Lucky Jar

Do you have a reward system for your kids or grandkids?

We have never had one for Grandboy but I came across a post over at

Three Sisters and Us about The Positive Jar and I fell in love with the idea.

Please check out that post, Very creative idea!

So we all agreed to "try" it with Grandboy.

The conditions were that he had to listen when we talk to him, instead of us having to tell him the same thing 10 times and having to practically do a clown act to get his attention.

He would also get rewarded for doing basic 5 year old chores on his own, like picking up his toys without having to be told. And if we felt like he was doing a random act of kindness, he would also be rewarded.

Then when his jar gets full, he will get a treat of his choice, within reason of course.

Some ideas we talked about were a new toy, a trip to McDonald's or a 

trip to GattiLand, which is similar to Chuckie Cheese.

We decided that we would not take away cotton balls as punishment.

I saved an empty peanut butter jar and spaghetti jar for this and I used paint pens to decorate. Since we didn't have any small pom poms or marbles, I decided to use cotton balls because I have a huge bag that rarely gets used.

Papaw used his drill to make a hole in the lid of the peanut butter jar so that we could just drop in a cotton ball.

After explaining to him what this was all about, Grandboy decided he wanted to call his jar the "Lucky Jar". Then I decorated the jar.

This is the finished Lucky Jar.

After a few cotton balls, I realized that it wouldn't take very long for that to get filled up, so I decorated the spaghetti jar.

Is that considered cheating?

No, I didn't think so either.

So here are the supplies for the glass jar. I put 2 pieces of duct tape over the opening so that it was completely covered and trimmed around the edges

Then I removed the tape and put a small piece on the other side, both sticky sides facing each other. I did this so that the cotton balls wouldn't get caught on the tape.

Then I used a knife to cut slits so that we could just drop a cotton ball in.

I put the tape back on the jar and screwed on the metal ring.

Again I used paint pens to decorate.

And here is the finished jar....

That will hopefully take a few weeks to fill up!

Grandboy is really excited about his Lucky Jar. He has been volunteering to help clean the house, he even washed my windows!

He has been listening to us better and we haven't had to repeat ourselves as much.

And he has been eating better at dinner time.

Every now and then he will bat those beautiful blue eyes at Mamaw and I will let him sneak a cotton ball or two in his jar. Shhh, that's our secret though!