Tag Archives: rewarding

Jul8

Keeping Your Kids In Check This Summer

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Keeping Your Kids In Check This Summer

Summer vacation is every parent’s dream and nightmare. On the one hand, you enjoy not needing to worry about school for a couple of months. You can have a bit of a lie in every morning and avoid the extra stress of getting everyone up and ready for the mad rush.

On the other hand, you’re faced with keeping your children occupied for multiple weeks in a row. It can start off pretty easy – and there are plenty of fun activities you can do with them, but it quickly gets very challenging. The biggest challenge is ensuring your kids stay well-behaved. When they get bored they can get a bit rowdy, which is exactly what you do not need when it’s very hot and sweaty outside.

Luckily, there is one very easy way to keep your kids in check during summer vacation: create a behavioral chart:

What is a behavioral chart?

Basically, it is a chart where you make a note of your child’s good or bad behavior. When they do something bad, you put a mark on the chart to show that. If they do something good – like help out around the house or mow the lawn, they get a positive mark instead.

It’s a very simple idea and you can make your own chart extremely quickly. Just create a table on your computer with your kids’ names on it. Then, head online and make stickers that correspond to good or bad behavior. This could be a smiley face sticker for good and a frown face for bad. Once everything is printed out and delivered, you’re ready to rock and roll.

How does this encourage well-behaved kids?

You might think that making a chart and tracking your kid’s behavior is a bit weird. However, the whole idea is that you make a game out of it. Think of it this way, you’re setting a challenge for your children that lasts the entire summer. They have to avoid getting bad behavior marks, aiming to get as many good marks as possible.

I know what you’re thinking; how do you make your kids care about this? Ah, well this is where the incentive comes in! Create a challenge that ends with a reward of sorts. It can be a toy, money, a trip to an adventure park – whatever you think your kids will enjoy the most. The challenge can be a target for your children to meet or avoid. By the end of summer, they should have as few bad marks on their chart as possible so set them a limit that they cannot go past. If they pass this limit, they fail the challenge and don’t get the prize. You could even add in a bonus prize for whoever has the most happy stickers on their chart.

Your children will be on their best behavior because they know they will be rewarded by the end of summer vacation. You can enjoy a more peaceful summer with kids that are very eager to help around the house and they can enjoy a nice prize at the end before going back to school. It’s a massive win-win!

Featured Image By: Pexels

May20

Musical Instruments You Can Learn As An Adult Beginner

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Musical Instruments You Can Learn As An Adult Beginner

Many adults have wanted to be famous musicians at some point in their childhood, fantasizing about selling out concert halls and filling stadiums worldwide. However, not everyone was privileged enough to take music lessons as a child, and many may not be practicing anymore. According to Statista data, just 10.10% of Americans aged 18 to 29 revealed that they had played musical instruments in the last twelve months as of 2018. You can revive your passion for music by learning to play an instrument.

It takes a lot of practice and dedication to become a pro at playing an instrument. You need to be able to put in the time to learn the proper techniques and how to read music. You can start by taking some lessons from a professional or even watching some online tutorials, such as guitar lessons from home. There are also a number of apps that can help you learn different songs. Once you have the basics down, you need to start practicing regularly. As you continue to practice and learn, you will eventually become a pro at playing your chosen instrument. Here are the best and easiest options to consider if you want to learn an instrument:

Harmonica:

The harmonica is an instrument that many people rarely think about. However, it may surprise you to learn that it is the best selling musical instrument globally. This instrument is quite portable, affordable, and easy to learn, making it excellent for beginners. There is no way to sound bad when playing the harmonica since all the notes you play will be in key. It is never too late to learn how to play the harmonica since you can absorb its core concepts in just a few hours. Anyone can play the harmonica, but you will particularly enjoy learning it if you are a fan of folk, blues, and country music.

Piano:

It is estimated that 21 million Americans play the piano, making it one of the most popular musical instruments. The piano is quite versatile, allowing you to play songs in various styles. This classic instrument will boost your coordination since it forces you to play different melodies with both hands. Although this sounds difficult, many experts say that you shouldn’t have much of a problem mastering it if you can type on a computer keyboard.

You will likely find a few piano teachers in your area, given its widespread popularity. However, the internet is an excellent repository of tutorials and video lessons that you can rely on to practice your piano skills if you lack the budget or time for in person lessons, so keep this in mind. You can download music notes here to start practicing and follow in the footsteps of all time greats like David Bowie, Thelonious Monk, and Prince, who were self taught.

Ukulele:

You will undoubtedly see the ukulele in any list of the easiest musical instruments for beginners to learn. It has gained popularity in recent times because it is more straightforward to learn than the guitar. The ukulele has only four strings compared to the guitar’s six, so chords are easier to memorize. It is also smaller than a guitar with a thinner neck, so it is ideal if you have tiny hands. This instrument has a distinct, cheerful sound that can make any song sound fantastic, and many people grasp the basic chords in a few weeks. Also, it is more affordable than a guitar and mastering it puts you in a perfect position to play more difficult songs and even advance to complex string instruments like the violin.

