Gold Tickets

Ok, so I made these yesterday:

I totally sang "I've got a golden ticket" over and over again

Yeah, I'm not an artist.  Sorry.

I could not find laminating paper in any of my normal haunts so I am without it until I go shopping next.  The tickets are made from 3 pieces of yellow construction paper, gold foil stars, and I painted the "1" on with black paint and a stencil.  Easy peasy and I didn't have to buy a single thing.

I also made the reward chart so he knew what his tickets were worth.  For this I bought one sheet of large poster paper in the color of his choice.  It was $1.19.

I don't know why but I feel the need to explain why I chose these particular rewards.  The candy would be 1 small piece and I make the smallest ice cream servings ever, lol!  We would rent a movie on amazon on demand not go to the theater (I don't know how I would ever do that with the baby in tow anyway).  We have an annual zoo pass and children's museum pass so there is no extra cost associated in that for me.  So the only thing that really costs any money would be buying him a book or small toy but I don't see him saving his tickets that long anyway.  He was pretty eager to "spend" his 3 today.

I'm not 100% happy with the reward chart.  He can't read yet so I am not pleased that I wrote them instead of using pictures but I don't draw well enough to get my point across and I hadn't the time to find another way to convey what the rewards were.  I may re-make it when I have some more time.  I am thinking cutting out pictures from magazines or printing out some clip art from the computer (but I need ink for the printer, ugh).

We used this system for the whole day today with mixed results.  He is still getting the hang of the whole thing but he was very motivated to earn the tickets and beyond ecstatic when he was awarded one.  I let him earn 1 before bed last night and he earned 2 tickets today for a total of 3 in about 24 hours.

At the end of the day, he opted to spend them on an icecream.  At first though, he was thinking they were like real money and the darling child wanted to use one ticket for an ice cream for himself, one ticket for an ice cream for his sister, and then use the third ticket to buy a beer for his daddy.  Yep, a beer.  He knows his father well.  I melted a little knowing that he was willing to share his "money" so easily.  I almost gave him another ticket just for that.

Stay tuned, I'm doing my trial week still and will post on that and I need to work out how I feel about some other aspects of homeschooling.  I also want to do a cost estimate thus far.