What are your best anti dawdling techniques? Please share!

[FriedClams]

I know it's the back-to-school groove thing, but dawdling drives me nuts. Yes - we homeschool so we can work at our own pace - but seriously! I don't want sloppy rushed work, but wasting time that we can use walking in nature, reading a book or coking together kills me. Yes, I do sample problems, and explain and review directions and do not leave the room or have any distractions going on - this is really just time wasting and lacking focus...

[As an aside - in leadership school we learned to define issues as WILL (can do it but won't) or SKILL (a training or preparedness issue). I know that kids dawdle over SKILL issues - and that's teaching and training - what I am talking about here are WILL issues and time wasting. ]

 

Here's what I am planning on trying or have tried:

 

1. This is new - but I think it will work well... Lunch starts 2 and 1/2 hours after school starts and ends 3 hours after school starts. If you're not done with school - dinner will be ample and delicious. We do math, bible, LA and reading before lunch and 2 1/2 hours is PLENTY (2nd and 3rd grade). Today I told a kid that lunch was over in 30 minutes - and BAM - those last couple of assignments went quickly and accurately so I know it's not a skill issue.

 

2. I am thinking about tokens. You get 3 free warning per day. After that - for every "get back to work" I get 5 minutes of chore time after school. I want the kids to learn diligence and completing a task - without me nagging them. Again - not understanding is one thing - staring out the window and playing with the pencil eraser is another....

 

So - what do you do to help your kids stay on track? What works for you? I much prefer creative over punitive and would love to hear what others use to help maintain forward motion. :)

[MamaSheep]

A timer helps here. The kind where you twist the dial around and it ticks down and then rings works better than a digital one, especially when they're younger because they don't have to be able to read numbers and do math to figure out how much time has passed, they can see the little arrow getting closer and closer. There's a fancy schmancy timer on the market that shows the time as sort of a pie chart with a red area that gets smaller and smaller until it rings that I hear is handy for kids who have a hard time reading a standard kitchen timer, but it's pricey and just watching the dial move around has always worked well for us.

 

I use the timer in the following ways:

 

1. Let's see if you can finish before the timer rings! (This is a just for fun activity that gets their blood pumping. It's not just math, it's a RACE! Big excitement if they "win", small commiseration and move on to the next thing if they "lose". No other consequences.)

 

2. Last time you finished in 15 minutes. Let's see if you can do it in 10 this time. (Healthy competition against oneself rather than siblings and a goal for self-improvement.) For my older one it sometimes works better to allow him to set his own time goals, so long as I think they are within reason. It gives him a feeling of control while still accomplishing what I want done.

 

3. The next activity will begin in 30 minutes when the timer rings. If you finish this activity before the timer rings you can have free time until it rings.

 

4. The next activity will begin in 30 minutes when the timer rings. If you have not finished this activity we will begin the next one anyway, and you will have to finish this one on your own time after school. This will cut into your play time.

 

5. This activity should take you about 20 minutes. I will set the timer for 30 minutes, and for each minute that is left when you finish I will give you 1 point. When you have reached X number of points, you will earn X privilege. We'll do this for one week only. I sure hope you earn X.

 

6. This activity should take you about 20 minutes. I will give you an additional 10 minutes of my time just because I love you so much, so we'll set the timer for 30 minutes. If I need to spend more of my time than that helping you with your work, then you will need to make up for it by spending an equal amount of time helping me with my work. (And the more obnoxious they are about it, the dirtier the job they will get to do for me.)

 

All of the amounts of time I've mentioned here are, of course, random. I tend to be a little overgenerous because I remember what it's like to be a kid and I want my expectations to be realistic. We don't do timers all the time, just when dawdling starts to become an issue, so it doesn't lose its "power" through familiarity. I also tend to start with an amount of time just slightly less than whatever exhorbitant amount of time they've been taking so they can feel the triumph of success, as I find that to be much more motivating than failure. "Wow! That was so easy for you to finish in 20 minutes, I bet you could finish in 15," gives them the feeling that Mom is proud of their accomplishments and believes in them, whereas, "This is a 15 minute task, what is WRONG with you that it takes you 20 minutes," makes them feel like a defective failure whose own mother is ashamed of them and like it's not even worth trying. As with many motivational techniques, a lot of it is in the presentation.

