Saturday, August 30, 2008

Book: Captain Underpants and the Wrath of the Wicked Wedgie Woman

Kayla enjoyed this book picked from the shelf at school. "This book is very funny and it might make you pee in your captain underpants" Kayla, innocently laughs and quips. Kayla tells us it took a week to read it. She explained that she reads on the bus and before she goes to bed (when mommy and daddy go to bed). This is a continuation of our model to encourage and reward our children to read books. We recommend that parents pay their children to read books not chores.

Our Model:
- Select and read the book
- log it in her journal (a book we bought for her with many pages for logging memories, ideas, and her book reading)
- post the book on the web from our Amazon account for future revenue
- get paid (our model is $1 for a super easy book, $3 for a more complex book, and $5 for a chapter book)
- save 80% which goes into the bank and 20% of the money she gets to spend on whatever she wants
- donate a portion of her revenue to a children's charity and to the children's ministry at church

What we believe: By paying kids to read books (not chores) we inspire kids to learn to read and love it. At some point, we believe she will develop a natural curiousity and will want to read without expectation of payment (although we don't mind paying her). In addition, we also have a model to pay her to write short stories. Inspire your kid today and try it. We would be happy to share more of our model with you.

Kayla enjoys negotiating her pay rate, logging her books, and giving us a mini-book review (so that we know she actually read it).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's a fab idea. I'm always on the hunt for great children's books and have recently discovered Bayard and their series of StoryBoxBooks, AdventureBoxBooks and DiscoveryBoxBooks (which has a special focus on teeth!) They have work by acclaimed children's books illustrator Helen Oxenbury appearing in the Storybox series for September. In addition to this, they also have some great activities for rainy days: http://www.storyboxbooks.com/potatoprinting.php, http://www.adventureboxbooks.com/macaroni-picture-frames.php, http://www.discoveryboxbooks.com/skittles.php Enjoy!

Kayla Renee said...

Kayla says that kids should get paid for doing extra projects outside of the norm of their daily chore duties. She said that some kids may live on farms and have bigger chore duties, etc. We think she has a point. So, we leave it up to her to negotiate her fee for the additional chores.