My peeps have caught a serious case of the Gimmies lately. As in, they think that toys and
stuff should just be purchased for them every day of the week for no other reason than that they are alive and breathing. Now, at 4 and 2, I think they're a tad too young for an allowance, but they're not too little to grasp the concept that you must work for what you want. Combine that principle with a few behaviors we would like to POSITIVELY reinforce, and I decided to give the Marble Jar a try.
I picked up this particular behavior management technique while student teaching in a first grade classroom. Any time the class as a whole did something deemed particularly worthy, one (or a few) student(s) would get to put a marble in the jar. There was something satisfyingly concrete about that clink, and it let everybody know that they were on the right track. I thought my two guys could use the same type of reassurance (plus marbles are super-fun to collect), so I hauled out a spaghetti sauce jar and let them plunk a few marbles in there for being especially cooperative during clean-up.
This marble jar has kind of helped me, too. I've gotten into a rut lately of punishing the bad behaviors without recognizing the good behaviors. Needless to say, that wasn't a very successful approach. Now we have a goal.
We want to earn a trip to the Parthenon of Pizza, the Temple of Skee Ball: Chuck E. Cheese's. Sarah and Will decided on this goal over the weekend, and, lo and behold,
Delia Creates is giving away a $100 gift card! We could take some friends with us and
really make it rain in that preschooler's paradise.
I think we might need a slightly smaller jar or run the risk of losing our focus...
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| She prefers to worship Chuck from afar. |
I know I've blogged about our first-ever trip to Mr. Cheese's
here, and I can't wait to do a follow-up, now that my guys are seasoned pros.
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