I'm Back

I hope you all enjoyed the wonderful and busy holiday season. I know we certainly did!
It was great to have Peter at home for 5 days at Christmas time and for another 4 during New Year's.

We celebrated Christmas 4 times and got to see all of our family. Then, we celebrated New Year's at home with just our family, some Papa Murphy's pizza and a crazy-awesome 2 hour dance party in the dark living room. Complete with flash lights, glow snowballs, and finger lights, of course :).

And, since it's been a few weeks, obviously I have some new pictures to share.

The boys and I spend our days off from school keeping busy. We cleaned the house and brought a whole van load over to Goodwill, we visited the MN Zoo, and also Edinborough indoor park.

Brady playing basketball at Edinborough Park

Homeschool Organization I finally found Marshall a bin to match Brady and Logan's!

Behavior Incentive

I started the Naughty and Nice bin idea almost 2 years ago. This has definitely been the longest that I have stuck to a behavior incentive program yet. I purchased the blue baskets (sold as a pack of 2) at the Dollar Tree and I also purchased the pack of plastic coins there. Since the coins only come in 2 colors, I just used a Sharpie to write B, L, and M on each of them.
This is how it works.
At the start of each week, each boy has 5 coins in the "Nice" basket. When someone chooses to disobey or act disrespectfully, I will give them a warning that they may lose a coin. If the behavior doesn't change, then one of their coins will move to the "Naughty" basket.
At the end of the week, which is usually Friday or Saturday night, we check to see who still has at least 1 coin in the "Nice" basket.
If you do, then you get to choose a reward from the list pictured. There are also more choices on the back side of this index card. We refer to this as our "cash in".
This system has worked very well for our family, because the boys are able to see very easily how they are doing each day.
We have even, at times, found ways to earn our coins back, by being extra nice or helpful.

This is my teacher spot at the kitchen island. Candle burning, hot coffee waiting, and math teacher guides and answer keys ready for correcting.

Logan was working on his new build a car set from Christmas.

All Done!

Marshall was playing with Cra Z Sand!

And Brady, was working on building his new bridge and train track set. It's coming along very nicely.
 

You may notice that my boys seem to be in their pajamas a lot in our pictures. Well, because of this awful and extremely cold weather we've been having, we did have 3 pajama days this week :).

1pm Friday, January 9. The boys are snuggled up by the fire, eating popcorn, and watching the Lego movie