Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Earning Privileges

   I mentioned yesterday taking advantage of some of the ideas from when my husband was a youth counselor.  Besides writing lines for discipline the other thing we decided to implement was earning privileges.

   You earn a grade for your behavior three times a day (or however many you choose).  We simply made a chart that says morning, afternoon and evening.  It's then divided into two columns, one for attitude and one for responsibilities.  It simply says responsibilities because those may change everyday and I don't want to list a million things.  Mainly, are you doing what you're suppose to be doing and with a good attitude??  They earn an A, B, C, D or E and the grades are worth points (4,3,2,1,0).  You can use the points for many different things.  We add them up and divide by what's possible to get a percentage.  There are certain things you cannot do if you don't have a high enough percentage.  We added a bigger kicker to it that we will take a weekly average for "video game Saturday" and their monthly percentage is how much of their allowance they get.  It sounds complicated but so far it has been very simple.

   Right now three times a day works well for school time, afternoon time with friends and family/bed time.  In the summer maybe we'll just do two times a day.  I'm not sure but for some reason this has clicked well for us.  It seems when we had chore trackers and such we'd forget to do them but attitude is easy to remember to keep in check.  We will still use our "Blessing Chart" to encourage the positive actions but this has helped us address behavior.

  It's been a great encourager for our kids.  They are really excited to maintain an A all day.  I'd like to think up some sort of reward in the evening for a really great day but I'm not sure yet what that will be.  We'll see how long we keep up with this.  Sometimes we have grand intentions and no follow through.  With this they will ask where they are for a grade often.  So for now... we'll run with it.

Sometimes changing up discipline ideas or even how we praise our kids can really get their attention.  Are there any changes you can make for the better??

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