Remembering Summer School

Sometimes I get these hair-brained ideas about learning a lot in the summer. This last summer we used m friend's Golden Ticket idea and added some other ideas to it. Here's how it works:

After you

1. get ready for the day

2. eat and clean your room

3. do a cleaning job

4. participate in school

then you get a golden ticket, which means you are free to watch TV or play computer. But in order to buy computer time you need to earn fun passes (I know, complicated huh).

Here's how you get 1 fun pass (worth 10 minutes). Any one of these things is worth 1 pass.

• play outside for 30 minutes
• play anything else inside for 1 hour
• read for 30 minutes
• play a game for 30 minutes
• create something for 30 minutes
• do extra cleaning for 20 minutes (generous huh)
• 1 pass for each assignment accomplished at school
  

Also, there was such a pestering about having late nights with friends every single night that I charged the kids 10 fun passes for 1 late night--it worked!

It only lasted the first month of summer since we were only consistently home then.

The one problem was that at least one child (who will remain nameless) consistently forgot to turn in his passes before playing computer and I frequently found them (the passes) scattered all around the house. So I started picking them up and putting them away which resulted in many tears and exclamations of "I had 28 fun passes and now I only have 4." Maybe a little too much refereeing of fun passes on my part. Maybe next year will try a chart. The thing that was great about the passes was that I didn't have to answer that never ending question, "mom, can I play the computer" or be the bad guy because "no" is my usual answer to that question. Instead the kids learned to monitor their own playing and couldn't really play more than an hour a day, unless they really did a lot of other mind using activities.