Patti's Homeschool Mentoring

Of the Three Types of Education Which Will You Choose?

Conveyor Belt Education  

The modern public school system was set up about the same time as the industrial revolution with the intent to educate the poor so that they could get a job, and thereby support their families.

Each person who travels through the conveyor belt receives a stamp of approval at the end (diploma), and comes out into the world as a “finished product,” ready to be marketed to the highest bidder for employment. And like a factory, conveyor belt institutions test and grade all students on the same scales regardless of individual needs or interests.

The Conveyor Belt does precisely what it was designed to do. It produces a relatively literate workforce for the general populace. It is not designed, however, to produce independently thinking leaders.

Conveyor Belt education can be found in public schools, private or charter schools, and even in home schools. It is sometimes referred to as the “soviet conveyor belt,” because standards and grade levels are set low enough to ensure that nearly everyone can make it through the educational assembly line.

Conveyor Belt Education has as its objective to prepare everyone for a job, any job, by teaching them what to think. This includes rudimentary skills to help them function in society. In general, compulsory schools are set up on the conveyor belt model, although most of us can cite wonderful examples of many excellent teachers in the public system who use leadership methods.

 

…Conveyor Belts have an important place in society, but it is essential that they don’t become a monopoly and that professional and leadership training schools are maintained.

Oliver DeMille, A Thomas Jefferson Education, 2nd Edition, pages 21-22

Goals:

• Educate the Masses and Lower Classes
• Teach What to Think
• Get a Job

Curriculum:

• 85% Social
• 15% Textbooks

Method:

• “Soviet” Conveyor Belt—Schools look and run like factories
• Individual intiative and innovation from students (non-conformity) is discouraged
• Individual initiative and innovation from educators is discouraged

Careers: (According to age)

• 0-12 Study
• 12-18 Play
• 18-24 College Major/Job
• 24-68 Work/Job
• 68+ Retire or Volunteer

Most of us can point to exceptions to the rule: teachers or students who stood out and excelled within the compulsory system; the fact remains that the system per se is not designed to produce such anomalies, and does not, in general, encourage or reward such outcomes.

 

Professional Education

Professional education systems create specialists by teaching their students when to think. This model has been used much longer than the soviet conveyor belt, since it arose from the tradition of apprenticeship, where the student was systematically taught what his master knew before venturing out on his own.

Each professional, whether a mechanic, a lawyer, a doctor, or a financial adviser, is trained to meet a certain set of standards and to think creatively within his field of expertise. However, outside of that narrow scope of knowledge, he tends to rely on the understanding of other experts. A complex society such as modern day America reinforces this.

Professional education is also known as the “competitive conveyor belt,” since the methods used are the same as the soviet conveyor belt, but the standards are set much higher—the top 10-15%.

 

The professional system does what it’s designed to do—create expertise. And if you need a doctor, a lawyer, or a manager for your business, you are glad they are well prepared. The professional system has been very effective in achieving its goals, but it is not a substitute for leadership training.

Oliver DeMille, A Thomas Jefferson Education, 2nd Edition, page 23

Goals:

• Train Experts
• Teach When to Think

Curriculum:

• 50% Case Studies
• 50% Ethics

Method:

• Competitive Conveyor Belt—Students Compete

Careers: (According to age)

• 0-18 Play
• 18-22 College Major
• 22-26 Professional Training
• 26-65 Career
• 65+ Retire or Volunteer

 

 

Leadership Education

 Leadership Education has three primary goals.

First, to train thinkers, leaders, entrepreneurs, and statesmen—those with understanding and competence to lead society (do things right) and the moral character to act with integrity in the areas they lead in (do the right thing).

Second, to perpetuate freedom by helping people understand what freedom is and what must be done to maintain it, and inspiring them to actually do the difficult things required to make it happen.

Third, teach students how to think, which is how the first two goals must be accomplished. Those who know how to think are able to lead effectively and help a society remain free and prosperous, while those who know only when or what to think will be unable to do so.

The method for training leaders is as old as humanity—classics and mentors. The student studies the greatest works ever created, and submits to the guidance of great mentors, who customize the education for the student’s mission in life.

This is the simplest, though arguably the most challenging of the educational paths.

 

“Leadership Education, which I call ‘Thomas Jefferson Education,’ teaches students how to think and prepares them to be leaders in their homes and communities, entrepreneurs in business, and statesmen in government.

“…What happens when a society does not prepare leaders? We get managers and professionals leading in areas they have no training for, such as government, and we get a nation of followers who see no problem with that because they have no experience with anything else. …This was the legacy of Germany in the 1930s—a highly trained but uneducated people easily swayed by Hitler.”

Oliver DeMille, A Thomas Jefferson Education, 2nd Edition, pages 21, 27

Goals:

• Raise Great Souls
• Cultivate Leaders
• Teach How to Think

Curriculum:

• Classics (any works that inspire greatness and are worth revisiting time and time again)

Method:

• Mentors that Design a Custom Education for Each Student

Careers: (According to age)

• 0-12 Play/Family Work
• 12-16 Scholar Phase
• 16-20 Superb Education
• 20-24 Depth Phase (Liberal Arts College)
• 24-50 Build Two Towers (a Family and an Organization)
• 50+ Impact the World (Statesmanship)

From:  http://www.tjed.org/about-tjed/

What is TJEd?

Discovered and organized by Oliver and Rachel DeMille,Thomas Jefferson Education, or “TJEd,” is an educational philosophy and a methodology by which great individuals throughout history were educated.

 Thousands of families and professional educators are applying those same principles today, with amazing success.

 

The Student Whisperer, Inspiring Genius--Locals Our Books Have Arrived!!!

Like a master gardener, a great mentor, a Student Whisperer, knows how to set the stage for transformational experiences—as often as they are needed. She knows how to create the environment where such feelings & experiences are frequent, how to use such experiences to help us discover & improve ourselves, & even how to repeat & reinforce such feelings so that our motivation & efforts are sustained.

