Musings: No S plan, Spanish, Should we pay kids for grades?

I haven't written for a while, which is my norm. So here are some things that are going on with me right now:


No S Plan
I was able to lose all of my pregnancy weight and then some, thanks to my horrible anxiety I had this fall. Who knew that barely being able to eat at all for close to two months could have such an effect? Anyway, the silver lining of my anxiety is that I did indeed lose a lot of weight. Once the anxiety went away, and I had a student teacher, I started creeping.

So, I am trying something new, called the No S Plan. While it can be used to lose weight, I am just using it to maintain my weight. On weekdays, the No S stands for no Sweets, no Snacks and no Seconds. On the S days (Sat. and Sun.), you can do whatever you want. I have changed the S days to be Saturday and our date night, Wednesday.

So far, I feel less guilty having snacks and sweets on my S days, and do not feel deprived on my No S days. And, I have stopped creeping.

Spanish in the mornings
I keep on trying different things for consistently speaking Spanish with the kids. I guess the idea is that I would like to find a routine that works consistently. The star chart worked, for a few months, and then I stopped using it so much. Talking after school worked for a while, but then I would be too tired or would fall off the bandwagon. My new plan is talking Spanish in the mornings, before I go to work, Monday through Friday.

My idea is that this way I am fresh, and have energy. The start time is when we wake up and the end time is when I leave for work. Once I get back, and I am a bit tired. I am not trying to expend more energy.Generally, I want to be talking in English to Alayna about my day and hear about her day in English while talking in Spanish to the kids. This was not working very well!

We continue to read in Spanish every day. And. . . as it turns out . . . research says that the amount of time spent reading or being read too in the second language has more of an impact on vocabulary and language skills than the amount of time talking!

Should be pay kids to do well in school?
There was this interesting article in Times magazine that talked about paying kids to do well in school. They looked at the impact of paying kids for effort (doing homework, reading books outside of school, showing up to school on time, not getting in trouble) vs. paying kids for results (getting good grades, passing the state test.)

The results: paying for effort works. In terms of reading, it works phenomenally (better than reducing the class size to 16, having a Teach For America Teacher or a great teacher) well and in particular for the hardest to reach children.

How well does it work to pay for results? It had no impact or the students test scores slightly decreased.

My learning from the article: reward effort, not results!