It’s easily one of the best parenting ideas we’ve ever had.
It came about because we were trying to figure out ways for the kids to talk nicely to each other, to help each other–to not argue with us, to find ways to show respect.
Everyone wants their kids to act this way, but it’s not always easy. How to reinforce the positive behavior while mitigating the negative? We came up with the idea of an “honor chart.”
The idea comes from the Biblical virtue of Honor: Letting Someone Know You See How Valuable They Really Are. The Apostle Paul writes about this Romans 12:3:” Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought…”
You see, even at a young age, we think we deserve more than we should, and it shows in the way we talk to others and how we treat others. So in our house, we developed the honor chart. It has everybody’s name on it–even Mommy and Daddy’s–and we measure two things: honor and dishonor.
The baseline is the way you should treat people. You should be respectful, you shouldn’t argue when asked to do something, you shouldn’t yell at your spouse. Go above and beyond–offer to share a toy, help someone without being asked, for example–and you get an “honor mark.” Fall below the baseline–by acting snippy or argumentative, not doing what you’re asked the first time–and you get a “dishonor mark.”
The goal is five honor marks a day. If you get five, you get an extra 1/2 hour of game time or an extra show on the Apple TV. It takes work to get to five. If you get five honor marks Monday-Friday, then you get a special treat on Saturday. Frozen yogurt or a small toy from Target. Nothing big, but a tangible way of saying, “Thank you for treating others in the family with honor this week!”
The flipside is five dishonor marks–you lose either your game time or your 1/2 hour of tv. This can happen on days when the kids have been cooped up in the house too long or when everyone is just crabby, but it rarely happens more than twice a week. Kids really dislike losing their tv or game time.
You can earn more than five of each. 10 honor marks or 10 dishonor marks–well, you get the idea.
What’s cool is that it teaches kids in a tangible way that treating others with respect and kindness, showing others how important they are, is something that makes family life, school life–face it, just plain life–that much easier.
Will this work for you? Maybe–maybe not. I do encourage you to find ways to help everyone in your family practice this most important–and sadly lacking–Biblical virtue, and “Honor one another above yourselves.”
It won Giacchino a well-deserved Oscar for Best Original Score, after being passed over for his amazing score on The Incredibles. It’s a waltz-influenced work with a main theme that works as a piano solo, triumphant brass, or jazz-flavored lilt. Easily one of the best scores from one of the best films of the last several years. Giacchino is at home with nearly every genre, having started in video games (the Medal of Honor series) and scored for television (Lost) as well. His scores for Pixar’s Up, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille, are all standouts.
One of the greatest film composers of all time, Morricone ranks with John Williams, John Barry, Jerry Goldsmith, and a few others as true masters of the art form. He has composed scores for many well-known films, but one of his scores I like best is the one he composed for Brian DePalma’s 1987 gangster film, The Untouchables, which also helped earn Sean Connery an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. It’s full of memorable themes (the triumphant brass of “Victorious” to the bass-driven tense strings of “Waiting at the Border” to the wah-wah brass of “Al Capone”), but my favorite is the theme called “Four Friends,” which also serves as the main “death” theme. It should have won the Oscar in 1987, but at least it was nominated.
Like Morricone, Goldsmith is one of the true masters of the film score. Sadly, when many scores have become cut and paste affairs (the entire Hans Zimmer score factory, and I like most of Zimmer’s work), composers like Jerry Goldsmith are becoming few and far between. His gift with theme and melody served him in practically every genre, even scoring for theme parks (his score for Disney’s Soaring Over California attraction is one of his greatest works). He won the Oscar for his music for The Omen, but I think his finest works are the animated Mulan (for which he was also Oscar-nominated) and Rudy, the story of an unlikely football hero.
A classical composer who moved from his native Austria-Hungary, he was more active in the classical world than in the world of film when he was brought to America to compose the score for the 1938 Errol Flynn classic. His influence on film scores is still evident today in that he brought the operatic styling of the letmotif, where each character has their own theme–a practice John Williams brought back to film scoring with his iconic 1977 score for Star Wars. He was the first composer to win the Best Original Score Oscar, and his music was listed at number 11 in the American Film Institute’s ranking of the best film scores of all time.
Kane is the most highly regarded film of all time for many reasons, mostly because of its advanced in the areas of cinematography, storytelling, art direction, and pretty much every other area of film. But its score, by the great Bernard Hermann, is equally impressive. It’s full of great themes, from its opening slow-moving bass string theme (as the camera gets ever closer to Kane’s lit bedroom window in Xanadu) to its gaudy showbiz number lauding “Charlie Kane.” It’s a classic piece of 1940′s film that deserves to be heard even more often. It’s that good–and was nominated for Best Dramatic Score in 1941.
The perfect marriage of filmmaker and composer, the Steven Spielberg/John Williams collaboration is the longest in the history of film and has brought about some of the most memorable combination of music and imagery in history. Since 1975′s Jaws, his music has rightfully earned a place in the hearts and imaginations of filmgoers. His accomplishments are many, but it is his 1993 score for Spielberg’s black and white masterpiece about the Holocaust, Schindler’s List, that stands out as one of his greatest. Haunting, sad, melancholy, and fitting to its subject matter, it is beautifully composed (by Williams) and beautifully played by violin master Itzhak Perlman. Nearly every piece is a mini masterpiece, and it deservedly won the Oscar for Best Original Score that year.
Randy Newman is an Oscar winner most readily identified with the Toy Story films, but when he composed the music for the Robert Redford baseball myth The Natural, he was better known as a writer of highly ironic and sarcastic pop songs. The score for The Natural is a practically perfect work, full of big dramatic moments (copied like crazy in sports films ever since), wonderful period-inspired jazz, and quiet lyric pieces. It’s easily one of Newman’s greatest scores and was nominated for Best Original Score in 1984.
It’s one of the greatest film scoring achievements of all time. Howard Shore’s monumental scoring of Peter Jackson’s epic Lord of the Rings trilogy combines epic themes, letmotif, Elvish choirs, unique instrumentation, and more, to add a musical score to J.R.R. Tolkien’s world of Middle Earth. While I love all three scores, my favorite is his work on the first film in the trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring. Giving musical life to Bilbo, Gandalf, Frodo, and places like Rivendell, Mordor, and Moira, Shore develops a rich tapestry of music that rightfully earned him an Oscar in 2001.
