EP 95: A Family Shark Tank Challenge

We have an uber-competitive family who loves any kind of contest, physical or mental, especially when prizes are involved. We recently gathered to compete in a Family Shark Tank Challenge. And in Episode 95 of Loving Life at Home, I’m dishing up all the details as to how it went down.

Family Shark Tank Challenge

Full Transcript from Episode 95

Hello, Friend. Welcome to Episode 95 of Loving Life at Home.

Last week I promised to tell you about our family’s recent Shark Tank challenge, so that’s what I want to do today. But first I feel like you need a little bit of background information.

We have a very competitive culture in our family. We love challenging, one another, whether physically, or mentally or with silly competitions that don’t count for anything at all, except for fun memories and family togetherness. So it’s a friendly sort of competition, but competition nonetheless.

When the kids were little, this often took the form of push-up or sit up or chin up competitions. Or we’d see who could stand on their hands or sit on the wall or hold a plank position the longest.

One year I bought the family a slack line for Christmas, strung it between two trees about 30 feet apart, and offered $10 to the first child who could successfully cross it without falling. They practiced constantly! One of our daughters, who was about 6 or 7 at the time, would get up with the sun every morning and go to the back yard while it was barely even light to get in practice time before siblings got up and started lining up for their turns.

A Variety of Contests

Of course, not all the competitions were physical. Sometimes we’d see which child could read the most books over the summer. Or design the most clear and concise gospel tract (I’ll include links to the winners of that competition in today’s show notes.) Or we’d race to see who could complete a trivia test the fastest (I have lots of free printable quizzes on our family website we’ve used over the years for different holidays – Thanksgivng, Christmas, Easter, Reformation Day, MLK Day, St. Patrick’s Day, and the like – and others that cover details from some of our family’s favorite movies that we’ll drag out anytime we re-watch a particular show together, especially around Christmas. I’ll provide links to both those categories in the show notes, as well.)

Sometimes we’ll compete in a board game tournament – just last night, we all played bananagrams and one of my daughters-in-law won every single round – against some really top competitors!

Or we’ll see who can get the highest score in a spelling bee or finish their math drills the fastest. Or earn the highest score on room inspection or make their bed and keep their rooms nice and tidy for the most days in a row.

When we travel, we often map out obstacle courses at rest stops, then time each child as they complete it. Or we compete to see who can correctly identify the most capital cities of states we’re passing through. Or execute the most impressive jump off a high dive. Or win a foot race to the top of a long hill. Or best the most family members at King of the Mountain.

1 Cor. 9:24 tells us,

“Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way as to win the prize.”

I think most of my family members have really taken that verse to heart, and I don’t just mean in the metaphorical sense it was intended. It really doesn’t matter what the competition was (or is), our kids are game and will be trying their best to win it.

A Prize for the Winner

That may be because we normally offer some kind of prize. Sometimes the winner gets money, sometimes a gold sticker on a chore chart, sometimes winner gets the privilege of picking the restaurant we eat at for at for dinner or the flavor of ice cream we bring home from the grocery store or even the movie we watch as a family that night.

Sometimes the prize is merely a pat on the back and the satisfaction that comes from finishing first – like Mikayla got last night with bananagrams. Or maybe a silly trophy or a medal made from a salsa lid strung on a piece of ribbon or a special certificate I designed on my computer and printed out at home.

One year we sponsored a neighborhood ping-pong tournament, for which the cardiologist next-door took top honors. Rumor is, he still has a framed copy of the ping-pong championship certificate he won at this event hanging on the office wall at his clinic, right next to his medical school diploma and his other professional certifications and accolades.

You get the idea. If you want buy-in from every member of our family, all you have to do is gamify whatever you want done and offer some token award to the winner.

My son Benjamin has always been great at making a game out of chores. He also loves playing tag and used to promise a dollar to any sibling who could catch him. He would run just slow enough for them to feel like they really had a chance, but when they started getting older and faster, he’d ramp up the speed. It was rare than anybody ever caught him.

