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I need some fresh ideas! Do you mind sharing your school rules, rewards, and consequences for younger children and teens? TIA

Behavior Boosters is a great resource! It was created by a former public school teacher who now homeschools her kids and it revolves around the idea of reinforcing the positive in a fun way. She uses these with her kids, but developed them for her classroom initially. She came and spoke to our MOPs group and has such a heart for God and training children to have a heart like His. Her website is behaviorboosers.com if you are interested

For us our house rules and homeschool rules overlap. Pretty much the main one is to do all their work without complaining. If they start whining or complaining they immediately must leave the room and sit at the kitchen table doing nothing until their attitude gets in check, come back, apologize, and start working. The only other rule is that they have to be respectful and quiet when I need to teach one individually. Those have been the only rules that I have needed, but my kids are still very young (7,5, and almost 3).

They do get rewarded for finishing all of their daily tasks which includes chores, school time, practicing music, etc. They must complete all their tasks and for everything they complete without complaining or arguing (Philippians 2:14) They get 5 minutes of electronic game time. This works well for us since I don't like them to have too much screen time.

Melissa

We use Accountable Kids. The kids don't get to use their tickets until school is finished and part of earning one of their three daily tickets is doing school with a positive attitude. They are used to the routine of breakfast, chores, then school every morning. So, as long as I don't let them get too wrapped up in playing before starting school, they are good about getting things done and eager to find out if there is something extra fun planned like "snack" math, or today's water activity connected with their science lesson. Getting back into the school routine after a break requires a little more diligence on my part, but the kids usually settle in after a couple days. My kids thrive with a routine, so as long as I am fairly consistent, we don't have to put a lot of extra rules/rewards in place. The kids are just used to doing the next thing. We do celebrate school successes though. Ds just finished The Reading Lesson, so we all went out and got ice cream to celebrate. Everyone was pretty happy about that HTH

One positive encouragement I use are smelly stickers. For neat good work I give a scratch-n-sniff sticker and they put it on the front cover of their workbook or folder. These are a really special treat because it takes good work to earn one.

As for punishments: Talking during school work time for my older boys (8 & 10) means extra work. I am really trying to teach them that they can't just talk whenever they want to and to stay on task. Natural consequences of a longer school day when they are slow on their work.