When the class project came home, I bristled. Teachers, in my humble opinion, should refrain from changing the order of family life. So being informed that I should assign chores to my child and pay him money for them...well, not exactly a popular assignment with me. All of us help out at home because we all live there. Keeping the home orderly and helping each other out are two of our family values, and frankly, I don't pay people for simply upholding values.
What to do, what to do...
The answer came on its own on a hot afternoon. I could find jobs unusual enough not to interfere with our normal family rhythm. I could trust that Griff's work ethic and helpful spirit are integral parts of who he is and that offering pay for work would not derail him. What's more, I could build on his recent money skills (hooray for being able to count coins and calculate prices!) as well as get across the concept of financial compensation proportional to the difficulty and frequency of the task.
The deal I offered:
10¢ per dandelion found that I dug up
25¢ per dandelion that he dug up, roots and all
1¢ per gravel chunk pulled out of a particularly rocky garden patch
He was intrigued by the offers. He initially wanted to go for the big money - or what looked like big money to him. 25¢ per uprooted dandelion sounds to a seven-year-old like a quick way to get rich. Problem is, if you leave the root in the ground, you don't get paid, and getting the root out is tricky. So perhaps it's more lucrative to merely find the dandelions and allow your mother to do the dirty work. (In the face of losing his commission for a broken root, he chose to find and dig out the root.)
Then came the rocks. A penny a pebble, doesn't sound like much even to a kid who feels rich when he finds a cent on the grocery store floor. But this kid knows that pennies add up, and he could see that the rocks were plentiful. Just how plentiful? We talked about submitting an invoice, and he completely grokked with the idea. Later that evening, after he and I counted up the rocks by 10s, he disappeared for a while, then reappeared and handed us the slip of paper pictured above.
Dandlaons: 3 Sens: 30
Rooks: 490 Sens: 490
pull up D: 1 Sens: 25
totl: 545
He is really proud of his hard work and of his math skills. I'm really impressed by his work ethic and how easily he seems to be able to add, multiply, and convert to currency - not to mention the way he really understood the concept of an invoice.
We're keeping our new handyman's totals posted. I have, by the way, mostly forgiven his teacher.