Benjamin also trained most of his younger siblings and nephews to be formidable ultimate frisbee players by running them through their paces in a variety of drills in our backyard, where he’d give a piece of candy to each child who could catch the frisbee, he threw their way. He had it down to a science and watching the whole group practice was like admiring a finely oiled machine.

A Family Tradition

But Ben is not the only one who has taken up the mantle in designing family competitions. My son Samuel and his wife Bekah Joy (we use her middle name to differentiate her from our daughter, Rebekah) – but they took things to a whole new level several years ago when they began sponsoring elaborate yearly competitions that involve the whole family.

Samuel tells me that, pretty soon after they married, the two of them spent a whole day – or maybe it was a whole weekend — brainstorming, and they generated a long list of ideas they’ve been working off ever since for what has now become a new family tradition of these elaborate challenges that we all look forward with great enthusiasm every year.

I think he drew inspiration from areas that he either really enjoyed as a kid himself and was naturally good at (like geography and physical fitness) or subjects he wished he’d given more attention to when he was younger (like public speaking and PowerPoint slides).

Truth be told, some of these competitions were undoubtedly designed to remedy perceived gaps in my children’s home education. They were either things I didn’t teach at all or maybe not as thoroughly as I should have – like budgeting and money management — or else I covered them in a way that was so boring it failed to catch and hold everybody’s attention.

But that’s okay. I’m just happy my older kids are finding such fun and creative ways to inspire their siblings to regularly devote time to learning skills and building habits that will benefit them and enrich their lives in the long run. That’s a win for all of us – no matter who comes away with the grand prize!

Really, they’re taking Hebrews 10:24 to heart by “considering how to stimulate others to love and good works” while simultaneously rectifying common learning gaps for the next generation – including his younger siblings and nieces and nephews — which I think is so smart and generous, and just all-around amazing. I love it!

Filling in the Gaps

One of the first competitions that Samuel and Bekah Joy sponsored was aimed at getting our kids to learn more about finances and the wise use of money. He challenged each of us to read a book of our own choosing on any topic related to finances then submit a written report on what we learned. That was pretty straightforward. He gave everyone a scoring rubric to use in evaluating all the essays submitted, and so we all read each one and voted on the our favorites using that grading rubric.

Skills taught or practiced through this competition included reading, writing, and finances – not only did you learn the material from the book you read personally, but you also got the highlights from the books everybody else read, as well, since we all had to read and score each report submitted.

It’s been a long time since that challenge, but I think top prize for that competition was $300, second was $200 and third was $100. There were also special prizes of maybe $50 or so for the top non-winning essays in each age group.

I don’t remember who won that competition. All I know for sure is that I finished dead — despite the fact that I read six or seven financial books during the course of that year and my essay reported on all of them. Or at least at least I reviewed all of them. I think I didn’t adequately summarize any of the books I read, which is what the sponsors were really looking for.

Let’s see, I believe the next competition for the following year was physical fitness. Samuel and Bekah Joy gave specific guidelines as to how we could earn points for working out at least 20 minutes three times a week and we got extra points for maintaining a streak of this three times weekly exercise for over two weeks. Top earner for that competition generous prize I want to say it was $500. Maybe more, toward something that would support the winner’s continued physical fitness, like a gym membership, or home workout equipment, or fees to join a sports team that sort of thing.

Learning New Skills

The year after that, they challenged us all to study a country and come up with a PowerPoint teaching what we learned. Samuel loved geography as a kid – I’m pretty sure he even won first place in a geography bee our homeschool support group sponsored when he was in middle school, but he admits the inspiration for the PowerPoint portion of the competition was an honor society convention for which he had to present a PowerPoint slide show  during college. He was very satisfied with his slides until he saw the amazing and visually stunning presentations all the other honor students delivered at the national convention and then he felt sad, and maybe even a bit ashamed, that he hadn’t devoted more time and effort to his own.

So to spare his siblings from that same kind of embarrassment, he wanted them to learn PowerPoint at a younger age and see examples of other family members PowerPoint before they ever found themselves in such a situation in college.

