Have you ever read Mary Pride’s column about math and how rewarding it is and how there’s a natural reward blah, blah, blah. . . (trying not to poke fork in own eye!) But she’s dead serious. And if you can pull the fork out of your eye long enough to read the whole article you’ll see that she gets real at one point and says to give actual rewards; tangible, sweet, chocolaty rewards to kids (for a time) to help kids along in the horrid drill part of Math.
This is where I’m at today. I needed one Cowboy to stop saying how hard it is and how he hates it, and I needed another Cowboy to keep his nose to the grind-stone and just do the work.
Then lightning flashed in my brain and I put these gripes together with the inventory of my fridge, and guess what I came up with?
Math Manipulatives!
And by “manipulative” I mean these chocolate chips will manipulate my kids into getting serious about math.
It started out kinda mild. I had to morph a game intended for a whole class of students and make it work for 2 kids. The motivation suggested in the book was that if you got your answer wrong on your turn then you had to sit down. Oh the shame! Well, my kids think of that as being off the hook, so I knew I had to come up with something else.
Ta-da! Break out those chocolate chips, and off we go.
If you can’t tell, it’s a little grid with 9 numbers on it. You point to 2 numbers at a time and your brother or sister adds them in their head and hollers out the answer and then both kids eat a chocolate chip in celebration!
This was surprisingly exciting and MOTIVATING!
After that was all over I realized that Rowdy was really not making any progress with his page of problems. It wasn’t that it was too hard or that he was having a bad attitude about it. He just lacked perseverance. He was allowing himself to get distracted by.any.little.thing. Made me wanna reach for the forks!
Then I had another lightening flash!
I got out a condiment cup and filled it with chocolate chips. I said to the boy, “You may have this cup and it’s contents when you are done with your math. BUT, every time I see or hear you not doing math I am gonna eat one of those chocolate chips. Any pencil tapping, paper fiddling, humming, singing . . . anything. I will eat one of those chocolate chips. But when you’re finally done you can have whatever is left, if any.”
That got his attention!
I figured it’s win-win for me. I either get a finished math assignment or a bunch of chocolate chips. I’ve never come up with a more productive “manipulation” than this. I only got one chocolate chip. Rowdy finished in record time!
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