Do you use rewards and incentives in your schooling? What are they? I recently started something with my older son, Beau, that he is loving! Every week that he does his school work, he gets to go to a local thrift store and buy a couple of new books! (The guy who owns this has 20,000+ books in his store and he has organized it like a library!)They are 50 cents a book and so this is extremely fair pricing, and maybe...I can pick out a romance book for me too...lol! What kinds of things do you guys do?
My son is young so he needs more immediate rewards. He absolutely loves doing little science experiments so I use that. When we start working on our short little lessons for the day, I show him an example of the fun science experiment we will do if he obeys and works hard that day. Works like a charm!
We use a marble jar. For every lesson that my daughter completes without fighting over she gets to put one marble in the jar. She usually gets to put in 4 to 5 marbles a day in the jar. Once the jar is filled I have a basket full of goodies from the dollar store, coloring books, journals and things like that. Plus my daughter loves necklaces so when I see a necklace on clearance at walmart or some place like that, I will buy it and put it in the basket also. My daughter loves the surprise of finding new things in the basket just as much as getting a new thing. This system works great for us so far. But I know as she gets older the items will have to get a little more pricey.
I love the idea of a treasure chest, or reward basket! I wonder if that will; work for Paddy? We are still looking for incentives for him, yet. Thanks for the ideas! We had tried Behavior Bucks in the past, but the kids never understood that it wasn't real money and that they couldn't buy things with it, so we scrapped it. Oh well! It works great for my friend's kids, so to each their own I guess! Kids are so different!
We'd use stickers instead of marbles, but it was a similar principle. They'd get to choose a sticker and put it in their sticker book for good work, and if they had a certain number by the end of the week, they'd get to come with us to the library to choose books. If not, I'd go without them and choose books for them, which is of course never as good as them choosing the books themselves. Now they're a bit older we don't really use stickers anymore though, but use more distant rewards like being allowed to play a computer game (educational of course!) in an hour. We've never really used incentives explicitly... Never said "If you do A then you'll get B". They know that hard work is recognised with stickers/etc. but we never try to bribe them to do things, because kids are quick learners and otherwise eventually they'd want a bribe for everything.
I take this idea from when I taught K/1; if my kids have been working hard and have had good attitudes I will set a half day or all day where we do a read-a-thon- they stay in their pj', set up sleeping bags in the living room and they choose books to read to each other, to their self, and I join in and we have popcorn. I have also done a game-a-thon too- same idea just with games- and get some good math and strategy games in there. The kids love this! It's just a nice way to keep us excited and do something a little different. And we also do the used book store often too! =)
I call mine bribes. LOL My daughter LOVES Subway; she HATES math. So, the deal is that if she does well on her math [a 'C' or higher] every day, then she can have Subway on Saturday. This also has a negative consequence in that if she doesn't do well [i.e. fails], then she loses game time until she's able to bring the grade up to passing. My son doesn't really require incentives as he's highly competitive. He literally cries if he doesn't make an A on his math. However, he gets to partake of the Subway food if his sister keeps her grades up all week.
You can also teach math skills by graphing their scores. I've done that with timed math tests, and also with teaching ABC's. We would graph how many were right. I had a thick, green line drawn on the graph at the score they were aiming for, and if they got to the line for three days in a row, they got a prize of scme kind. I showed one boy's graph to his mom during the parent conference. The next day, I received a note from her. When she got home, the first thing he did when she got home was to ask all excited, "Did Ms. K show you how close I'm getting to my line?"
I have a chart for each kid that hangs on the front wall next to the whiteboard, divided into 36 weeks for each subject. If they pass a chapter/unit with a decent score they get to put a sticker on that subject for that week. If they flunk a chapter/unit, the sticker is all black (I color over the ones I'm not crazy about with a black Sharpie). Sort of a visual "attaboy" more than anything else. "Ah! Good score! Come get your sticker." Lately I've been using a weekly chart near my desk, where they get a sticker for every assignment completed. If they get a certain number for the week, they get to "grab bag" in a box of mixed trinkets I got from Oriental Trading. I'm sorry to say this isn't having the desired effect (increasing number of assignments done)... :\ In over a month, I've only been able to give away one prize, and that was to my 8th grader.
We have a treasure chest. There are coupons in it for .25, 1/2 of a webkinz, movie night, lunch out.... all sort of different things. I also find items at Five Below that I will occassionally stick in there. Dd earns them by 5 days of getting Math done in under an hour or when she has a period of time where she does not complain or get upset over school work (she will occassionally flip out if she cannot understand something immediately or if she gets items wrong.) I will also use it if I see she has done something especially good or nice just to reinforce the behavior.
I have been a mom for almost 20 years and still can't figure out how I feel on this topic. I always want my children to do right because it is right not because they are going to get something for it, but at the same time... well I just don't know. I have been looking into these books however, and there are some neat ideas. http://behaviorboosters.com/dnn/Books/tabid/55/Default.aspx The idea behind them seems to be not that you reward positive behavior with prizes, but just reinforce positive behavior by noticing.
I started to type this, walked away and never came back to it. My incentive is, they do their work, they get to live. LOL!!! JUST KIDDING!!!! My oldest and youngest really do not respond to incentive or punishment. My middle - does. For him, if he finishes his schoolwork by 2:00 p.m. he gets time on the computer. If he does not. He doesn't. Period. Two days in a row, no computer, no TV. Three days in a row, no computer, no TV, all legos removed from his room (and that is substantial) and remain gone for one week. We have NEVER EVER gotten to the Lego step. Some days I offer grace because the workload was much heavier, because we had lots of other things going on (doc appts, etc.), or he's sick and really trying to work through his work. BUT...for the most part the 2:00 rule sticks.
Read-a-thon and treasure chest from the dollar store!! I love those ideas!! Ahem, here is my own: we have coupons, any good deed gets a coupon. 20 coupons by the end of the week = xbox on the weekends. They can also use the coupons for other things, and it usually works
Yup, I use prizes, too. I use a print out of a marble jar with 100 marbles in it. Each kid gets one. I randomly color in 3 dots. Each completed assignment gets one dot colored in, When they reach one of the colored dots, they get a prize valued at 5.00. When they fill in the whole thing, they get a more expensive prize up to 15.00. My kids don't get a weekly allowance so this is exciting for them.
