Homeschooling Mom

With only one month of schooling under her belt, Alene has already learned the art of delay and slow down to avoid her least favorite subjects. She earned frowns on three of last week's four school days. I am pleased to see that she doesn't like to receive frowns on her pages, but so far, that hasn't motivated a change in her behavior.

Follow up:

Then I remembered something that her Kindergarten class at church does to organize the kids as they come into church each morning. Knowing they will have between 25 and 50 5 year olds for an hour, they have 6 small classrooms off the main Kindergarten worship area. Each classroom has a different activity, and is color coded. The purple room has blocks. The blue room is table games. The yellow room is computers. There is also a video room and a cooking room. As the kids come in, they get to choose a ticket from the board and put it in the envelope for the room they want to go to. When a room is full, there are no more tickets of that color.

How does this help Alene do her unpleasant tasks? Ah, this is the fun part, because she actually wants to organize her week this way. We are going to make a ticket board with all her weekly activities printed out on separate tickets. There will be a pocket for each school day, and she will get to choose a ticket at a time to accomplish. At six tickets a day, four learning activities and two fun activities, she will be able to plan her week out as she goes. If she does all the fun topics first, the end of her week will be really long. If she does a few harder classes with some really fun ones each day, school will be more pleasant for her.

Of course there are a few ground rules about what she can choose and when. That is part of how the board will be organized. A row of tickets for the academic classes will be separate from a row with Arts and also from the row with fun rewards. The daily envelopes will be at the bottom. She will get to choose three academic tickets, one Arts and two rewards each day.

Think it will work?