Sarah's Heart Chart

One of the blogs I follow is called "Women Living Well".  It is done by a Christian stay at home mom.  Last week she did a vblog titled Positive Parenting Tips.  It was very inspiring.  One of the tools she uses to encourage good behavior is called a Heart Chart.  I thought I would make one for Sarah and see if it could help us encourage better behavior from her.  I went to Joann's fabric with an idea of what I wanted to do, but no real plan.  I wandered around the store for well over an hour thinking and looking at everything.  I finally decided on a wooden plaque and some wooden hearts.  Sarah was excited when she got home from school and we set off to work.

Sarah painted the larger hearts pink

I wanted it to have a distressed look, so first I spray painted the base with a dark brown paint and wiped it off with a paper towel (didn't have a stain, so I improvised with the spray paint), next I painted it lime green and finally pink.  I also painted the smaller reward hearts the lime green color.

Here is everything painted.  I used scrapbook paper for the center of the board.  I distressed the painted wood using sand paper.  In some spots I went all the way down to the wood (which was sort of stained brown from the brown spray paint)

Notice how the paper on the left looks nice and new.  It didn't look right up against the distressed wood.  I tried a couple of things on a piece of the paper that I trimmed off.  Sanding the paper with 400 grit sand paper worked perfectly!  I was so happy with the way the paper turned out.  I wanted it even more distressed in a couple of spots, so I used a tiny bit of water on my finger.

Sarah wanted me to use the Mod-Podge with glitter in it for the big hearts.  I used the regular Mod Podge to glue on the scrapbook paper. I used a hot glue gun and glued the big hearts on the board and glued ribbon on to the small hearts.  I picked up some upholstery tacks at Home Depot to hang the tacks on.

Here is the finished "Heart Chart" 

Each of the small hearts is worth 1 heart and the bigger ones at the bottom are 15.  Sarah and I came up with ideas about how she earns hearts.  Some of the ways are getting ready for school on time with no one having to yell at her to get a move on, getting to bed when she is told, sharing and basically just doing what we ask her to do.  She can also lose hearts by not doing what is asked of her and pestering her sister.  We also wrote down what the rewards are.  She can turn in 30 hearts for Baskin Robbins ice cream, 45 hearts gets her a dipped waffle cone and 60 gets her a milk shake.  She also decided that she wants 1,000,000 hearts will get her an i-phone!  Fine with me ;-)