Motivate me!

I have two kids who are readers. One digs right into chapter books and reads them from cover to cover in a couple of days. This child started Little House on the Prairie on Sunday and only has two chapters left. This is also the child who is totally motivated by a points system, loves allowances and rewards, and wants to lift weights with me every afternoon.

I totally get this child. I may not always like this child (during the relentless pursuit of the easy bake oven this afternoon, for example), but I get this child.

This summer I decided that from 12:30-1:00 each afternoon we'd have a silent reading time. The child who takes after me runs to the bedroom, grabs a book, and reads until the timer goes off. The child who does not take after me hides, takes 10 minutes to find a book, then tells me that it's finished after about 2 minutes of serious reading.

I do not get this child. These thirty minutes are the most frustrating minutes of my day. I'll get the kid started by reading a couple of pages, then I sit by and monitor during independent reading. To keep the kid on task, I end up reading more and more and it eventually turns into me reading, and the kid sneaking out of the room and to the computer to do some "research" on animals.

Do you wonder which kid is which?

Anyway, I'm feeling like I'm losing motivation. I really want to teach the unmotivated kid some discipline. When Eddie reads with him, it often turns into a battle, and I don't want to do battle-- I just want him to read. And he reads well, he just gets so bored so quickly. I took him to the library this morning and got him his own library card and let him pick out books. I was hoping he'd come up with a better alternative to what we're currently reading (Henry and the Clubhouse by Beverly Cleary). No such luck-- he only wanted to pick out one-- a ten page book with about five words on each page that he's already read before.

I don't want slacker kids who lie around all summer and let their brains turn to mush. But I hate the constant policing. And he's like this with everything-- putting away laundry is a battle, making beds never happens. He's the master of the shirk, and I want to nip it in the bud so I don't have to deal with it for the next three months.

Any suggestions?

--originally published 5/30/07