Student prizes (each student earns their own)
"Read 500 minutes, get a fidget spinner." Every student earns their own.
A student prize is something each student earns on their own when they reach a number. "Read 500 minutes, get a fidget spinner." When a student crosses the line, the teacher gets a heads-up so they can hand out the prize.
That's different from school rewards, which unlock for everyone when the whole school hits a number. Student prizes are about each student racing themselves.
Setting up a prize
From your dashboard sidebar, click Student prizes. With no prizes yet, we suggest three reading tiers sized to your campaign's length; or click Add a student prize.
Name the prize, choose how students win it, pick whether it's counted by money they raise or minutes they read, and set the amount. Give it a specific name: "Fidget spinner" gets a student more excited than "small toy."
Higher tiers stack — a student who reads 1,500 minutes earns both the 500-minute prize and the 1,500-minute one. And if a student has already passed the line when you add a new prize, they earn it right away.
Have a kind of prize in mind that PagePledge doesn't offer? Email us a feature request. The same link is under your list of prizes.
Two or three prizes is plenty
One that almost everyone can reach, one that's a stretch, and one that's a real achievement. Any more and it gets confusing; any fewer and motivation drops once kids clear the first one.
Top student prizes
Choose Top student under "How students win it" to give a prize to the student who reads the most minutes (or raises the most money). Under "Who competes", pick Each class for a winner in every classroom, Each division for one winner per division, or Whole school for a single winner. Set each classroom's division on its Edit page. Want both a top reader and a top fundraiser? Add two prizes.
- Ties all win. If two students finish tied for first, both get the prize.
- Winners are final when the campaign finishes. Until then, teachers and the prize report show the current leader. Parents only see their own child's place, never another student's name, and teachers only see names from their own class.
- Minimum to qualify defaults to 1, so a class where nobody logged anything has no winner. Raise it if you want the prize to take real effort.
Once the campaign finishes, each winner shows up on their teacher's prize tracker with a printable certificate, ready to hand out.
Prize draws
Choose Prize draw to give students one entry for every so many minutes read (or dollars raised). After reading ends, open the Prize report and draw a winner — from the whole school, or one draw per grade band by choosing classrooms. To draw a winner in each division, set "Draw winners from" to Each division; the prize report then has a draw button for every division. You can draw early, but entries keep growing until reading ends.
Removing a prize removes its history
If students have already earned a prize, removing it also deletes their record of earning it and any draw winners. The remove button tells you how many before it asks. Once anyone has earned a prize, how it's won can't change.
Earning vs. handing out
We track these as two separate steps so prizes don't slip through the cracks. The moment a student crosses the line, they've earned the prize — but a teacher still needs to mark it as actually handed out in real life. Until they do, the student stays on the teacher's prize tracker as "waiting." See Handing out student prizes.
Once a student earns a prize, they keep it
Even if a teacher undoes a reading log that pushed a student past the line, the prize stays earned. Pulling a "you earned it!" announcement back from a child is the wrong move. (If you genuinely need to clear one — say, a duplicate by accident — email hello@pagepledge.com and we'll help.)
Tracking who's earned what
Click Prize report on the Student prizes page to see every prize broken down by classroom — who's earned each one, who's still waiting, and who's been handed it. Teachers see the same for their own class on their prize tracker.