Self managing children and sane parents
reasons for doing it:
- -teach children to plan their week
- -de stress mom/primary homeschooler from having to worry about what the kids every day
- -give the mom/primary homeschooler time
- -teach children responsibility
- -give the primary homeschooler the ability to visualize the week
- -managing the kids expectations
what you will need
- -a wall
- -post it notes, 4 colors
- -2 hours on a Sunday
- -everyone involved. including the father
how it works
-primary homeschooler(in this case its mom) writes a card for every activity that the kids have to do that week. 1 activity per card. The back of the card has the acceptance criteria for that card. for example, each you're not finished your math work if there is more than 2 mistakes per page.
note: the key to this part is that the mother is talking while writing. this is meant to be a conversation, not a quiet ativity.
note: each child has a different color post it note.
-write & explain every trip that the the kids are plannig on doing this week on a separate color.
-ask each child which items that want to "accept" into that week. there will be a conversation around why they dont want to do those items. they only take items that they want to do for that week. (kind of unschooling)
-ask each child if there is anything *they* want to during the week. add any items they want to do.
note: at this point there may be allot of stuff. that is ok.
-put it all together.
- put the days at the top
- put the trips that the kids are going to do
- now tell the kids to take their activities and put it on the day that they plan finish it on. encourage them to talk through their thought process. if they decide to do everything on the first day to get their "work" overwith, talk them through this. at this point, you will probably need to "split" items into smaller items. this is reaaaaaly important. you are teaching your children how to break down big items. if the child is younger you might need to pre size the activity into bight size chunks
day 0
we setup the board and a surprising thing happened. it was sunday night around 8pm when we finished, and they both insisting on starting right away.
day 1
we woke up to our daughter sitting at our foot of the bed saying she wanted to start the.
my older son broke down
week 1: mixed results
- +kids did allot of work sunday monday
- +the kids new what the week ahead would be like and were part of the planning
- -didnt do much work tuesday wednesdsay, thursday
- -cards on the floor became unruley
- -items were to big, we didnt teach the kids how to split items into management chuncks
- -only did the easy stuff
- +removed reward as insentive
- - too much stuff, parents got over excited, setup the kids to fail, less items going forward
week 2 improvements:
- -cards hung up
- -introduced points systems
- -daily hulk
- -more coaching from parents on how to manage the week
- -introduced goal graph
- -introduced behavior penalties
- -gave the kids less to do, setting up to succeed
- -introduction of the wildcard
- -observation-: son did all the easy tasks. hard tasks remained on undone for 2 weeks in a row
- -waiting untill monday to setup the weekly board. bad practice, shoud stick to the ritual. not sure why but it felt wrong to delay it
week 3 improvements
- -introduction of character points(similar to harry potter)
- -observation: daughter much better at single tasking than son. son starts many things at once
- -introduction of wip limits to help teach yusuf to finish task
- -observation: yusuf did no work for 2 days while he was racing though harry potter. areeg is losing patience with him and insitisted that he do some work. broke the rule of not telling him to do anything.
- -trips, trips, trips are really hurting the cadence in my opinion