"A classic! It will apply to the businessman, teacher and mom alike."

The wait is finally over! The Student Whisperer by Oliver DeMille and Tiffany Rhoades Earl is now available in paperback. Reader response is the best ever. See for yourself:

• “My ‘epiphanal rate’ was off the charts.”

• “I was moved beyond words.”
  

• “…a guide book for all who want to truly mentor well and make a difference in the world.”

• “…no matter what I say it would be an understatement.”

Click on the link for: 

 Description

• Chapter Outline

• Reader Reviews

• Sample Download

• About the Authors

http://www.tjed.org/purchase/books/student-whisperer/

• • 
    

     A great mentor cares- and she is effective! 

    
    

    Hey locals, our books have arrived at the discounted cost of $10.00 each! 

     All I can say so far is WoW, so well done, a truly inspiring story and guide book!!! Another homeschooling classic that should be in every families resource library!

    TJEd MomSchool participants your books are by the front door. 

    Others, contact me to make arrangements to pick them up.

     
  • Enhance your experience with The Student Whisperer by downloading your free Student Whisperer Journal: 

    Click on the link below for: A free pdf download of The Student Whisperer Journal, a 176-page 8 1/2″ by 11″ binder insert designed to complement The Student Whisperer and enhance your experiences with the workshops and exercises it outlines.

    
    A free pdf download of the List of Inspiring Archetypes, from The Student Whisperer
    
    

    A free pdf download, “What is Thomas Jefferson Education?”
    
    

    Periodic updates, articles and downloads to assist you in your mentoring
    
    

    Notification of upcoming Leadership Education and LEMI events such as seminars, forums, online classes and webinars, etc.
    
    

    Access to special pricing on webinars, podcasts and new releases
    
    

    The monthly TJEd newsletter, “Inspire!”

     

     http://www.tjed.org/resources/student-whisperer/
    
    

 

On This Day in 1879 Albert Einstein was Born: From TJEd- This Week in History & The World As I See It by, A. Einstein

Have you ever seen TJED's This Week In History?  This wonderful resource is a constant in our home school!  We look forward to seeing all that has happend in our world and really apprectate the effort and research that goes into each weeks post.  It's a history curriculum all to itself!

 

 

This Week in History  is not only a great value, but a time saver and a worry eliminator, it...

• relieves fear, stress and burnout
• energizes your kidschool
• fills in the gaps
• cultivates cultural literacy
• facilitates state or provincial compliance
• correlates resources for co-ops, classrooms and family learning
• harnesses the power of technology in a classical leadership education
• harmonizes with Unschooling, Charlotte Mason, Montessori, Trivium/Quadrivium, IEW, eclectic, etc.
• delivers new ideas and areas of learning to you and your child
• instigates discussions and projects that expand wisdom and understanding
• connects the subject areas--from music to math, from geography to world religions, from hobbies to science projects, etc.
• motivates you and your students to greater excellence
• delivers Face to Face with Greatness
• empowers you to mentor your students in the classics
•  enlivens the 7 Keys of Great Teaching
• activates Phases of Learning

...so you can "Inspire, not Require"

For less than 35 cents a day, you have the world at your fingertips.

 And, so worth the subscription!! http://www.tjedonline.com/day-in-history.php?id=182 

 

1879: Birth Date of Albert Einstein.

  Albert Einstein was the physicist who formulated the theory of relativity that broadened understanding of space, time, and motion. He formulated his relativity theory in 1905 when he was 26 years old, and in 1921 he won the Nobel Prize for Physics. Born in Ulm, Germany, Einstein was forced to leave his homeland in 1933 when his German citizenship was taken away by the Nazis because he was Jewish.

He was the scientist who delved into theoretical physics; using a pencil, paper, and mathematical logic, he expanded our knowledge of matter, energy, heat, light, and atomic structure. His findings contributed to the development of such complex devices as the electric eye, sound movies, and television.

He also developed an idea that provided the basic principles for making the atomic bomb and other nuclear devices. Einstein's work on conversion of matter into energy helped bring the world into the atomic age.

 

Resources:

 

• History
• Who Was Albert Einstein? Brallier
• Albert Einstein: Young Thinker (The Childhood of Famous Americans Series), Hammontree
• Odd Boy Out: Young Albert Einstein, Brown

CHECK THIS STUFF OUT:

• A boatload of Einstein resources for kids and classrooms!

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/

Who was smarter Newton or Einstein? 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/genius/index.html

http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/

http://www.kidsnet.org/sfkc/sfkc20030117-1.html

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/ein.html

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/time/think.

 

 

 The World As I See It 

                                                             An essay by Albert Einstein

 

"How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people -- first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving...

"I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves -- this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts -- possessions, outward success, luxury -- have always seemed to me contemptible.

 "My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude..." "My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced, they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality... The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

"This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man... I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence -- as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature."

Source: TJEd This Week In History: [Source: http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/essay.htm]

 

 Fun Einstein Quotes: 

 ********************************

[Note: This list of Einstein quotes was being forwarded around the Internet in e-mail, so I decided to put it on my web page. I'm afraid I can't vouch for its authenticity, tell you where it came from, who compiled the list, who Kevin Harris is, or anything like that. Still, the quotes are interesting and enlightening.]

Collected Quotes from Albert Einstein

• "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction." 

• * "Imagination is more important than knowledge." 

• * "Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love."

• * "I want to know God's thoughts; the rest are details." 

• * "The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax." 

• * "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one." 

• * "The only real valuable thing is intuition." 

• * "A person starts to live when he can live outside himself." 

• * "I am convinced that He (God) does not play dice." 

• * "God is subtle but he is not malicious." 

• * "Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character." 