[Jane]

My system is not creative, but it is simple and effective in my home:

 

1) For elementary age children I keep my goals short. I establish a block of time for each subject. If a child completes her work before the block of time is over, she is PRAISED and given some free time. During free time she could read, do an art project, play with one of our educational toys, grab a snack, etc. Sloppy work does not count as completed work; sloppy workers start over.

 

2) If the child does not complete her work in the established block of time for whatever reason, then that work is saved for after school hours and called "homework." No free time is given until her homework is completed. No big deal. No big words from mom. My wise children find a way to complete the unfinished work even before school hours are over. They are creative and find time during lunch or during a different block of time when they are more efficient. I never nag them to use these bonus minutes, they just figure out it on their own because they don't enjoy homework.

 

HTH.

[Pongo]

Plan, plan, plan.

The best executed day is a planned one:)

 

I have EVERYTHING laid out and ready to go the day before. Even if it's an Art lesson, I get it ALL ready. Anything that needs to be photo copied, or pre-made is done. Even when we do salt maps, I have everything measured out in Ziploc bags and the bowl on the counter ready to go.

 

I do not work well on the fly, I need everything laid out and we move pretty smoothly through our day.

[rafiki]

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[schsmom]

I use the free time method. I give them so many minutes of fun of their choice but if work is not done, their time dwindles. When one is more diligent than the other suddenly it hits home when the other child has more fun then them. The next day they are much better at time management.

[dcjlkplus3]

I use the free time method. I give them so many minutes of fun of their choice but if work is not done, their time dwindles. When one is more diligent than the other suddenly it hits home when the other child has more fun then them. The next day they are much better at time management.

 

How well does this work for older children whose sisters and brothers don't have as much school work as they do?

[Capt_Uhura]

Mamsheep - thanks for your post!!! Very helpful!

[Haiku]

My kids' dawdling time comes out of their tv time. This goes for school and non-school tasks, although I honestly don't really have much dawdling in school because my kids don't have much independent work.

 

If they dawdle away their tv time (which rarely happens), then their dawdling time comes out of their bedtime.

 

Tara

[Greta]

I was just watching the seminar DVD from SimplyCharlotteMason.com and in it she talked about helping your children develop two important habits: attention and perfect execution. The basic idea is that you keep the lessons short enough that you end it just before your child's attention starts to wander and you lose them. In that way, they never develop the bad habit of giving their work only part of their attention and effort. You keep the lesson going only long enough that they can be fully focused on it, and do their work beautifully and with their best effort. Once you've "lost them" so to speak, you let them go, because it's better to get 15 really good minutes out of them than to teach them to spend 45 minutes only half-way paying attention and putting forth a mediocre effort. She said it a lot better than I have, but I hope that makes sense. It seems like a good principle to me. But you have to really know your kids and be tuned in to the signs that they're reaching maximum capacity.

[schsmom]

How well does this work for older children whose sisters and brothers don't have as much school work as they do?

 

Actually I make sure my kids are doing equal time at home with work no matter what the age. They have "essentials" they have to work on as well so we usually finish really close to the same time.

[KAR120C]

I know it's the back-to-school groove thing, but dawdling drives me nuts. Yes - we homeschool so we can work at our own pace - but seriously! I don't want sloppy rushed work, but wasting time that we can use walking in nature, reading a book or coking together kills me.

If you search on that you might find some old posts from me... :D But the general idea is that it's a double timer, and when DS and I were not in agreement about just how much time his work was taking (he was sure it was WAY too much and I was sure he was dragging his feet), we settled it with a chess clock. One side times the minutes he's actually working. The other side times all those dropped pencils, need to go get something, forgot where I put my book interruptions.

 

What I found was that when he was timed on and off task, he was much longer on task. We didn't have any particular rule about how long off task he could be or anything -- if he really did need a snack then he needed a snack, but that's not part of his work time. And what it proved was that when he was on task, he got a LOT done and he got it done FAST. Which was a really good point to have made.

