same room at the same time and this made that task easier. We used the program with grades 1-5 and the kids worked with each other. I'd be excited to see what we could do to build upon the program if I was at that school this year.

*note--I'm personally not a fan of providing extrinsic rewards (it took me 8 school years to even do so). However you have to do what you have to do to make it through the year and make things meaningful for students. This worked for me this past school year.