The Halo Reach Carrot

The summer didn't go quite as planned for our family's homeschool plans. I wanted to do some lessons over the summer in a relaxed manner, in between vacation trips, sports and Boy Scout activities.

Instead the summer wound up being herky-jerky. Two weeks dominated by the Community Rowing program at Yale, that's getting up early (six in the morning) and not getting home until noon. The kids were tired after the exercise, and hungry.  They went to bed earlier than usual at night. Then a week at home with me doing major house projects (like decluttering the basement) and the kids relaxing. Then a week away where I got relaxed again to come home to more super busy-ness. For over a week workers were in the house installing a new furnace, which was messy, smelly, and disruptive to say the least. The pace went back and forth like that right up to Labor Day weekend.

The homeschooling over the summer really never happened. To my disgust, my ten year old read only one fiction book the entire summer, past the library reading program's deadline, so he didn't even get one book on his list. Pathetic.

In mid-August the kids fell suddenly into a haze of sneaking television and sitting like zombies in front of my most hated TV show for tweens: iCarly. Ugh. They weren't in that bickering stage but reached a point of laziness which was a bit ridiculous. They began talking non-stop about the September release of the xBox360 game Halo Reach.

One day in mid-August I made a quick decision in order to get their priorities in order and to get their minds on schoolwork. I said in order to get the pre-order of Halo Reach with its bonus features they'd have to complete all the homeschool assignments I gave them. They were not happy.

At their request I wrote out three weeks of lessons. These weeks were the two weeks before Labor Day then the week after, in which none of their homeschool-related activities and classes were taking place yet.

Well they weren't lessons all mapped out but a list of assignments. They were free to do their own in whatever order they wanted, or doing more on one day than another. In the mean time there was no watching of television and no video games either.

Boy, were they pissed at me.

The first week they did barely any homeschool lessons, a bit in denial of the fact that the work load was quite do-able if they actually did work on each day. In avoidance of the school work they found things to do and play with since they had no TV, computer, Internet, or video games, they played some board games, card games, and LEGO. They even (!!) were cleaning their rooms and tidying up and rearranging their stuff all on their own.

It hit them that the week we were going to be away in Cape Cod for our first real vacation our whole family was to have this summer, they would have to do homeschool lessons more than expected while in Cape Cod due to their procrastination. They got down to work and did a little work while in the car driving to Cape Cod. (Truth be told if we were busy doing fun Cape Cod stuff I planned to reduce the lesson workload.)

Once we were away, I was shocked and happy at my older son's dedication. He attacked the lessons with vigor and set unrealistic goals about how much he could get done, like trying to do three hours of math work in one sitting withoute ven a break. He did realize though that the backlogged lessons were a workload that was now unreasonable. He worked hard at it. While the kids did that my husband wound up doing work from home via the Internet and using his computer and even calling in via phone for daily meetings. I myself relaxed and read books and went on long beach walks alone, took photos, and spent more time than usual on the Internet. We did do some fun things as a family but they were not day-long things. So, I never reduced the homeschool lesson load.

Let the Negotiations Begin

Negotiations were attempted about the ramifications if one of the brothers fulfilled the goal and if the other did not. I decided if one did the work I'd do the pre-order but the one who didn't do the work could not look at the game or watch his brother play the game, and he'd be banned off the game for a full month. My older son was happy with that and he fully intended to finish the work.

My ten year old, one day 12, was still not enthusiastic about getting the work done and decided that he'd not care if he could not play the game for the first month.

Two weeks into this I mentioned to my husband my concern that once this was over the momentum to keep doing lessons would be lost. Once the kids get busy with running around here and there doing this homeschool co-op and that sport, they will surely want to slack back and not do lessons at home. My husband said we should have weekly lessons with a Friday night deadline. Since the kids usually only play the games on the weekend, they'd only be able to play if their lessons were done by Friday night. I agreed.

The only bummer about this was that a fair part of our family vacation was spent doing homeschool lessons. The kids even asked to not go to the beach and other typical activities we do in order to stay home to do schoolwork.

I don't usually offer my kids rewards, or they are few and far between. I'm not into reward systems. In this case I think it was a good one for getting the kids back into doing multiple subjects of their homeschooling just to get them back into the groove of doing spelling and math and other lessons they'd not done since June.