We had some amazing family presentations that year. Several people included elements other than the slide show to help immerse their audience in whatever country they studied. One of my daughters studied to England, dressed up in period garb, and a served scones and tea during her presentation.  Others served soup or passed around souvenirs and artifacts from the country they studied.

My country was Poland, so I hand embroidered a traditional Polish costume to wear during my presentation, sang some Polish songs, and served special wafers that are common treats in Poland around Christmas time, which is when this particular family competition was taking place.

I did much better that year than I did on the financial book reading. I think I may have even earned first place. Again, Samuel and Bekah provided a grading rubric so that we could each score one another’s presentation. I don’t remember for sure what the prize was that year. So maybe I didn’t win it after all. I’ll have to look back at our Christmas letter to figure it out.

A Worthwhile Endeaver

I do know the following year’s competition was Bible memory. We had several amazing presentations that year. I’m pretty sure I already explained the details from that challenge and an earlier episode of this podcast. I’ll look it up and link it in the show notes in case you’re interested.

I know for sure I won the top price that year, which was $1000 toward a trip to Israel or $500 cash. I totally would’ve taken the allowance for a visit to the Holy Land, except that was right after the October 7 Hamas attack, so I opted for the cash prize instead and used it as seed money to fund ongoing monthly memory challenges for my kids and grandkids.

We’ve been doing that for a couple of years now, with more than 20 family members participating who have learned a combined total of well over 1000 verses. I’ll link more information about how we do that competition in today’s show notes, including a couple of print packs filled with the verses we’ve learned plus all the resources I created to help make memorizing those passages easier – including unique awards certificates for each month, in case you want to establish the same tradition in your own family.

Let’s see… the year after that, we were all required to make a 2- to 5- — or maybe it was 2- to 10-minute — video on a stem topic of our choice. STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics for those who don’t know the acronym.

Anyway, that was a really interesting competition. We all learned so much. My daughter Rachel won first prize in that contest for a very thorough and well done look at evolution versus Young earth creationism. I would really love to post several of those videos the kids did that year. If I ever get around to doing so, I’ll come back and link those videos in the show notes as well.

Pitch Yourself or Your Idea

And that brings us up to this year’s family Shark Tank challenge. Samuel and his wife had set aside a fixed amount of money they wanted to invest in projects other family members were interested in. I know they give a certain percentage of their income each year to charitable causes anyway, so I think this is challenge was probably just one sub-category of giving for their family – and so much appreciated by the rest of us.

But beyond investing part of their treasure in the lives of their loved ones, a secondary goal for this competition was to help refine family members’ ability to pitch themselves or an idea — something Samuel noted is very important, because if you don’t know how to do this properly, then someday “you may go ask your boss for a raise from and get fired instead.” So it’s an important life skill.

To participate in this year’s competition, family members had to either pitch themselves as a potential shark or pitch an idea and a request for funding. We wound up with a panel of five sharks, which included: Samuel and his wife Bekah Joy, my husband, Doug, my mother (whom all our kids and grandkids call Nana) and our 19-year-old son Daniel.

Actually, Nana didn’t pitch herself. She was nominated by Samuel who wrote the most wonderful and honoring pitch on her behalf. I need to have him send me a copy of it, because it’s a real treasure and I want to keep a copy forever.

He did such a great job outlining all Nana’s qualifications – including the fact she already invests in the lives of all her children and grandchildren and great grandchildren by faithfully praying for them by name every single day and by combing through our family chat for details that will help her pray more specifically.

Anyway, the rules (which Sam and Bekah totally made up just for the occasion) specified that sales pitches would be given in order of age, youngest to oldest. If you skipped your turn, you would be bumped to the very end, which means funding might run out before they ever got to you again. So it paid to go when it was your right by age to do so.

Also, the other sharks were allowed to add to the pot of funding before the competition began, but once the first pitch started, the budget couldn’t change. Also, sellers had to convince a majority of sharks to fund their project. No individual shark could fund any project separate from the group. And any sellers whose first request was denied would be given an opportunity to negotiate for less funding with one and only one counter-offer. If that one was denied, as well, then you lost out and your project didn’t get funded.

