go figure

Sunny has done really well with her schoolwork the past 3 weeks - she's not enthusiastic about math but at least she's doing it without a lot of griping, and her other work is done fairly early in the day. She's even reminding me that it's "time to start school." I've been trying all year to get us on a 10 am start time and it's never worked until, oh, now. The other day, she came into the kitchen wearing her backpack and asked if it was time to start school. Nope, she still had 2 minutes. The next day, right at 10, I was upstairs taking care of the baby, and Sunny started yelling from downstairs that it was time to start school. Who are you, and what have you done with my daughter?

The secret? Candy.

Seriously. Sunny will do her schoolwork for candy. I never buy it but the girls got a good substantial amount from trick-or-treat on Halloween. I counted out how many days of school we had left until Thanksgiving, tacked on a bunch more to try to get us closer to that ever-elusive 180, and Sunny chose that many pieces of candy from the Halloween stash. They were put in a ziplock bag as her "school candy." (I did count out candy for the other girls as well, even though they don't have official work that has to be done. Basically, when Sunny gets a piece, everyone does.) I mapped out her assignments for the rest of the year - mainly her math and language because those are the challenge with her - and for every day of schoolwork that she finishes, she gets a piece of candy. If she does double work, she gets two pieces. And stunningly, she has done double work about twice a week since the beginning of the month. WOW! If she complains - this is boring or stupid, or just that she doesn't want to do it - she loses the candy for the day.

And this is working. After so much not working with her, I'm kind of in shock that something is finally getting through to her.

I'm not a fan of using candy or any kind of junk food as a reward, especially on a daily basis. But it's candy we have in the house anyway - this way, they get to eat their Halloween candy but it's rationed out in small doses, and they're fine with that.

And apparently Sunny needs daily incentives to get through her work, rather than weekly or longer. She loves getting new books, but that incentive plan only lasts a week at a time and there's still a ton of complaining. It looks like we're going to get through the entire month with minimal complaining and even some double-work days with the candy. Huh. I need to think about how to handle this in January when the Halloween candy is gone ...