Make Time For It: August 2014

Sunday, August 24, 2014

Project Kindness

Sociologists like to say that most laws are made to remedy a specific and chronic problem. That is how Project Kindness came about this morning. Yesterday my oldest was nasty to just about every kids he came across, including his brother. This is not acceptable at home, at parties, and certainly not at school. To help him remedy his errors I decided he would perform one act of kindness for every person he had hurt the day before:

1. Donate cans/ bottles to rescue mission
2. Collect and ornate clothes/ books/ toys to the rescue mission
3. Make and deliver homemade doggie treats to Helping Hounds Animal Shelter
4. Write a "Stickie" to each of the people he had hurt

He also missed out on going to the Fair. At first I wasn't sure if it would be enough, but we had such fun coming up with ways that we could complement others and serve our community. It was a great experience and one that I hope to be able to repeat each month.

Doggie Biscuit Recipe

1 cup peanut butter

1 cup milk

1 tbsp baking powder

2 cups whole wheat flour

Combine wet ingredients in a bowl, dry ingredients in another, then mix together. Roll out dough to 1/4 inch and cut out in shapes. Cook at 375 for 20 min.

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Preschool Task Chart

Up till now I have been using an arbitrary "worker bee" system with my 4 year old, where when he does something good he gets a sticker on one of his bees, and when the bees are all filled in he gets a prize. I put this in place right after his 3rd birthday with 10 bees and eventually raised it to 20. It's been working quite well, but recently I noticed that he was going too fast and filling in all 20 worker bees in a few days. Know what that means? Time for a new system!

So I considered starting him on a base-4 system given his age, but it would be very confusing to have two different amounts for the same number of points. I simply kept his chart at a base-6 but with a lower expectation of potential. So his true potential would be 24 points over the course of 5 days, while my 7 year olds is 42 points over 8 days.

We worked together to come up with the tasks that he should be expected to do. Most of them he was already doing but we added a few more.

Since I am keeping them both on the points systems most of the things he works toward now have a point value instead of a monetary value. For instance a lightsaber was worth 80 points, and a trip to Check E Cheese is worth 60. I will keep trying to insert the diagram of the updated chart below, but right now the file is not cooperating :/