Our refrigerator is covered in charts. Our counter has an envelope for chores and rewards. When did my life become governed by points, stickers, and x's? Jack's behavior at school hit a low point a couple weeks ago so I talked to his teacher about sending home daily, or as often as she could, notes about his behavior. These notes would translate to points on his chart. X's for red ticket, 25 pts for yellow ticket, and 50 pts for green. If he gets 4 X's before the school's movie night, they have movie night every other month, then he can't go. When he makes it to 500 points he gets $5.00. His behavior is doing better-not sure if it is related to the chart but as he has only gotten one red ticket since starting it I am not willing to take it down.
About a week after starting this chart I was realizing that all of the cleaning up in the house was being done by me. So basically I would straighten up all day and then at night the kids would have one more burst of playing energy, dump all the toys out, and then go to bed, leaving me to clean it all up on my own. I was not pleased. So I decided to try something out on Jack and if it worked on him modify it for Luke too. Since I didn't want another chart I just took an envelope cut it in half and wrote Jack's chores on one half and Jack's rewards on the other. Then I got construction paper folded it into eights and cut. On each piece I wrote a chore for Jack to complete during the week. They are things like: clear table and scrape off plates, make sure living room floor is clean before bed, and wipe off and clean up toothpaste from your bathroom sink. I didn't really want to pay him for doing basic chores and since his discipline chart has a financial component to it I came up with other ideas for his rewards. These are things like: you pick family movie night with no one (parents) using other electronic devices. *He also gets to pick the snack, go to Toys R Us and make Christmas list, go out with one parent to get ice cream, one hour playing with toys and you don't have to share or let your brothers anywhere near you, and going to the park or playground of your choice with parent of your choice. So he just reaches into the chores half and draws a chore. He if completes without whining or throwing a fit then on Sunday he gets to draw from the reward envelope. Repeat. So far it worked pretty well, the only thing was me carving out the time for his chore. Sometimes our nights are super rushed and so it is easier for me to do it, but that doesn't teach him responsibility and I may not mind one or two nights but long term I sure do. I think next week I will make Luke an envelope too.
Seeing that Jack had a chart and a chores system Luke wanted a chart. He also wanted to start wearing underwear so we made Luke a potty chart. Now we are just sort of going with whatever Luke wants. I think in the last 8 months Luke has decided he wants to use the potty every 2 months, and for about 2 weeks he is very serious about it then decides to go back to diapers. So even though this time there is a chart we aren't dead set on potty training him. We ask him every morning if today is a diaper day or an underwear day and he gets to pick. Still our chart allows 1 sticker for pee success, 2 stickers for poop success, and 3 stickers for no accidents. X is for the days he decides to just be a diaper boy. He likes picking out the stickers and putting them on the chart and in the last 8 days he has done about half diaper days and half underwear days. The days he picks underwear he is serious and goes to the bathroom no problems. He gets a sucker after every successful trip to the potty-- we define successful as nothing came out before he made it to the potty. He has a short term goal of 20 stickers in 11 days for a small prize and then the long term goal is 11 consecutive days of no accidents and a trip to Chuck E Cheese. We will see. I think he just wanted a chart.
On a side note-- Luke has worn his Incredible Hulk Costume everyday for the last week or two. He wears it to the playground, grocery store, pick up Jack from school, while watching tv, while running around the house, and to get frozen yogurt. He truly is Incredible Hulk and you better not tell him anything different.
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