Teaching Kids Thoroughness with an M&M Search

Today I worked on teaching kids thoroughness with an M&M search. Thoroughness is the trait we are working on in our character development series. If you are new to the character development series, I really hope you’ll look under the “character development” tab and explore a bit. The first year of my blog (2012) I worked on a trait a week (for a total of 52 traits) and had an activity a day (365 activities last year). I have been adding to the character development series this year, so you will find 7-8 activities for every trait. I am still working on getting all the tabs up from last year. I am trying to find a good balance of doing the blog while being a mom. I don’t want to be getting out of whack and saying to my kids, “Leave me alone so I can blog about how to love you better.” Therefore, I am still working on getting it all up and organized under my transition to the WordPress. You’ll have to have patient with me. I currently have 38 out of 52 all updated and easy to find. The rest are there just need the proper tabs to be found easily. OK – now on to our activity for thoroughness.

You will need a bowl, rice, M&M’s and tweezers. We used kid tweezers from their doctor kit because I thought it would be easier for them to use. They tried it with real tweezers too. It still worked, it just took more patience.

I then dumped a majority of the M&M’s into the rice. I may have kept a handful for myself.

Next, I had the kids take turns mixing the M&M’s into the rice to cover them all up. Once they were done mixing, I had them poke the M&M’s under the rice with their fingers. Once they had them covered, I presented the goal and the rules. I explained that thoroughness is doing something all the way the right way. It is doing things completely. I gave the example of cleaning your room. We don’t take shortcuts and try and hide things. We put everything back where it belongs. Another great example is school work. If we do things thoroughly the first time, there is less work in the end. I can’t tell you how many times I may have to call a child back to do things thoroughly. It’s definitely something we will continue to work on around here. We then spent some time working on the Bible verse, found at the beginning of this post. The M&M search teaches thoroughness because they have to find every single M&M or they miss out. Trust me, they were motivated in thoroughness with this activity. Any M&M’s left in the bowl ends up in Mommy’s mouth. They cannot use their hands. They can only move the rice around and search with the tweezers.

I tell you, if you want to keep your kids occupied for quite some time, just dump a bunch of M&M’s in a bowl of rice. I’m not sure they’ve ever sat at the table for that long. They took turns nicely. If they didn’t obey the rules of the game, they had to skip their turn. That was a huge motivator to stay in line.

Although I’m sure little man didn’t grasp the entire concept of thoroughness, this was a game he could play and enjoy as well. They only had one M&M missed in the bowl. Poor me.