M&M Geography

I've talked a lot about M&M geography, so I thought I'd put you out of your misery and explain it. It's my mother's idea, again, and very simple.

Break out a map, globe, atlas, or whatever you have handy.

Have her find a geographic region, feature, state, nation, body of water, etc. I always quiz Mi'ita on whichever area we are currently working on. We've been covering Egypt, Greece, and the Middle East, so I have had her find Macedonia, Troy, Suez Canal, Nile River, etc. etc. etc.

Give her a minute piece of candy for each correct answer. It's called M&M geography, but I let her choose whatever treat she likes. One candy bar survives several bouts of M&M geography, usually more than a week. Any time she wants some bad for her item, I make her work for it during M&M geography. She is on the chubby side, so I make her work very hard for her sugar.

Whenever we pick up her friend after school and have an hour to kill before we need to go to ballet, we've been doing M&M geography. They get really good very quickly.

Feeding the puppy

My daughter is ruled by her stomach. Dogs are, too. You train a dog with treats. I do the same with Mi'ita.

We have our nifty little point system to appeal to her greed.

We have our weekly goal and ice cream outing to appeal to her stomach.

The best ice cream parlor in town is a block away from the library. If Mi'ita meets her weekly goal, we get ice cream on the way back from our Monday library trip.

Weekly goal:

• 4 math exercises
• 4 Latin exercises
• All library books read completely if a picture book, or a chapter out of a longer book (she checks out, her own choice, one biography, one history book, one science book, one art book, one poetry book, one folktale/myth/legend, one novel, one nonfiction DVD, and one music CD)
  
• Guitar practiced every day (as soon as our lessons start)
• 1 completed writing with art posted on her blog
• 1 science project completed, experiment performed, or book read
  
• 1 history project completed or book read
  

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.