• * "I never think of the future. It comes soon enough." 

• * "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility." 

• * "Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing." 

• * "Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind." 

• * "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new." 

• * "Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds." 

• * "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." 

• * "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." 

• * "Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it." 

• * "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." 

• * "The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education." 

• * "God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically." 

• * "The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking." 

• * "Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal." 

• * "Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding." 

• * "The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible." 

• * "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." 

• * "Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school." 

• * "The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing." 

• * "Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater." 

• * "Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity." 

• * "If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut." 

• * "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." 

• * "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." 

• * "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods." 

• * "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." 

• * "In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep." 

• * "The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead." 

• * "Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves." 

• * "Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!"

• * "No, this trick won't work...How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?" 

• * "My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind." 

• * "Yes, we have to divide up our time like that, between our politics and our equations. But to me our equations are far more important, for politics are only a matter of present concern. A mathematical equation stands forever." 

• * "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker." 

• * "Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence." 

• * "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed." 

• * "A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeeded be in a poor way if he had to be restrain

• ed by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death." 

• * "The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge." 

• * "Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." 

• * "You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat." 

• * "One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year." 

• * "...one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought." 

• * "He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder." 

• * "A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

• * "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." (Sign hanging in Einstein's office at Princeton) 

Source TJEd This Week In History & Copyright: Kevin Harris 1995 (may be freely distributed with this acknowledgement)

[Source: http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/EinsteinQuotes.html]

 

 

 

Intellect vs. Intelligence, Teaching the ABC’s & Early Reading On & Off the Conveyor Belt

I was wondering which is the best approach to introduce toddlers to the vocals and alphabet?

Begin with the vocals, the full alphabet or using a program like Your Baby Can Read or Hooked on Phonics For Toddlers. What worked for you when you began with your kids? 

My twins are 19 months old and I am beginning with the vocals but any tips would help me and will be greatly appreciated.  ~Yadi

 

“Great teaching inspires students to educate themselves.”

 ~Dr. Oliver DeMille, Creator TJEd, Founder GWU and popular homeschool author.

Photo of a student directed Shakespeare study group, each teen is choosing to participate. 

 

     Trial and error and lots of successful “real learning”, has taught me that children should go through their days incorporated into the parents everyday routine, learning about life naturally.  In the child’s early years a parent’s educational focus is best devoted to character building and family work and, not academics.  A parent, as the primary role model for how and why to learn, should model a love of learning as the key component to “teaching” our children society’s body of knowledge.  By modeling, the parent naturally introduces what the tools are that we use to learn.     

 

       My initial, off the cuff response to your question would be,  if Hooked on Phonics or Teach Your Baby to Read are something you would choose for you, to learn with, and is something you love to work with, then do it.  But, if it is not natural to you, then why do it? 

 

      Obviously, we are interested in “teaching” our children the alphabet as a beginning to reading.   Wanting or feeling the need to “teach” the alphabet,  using popular learning resources, is natural because  we have learned from our own experiences that this is what parents do with children of this age.  The beauty I have seen in a Classical Liberal Arts (aka: Leadership Education) home school, is that children learn the same information naturally, because they are curious and want the tools to go through their days satisfying that curiosity.  Parents love to “inspire” natural learning, more than they like creating lesson plans and using pre-fab curriculum.  

 

      Home schooling should not be something else on your to do list.   Learning and living together in a natural way,  turns learning into a natural extension of who we are and how we spend our days.

 

     When it comes to learning to talk, learning symbols  such as the alphabet, for example  and reading,  I have discovered it is best to just talk to your children, to share your interests with them and to read.  Read the classics, read articles and read some more,  for yourself, and to them, early and often!  The most important of these learning ingredients is that they see you reading!!!  Their presence while you model a love for learning by  reading, researching and discussing, is the single most important thing you can do as their “teacher” to bring out your children’s innate genius!  Nurturing of their genius, in this way, ignites their natural curiosity and in turn they will seek the tools (learning the sounds of the letters), that society uses for learning when they are ready. 

     By changing the focus of my attention to me rather than them, I found I wanted to read to them more; I wanted to share all that I was discovering.   I structured my schedule so I would have the time to let them see me reading and I also read aloud a few times a day to the children in my home.  I make it a priority each time they asked me to read a book to them.   I filled my daughters (and the kids in my Mom School co-op) life with books.  I turned off the TV and computer, added a few strategically placed, open ended learning toys, especially those that condition life skills and building. I displayed thinking toys such as puzzles (yes, a few abc puzzles too) and math & language arts games, and filled the rooms with lots and lots of books on bottom shelves.  I let the shelves stay messy; it makes the books more attractive to toddlers, than a straight line of books does.    This environment went a long way to “teaching” all that they needed to know about the sound of letters and words.   The more I use the environment along with modeling and the less I use what I learned about teaching in “conveyor belt” schools, the more the children in my life fall in love with knowing and the brighter and more self-directed  they are! 

 

This is one of a couple book shelves around our environment, this is in the space where the toddlers spend most of their time.

      A natural learning environment and my enthusiasm about being with the children in my life speaks volumes to them;  more so than formal instruction as in, this is the letter A and it sounds like____, could ever do!  This approach tells the children that I value and trust their abilities to learn and those books are where we get our information about the world and entertainment from.  The books lying around and the older people reading them in the home,  kicks in the natural next step of curiosity so that someday, when it is time, they will want to be just like mommy, able to read on their own.

 

   Change the Environment Not the Child-Books and Thinking Puzzles  

    If there was one best piece of advice most of us veteran home schoolers would love to tell new parents it would be;  learning to read (or learning any other subject for that matter) will happen even if you don’t require them to learn it, or try to fill them up with the information of it!  And, surprise, in most cases the learning is deeper.         

