Wednesday, October 19, 2011

.74 Per Day

I encouraged #6 to pick up two plastic bottles on our way home from walking #5 to school today.  He put them in a garbage sack with the intention of returning them to the store next time we go.  He will get 5 cents for each.  That's 10 cents on his way to the agreed upon $150 for the trumpet.

When we walked in the door, I got out a calendar and a calculator.  Figuring how many days of school are left and eliminating Sundays, #6 has 74 cents to earn each and every day until June 13th.  At that point, he will take his jar of money to the band teacher, and the Hess family will have a big celebration.  We'll all be tooting our horns for him.


I figure that picking up dog poop'll get him a quarter.  The dog only poops once a day, I believe (I guess I don't pay very close attention to this, so it's completely an assumption).  There are definitely two more jobs that can earn him a quarter each, or maybe I'll make him my garage cleaning assistant, and that'll earn him 50 cents.  That'll also be good incentive for me to get out there and take care of it a little at a time.

That should do it, don't you think.  $150 sounds like so much money for a five-year-old, but breaking it down to .74 a day makes it sound so much more do-able.

The plan from here is to get a jar or container to hold his money each day.  At the end of the day, that container is emptied into another, larger container.

Sounds like one of those Unicef commercials--"For just .74 cents a day, you too can sponsor a bent and dented trumpet."

I guess for today, he's well on his way.  He already has 10 cents--once we get to the grocery store.  Only 64 more to go.

1 comments:

Alyson said...

What a learning experience this will be for him! Whenever my kids have to earn a lot to repair something they've broken, I always hope they'll see how much better they could have put that money to use if they weren't giving it all to me. So let us know how he does on that, too.

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