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^^^ Pixabay Image

If you are looking for a new and rewarding hobby, then learning how to play an instrument is the way to go. Remember, all of the greats started out as beginners too!

Featured Image By: Pixabay

Dec4

Productive & Rewarding Activities To Do As A Family

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Productive & Rewarding Activities To Do As A Family

As a parent, you’ll want to do all you can to make your child’s (or children’s) quality of life the best it can be. This means you’ll have to put in work in various areas. Educating them is obviously high on the list of priorities. Keeping them healthy mentally, physically, and socially is also important, of course. You also must make sure that their minds are being stimulated every single day in a positive sense, too. Part of being a parent is helping your child to view life in an optimistic and positive light. There is very little point to life if we’re not enjoying every single day!

Your job is to raise them properly and ensure that they have every advantage going into their adulthood when they’re entirely responsible for their own life. No matter how old your kids are, they are never too old to do things together as a family. Here are some activities that you can do with your family that will be educational, productive, rewarding, and fun:

Family work outs and exercise:

Working out as a family is a great way of bonding as well as staying fit and healthy. It’s often tedious and grueling when you have to work out on your own – especially during the cold, dark, and gloomy days. Getting your gang to tag along with you can be so rewarding. Not only will you all enjoy it, but you’re teaching your entire family about the kinds of things they need to be doing in order to feel better mentally and physically. They could also pick up all kinds of sporting hobbies – which is, of course, an added bonus.

Extra curricular schooling:

Some kids may not like the idea of learning things when they’re away from school. Others, however, may find something they genuinely love and they may want to delve into it even further. The practice of learning from home has become a lot more popular due to the pandemic, but that doesn’t mean it has to stop once life gets back on track again. One thing’s for certain; you’ll have a much smarter child on your hands than if you don’t bother with it!

Work on the house:

Nobody’s expecting you to behave like professional remodeling companies, of course. Even though that would be AMAZING if you could replicate that stuff! Doing some DIY and conjuring up little projects would be fun a place to start. You’ll get productive tasks done while teaching the kids (and yourself) all kinds of new, useful skills.

Travel to new places regularly:

Doing the same kinds of things over and over again, even if you find them quite entertaining, will end up being boring. You won’t stimulate your brain anywhere near as much as perhaps you should. Visiting new areas of the world definitely would. Even new areas in your home country need exploring! You’ll learn so much and your confidence would grow a lot. Plus, there are plenty of awesome memories to be made when traveling with your family!

Enjoy quality time all together with the ideas above for an even stronger family unit in the future.

Featured Image By: Unsplash

Oct6

Life, Career Choices, The Boring Stuff!

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Life, Career Choices, The Boring Stuff!

Life, Career Choices, The Boring Stuff!

It’s come to the point where I want to think about what I want to do with my life. Not just as a way to earn money (although I would love to make money by lying on a beach sipping champagne or making music. I’m not picky!) but what I can do that has those things that people’s parents talk about so much. You know, those words like stability, progression, and preparing for the future…As boring as they sound, I guess they have a point. So, I thought to myself, what do I want to do with my life? They say that you spend a third of your life working, so you’d better make it count, right? So I’ve been doing some research into what I might want to do. I started by just typing “fulfilling careers” into my search engine and then I went on a little job journey. Here were some of the careers that intrigued me:

Counselor: As cool as my guidance counselor is, I don’t mean spending my days doing that. Therapy and helping people out has intrigued me. And looking further into it, you need to have so many people skills to be able to do the job properly. I mean, you spend your days talking to people who are relying on you to fix them! That’s a lot of pressure. But the rewards come from helping someone out who might have depression or anxiety, and after they spend time with you, they’re able to go through life happy, and that’s a BIG DEAL.

Midwife: Looking at medical jobs would be pointless, I thought. You’ve gotta spend many years training to be a doctor or a nurse and what if you don’t even like it after all that? Then I saw that you could do a job helping mothers deliver their babies. And what’s more rewarding than that? Spending your days (and nights) delivering babies requires a couple of years training. Interacting with the parents and helping them through a tough delivery seems like such a rewarding thing. Seeing the look of joy on the mother’s face after you’ve helped them give birth to their child seems like payment enough!

Teacher: My teachers back in school must have had a hard time. The amount of homework they had to mark or if there was a student that was a complete nightmare must have been difficult to cope with. Saying that, if you get the job just right, the gratification you would have in helping someone on their life’s goal would be fulfilling. I used to think about some of my old teachers, “why are they still doing this if they are tearing their hair out with frustration ALL the time?” Well, it’s because they’re waiting for that one student to make it all worth it.

Nobody wants to be thinking about what to do with their lives, but when it comes to looking at a “normal” career, I think I’d want to be helping people make a difference in their life. It’s not a cool thing to say, but maybe my parents were right (don’t tell them I said that!).

What was your career choice when you were little? How does it differ from the job that you have now? I want to hear from all of you, so leave me a comment and let’s cat! Much love. -Sarah