End of the Year Goals, Celebrating Star Wars-Style

 

 

Mr. One is a reading machine.  He has his face buried in a book at least half of the day.  I have even threatened to take his books away as punishment because he gets so distracted when he has something new to read.  Loving to read is not his problem, but having him remember to take his AR tests in class (this is a reading comprehension program that the school uses) to meet his goals has been a challenge.  Until we realized how badly he wanted to watch the Star Wars movies. 

Our agreement was that for each quarter of the school year that he met or exceeded his point goal, he could watch an episode of Star Wars.  He very quickly started to meet his AR goals, and ended up having the most AR points in his class!  He finished the year with 78 AR points. 

Since the original movies are a trilogy, we weren't sure what to do about the final quarter of school.  Eventually we decided that, even if Mike and I aren't really fond of The Phantom Menace, Episode 1, the boys would like it.  Mr. One met his goal and we watched Episode 1 on Saturday. 

Mr. One and Mr. Two have been anticipating our movie night for weeks.  In school, Mr. Two has been making paper "tickets" to use for the movie.  I have found lots and lots of little colorful squares of paper, cut with decorative edge scissors in his shorts pockets (and in the dryer ;)).

 Mr. One and Mr. Two spent a good chunk of the day making bags for collecting tickets and signs for the movie, that they cheerfully taped around the living room.  So, after dinner and showers/baths, we got ready for movie night.  I popped some popcorn using the paper bag trick (Awesome! just put 1/4 cup popcorn kernels in a brown paper bag, fold down top and secure with a piece of tape, then set your microwave like you would for regular microwave popcorn.), burned and tossed the first few bags (still haven't gotten the hang of the new microwave), finally got it right, then sprinkled generously with salt and melted butter.  Along with the popcorn, we let everyone pick out a few movie sweets, then snuggled onto the couch to watch Star Wars together. 

(In case you can't read this, the brown bags say, "ticket collector" and "money collector".)

The boys loved every minute.  Even better, Mr. Three fell asleep before the scary fight scenes started.  I may have taken a little nap while the movie was playing, too.  I was a little sad that I missed the ET's cameo.  It was a fun way to celebrate Mr. One's hard work this year.