Thursday, April 09, 2009

Reward charts

Soliciting advice on reward charts. We want to do one for Lily (3.5 years old) but we need ideas.

We have 2 main issues:
a) Getting dressed in the morning
b) Listening during bedtime routine (putting on pajamas, going potty, brushing teeth, going to bed)

How many stars (or marbles, or whatnot) should Lily receive before her reward? Should it be a number that she can easily count to? If so, should we have 2 types of rewards...5 stars=picnic or a small toy and 15 stars=trip to mall for carousel ride? Do we take away stars/marbles for bad behavior? Or only reward good behavior?

Comments are open for discussion!

2 comments:

Heather said...

I like the five-star small, fifteen-star big reward approach of the choices you've outlined. In my experience taking away stars/stickers for bad behavior didn't work because the "punishment" was too hard for the bug to understand--she lost something she'd already won a long time ago so it didn't click. It worked a lot better for me to say "Well, because you did X you do not get a sticker today," so the stickers were privileges to be earned. I think the good stuff she does isn't erased by the bad stuff, I guess.

Staci said...

I agree with Heather. We've had a lot of trouble sticking with a reward chart just because I get distracted and forget to give the stickers/marbles, but we've had success with it a couple times. I like small prizes and larger ones to work toward. Or we've done things with marbles where, once a week, the kids can "buy" prizes, and the prizes have different values, so if they were very good, they can "buy" larger prizes than if they were only moderately good. But everyone gets something so long as she's earned some marbles.