     The only other tactic I might add when inspiring children, is pointing; when reading to your children take your finger and as you read follow the words you are saying.  This naturally, enables them to connect that what mommy is saying is connected to the symbols they are seeing.   Learning letters (symbols) and their sounds this way is more relevant to them, which inspires their natural curiosity and they form the questions in their own minds that are needed to learn.  This is how children “own” their education.  It is not parroting and unlike “teaching” when the question hasn’t been asked, engages the full brain, not just a part of it.   

     I learned years ago, in my early child development and alternative education classes that when a child parrots back the alphabet or reads letters or even words, before they are ready for the information, they are doing just that -parroting back, and are only engaging and developing part of their brain. Some child developments specialists are even suggesting that the capability for high level comprehension doesn’t develop until late elementary and/or up into the middle school years for some.   My experience is that children let you know when they have that capacity, so I take my cues from them.     

      Showing children the letters and singing the alphabet song is not necessary but can be a good thing if done in a playful way, it gives them a memory to build from. So a CD with the alphabet song playing in the back ground, mommy pointing to the letter A and sounding it out while the child is looking, or daddy saying with sincere interest, “I want to share this book I am reading.” And, “Look honey these are words and letters and they tell me _______ (what it says) and it makes me feel _____(fill in the blank).”   All of this can be a wonderful foundation on which to build learning.    When interest in words starts to show, I will read a word, slowly sounding out each letters sound and telling the child these letters are b-a-b-y and that says baby.  When a child starts to drift off, I stop, immediately.   Doing this along with pointing to the words you are reading works but, it must be done only when there is relevance to the child. 

     After twenty years of working with children, this much I know for sure, I cannot teach or inspire anything I am not sincerely interested in and it must be relevant to the child, as well as to me.  So, when I gather with children, my main purpose is to “be” with them, while reading and learning together for pleasure. Being together is the first priority, doing a lesson with them is the second.  I like to call our lessons playing at school.  I take my cues as to whether or not to introduce the lesson from the child.  And, most important I have learned that there is no certain age when a person should know something.   Keeping this formula in mind is what I like to call my, “kid magnet”.  It is my secret ingredient for why I have so many kids loving to learn around me.    

     I learned the hard way that introducing early academics and reading before a child is naturally ready can hinder the child’s full brain development and curiosity.  My step son was three when he came into my life and his parents were doing the Teach Your Baby to Read program from The Better Baby Institute in Philadelphia.  At three, he was reading words and at four, books.  The beauty was that his mom spent lots of time with him doing things she recognized, was comfortable with and, which gave her a purpose and gave him lots of attention.   The negative was when he was four we were driving down the road and from the back seat we heard, “Live nude girls.  Why are they nude?”

      In my opinion, my step son was exposed to society’s body of knowledge at far too young an age because of his early reading.  He didn’t have the emotional and social intelligence yet developed to assimilate adult knowledge.   This early maturity in his left brain served him well in the private college preparatory schools he was educated in.  He learned to play the school game and play it well, receiving good grades and his choice of college.    

     By the time our son was ready to go off to undergraduate school he was extremely burned out and lacked knowing what his mission in the world was.  He longed for what he called a “real education” and applied to a great books liberal arts college, which scared both his parents and school counselors, since it was not what he was groomed for.   But, off he went, with a comprehension problem stemming from learning to read too early and having never really enjoyed reading for fun, to this small college, where he would spend his days reading and discussing three hundred or so, of the greatest books ever written, for a degree in philosophy.   Not only did his choice change his life for the better, but it changed ours too!  It began his and our entire family’s de-schooling journey, we all fell in love with “real” whole brain learning.   Today, our son is choosing to home school- holistically his own children.      

Our grandson is just starting his learning journey!

     At eighteen, when our first born was heading off to that great books liberal arts college, his sister came into our life.  We had learned a lot by then, and chose to home school in harmony with the phases of learning as dictated by nature.  Our daughters  toddler through second grade years were full of real family work, handwork, natural learning rhythms and a love of learning environment that kept her in that magical world of childhood imagination and play.   Despite going off this path for a bit in the later elementary years, out of fear, our ninth grade daughter is in love with, and self-directed, in acquiring knowledge.  She thinks more deeply at fourteen than our son did, is better-rounded, and, learning comes easily to her now that she is the one asking the questions.  She  is in the habit of regulating the information that comes in to her life, making sure she is ready for it, and is a young woman full of good character, purpose and is simply joyful.   I attribute this to getting out of her way and not “teaching” her phonics and such.

Open Ended Toy & Imagination Enhanced Play Area 

     Unlike our son’s experience, our daughter spent much time in her imagination as a younger child.  Even today, at fourteen, she loves to read and write stories, and says she “has to write” for fun every day.   Child development science has repeatedly proven, that it’s through the imagination and play that our brain assimilates society’s body of knowledge and is then developed to its full capacity.    Children allowed to develop in harmony with their natural clocks and phases, who first ask for the information and, whose childhood play is more prevalent than academic learning, all the way up through middle school have a better opportunity to fully develop all seven of their intelligences! 

     When you think about developing multiple intelligences in a child, one could make the argument that these children are smarter because they are self-directed in their learning and able to think for themselves when compared to a child thrown into early academics.  Early academics can have a tendency to lead to developing intellect in a specialized learning capacity.   Specialized learning is the overdeveloping of one or the multiple intelligences, at the expense of full brain and character development. 

     There’s an extreme metaphor that sums up the difference between whole brain and specialized learning:   A specialized “intellectual” person knows how to build a bomb, so they do.  A whole brain developed-multiple “intelligent” person also knows how to build a bomb, but they don’t.    

