Disclosure: Our blog is participating in a sponsored blog ambassador program from cwist. As a part of this program we have received paid compensation for placement of digital advertisements and specific postings related to cwist.
During the summer, I still make Mary do work. I know this probably sounds mean, but when I was a kid, I suffered badly from loosing information after a period of time. And math was my worst subject so I usually lost that information overnight. It wasn't that I didn't try hard either. I hard straight A's in everything except math because I just couldn't retain the information at all. I even went for testing when I was a junior to see what could be causing the problem and I found out that I process information ten times slower than anyone else my age. This means that if I learn something, like math, in the classroom at school, my brain usually wouldn't process and understand the information until the next morning. So you can see that my homework was always a problem because I didn't understand what I was doing. I really could have benefited from a UCAS contact back them for testing help!
Since I still have this problem, I make sure to make Mary do work during the summer because I don't ever want her to forget information like I do. And one of my favorite things to do with her during the summer is summer reading. Right now Mary has a list that she needs to read before the summer is out and when she's done, she'll get to go to the children's museum near us. And the best part is that her list is a CWIST! If you don't know what a CWIST is, it's a chore that you set for your kids online and then attach a reward to it for when they finish. The kids can keep track of their progress online so they can see how close they are to the prize and mom and dad can keep track of how well their doing their projects.
So far, Mary is about halfway done with her summer reading and since I'm making her read 50 books, that's saying a lot! Right now, she only has two chapters left in Charlotte's Web and that's been her favorite all summer long.
If you want to set chores for your kids and you're looking for creative ways to do it, check out CWIST!
CONVERSATION