Since we started homeschooling our kids (it’s a long story, but at the time we were living in Orleans Parish) we’ve struggled to motivate our kids to learn, and to develop personal skills.
If you’ve never seen or read the Harry Potter series, a “muggle” is a non-magical person in a world of magicians. In the stories, wizards who are born of one magical and one non-magical parent are “mugbloods”, or half breeds. They are viewed with contempt by the pure-blooded wizards, but the fact is they are just as powerful. Their lineage has nothing to do with whether or not they’re good wizards.
So often in our life, we look at non-churched people with contempt, because, well, they just couldn’t be as holy as us. Cause you know, we go to church. The same goes for anything…. homeschooling, bike commuting, cars we drive, clothes we wear… other people are different. And we’re not.
Yeah, right.
As far as allowing my kids to read and watch Harry Potter, I did consider it carefully beforehand, and no, it’s not perfect. There’s a lot there that needs to be addressed, but that discussion is for another day.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. Homeschooling.
So we’ve always had normal behavior problems with our kids, for a variety of reasons. I decided to take advantage of my kids’ interest in Harry Potter by setting up a points system like they use at wizard school. Students can earn points for bravery, doing good deeds, following instructions, and being helpful. They gets points deducted for breaking rules, arguing, and being dishonest (we have to specify dishonest instead of lying because sometimes they will try to trick each other without words!)
We split our kids into two houses which happened to be the same as their houses on the website Pottermore.com and at the end of a predetermined time, whichever house has more points wins a prize, and the house cup. The other house will also get a smaller prize, because they earned points as well. For every point they earn, they add a bean to their house jar (white beans and red beans, because that’s what we had… the kids rolled them in glitter to make them “magical”) and after a couple of weeks, we add them up.
So far, it’s been fairly okay, but we’ve had a few meltdowns over points that we’ve had to deal with. Last night I had to take away points for the first time, and there was a major meltdown.
I guess the main thing about it is that for us to be able to assign house points, we have to be actively watching our kids. If they do something right and we don’t see it, but their siblings do the same and we catch it, then they get mad (and rightly so). It makes it very hard to be fair, so I’m required to equally spend time with all of the kids. Imagine that!
The truth I have to take away from this is that you have to meet kids where they are. You can say they need to learn something till you’re blue in the face, but when you speak their language, they listen.
And a little bit of magic doesn’t hurt!