     The conveyor belt education that emphasizes a one size fits all, specialized education, is not what is needed for our changing world.  Curriculum such as Teach Your Baby to Read and adult led required lessons are part of a conveyor belt education.  It fills our society with intellectual adults and lacks grown up people who embody intelligence.  Unfortunately, this lack came from good intentions by parents and society to “teach”.  We now know that in order to develop all of our brains capacity it is best to foster natural curiosities, by modeling an inspired education, promoting a love of learning and conditioning self-reliance in all areas of life.  More and more home educators are coming to the realization that just because using curriculum and having someone try to fill us up with information was the way we were taught, doesn’t mean a conveyor belt education supports a harmonious home school family life and the kind of future we want for our children.    Unfortunately, many home schoolers are walking in both schools of thought these days and,  at times are at a loss for how to inspire the child to want to learn, instead of teaching lessons.

     Whenever I feel the need to “teach” something to a young person, I tread carefully and question why, asking the children first if they are interested in knowing this information.  If they are not interested and I still want to teach it, I have conditioned a big red stop sign to pop up in my mind, as a cue to look deeper into my need to teach.  Nine times out of ten, it’s my own conveyor belt education popping up and, I realize I am afraid they won’t learn the information in the end.  I simply don’t trust the natural process.  By requiring them to learn something, based on my time line, I think I am becoming more comfortable.   After all, isn’t it a part of the mommy job description in our society?  Filling our child up with every possible piece of information is familiar and, is what we think we are supposed to do to prepare our children to be successful grownups.    But that is all it is, familiar.  I have been raising kids long enough to know it is not necessary to prepare a child on my agenda and doing so could possibly make my family life and future grown up children less comfortable in the end.   So I let it go and put the focus back on me and modeling my love of learning, spending my energy creating opportunity to inspire the lesson.   Sure enough, one never knows when, but the information I was looking to teach gets into the children because they asked for it.  With each lesson learned I develop less conveyor belt tendencies and more faith in the natural processes of learning!      

     How could a question as simple as, “How should I teach my children the abc’s, verbally or with popular curriculum?” Turn into this big picture answer?   Because after twenty nine years of parenting I am learning more and more to begin my answer with the end in mind.

       I am reminded of a reoccurring conversation that happens in the home schooling world, about how much of a pleasure it is to “teach” our kids when they are little.  After all, young children just want our attention and are like sponges, soaking up everything, whether the information is relevant or not.  This same wonderful experience of teaching our littles, commonly turns into drudgery when those same children enter the later elementary years!  How many a home school mom asks, “Why does little Johnny fight me when it is time to sit and teach him a lesson?”    The answer is, that he has just enough balance and real whole brain learning happening in his home school to fight for what his brain development really needs, which is to allow him to form his own questions!    Another thing you here from a parent is, “I already did fifth grade, I’m not interested in spending my day teaching this stuff!”   So maybe we should stop looking to what is familiar about education and start our home school life by taking our cues from the children in our lives, trusting the natural learning process and teaching by answering questions when they are asked.   Instead of planning teaching time why not spend that energy inspiring and modeling for our youngster’s brain- the ability to be able to learn on its own, an effort sure to avoid the sitting for lessons and the drama that comes with it the later home school years.   

Self directed lessons-researching and creating

    By all means share the alphabet with your children, draw, sing and show it, if showing the symbols and how to use them as a tool is what is coming naturally to you in everyday life with your kids.  Being careful about your desire to do it now, asking yourself if it is because you feel it is time to teach it, based on their ages, or this is what you are supposed to be teaching because you are trying to give them a good head start. Teaching the alphabet sounds using a curriculum will give them a head start, but maybe not on the road you want them to be on in the end.   

   Children live in our emotions and they may be able to parrot back academic learning, but how you feel about what you are teaching and how they feel is the real lesson they are learning.  By focusing on you and your love for learning and, not them, you change the environment around so that your children learn to trust themselves and their abilities; they go from depending on you to “teach” them about the world, to depending on themselves and having a hand in all of their education endeavors.  You become a mentor instead of a teacher. 

     The question for me has become not, “How do I teach this or that?” But, “What is it I really want for my children, when it comes to their education and how can I inspire it?”

      My answer has been pretty consistent for the last couple of years, always choosing the path that enables them to own their education, whether I am comfortable with it or not.  

Choosing a classic book assures many valuable lessons learned and is something all ages enjoy! 

 

 

How We Overcame Our Fears of Learning Math

When it comes to Math, studies show that only 30% of children are successful at learning in a conveyor belt (traditional school) setting.  The curriculum in these schools is also popular in home schools, where the system and methods  have been in place since the industrial revolution, whose focus was to train the masses of common children who had little use for any studies that did not translate into wage-earning.

What happens to the 70%  of the students who just don't get it, are bored with it, or who get a bad taste in their mouths, along with a negative self image, because the Math information being taught is not relevant?    They become grown up adults with limited Math experience,  just look at the current American statistics surrounding Math, and you'll find something is not working!

Twelve years ago, I started my then, pre-schooler, off with an environment full of wonderful Math, engineering and geometry type games, toys and Waldorf & Montessori inspired Math resources, in an effort to give her the best Math start.    I felt like she was getting the "language" of math with a solid foundation and this would enable her to be able to learn higher concepts as she grew.  

When our daughter reached seven years old we introduced the popular home school curriculum Saxon Math and required her to learn it, as a Waldorf inspired teacher I knew better, but it was what was popular, traditional, and I thought she could handle it because of her wonderful start to Math concepts!   

 I wanted her to be good at Math and didn't want her to have the phobias that I did towards Math study.  So I took myself out of the equation and hired other home school moms and tutors through the years to teach her, thinking that would make all the difference.    

By the time she was eleven years old, we had given up on the tutors and thrown out Saxon Math, while my heart broke as I realized all of my fears had come true,  I had a child with a Math phobia and a low self image around being able to learn Math

At the same time A Thomas Jefferson Education aka: Leadership Education came into my life and I started to understand the concept of "inspire not require" and what the phases of learning were... so we started back at the beginning.  

