Seriously, my kids are good kids but you know there are those times that I feel as if I'm losing my mind. "How many times do I have to tell you to do that?" "You really think this room is CLEAN?" "We have to go, NOW. No, I cannot wait one second, you've had 45 minutes!" So, you see what I'm saying? The kids have been struggling in the area of keeping up with responsibilities. Mama has been struggling to find effective consequences for infractions......enter Class Dojo.My daughter's teacher is using this in her classroom and sent an email home explaining how she is using it there. The system is designed for teachers, however, I could see the advantages of using it at home so I set up my own home classroom.
Everyone will have different ways of setting up their home or classroom. I'm not going to bore you with all the details of how we work this system. If you want the details, let me know and I'll be happy to share them with you. The basics are that they get points for positive things and lose points for negative things. You can use their suggestions, add to, or take away from what they have. My kids get points for clean rooms, homework done, chores, hard work, being helpful, kindness, etc. The idea is I don't want to just reward them for what they have to do, I also want to catch them doing positive things and reward that behavior as well. The flip side is that they also lose points for things like being late, disobedience, disrespect of others, fighting, whining, etc. I don't argue, I just take away a point. Each child has to earn or maintain a certain number of points by Friday in order to be able to participate in weekend activities other than family activities.
I'm not telling you that it's perfect and we are not fussing at all. My kids are still learning the ropes and figuring all this out. However, I went to Walmart with them today and didn't feel like I needed to drink heavily when I left. LOL This is a GREAT accomplishment! :)
