Quick and Simple Project

As any mom knows, there are times when your child is having a hard time following the rules.  Our son Jared was recently going through such a time, and in his case, standard punishments don't work well.  Time outs don't work, taking away privileges don't work, these things only seem to fuel his fire.  After a horrific experience in a restaurant with him, I decided to try a whole new approach.  He loves dinosaurs! I can't even tell you how much he loves dinosaurs, I'll just say this.  When his cousin came over to play the two of them got into a fight because Jared insisted that ALL of his toys were dinosaurs.  The stuffed animals, the cars were all dinosaurs.  So I decided to come up with a reward chart for Jared.

Instead of using stars or some other basic shape, I had to use dinosaurs.  I used the doodlebat titled Ding-o-saurs and selected 8 dinosaur silhouettes.  I cut these out of black cardstock on my Cricut.  I then took some adhesive magnet sheet and adhered some various colors of green cardstock and adhered the dinosaurs on top of that.  I was planning on using MTC to make shadow layers and cut the magnet sheets, but I ran out of time, so I just cut them out by hand real quick.  After all Jared is 5, he won't know the difference!  I used the Hey Gorgeous font to cut out Jared's Dinosaurs.  I grabbed a cookie sheet that I had purchased at Target.  I had this in my stash because I was planning on making a calendar for my nephew, and never got around to it.  This cookie sheet has a lip on it, so I used the back of the cookie sheet as my front, and adhered the title on with Zip Dry.  I used my Big Bite to punch the hole in the lip so that I could thread the ribbon through, so that this could be hung up.  All in all, this project took less than 1 hour!

Since the lip of the cookie sheet rests against the wall, I can put the dinosaurs that he has not earned yet on the back of the reward chart and it still sits well on the wall.  No rocking around scuffing up the paint.  My DH and I sat down with Jared and explained the rules to him and how he could earn dinosaurs and also how he could lose dinosaurs, and when he gets all 8 dinosaurs, he gets a special treat.  Since we have implemented this system, he has earned all 8 dinosaurs twice now, and we have only had to take away a dinosaur twice.  He loves when we tell him that he earned a dinosaur, and he can go and turn the chart over and pick out the dinosaur that he wants. He has really responded well, and we are very proud of him.  He is also starting Kindergarten this year, so in the next few weeks, you will see some things that I am preparing for that.

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