Marbulous!

Recently Joshua started going through a rough patch at school behavior wise. He wasn't doing anything bad, just typical reports of not listening and making bad choices. The kind of things you would expect out of a 4 year old from time to time. He's reaching the age of being influenced by other kids, and just growing into his own person. But he has set a pretty high bar for himself as all we've ever gotten from him are glowing reports, so this change, however mild it was, was a bit alarming to us so we thought it was time to take some action before it got worse. At first we took the "punishment" approach. If he got a bad report from school, he would get a punishment when we got home. After a while we realized this didn't really seem to be working, mostly because he was being punished for something that happened hours earlier so the punishment had lost its significance.

So we came up with a great idea for positive reinforcement, to give him something to work for instead of to fear. This was the birth of the marble jar. We split the day into 4 sections, each worth 1 marble. He also gets a marble if he does his reading, for a total of 5 possible marbles each day. Once the jar is full, we will get to do something special. For his first full marble jar, we decided we would go to Peter Piper Pizza.

The marbles have worked like a charm! Josh has lost very few marbles since we started, and this weekend the marble jar was finally full!

Tonight he cashed them in and off we went to Peter Piper for dinner and games. What a fun time we had! They each ate a slice of pizza, and had a blast running around playing all the games.

One of Joshua's favorite games was a snow mobile video game.

He was laughing hysterically the entire time. It was awesome! Just look at this face!

Of course we were on the prowl for as many tickets as we could get. One of the games was kind of like a slot machine. You pull a lever and then smack a button and whichever number was lit up when the button is pressed, that's how many tickets you get. The highest number you could get was 250. Of course Lucky Andrew hit the jackpot!

We had so much fun, Ben REALLY didn't want to leave. Can you tell?

He cried the whole way home and almost all through his bath that he wanted to go back.

We're so proud of Joshua for the good choices he has learned to make, and we hope he keeps it up. Good job, Dude!!!