Using classic books and biographies of mathematicians, beginning with the Mathematicians are People Too books, which are stories from the lives of great Mathematicians, we went in chronological order learning about the discoveries , scientists and Math concepts.  We watched shows,  followed popular Math people in the world and we brought Math concepts to life naturally in our home.  We involved her in the book keeping of our business and home, the kitchen work, the projects and we played lots of Math and deeper thinking games.  

We changed the conversation from you are not good at Math, to you are one of the 70% who have a problem with the way Math is taught in schools and you will learn it differently (when you are ready) than your friends are learning it in public school, conveyor belt settings.  

We also told her that it wasn't important to learn Math, that she would learn it when and if she needed it, no big deal.  And whenever possible we showed her that she had a Math brain, sometimes this took lots of creativity, foresight and pulling information out of left field, so to speak, to inspire that belief in her.  Changing the conversation started working but, a little part of her still was worried about getting into college and passing the SAT, that's where  John Holt's writings on learning Math later in life when the skills were needed came in.

Holt, one of the founding fathers of the Unschooling movement,  tells a story of a group of teens who didn't know much Math at all and decided they [wanted] to learn it.  The story goes on to say that within a short period of time, 30 to 60 days, if I remember correctly, they learned the concepts from addition up to calculus.  Using less rote learning and more whole brain instruction, not only could they pass a test, they owned their Math learning for life! He has similar stories about learning a musical instrument later in life when the adult [wants] too.  (See Holt article below.) 

How many adults can say we remember our higher Math lessons? 

My daughter started buying into this theory.   Her self image started shifting and we were banking on the idea that she would be able,  when and if the time came,  to learn all the Math concepts needed to pass an SAT in a very short period of time.  

As for me, deep inside I knew that what I had focused on had expanded, I had made my worse fears come true by requiring she learn Math the traditional way.  I believe our children  live in our emotions and my daughter had picked up on my phobia about Math.   How many times did I teach in my parenting classes that a core answer to most parenting dilemma's is,  "How can you become the change you want to see in your children?"  I knew if I wanted her to have a positive self image over Math, I needed to get rid of my negative one.  My thoughts went something like this...  I am almost fifty years old, not really interested in Math, never mind the effort it would take to over come that deep fear at this point in my life!  But, my daughter needed me to shift...

As my daughter entered into the teen years I was changing too.  The teen years is a time for tremendous growth, not just for our young adults but, for parents of teens, as well.  My fourteen year home school journey had taught me to want to model  a Love of Learning for my children, nieces, nephews and grandchildren and, to inspire them, not require them to learn!  

Based on this principle, I had started down the path of my own Classical Liberal Arts studies and was one  chapter ahead of my daughter in just about every other academic subject,  but could I reall do that with Math too?  (((MUCH FEAR)))

 Foundational parenting rule here, if I wanted her to love learning Math, I need to show her how it was done!     

My Classical Liberal Arts approach to learning Math began with a purpose that was full of love for my daughter, making my choice to study Math a good one (and somewhat more appealing)  for me too, since inspiring her education was part of my mission in life. 

 

 Everything that I learned I told her about in natural every day conversations.  She watched and even participated, as I struggled and used her Math knowledge and study skills to Mentor me.  She  knew more than I did, and learning came easier to her.  "We teach what we need to learn", comes to mind.  Together we discovered that a person who really [wants] too, can learn new and challenging concepts.  I really [wanted] to learn Math, because I [wanted] her to loose the fear of it.  I have to say  fighting those deep, low self image demons inside of me was one of the hardest parenting things I have ever done! Once I stopped fighting my decision and let go of the fear, the rest came easily...  we-e-e-l-l-l... the decision was easy anyway!  LOL...

There's a saying, "when the student is ready, the teacher will appear."  A chess master had walked into our lives after a few months into my Math study, he had decided to volunteer his Mentoring services to our  Scholar Study Group in our weekly TJEd KidSchool Co-op.  One day he was talking to my daughter about Math and deeper thinking, I heard her saying in response, something about her troubles with Algebraic concepts.   He said, her trouble with understanding this pattern of thought, was probably because they weren't introduced to her in a good and everyday life- relevant way.  He went over to the white board, showed her some Algebra, that fit in with their conversation, and about  three minutes later  she was asking him to be her Algebra Mentor.    

Mr. G., as we call him, has been her Math Mentor ever since.  He comes to our home for an hour once a week charges us $20.00 and uses a holistic, living and Classical approach that is a combination of the resources listed below when teaching.  He also has the gift of  inspiring by showing the students the Math relevance in life,  instead of requiring his students to memorize only!  

Today my daughter and I are discovering we CAN learn new and hard things and that it is best to study Math concepts as they go hand and hand with real life experience.  Our success at overcoming our fears has taught us not to worry that our journey in learning Math does not look like societies (or traditional school) time line or path to learning. 

We shifted our ideas, process and beliefs,  and now Math  is  more naturally integrated in everyday things  and sits in our lives just as language arts or history does, and like Language Arts there are tools inside of learning Math that we use in everyday life.   

The success key: We learned how to learn Math, we do it the same way we learn History, Science and Language Arts, in a Classical Liberal Arts Setting full of simulations!

And this blows my mind...

Today, I am reading and studying Sir Isaac Newton's Principia Vol. 1 & 2!

Here's a list of our favorite Math resources:   

Classical Liberal Arts Academy (CLAA) 

Online Classical Liberal Arts -understand mathematics both philosophically and practically:  

From their web site: 

By restoring classical mathematics we are neither running away from nor neglecting mathematics as they are used today.  After all, most of what modernists claim as their own was inherited from classically educated mathematicians, whose education they despise. 

