I piled the kids in the car and forked over a few bucks for raffle tickets and pumped up the program to my son. It was recommended, in the book that I read, to throw in some theater or use your cheerleader voice (depending on what kind of person you were in high school, I guess)
Me: “Ethan, We are going to try something new!”
Ethan: (suspiciously) “What kind of new thing?”
Me: “We are going to get tickets for doing great stuff and you can earn awesome things for going to school and doing your chores.”
Ethan: (still suspicious) “What kind of things?”
Me: “Oh, whatever kinds of things you like … games, movies, ice cream … ”
Ethan: “I like Wii games”
Me: “Well, that might be something you could work towards, but um, those are a lot of money … but we can try! Rah Rah Sis Boom Bah! Gooo Team!
That is all it took to get him on board. We sat down and put together a list of activities that I wanted him to do around the house and a list of his rewards. We used a recycled coffee container for official ticket storage and worked all day the next day on putting together a fabulous chart of activities that he could do.
Ethan’s chart is a picture chart, since he is not reading just yet. I pulled all of the images from Microsoft’s clip art collection. Ethan picked each of the pictures and we cut them out, mounted them on cardboard, and wrote number values in the corners of each picture. I have to say, we were both pretty proud with the finished product.
Ethan has one page of things he has to do to earn tickets and two pages of awesome rewards. We have them hanging on the refrigerator and he has been checking it and counting tickets like nuts for the past two days.
Earn Tickets:
Going to School Nicely = 3 tickets
Make My Bed = 1 ticket
Put breakfast dishes in the sink = 1 ticket
Pick up toys before bed = 3 tickets
Go to Bed Nicely = 1 ticket
Feed the cat = 1 ticket
Help Mommy With Laundry = 3 tickets
PREVIOUS PAGE
