Summer homework wasn't getting done, so I cut the whole pile into TodoBingo squares and taped the summer to our dining room wall. He took one look and lost it. Then finished a month of work in about two weeks.
Late June, the kitchen table had three stacks on it.
The school's summer packet. The bridge workbook we'd ordered off Target back in May, because apparently that's a thing we do now. And the leftovers from the school year, the worksheets that never got turned in.
That third stack is the heavy one. It already carries the "you didn't finish this" thing on it, so he won't even look at it. Summer homework not getting done is normal around here, every year. The volume this time was different.
So I dumped all of it into TodoBingo.
Nothing clever. I chopped the work small and dropped the pieces onto boards.
3×3, 4×4, 5×5, split by subject. One board for reading, one for math, a few more for the rest. Ended up with about eight of them.
The pieces are small. Not "do reading today" but "this workbook, page 12 to 14, that's one square." I sized them so a square takes five to ten minutes.
Felt like overkill while I was setting it up. It wasn't.
The app wasn't the whole thing. The other half was a roll of butcher paper and a stack of Post-its.
Everything still outstanding for the summer went up there. School packet, workbook, the June leftovers. Then I broke it down to the day, so "what am I supposed to do today" is answerable by looking at a wall.
They do different jobs. The paper is for seeing the whole summer from above, and TodoBingo is for killing the one square in front of you. Take either one away and the other kind of spins.
The second I finished taping it up:
"No way I can do all that!"
Then he lost it. Which, fair.
The paper was solid Post-its. Eight bingo boards on top of that. Even I looked at it and went "ok that's... a lot." From where he's standing it stopped being "do your summer homework" and turned into "here is a mountain, get to work."
It's the garage halfway through cleaning the garage. Everything's out on the driveway and the place looks worse than when you started. That's the moment people quit.
Should I have cut the pile down for him? Still don't know. It's not that I want to be hard on him, but shrinking the list just creates a second list, the invisible one. Nothing to tell you what's left, when it's due, how far in you are. For my kid that unknown seems to sit heavier than the mountain does.
So I left it and said, once he'd calmed down, just start anywhere. Not exactly parenting-book material.
This is the part that did the work, I think.
The reward isn't five minutes of game time per assignment. A completed line is five minutes of game time.
When you're staring at one worksheet, the only finish line is one worksheet away. On a board, "one more square and that's a line" is sitting right there in your field of view. Same problem in front of him, different landscape behind it.
And the tiny pieces pay off here. He'd start one and go "wait, that's it?" and the square is filled. Then another. Then the line is done.
A month of planned work collapsed into about two weeks. More than I expected, honestly.
Not every day was smooth, obviously. There were days with yelling, days he was just done with it. The must-finish pile got finished anyway.
Here's the part I didn't see coming. He did the first pass of the workbooks in a notebook, so for round two I had him write straight into the books. Same problems he'd already solved, so of course it goes faster. I said we could reset the boards and run them again, and he took off.
Took off so fast that every board filled up and there was no more game time left to earn. "Fine, let's set them up one more time so you can keep earning," and that's where we are now.
Your kid can burn through your plan faster than you built it. Filing that one away.
TodoBingo has a calendar mode, where each day is a square you fill in. Summer homework is basically the use case I've pitched for it before.
It didn't hold up this time. With school, workbook, and leftovers crossing against reading, math, and everything else, a date axis alone means somebody has to decide what goes in "today's square" every single morning. That somebody is me.
So it became three layers instead: butcher paper for the whole summer, Post-its to pull out today, TodoBingo for whatever's directly in front of him. Calendar mode isn't worse, its just built for one thing repeated daily. Piano. Reading minutes. That kind of thing.
What I took away from all this is that the size of the pile mattered less than how the pile looked.
Not one assignment came off the list. Taping it to a wall arguably made it feel bigger. But "I know what to do next" got built, and that part held.
The question was never how many times I say "go do your homework." It's what has to be true for his hand to reach for the next square on its own. This worked once, in our house, this summer. No idea if it works next year.
Also the butcher paper is genuinely in the way. Lost a wall of the dining room for all of August.