Back to the books

We're easing back into the books. Jetlag is doing both of us a number, but more so for me. Come noon I feel like I've been poleaxed and need to sleep for several hours. Mia doesn't need to nap, but she's been very irregular in her sleeping schedule.

While we were gone, the only math I had Mia do was figuring out money. I figured that converting dollars to dongs, dollars to bahts, and dongs to bahts was enough math for anyone. She had an allowance to spend, figured in dollars and then converted, and she was always helping me figure out how much things cost. I had a cheat sheet that was absolutely necessary for me, but Mia could often figure things out without it.

Yesterday I had her review her Latin flashcards and do some long division. Today I had her take a math test to see how much math she had forgotten.

She knows how to do long division, our current lessons. She has forgotten how to do long multiplication, which is required to check her long division. She had 18 problems to do and it took over an hour. She has some catching up to do, for sure. Tomorrow we'll review long multiplication. I don't think it will take long for her to get back up to speed.

We need to do some writing, too. I've never really taught writing before and I feel like I've been floundering a bit. Yes, I can require her to write, get her to do a cohesive paragraph about some topic, and help her edit her work. I don't really feel like that's enough, though. This trip has been eye opening in that area. The two boys that were on the tour with us had to write journal logs, too. One was a year older and one was a year younger and both of them were vastly superior in their writing abilities. I listened to their parents working with them. They required quite a bit more from them--more volume of work, more variety of writing styles, better vocabulary usage, etc. I pumped up my expectations for Mia in response to that and got nowhere really fast. She mutinied. We ended up eliminating the journal entries in favor of daily emails to her father. That was vastly more popular, but not as easy as it sounds. Computers were not always available and we had not a few computer problems on the way.

Needless to say, we need to get back to writing. I had bought a writing curriculum way back when we first started homeschooling, but had abandoned it when we stopped the classical method in favor of freeschooling. During our musing for our mission statement, writing came back as an essential skill that needs to be a part of our curriculum. The Daddy required Mia to read two newspaper articles a week and do a summary of them. I required Mia to do journal entries on the other days. The articles and summaries are still good skills. I want to continue that. I think the journal writing isn't enough, though. I'm sticking Mia back into that writing curriculum today to see how that works.

But we'll skip Latin today. We're just easing back into the swing of things.

Nifty Little Point System

Would you go to work every day if you didn't get paid?

Some people would, of course, because they love their job, but I think even those people would modify a few things. They'd quit doing the obnoxious parts, shift their schedule, work fewer hours. And a lot of us wouldn't darken the doorway again.

We tell children that school is their job, but they don't get paid.

Now we get into the muddy water of instrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. If children are paid for learning with money or points or good grades, they stop loving to learn and they work for the money, points, or grades. Lots of studies show that extrinsic motivation is detrimental to learning. Lots of other studies show that it is effective at behavior modification.

Even though I know the limitations of extrinsic motivation, I'm doing it. I give Mi'ita points for doing her schoolwork. The behavior part of it is much more important to me than the work part. I give her double points for doing things with a good attitude. To try to reduce the complaints, I give her an extra point every time she says, "Okay, Mom."

I'm not looking for complete compliance; I want cheerful learning.

Mi'ita gets a dime for each point. She has earned as little as 7 points in a day and as much as 25. At the end of the week we tally it all and I pay up.

She doesn't get to keep it all, though. She pays $1 to the local pet shop for crickets for her lizard. The rest is divided three ways. A third is cash she gets to blow. A third is put into savings that she gets to spend once she has earned $20. The last third goes into her college fund.

It's money management. It teaches her to save up for something that she wants. It teaches her that pets are expensive and that she needs to think before she adopts. There's some real life math involved. It helps me focus on one behavior that I want to change at a time.

It works.