Thursday, May 30, 2013

The Pintester Movement

I am a Pinterest addict. I love all things about Pinterest, I pin almost daily, and on occasion I even actually make the things in the pins. I've made the laundry soap, loads of yummy Gluten free recipes, and, and crafty inspiration for projects abounds on my boards.

One lovely find from Pinterest has been the Pintester, a blogger who tries (and often fails) at testing out Pinterest pins in hilarious ways. Watching her set this bottle on fire about made me pee my pants! Today she's hosting a blog carnival of Pinterest inspired projects called the Pintester Movement. Some will be good, some will be bad, some will be ugly, but all will be awesome I'm sure!
This isn't my usual crafty post. My pin test today is inspired by my rowdy, lovely little boys. We needed a system, you know, something to help handle all the tiny irritating things they do to each other each day and turn it around into gentle happy reminders of how to be kind, etc... I pinned THIS a long time ago...but finally the sibling nitpicking got so bad I was forced to craft a new solution!

I made ours a rainbow so that everyone's favorite color made the board. Then I worked really hard to try to line everything up perfectly...only to get to the end of the project and realize the whole thing is slightly crooked. To that I said "whatever" and applied six layers of glitter to the WARNING label. Glitter makes every craft better...or at least it'll blind anyone looking at the sparkly board and prevent them from noticing how crooked the labels are applied.

Since I spent so much time lining up the crooked labels, I ran out of time to make cool magnets, so I grabbed some leftover ABC letter magnets from our fridge and scotch taped printouts of the boys' heads onto them to use for "pegging up and down" until I get around to making the intended magnet markers. Someday before the boys are too old for this board. 

I hung a shelf above the board with three labeled jars on it. The idea is every time the peg up to AWESOME they get a pom pom. When they pom poms reach the washi tape finish line, the child in question gets to pick a group activity for that weekend. Don't feel bad for Gabe...he actually filled his jar already and is starting over on round two. He wants to take the wild rumpus to the Children's Museum in Salem this weekend. I agreed immediately, as I am hibernating and working on Convention Extravaganza projects all weekend, so that'll be John's Saturday activity with the crew. Bwahahaha! This system is fabulous!

Honestly, we started this board because the squabbling and tattling between the three small fries was getting out of hand. We've done other charts, sticker charts, time outs, just gobs of other systems and nothing stuck or seemed to help much without being a huge hassle. So far, this actually seems to be working. The boys really want to earn pompoms, but more importantly, they all REALLY want to be able to claim the title of AWESOME. So they work hard to make sure their face stays on awesome. I almost wonder if the bottom layers said things like EVIL and KRAANG if they might try even harder to make sure to stay above the shiny WARNING level.

Check out the Pintester Movement for more Pinspiration, and STAY AWESOME!

6 comments:

Sonja Foust said...

Cute idea and great job!

Heather said...

I didn't even notice it was crooked!

Lynne said...

I use this kind of system with clothespins in my classroom- it's called a clip chart by Rick Morris- works great!

Jenn said...

Love this, totally great. And I love the use of glitter :)

Katherine said...

Oh I like that idea. I like that idea big fat lot. You know my favourite bit? Where someone else entertains the kids for a couple of hours...and it's a REWARD. Genius. Slightly evil genius.

Shelly Nemitz said...

After raising two boys (13 months apart) with a similar system I can't tell you how much I enjoy my 21 & 22 year old sons. There's something about boys that makes them soooooooo motivated by points and charts and REWARDS!!! I love that this is based on attitude, because it's what's inside that counts in a person ... not how perfectly he can get tasks done.

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