Briana has been working on so much in Kindergarten. One of the things we have tried to teach her is to (1) set a goal (2) reach your goal (3) receive a reward.
Every day Briana comes home with a folder. On the back of the folder is calendars with stamps on each day. There are colors depending on the type of day she had. Pink stamps means she had a normal day. Green stamps mean she maybe didn't follow the classroom rules or something. Yellow means she was on green, but continued to not follow directions or the rules in the classroom so now it became yellow. Red is what Michael and I call "a bad day" - it's where she started out on green, then it moved to yellow and then the final result was red because she wasn't following directions or whatever.
Michael and I wanted to teach her that good behavior would equal a reward of some type. Whenever we go to the Mall, her favorite store is Brookshire because they have some aqua frogs (they are technically called Frog-O-Sphere but our family just refers to them as aqua frogs). She'll always want to go visit the frogs whenever we go to the Mall and she talks about them a lot when we are away from the Mall.
So Michael made her a deal: get 10 pinks in a row with no other color and she could get the frogs.
This sounds easy enough...to me and Michael... honestly we only have like two months left in the school year and we have yet to accomplish the goal placed before her. Briana came close a couple times. I think one time she got 8 pinks and then she got a green stamp so she had to start over. Another time she got 9 pinks (we were confident it was "in the bag" that time) and then came home the next day on RED (what happened?). By now everyone in school knows about these frogs because Briana has told them. The teachers and staff know how bad she wants the frogs and every day the ladies in the cafeteria ask Briana how many pinks she has left before she gets the frogs.
On 4/15/10 she accomplished her goal of 10 pinks. This morning we woke up and (not so patiently) waited for the Mall to open. We walked into Brookshire and the sales man asked "Is there something I can help you with?" Briana shook her head NO and bee lined it to the aqua frogs. There were 9 sitting on the shelf, but only ONE with pink gravel (can you guess which one we took home?). Daddy held the frogs in his lap while I drove us home. We cleared off a space in the living room for them to sit so that we can all enjoy them as a family.
Briana has named them Prince Naveen and Princess Tiana (from you guessed it - The Disney Princess and the Frog movie). Every few minutes she goes over and talks to them - she is very, very happy to have finally received her aqua frogs!