Our aim, like that of all classical mathematicians, is to understand mathematics both philosophically and practically.  The exclusively practical focus of school mathematics courses was developed in the 1800s by the public schools, whose job it was not to train elite students but the masses of common children who had little use for any studies that did not translate into wage-earning.  Today, there is hardly a school available that is not oriented toward the workplace.

Our aims are what they were among all wise men of the past.  We wish, as Socrates said, "to rise out of the sea of change and lay hold of true being".  That is, we wish to ascend, by means of the mathematical arts (and later by Logic), into the study of transcendent and unchanging truths that cannot be studied through the senses. 

http://www.classicalliberalarts.com/Courses/QUADRIVIUM/index.htm  

Living Math

~ Insisting a child must be taught traditional, scope-and-sequence arithmetic to learn mathematics is like saying one must learn classical notes and scales before one can learn music. You might get there, but you miss out on the inspiration of beautiful music created by the masters along the way. We need not master all the "basics" before being able to experience the appreciation that carries us through the hard work of learning. Think of applying living math principles as developing a "mathematical ear" while working toward the mastery of basic theory. ~

This site is dedicated to sharing resources for learning, exploring and enjoying math in a dynamic and holistic manner, for all ages.

Philosophy and holistic methods: http://www.livingmath.net/

Math U See

Our goal is to help produce confident problem solvers who enjoy the study of math. The reason we study math is so we can apply what we learn in everyday situations. The students learn their math facts, rules, and formulas, and are able to use this knowledge in real life applications. The study of math is much more than committing a list of facts to memory. It includes memorization, but it also encompasses learning the concepts that are critical to problem solving.

K-12 Curriculum: http://www.mathusee.com/

Life of Fred Series

Never again hear the question which many math students have: "When are we ever gonna use this stuff?" or "Math is boring!"

No other textbooks are like these. Each text is written in the style of a novel with a humorous story line. Each section tells part of the life of Fred Gauss and how, in the course of his life, he encounters the need for the math and then learns the methods. Tons of solved examples. Each hardcover textbook contains ALL of the material – more than most instructors cover in traditional classroom settings. Includes tons of proofs.

http://lifeoffredmath.com/index.php

 

ALEKS hosted through TJEd

What is ALEKS? Assessment and LEarning in Knowledge Spaces is a Web-based, artificially intelligent assessment and learning system. ALEKS uses adaptive questioning to quickly and accurately determine exactly what a student knows and doesn't know in a course. ALEKS then instructs the student on the topics she is most ready to learn. As a student works through a course, ALEKS periodically reassesses the student to ensure that topics learned are also retained. ALEKS courses are very complete in their topic coverage and ALEKS avoids multiple-choice questions. A student who shows a high level of mastery of an ALEKS course will be successful in the actual course she is taking. ALEKS also provides the advantages of one-on-one instruction, 24/7, from virtually any Web-based computer for a fraction of the cost of a human tutor.

http://www.tjed.org/resources/aleks-math/

The following books really inspired us!!!

Inteligro Math, The Holistic Approach to math and Science for the New millennium

by Tiffany Rhoades Earl

This book will motivate youth, and practically anyone, to want to study and understand math and science.  It inspires!  If you know someone who needs to fall in love with math or science, have them read this book."  Oliver Van DeMille, Founder of George Wythe University, and author of A Thomas Jefferson Education 

http://shop.lemimentortraining.com/Books_c8.htm 

The Math Book,

From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathmetics

By Clifford A. Pickover

A wonderful coffee table book that we purchased at the Smithsonian last summer!!

http://www.amazon.com/Math-Book-Pythagoras-Milestones-Mathematics/dp/1402757964/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1292450411&sr=8-1

 

Here's a little inspiration for you... An excerpt from an interview with John Holt on teaching Math

  copied from An Unschooling Life

http://anunschoolinglife.com/john-holt/

John Holt (1923-1985) was a teacher and controversial education writer who advocated school reform and ultimately became one of the forces behind the homeschooling movement of the 70’s and 80’s. He wrote ten books about education and founded the magazine Growing Without Schooling. John Holt’s books Instead of Education: Ways to Help People do Things Better,  How Children Learn and How Children Fail are still popular among parents and people seeking a self-directed education.

Although John Holt’s work primarily discusses children, the overall message can be applied to learners of all ages. If you want to cultivate your ability to learn deeply and effectively, you’ll definitely want to see what he has to say.

 

What your philosophy about math?
My approach to math is to say, What do we adults use numbers for? We use them to measure things. And we measure things so that having measured them we can do things with them, or make certain judgments about them. And so I say let children do with numbers what we do with numbers. I’m a great believer in many kinds of measuring instruments – tapes (centimeter tape, inch tapes, rolls of tapes), rulers, scales, thermometers, barometers, metronomes, electric metronomes with lights flashing on and off that you can make go faster and slower, stopwatches, things for time.Another thing is money. Kids are fascinated by money. We all say: “We’ll have to teach them all this arithmetic so that some day they can deal with money.” I think dealing with money is inherently interesting to children. I say family finances ought to be out on the table, charts on the wall: expenses, food, taxes, insurance, health care, how much this costs, how much it cost last year. I think actually, like typing, double-entry bookkeeping and basic accounting are fascinating skills, and if you’re talking about basics, those are basics.The fundamental idea of double-entry bookkeeping, the distinction between your income and expenses and assets and liabilities is one of the really beautiful inventions of the human mind. It’s fabulous the way it works, and I think families should do their finances as if they were a little teeny corporation with income and expenses and assets and liabilities and depreciation.Some kids might get to the point where they would want to be the family treasurer and keep the family books and balance the checkbook. This is all really “big adult stuff.” Let the child write out the checks that are paying the bills, instead of the harassed picture, you know, of father with his tie untied, sitting at the desk and papers all over the place. Why? This is inherently interesting, so let’s at least make this part of our life – like every other part – accessible to children. The best way to meet numbers is in real life, as everything else. It’s embedded in the context of reality, and what schooling does is to try to take everything out of the context of reality. So everything appears like some little thing floating around in space, and it’s a terrible mistake. You know, there are numbers in building; there are numbers in construction; there are numbers in business;there are numbers in photography; there are numbers in music; there are fractions incooking. So wherever numbers are in real life, then let’s go and meet them and work with them.