[Garga]

whereas, "This is a 15 minute task, what is WRONG with you that it takes you 20 minutes," makes them feel like a defective failure whose own mother is ashamed of them and like it's not even worth trying.

 

Somehow that hit me as very funny.

[kalanamak]

How well does this work for older children whose sisters and brothers don't have as much school work as they do?

 

I only have one, and after it has gotten a bit silly, I point out that he is missing out on X Y or Z. This may be dessert (this kid'll do anything for dessert) a run in the park, or cuddle up and read time. I just put something wonderful on the far side of the school work. Sometimes beat the clock works, too.

[MamaSheep]

Mamsheep - thanks for your post!!! Very helpful!

 

You're welcome. It's nice to know it helped someone out there.

 

Somehow that hit me as very funny.

 

Good. I meant it to be a little funny, even though I was trying to make a serious point at the same time.

 

I do think that the way we talk to our kids makes a huge difference in the attitude we get back from them, but a lot of the time we are so focused on what THEY are doing or not doing that we don't really pay attention to what WE are doing and how that might be contributing. I took a class once on managing problem behavior in children and one of the things the instructor did was to challenge us to go home and stick a 3x5 card and a pencil in our pocket for a couple of days and just make a little tally mark on one side for every positive interaction we had with our "problem child", and a tally mark on the other side for every negative interaction. He suggested that we might be surprised at the ratio of positive to negative interactions. Evidently there was a study done that showed that kids who had 4 positive interactions for every 1 negative interaction were much more likely to be cheerful and cooperative and to have a positive view of their parents. Anything less than a 4:1 ratio, though, and kids tended to be much moodier and have many more problem behaviors. He challenged us to make an effort to track the ratio and keep it above 4:1 for a while and see if that made a difference. I never did actually keep score, but it did make me more aware of kind of the general ratio that was going on at our house, and it really does make a difference. It felt a bit forced and stilted at first, especially with my son, who at the time had parents, neighbors, and professionals ready to string him up by the toenails and play pinata at the time. But I made an effort to notice the things he did right, even if it was some dumb, obvious, silly little thing that I could compliment him on. (I like how you look in that shirt. Thanks for chewing with your mouth closed. I like how your hair doesn't need combing when its that short. That time you only yelled, but you didn't slam your door; that's a big improvementin self-control, well done.) Of course compliments are not the only kind of positive interaction, a hug, a smile, a friendly joke all count too, and there are lots of other positive things, but compliments are a good starting point. I saw a difference almost immediately, even when I FELT like I was faking it, and I've gotten a lot better at it in the years since. And my son is actually a rather pleasant young man to be around these days. I haven't had the urge to sell him to the gypsies for a long time. The higher positive to negative ratio isn't the only factor, of course, but it really does make a big difference. And when I'm faced with a "situation" with my kids, I find that I now try to find a way to make it into a positive interaction if at all possible even if it would be easier to have a negative reaction, just because I've come to understand the difference it makes in our family. If they're not picking up like they're supposed to, it's easy and fast to holler at them and threaten to take away some privilege, or put them in time out, or whatever, but in the long run it's better for everyone if you can laugh it off and make a game out of it, or offer a reward when it's done satisfactorily, partly because they come away feeling like you're on their side instead of "the enemy". And now that ds is 12 and "growing up" I'm finding that it really is paying dividends because he comes to talk to me about "stuff" (like the discussion we had the other day about girls who dress immodestly and what kinds of feelings are "normal" for a boy his age to have about that--a conversation completely instigated by him and not something I'd have guessed he was mulling over had he not brought it up). And now I'm realizing that I'm totally off topic and I'm rambling away like I'm sleep deprived or something--probably because I am--and I'm going to hop off my little impromptu soap box and shut up...lol.

[skaterbabs]

We set a timer. "You have ____ minutes to complete this assignment." If they finish before the time is up, they can use the remainder of their time to play. Otherwise, it's homework. For example, Yacko didn't finish his grammar yesterday. So he gets to work on it over the weekend.

 

We also (when the dawdling gets too bad) schedule snacks and meals. My crew has a tendency to whine "but I'm HUNGRY!" whenever given an assignment, so they wander off for a snack. We don't always enforce scheduled snack times, but it does help when they start using hunger as a delaying tactic.

