Twins!!

This is a picture of my favorite set of twins (they are tied with another set I have at another school though :)). They are in the 2nd grade. They are making a surprisingly goofy pose but usually they are very serious and well-behaved in class and very, very sweet. Their English level is really not very high, but they are always participating and trying really hard so I can forgive them. They always want to be the leaders on their team! They have the right attitude and I think they will do very well in life.

So in this class, there are several very good students in addition to them, and at the end of the year I am only able to give out 3 English awards. This is making me nervous in every class, and especially in this class. I really want to give them an award, but if I gave it to both of them that would only leave one slot for another student! And their English is not THAT great...there are other students in the class with better English. So my idea was to just give them one, shared award, if they could understand that it was meant as such, even though it would only have one name on it. I didn't want one twin to think that I only thought one of them deserved the award....! I knew they would not be able to understand me, so I grabbed one of my 2nd graders with suuuch good English and asked him to translate, he told me he would try! The twins were so sweet of course and readily agreed to it. The both said they would write the other brother's name on it.

I was sort of thinking about bringing up a bunch of the good students in my other classes and just letting them work out themselves who deserves the award...because I think I am incapable of choosing only 3 out of 55 kids per class!!!!! In some classes, I think this strategy would work. Sometimes when I am giving stickers out a student will tell me that another kid should get the sticker instead of them, or the students will help me choose who did the best in the class to give the stickers to. However, some of my other classes are just way too competitive...there's going to be a lot of crying about this....ahhhhh!!! I can't stand having to do this, and I'm totally just going to go by my gut...how can I make criteria for this?!?