Go, Caution, Stop

At school, Chase has a stop light in her classroom to monitor behavior. She is always on green. Something that we find somewhat amazing considering her penchant at home for bad behavior. [Apparently she save it all for us]. So we are trying the system at home. We are only a few days into the experiment and I can't say if it will work or not. It isn't really any different that what we have already been doing, but I thought that maybe the VISUAL might be helpful.

So far, Chase was horribly offended when she ended up on yellow, then started yelling and kicking me and ended up on red. She spent a tearful half hour in her room--only to come out to tell me that she thought SHE might be able to forgive ME. And then there have been a few times that she moved her sister to yellow light because she wouldn't play what Chase wanted to play [I am not surprised since we regularly have conversations about the fact that Chase is not allowed to discipline anyone but herself].

This morning the first thing Chase said to me was "What special activity do we get to do today?" I asked her what she was talking about, and she said that it was her reward for good behavior. [Our agreement was that if they were able to maintain mostly green, with a few yellows, that we would let them pick something fun to do, like picking a playground to go to or get ice cream cones.]

Maybe this is an adjustment period? Or maybe a failure. We'll give it a little longer to see if we can get a hang of it.
The girls did have a lot of fun choosing and coloring the magnets. They have also made ones for the parental units. They made a Knight for Mark and a Fairy Princess for me. We suspect that if it was up to Chase and Ellis that the parent magnets will be spending a lot of time on yellow and red.

Which, now that I think about it, might not be such a bad thing. I would gladly take a nice long time out in my room.