Marshmallow Motivation

About a month ago, we had a FHE lesson on Laman and Lemuel from our new Ites book.  Seriously, that could be a whole blog post in itself.  But I'll just sing it's praises here.  It's a book from Deseret that we got for Christmas from Sarah and Tyson.  I had seen it on the Deseret website previously and made a note that I wanted to get it, and miraculously we got it for Christmas and I LOVE it!  It has 52 characters or groups of characters from the Book of Mormon with descriptions about who they were, what they did, lessons to be learned from their example (good or bad) and an activity.  There's 52 so you can plan an FHE lesson for each week with it.  It's illustrated awesomely and each one is short enough to keep the kids attention and they're excited to do it.  LOVE it.  

Anyway, the lesson on Laman and Lemuel talked about murmuring (no surprise there) and we also talked about how it seems easy or habitual to murmur in a family especially.  That Nephi's brothers were the ones that gave him the hardest time.  Not hard to relate to.  The activity associated with the lesson talked about keeping a jar in the house that you can fill with pennies or candy, keeping track of positivity and kindness.  We decided to use marshmallows and we have 3 jars.  One is labelled wave pool, one is labelled movies, and one is labelled bowling. 

 Well, after a long haul, we finally filled the bowling jar last night.  (that was partially due to combining the contents of the bowling and wave pool jars - Lucy was aiming for wave pool and the boys were aiming for bowling but she graciously donated so we could reach one of our goals), and there were a few last minute 'chores' after school to top it off.  

So last night we finally went bowling.  It was a great evening out.  We pretty much had the alley to ourselves, which worked great for a sleeping Seth, and it was awesome to see the results of hard work.  The kids have worked really hard.  Logan has tried extra hard to get reverent for family prayers quickly (something that was a trial previously), Max is ALWAYS quick to help, so it was good to reward him for his naturally helpful behaviour, and Lucy struggled a bit to earn any marshmallows, but definitely contributed once she got into the spirit of it.  She was a bit unmotivated because we weren't rewarding her reverence the same way we did Logan and we had to explain that because she's nearly 10 and he's only 5 that our expectations are different, and that she needed to do something MORE than what she was already doing in order to earn a marshmallow.  

We're looking forward to continuing our marshmallow reward system and earning our way to the wave pool and the movies.  

Measured success!