The Johnson Crew!

Hi friends how are you today if you are struggling with how to deal with bad attitudes bad behavior your kids not wanting to get their schoolwork done during your home school then hopefully this video will be helpful to you today to see how we handle all of that to see the system that we've put in place that has been working really really great for us so I want to share the nuts and bolts of that with you today so stay tuned welcome back to my channel if you're new here I am Sarah from The Johnson Crew

And my husband Bud and I have four beautiful children that are 10 8 6 and 3 and we have been homeschooling for about seven years now and we've done a lot of trial and error a lot of air yeah um we've done a lot of just trying to figure out what works best for our family and how to do this whole homeschooling thing so I want to bring some of those experiences in and try to offer some tips and help for any of you who are also trying to figure it out that's the beautiful thing about this YouTube community that we have here that we can share things that we've learned share our experiences

And help each other even when our home schools look really different we can still learn so much from each other so really appreciate you guys being here today definitely leave a comment below introduce yourself if you're new here and just let me know if there's other Behavioral Systems that you've tried before let us know the pros and cons so we can kind of pull from your experience as well okay so taking you back a couple of years a little bit of a little bit of History here um we you know we're doing homeschool

And let's see when my oldest was like seven so like second grade year I also had a five-year-old and a three-year-old and a one-year-old something like that uh and so things were like a little bit hectic and that's the year that I feel like School gets a little bit more intense intense isn't really a great word for it but you know it there's a little bit more to do there's a little bit more work to do so that was the year that I felt like oh you know our normal discipline isn't working great for school time like it's kind of derailing us um what's a different way that we can handle things during school time specifically that's going to be productive active for school

You know how am I going to help him be motivated and how am I going to help him stay on track and change his attitude when maybe he's in a grumpy mood or obstinate mood whatever and so you know talked it over with my husband you know probably until I was blue in the face and um he's just so wise and anyways we talked about some different ideas and he came up with this system that we've been using for the last couple of years that's worked really

Well we have made some tweaks to it so I did make a video a couple of years back but we've tweaked a couple things so I wanted to do a new updated video about how we do this and he has coined this the star system okay so when I refer to the star system in any other video now you'll know what I'm talking about so what is the star system so basically the kids get 5 five stars to start their day with so I think this is really a good part of it that they start out in the positive right they're not having to earn up those Stars we've given them five to start with

And so the positive reinforcement part of this system is that at the end of every week they get to go shopping in the star store and I'll show you what's in that at the end of the video but they get to pick out a prize at the end of the week with the Stars that they've earned over the week or the stars that they've kept during the week the negative part of it negative reinforcement part is that if they lose a star they obviously have less spending power at the end of the week less stars that they can spend in the star store

So that's a bummer right and then the other piece that we have to this is that if they lose all five of their stars in one day then they lose their iPad time that afternoon now I'm sure every family is different maybe you don't even do iPads at all whatever it is fill in the blank that would be a good consequence I say good as in like it's going to be something that really means something to them whatever that is for your kid then that would be the thing that they would lose that day

So this is something that's going to happen after school time is over it's not like they're going to go and time out right in the middle of school this is something that they would normally get after school time and so they really don't want to lose all their stars because they love getting to have their iPad time in the afternoon so that works really well as a good motivator to them and actually as they've gotten older um so like for my eight and ten year old my rule with them is that if they lose three stars in one day then they lose their iPad 10 that afternoon because I feel like they're old enough to wear they should not be able to just like

Have so many infractions within one day without a a bigger consequence than the loss of like Star store points does that make sense so those are the rules around the star system now what are Star losable infractions right let's talk about what those are and this is what you've got to prep your kids with right they've got to know the boundaries okay so for us it is having bad attitudes like arguing with me and refusing to do something that I've asked them to do or just be an ugly back to me like a disrespectful tone or if I've like given them a certain time limit that's really reasonable for them to get their work done

And it's clear that they weren't even trying like they just kind of sat there and dawdled around and didn't try at all to get their work done that's a that's a star losing a fence for sure or like you know getting up and and and being crazy when they're supposed to be sitting down and getting something done um those kinds of things for us are okay you're going to lose a star for that oh and like fighting with a sibling during school time you're gonna lose a star for that

So really a very big key piece to having the star system even work for you is prepping your kids for this you gotta really prep them like I'm talking probably a couple of weeks before you want to implement this you want to start getting them on board you want to tell them how it's going to work uh you know everything I just shared with you about how you keep your stars what's going to happen if you lose all your stars and then the exciting part about how they get to spin Their Stars at the star store at the end of the week everything that they've kept all week long you know if you've been a really good listener

And had a good attitude you get to pick out a prize yay you know and get them excited get them on board let them know specifically hey these things things if you do them during school time you're gonna lose a star like there's not going to be warnings you're just going to lose a star and so that very first week that you implement the star system you're gonna have to stick to your guns you're gonna really have to stick to your guns or else the star system really loses its power

And they're not going to respect it and it's gonna seem like a joke right so we gotta really stick to our guns in order to make the system work so that means if they do those things that you've already warned them about sorry buddy You Gotta Lose a star what's nice about the star system though rather than like all right now you're in timeout or now you've lost this or whatever it is that you would normally use as discipline losing a star is not such a big deal it can be enough to help them get back on track refocus up you know put more effort forth