The youngest grandchildren to participate –and therefore the first to give their pitches — were actually the children of the original two sharks, Samuel and Bekah Joy. In a brilliant and time-saving move, Samuel had pre-recorded their speeches so that they each only had to stand at the front of the audience underneath their slideshow while the tape played.

Youngest to Oldest

Sarah went first. She’s not even three yet, so her dad had used the voice memo feature on his phone to pre-record her saying one sentence at a time, pausing to prompt her with each new sentence before resuming the recording, so that the finished presentation flowed so smoothly and lasted less than two minutes.

She requested seven dollars for a gallon of sweet tea to share at the pool with her family because they all love tea and enjoy spending time together, plus the summer is hot and it’s important to stay hydrated. Her request was approved – unanimously, I think.

Their oldest daughter, Evelyn, Is 4 ½. She asked for $21 to buy three coloring books, one for her and one for each of her siblings. Except the baby. She didn’t ask for a coloring book for him, as he is too young to color right now. But she had specific coloring books in mind for everybody else and had already priced them. She pointed out the fact that coloring is good for hand-eye coordination and fine motor skill development. It fosters creativity and is also a fun screen-free activity. She got fully funded, just like her little sister.

Next up with Nathan who is six. He requested a set of Ninjago Legos. His mom and dad voted against his first request, which they thought was too expensive. They’d already helped him prepare a counter-offer slide for a $17 set they thought would be more his speed, but the other three sharks out voted them, so Nathan got the set he really wanted, after all.

There were such a variety of requests. I won’t recount them all here, but will just give a few highlights. Some of the sellers did not get their original request funded, but did receive funding for their reduced request.

For instance, one granddaughter asked for $20 to buy candy to sell at her brother’s lemonade stand. The sharks had lots of questions for her, like what are you going to do with the candy that doesn’t sell. Answer: eat it and share it with siblings.

The sharks declined to put $20 towards that project but  granted her negotiated offer which for $10.

Ditto for a grandson who requested money for new shoes. He already had several pair at home, but the sharks agreed to go halvsies with him on the new tennis shoes he was hoping to buy. Which means he’ll be mowing a lot of lawns to earn his part and will probably appreciate and take care of them better as a result.

Let’s see… our five-year-old granddaughter, Ellen, had asked her mom to video her pitch so they could just play that at the competetion, but her dad offered her a piece of candy if she’d give the pitch in person. And she wanted that candy so much that she overcame her nerves and natural shyness and bravely gave her pitch through tears. It was so sweet to see her conquer her fears at that tender young age!

She was requesting $35 for ballet tutus — one for her, and matching tutus for each of her little girl cousins. She had taken a ballet class this summer and also offered to teach the others what she had lerned.

Another grandson who is almost 12 has been very diligent to work out every day this summer, running laps around their property and doing push-ups and situps. He requested money for a set of weights, since “I can’t afford a gym membership, and even if I could, I don’t have a car and don’t know how to drive so I would be dependent on somebody else to take me.” That was also funded.

His older brother asked for money to buy blueberry bushes, citing  the health benefits of blueberries and the savings growing your own would offer over buying them at the grocery store. His project was funded, too, and those plants are already bought, paid for, and in the ground with a drip irrigation system to keep them well-watered in the Texas heat.

My youngest daughter requested pottery lessons. She had an adorable slideshow that listed the mental-health benefits to creative endeavors, such as pottery, and the savings a class would offer over buying all the tools and supplies on your own. Especially considering the fact all the girls in our family are going to take those pottery classes together, and she negotiated a group discount for us to do so.

Another son requested money for a popcorn machine. He’s planning to sell popcorn this year on trade day at the family camp we attend every October, as well as at a homeschool craft fair we’ll be participating in in November. Plus, he loves anything nostalgic, as he noted in his slideshow, and the popcorn machine will also come in handy popping up snacks for the outdoor movie he is planning to host for family and friends this fall.