[MerryAtHope]

Some things that have helped us:

 

Racing. I'll ask my kids, "who do you think will get done first, you with your math, or me with this laundry? Ready--set--go!" I make it so they can win if they try. They always won unless there truly was a skills issue & then of course I helped :).

 

Workboxes (link in my siggy)--these help my kids to know that their day does have an end--as soon as they get through their boxes.

 

Time limits--if I see dawdling, I'll say, "you have X more minutes to finish, and then we'll move on. The rest will be homework." I make the number of minutes a number they can meet if they try. "Homework" means that at the end of their school day, when it is their scheduled "free time," they have to lose freetime and do schoolwork instead. This works better than just letting the day drag on--they see concretely that they have free time & that their dawdling makes them lose it.

 

Hang in there! Merry :-)

[TulaneMama]

Some things that have helped us:

 

Racing. I'll ask my kids, "who do you think will get done first, you with your math, or me with this laundry? Ready--set--go!" I make it so they can win if they try. They always won unless there truly was a skills issue & then of course I helped :).

 

Workboxes (link in my siggy)--these help my kids to know that their day does have an end--as soon as they get through their boxes.

 

Time limits--if I see dawdling, I'll say, "you have X more minutes to finish, and then we'll move on. The rest will be homework." I make the number of minutes a number they can meet if they try. "Homework" means that at the end of their school day, when it is their scheduled "free time," they have to lose freetime and do schoolwork instead. This works better than just letting the day drag on--they see concretely that they have free time & that their dawdling makes them lose it.

 

Hang in there! Merry :-)

 

i LOVE those workboxes. where did you get them? where do you stick their chores? is there a chore board? and if you wouldn't PMing me some more info I would love it. Ithink this approach would work wonderfully for us. (oh and what is AAS?)

[MerryAtHope]

i LOVE those workboxes. where did you get them? where do you stick their chores? is there a chore board? and if you wouldn't PMing me some more info I would love it. Ithink this approach would work wonderfully for us. (oh and what is AAS?)

 

I got the boxes at Staples. They came in 6-drawer towers, but all of the drawers (except the top one) are interchangeable, so I got 3 towers & have 2 drawers on my desk--they have the other 8.

 

My kids have had the same family service (chores) for a couple of years so they know what to do on what day. I keep track on my school schedule, but I don't have them written for them. I just have the velcro sticker that says family service on it, and they have to move it to the chart each day. Other jobs they do (like helping in the kitchen etc...) are just as I ask them to.

 

Now, another mom with younger kids took the workbox idea to a whole new level for chores and came up with the "Do-it Door." Read & see pics on her blog here for inspiration!

 

All About Spelling is a multi-sensory spelling program that has helped my children incredibly! (There's also a link to my blog post on it in my signature).

 

Merry :-)

[greenmamato3]

And now I'm realizing that I'm totally off topic and I'm rambling away like I'm sleep deprived or something--probably because I am--and I'm going to hop off my little impromptu soap box and shut up...lol.

i actually really enjoyed this! :) thanks!

[3boysmama]

This is a system I just set up to help my kids (one in particular) not to dawdle so much.

 

I bought one of those charts that you can get from a teacher supply store, that is set up like a grid. Across the top I put the days of the week repeatedly, I was able to get 5 weeks worth on there. Then down the left hand side I put each childs name, and under each ones name I listed 6 things for them to accomplish each day.

 

1. I did my work well

2. I did my work quickly

3. I did my work neatly

4. I didn't give mom attitude

5. I did my work cheerfully

6. I did all my work

 

At the end of the day, I will (or they will) put a little smiley sticker next to each one they accomplished. On Friday, if they have at least 25 stickers (they can get a total of 30 for the week) they can pick a treat out of the treasure box I made. Now, if they get all 30 stickers then they can pick two treats. The stuff I put in my treasure box are things from the dollar store, candies, stickers, passes to stay up late, etc.

 

I'm pretty excited about this, I think it will be very helpful for them. More of a positive reinforcement then a negative one. I feel like I've tried everything else. :001_smile: I have one child in particular that will spend HOURS on math and still only have 3 problems done. Anywho, I just wanted to share!! ~April