And try to have a better attitude but thankfully it's not enough of a big deal consequence that they're then gonna like burst into tears and be so sad or like you know be stuck in time out so that now they can't even get any work done does that make sense so that's why I feel like this works really well for us but the fact that all their stars in one day there is a bigger consequence waiting for them which is for us losing their iPad time that afternoon that is a good reminder to them that you need to get back in line buddy you need to really Shape Up or this is going to be a real bummer of a consequence for you

So that does help a lot and the positive part of it really works too they do get really excited about earning up their stars to get these different points they really look forward to Star store Fridays that they get to pick out a prize so all of those things have been wonderful motivators and a great way to kind of turn things around and get them back on track when things kind of Veer off the rails right okay so we talked about getting your kids prepped for starting the star system

And really sticking to your guns that very first week especially now let's talk about how to keep track of Their Stars so when we first started we were just using our dry erase board and I would put their five stars on the board for each kid to start the day and then you know could easily erase them and then easily add them back in the next day so that works for like the day of keeping track but the way that I was keeping track of Their Stars like day to day

And week to week was just on a piece of paper inside my desk which they couldn't see obviously and then it was kind of out of sight out of mind for me and sometimes I would forget to write stuff down sometimes I'd forget to write down how many stars they used in the star store and so like the keeping track thing really went off the rails and then the star system kind of lost its power so this year I have gotten way more organized and it's working really great

And I've been able to be really consistent with keeping track so let me share that with you so um over here I've got my bulletin board this is my desk that I sit at and I've got kids on both sides of me so everybody can see this board really well so I just made this template in Excel and then I laminated it because I love my laminator if you've seen my other videos um and that way I can easily you know erase and write it back on there if I need to down here I've got day one day two day three day four because we are a four day a week homeschoolers

So I can write down how many stars they earn that day and then at the bottom I've got the weeks total so I can total up each kid's amount and then I transfer that over to this other sheet where I'm keeping track of their week to week Stars so let me show you this one now this one does not need to be laminated so if you don't have a laminator but you do have a dry erase board or something else where you can do the daily Stars you know use that

And then this is just a piece of paper so I also made this in Excel and so on every other line I wrote down the weeks dates for each week of the school year and then every other line underneath that I wrote used and then total left in parentheses so when we go to the star store and we use their Stars I'm able to write down okay minus this many stars that's how many they used and then in parentheses is how many they have left because I do put some things in the star store that might take them like two weeks to save up for

And earn in some weeks they don't have quite enough to get like a big prize they can only get like a small piece of candy so anyways that's where the keeping track is really important and what's really great about having it up on the wall is that they can see it anytime any day it's there they know what they have and that's motivating too like they know how close they are to earning whatever prize it is that they've got their eye on so I do like having it posted up for them to see

Now I want to show you what's in our star store okay Tada okay so here's my bed yeah I'm cheesy I laminated this too it says star store you don't have to go and do all of that just need a little bin to put your little prizes in but in here I just went to the Dollar Tree like this didn't cost me very much money just went to the Dollar Tree now they don't know how much each of these cost me so I can put whatever value on them I want

And they don't really know so I've just taken these little white stickers like you would use for yard sale prices and put those on these and just price them out and so for us we do homeschool four days a week so they have the potential of earning 20 Stars per week right now obviously they're not going to earn 20 Stars every single week and so I wanted to still have things in here that they could earn even if they didn't keep all their stars during the week I don't want them to be discouraged that they couldn't get anything right we still want to reward them for a pretty good week or even a fairly good week

So I've got in here um like Tootsie Rolls these are five stars each so they could easily get one or a couple of those and then I've got this bag of lollipops which they think are super cool and these are 12 Stars each and then these bubbles actually came three in a pack and I put 15 stars on these um this 48 piece puzzle I put in there for 25 Stars an LOL craft kit also 25 Stars little um like off-brand Lego guys superheroes um

And I also got this like wizard set so these are 28. per set so they'd have to save up more than one week's worth of stars in order to earn these but even if they wanted to save they could still get like one Tootsie Roll right for five stars and still be saving the Rest of Their Stars for the next week so I feel like it's working well to have small stuff and then bigger stuff in here one last thing that I'll show you that I have on the inside of this bin is a little chart with a few other things that are not like tangible prizes

So one of them says for 20 Stars you get 30 minutes of extra iPad time that's like really exciting for them for 35 Stars you can stay up for 30 extra minutes it's a big deal and then for 50 stars you can get a new book and I actually asked my oldest son what are some things that you'd like to have because I was kind of worried that he wouldn't be into some of the stuff that I could find at the Dollar Tree and so he helped me put those things on the list funny enough he hasn't actually gotten any of those things yet he's chosen prizes from in here

So that's great I'm glad that it still works really well for him even though he's 10 he's still into this it's still um a powerful tool I'm sure that that is kind of coming to an end here soon or we'll just have to really tweak what the rewards are I don't know we'll see and if you have older kids and have some insight on that please share in the comments below so this has worked really well for us we started this at like age six for each of the kids um like the keeping track of stars part of it um for my three-year-old I'll still let him pick out a prize

But we're not like keeping track of stars like he's three doesn't really know but I still let him join in and have fun with us and the older kids don't seem to mind that he's getting to earn a prize so it's it's all worked out well so that is everything that I have to share with you hopefully that is helpful to you please let me know if you end up trying out the system in your home school I'd love to know how it works for y'all I will leave a video up at the end of this one that you can click on next that I think will be really helpful to you

And I will catch you in the next video thank you so much for joining me today and I hope you have an amazing school year happy schooling foreign