My daughter Rebekah gave a lovely appeal for the family to join her on a maple tapping expedition early next spring. She started her presentation with three books that we read together during her childhood: Little House in the Big Woods, Tasha Tutor’s book of holidays, I don’t remember the exact title of that one, and Miracles on Maple Hill. The thing all three books had in common was that, at some point in the story, the characters got to tap maple trees and make homemade syrup, something Rebekah has wanted to do ever since first hearing about it.

Her pitch included breakfast on the front porch for our entire family, complete with homemade pancaked topped with authentic 100% maple syrup. They were delicious! And her request — beyond asking the family to set aside time to travel 13 hours from home to the nearest festival that actually teaches tree tapping sometime next March — was enough money to buy festival tickets for the whole family  (I think tickets are normally $10 a piece for adults and $4 or $5 for children– something like that), so her project was enthusiastically approved, as well.

Probably my favorite pitch came from our 22-year-old son, Isaac. He started his slideshow with an adorable story about penguins, and noted how two species of penguins mate for life. He had cute, close-up pictures of them engaging in a pebbling ritual, where the male penguin presents a smooth stone to a female of interest. Isaac then noted the fact that humans engage in a pebbling ritual of their own, where in a male gives a smooth cut stone – usually a diamond—to his female of interest, something our son is planning to do within the next year as he will soon be graduating from university with a degree in chemical engineering and would like to marry his steady girlfriend soon afterwards.

So he requested the sharks contribute a certain amount of money to his ring fund – an amount which he would match and invest in Fortune 500 stocks where it could grow until time to buy the ring.  This presentation elicited lots of enthusiastic cheers, hoots, and hollers from the audience. And the sharks agreed to his original asking price.

Out of Money

Sadly, the sharks ran out of funding before the family ran out of pitches. They liquidated all remaining assets in order to help fund a new work truck for my electrician son. That request was a complete surprise to him, something his precious wife put together on the sly.

He thought they were asking for money to buy a couple of goats for their little homestead. She even prepared two slideshows, so he wouldn’t suspect what she was really up to. Her request was just so honoring of her selfless and hard-working husband who has been folding his lanky 6 ‘5” frame up into her tiny economy car ever since she got too big in her last pregnancy to fit behind its steering wheel. Needless to say, that car had zero extra room for all the tools required for his job. But she had really done her homework. She had already figured out how much they could get in trade-in value, how much they could contribute from savings, and how much they would ideally need from the sharks in order to buy a nice used vehicle debt-free.

Even though the sharks ran out of money, all remaining projects ended up getting the requested funding. According to the rules, none of the sharks could fund anything projects individually. But the rules said nothing about crowdfunding from the rest of the family, which is exactly what happened with almost everybody pitching in $10 or $15 each to cover expenses for the last few projects.

It was such a wonderful, wonderful challenge. And it has been great to see the funded projects start to take shape – the blueberry plants in the ground, the fortune 500 stocks aleady earning interest, the popcorn machine cranking out snacks for family movie nights, the pottery lessons on the calendar, the new weight set being used to build muscle, the deal signed on the work truck, the illustration software being used to create amazing artwork, the Ninjago legos ordered, delivered, and already assembled!

Plus, Samuel and Bekah have already announced next year’s challenge. They’re starting a family book club. Where we will all read one book a month – the same book – and discuss. They’ve had each of us fill out a form with the books were interested in reading in about a dozen different genres so I’m excited about that. We’ll see how it goes.

Junior high, high school, and college students can earn money for doing this reading on top of their other schoolwork. There will also be a final exam – based on the year’s reading — that (Lord willing) all participants will take 15 months from now, while we’re gathered for Thanksgiving next year. There will be cash prizes for whoever does best on the test, as well as for the best essays written based on any other books we read together.

Stay tuned for how that one goes. I’ll do my best to give you an update after Thanksgiving 2026.

More Bible Memory Help

Want a month-by-month plan filled with resources to make hiding God’s Word in your heart a habit? Check out my new Grand Investment print packs.

I’ve packed both volumes full of pretty, pertinent printables: copywork and coloring pages, award certificates, and tracking charts, along with links to videos and songs I’ve used both in memorizing Bible passages myself and in encouraging my kids and grandkids to do the same.