First run was a success

We just finished our first run this week. We ran the board from Monday to Friday, staring off with a little planning on Sunday. I’d already talked with the kids and they were ready to try this, so just as the board was fresh from the print on Friday we set it up an decided on goals & awards for the first “run”.

First day over and planning for next day underway

Man down
Mom went abroad so we were one man down for three days. We still managed to pull it off (a lot of brushing teeth, folding laundry and other fun activities 😉
Looking back I’m so happy I started this just when she went away…else the apartment would be a total wreck…the kids really did pull through and help “keeping up appearances” so now I have some time late on Sunday evening to blog about this rather that being tied up with cleaning 😉

Many icons
There were a lot of different types of tasks they could complete. The most used was brushing their teeth…not everybody brushes twice daily so better use this for some simple tasks and encourage them to brush more often =)
The board become a little crowded soon and we needed to do some reprints of the icons, but that was okay…everybody was doing their part and even the 4 year old took out the trash with help from his sisters…he didn’t quite understand why he couldn’t move the extra ice-cream ticket up to his row 😉

Retro
Being an Agile geek I had to do a Retrospective on the first run. I started out with my favorite retro with the Learning Matrix. I didn’t plan on having them write or do anything, just say what the liked, disliked and ideas…but as soon as I had put up the four post it tickets they started moving icons on the board they liked to the green (happy face).

I was a little surprised and enlightened. They where happy with the rewards (no surprise there 😉 and even with the laundry folding and putting the cloths into the closets. There were two tickets that they were not happy with but had very good reasons:

• Swing (play outside) – since is was never used…the wether has been rather bad all week with the exception of excellent wether on Friday morning for the solar Eclipse 😉
• Happy face (schoolbag in order) – the complaint was just that the icon should be a schoolbag.

So we were pretty pleased and there always fun around these people:

Final thoughts
It was a lot of work but everybody chipped in and we had fun with the rewards too:

• Icecream (in a snow blizzard)
• Ipods whiped and set up for the 3 eldest
• Mamma Mia school play what we saw today (3 eldest again….the youngest wen’t to his grandparents and didn’t want to go back home from there so he got something he wanted too 😉

Everybody was ready to take another “run” on next week and the rewards have already been planned…so I guess the story continues next week =)