“The human animal is a learning animal. We like to learn; we need to learn; we are good at it; we don’t need to be shown how or made to do it. What kills the processes are the people interfering with it or trying to regulate it or control it.”

Try Narration Instead of Testing

 "Whatever a child or grown-up person can tell, that we may be sure he knows, and what he cannot tell, he does not know."

&

"As knowledge is not assimilated until it is reproduced, children should "tell back" after a "single" reading or hearing: or should write on some part of what theyhave read."~Charolette. Mason

Many of our founding homeschool gurus along with Charlotte Mason, have discovered the whole brain exercise and superior learning that accompanies the habit of reading a single passage once and then narrating it back...

We use oral and written narration in our homeschool and in our KidSchool co-op. When you see natural narration in action, you realize quite quickly there is no need for testing. 

What do you remember from your memorization school days? You passed the test yes, but what information stuck? 

When you look at what your children have memorized as a natural process of play, or for fun, you can start to get more and more comfortable trusting the brains natural ability to learn. 

I am not saying that there is never a place for testing, but in the elementary (Love of Learning) & middle school (Transition to Scholar) years, there really is no need. After-all, we want our child to fall in love with learning and questioning can deter that. 

When we give our children juicy, age appropriate classic books, that they can sink their minds into, they will naturally narrate back, especially if we inspire the conversation and not require it! 

Here are some Charlotte Mason discoveries and quotes on the power of narration: 

"What they receive under this condition they absorb immediately and show what they know by that test of knowledge that applies to us all, that is, they can tell it with power, clearness, vivacity and charm."

"Children working on these lines know months after that which they have read and are remarkable for their power of concentration (attention); they have little trouble with spelling or composition and become well informed, intelligent persons." 

"This is what happens in the narration of a passage read: each new consecutive incident or statement arrives because the mind asks itself, ---"What next.?" For this reason it is important that only one reading should allowed; efforts to memorize we

Is Your Child Punished by Rewards?

 Living an Inspired Education with Donna Vail has a good article on rewards and inspiration, stop by her blog and take a look. 

Is Your Child Punished by Rewards?

"If we want children to become able to act with personal conviction about what is right... we must reduce our adult power and avoid the use of rewards and punishments as much as possible." -Constance Kamii, 1984

Patti's Homeschool Mentoring 

These principles were hard learned for us! By taking our cues from the kids, much trial and error and by letting go of fear we find we are more and more internally driven and productive in a natural state of self directed learning. I am ...becoming comfortable that the learning process doesn't look like I expected it too. Finally, we are trusting the process! From daddy, to mommy all the way down to the youngest child and now grandchildren, each of us is in love with learning and on our own journey. The reward is the love and appreciation we have for this joyful state of being!

~~Patti

 http://donnavail.blogspot.com/2010/12/is-your-child-punished-by-rewards.html

Mentor Meetings: How do I know when my child is ready? A glimpse of what ours looks like.

 

Our weekly Mentor Meeting happens as a natural part of our Sunday morning routine.   For over twenty years now our family ritual has been a yummy Sunday morning breakfast, full of our favorite eats, sprinkled with a whole lot of chit chatting. It‘s a soulful morning for us, a time to reconnect and get what I like to call our “juice” from each other. So when it was time to incorporate Mentor Meetings into our home school, Sunday morning was the natural time slot to pick.

Our children were already conditioned to coming together and talking about their life.  Since school is not separate from life, our conversations as they grew, naturally progressed to organizing their interests and studies.

Before our daughter wakes on Sunday mornings, my husband and I head to the lanai, we sit in the sun and drink our coffee. This outdoor space is our meditation and reconnection place and, we love being there. Our round table (as we affectionately call it) is on our lanai and is the favorite gathering place.  It frequently comes alive with juicy conversation, intense study, business work, dinner parties, and much laughter.  This place, where we gather, holds the sweetest memories in our home, making, the round table the perfect place for our Mentor Meetings. 

View from the table.

We gather our day planners, or notes from the week and the home school lists...

In the fall, after the holiday’s and at the beginning of summer we have a goal setting meeting and put together a “big list” of what we would like to study and accomplish this year. Each of us does one individually, and then together we do one for the family, included is the books we want to read individually and in our family reading time.    We bring our TJEd planners, any note we took during the last week about what we wanted to discuss, the lists and we use them as a foundational guide for our weekly meetings.

Our teen has a dry erase board in her room that she has the list on with a minimal weekly schedule and some doodles to inspire her main course of study this year, which is music. Having it on a white board enables her to see it at a glance. The way she organizes her time and reminds herself is her own expression and completely different than my idea of time management and daily planning and I am learning not to ask her to do things my way. This is probably my biggest challenge as a parent Mentor.

During the week as I watch our home school and I note if there is something that needs to be addressed on a tablet that we keep on the kitchen desk for this purpose. This way I will remember when Sunday comes around. Also, this gives me an opportunity to contemplate it for a bit before we talk.  Waiting until Sunday eliminates interrupting the flow of the days with constant tweaking.

My husband and I start our early Sunday morning meeting discussing our relationship, we check in on our goals, we organize our up coming week and then we move on to the kids, the grandchildren,  and our home school. This process enables us to present a united front, develop a plan and to go about inspiring each person in our life according to our goals.

Our daughter (the only child left in our home) joins us when she wakes and while we eat the conversation turns to, how was your week honey? What have you been thinking about? Anything you’d like to do, learn explore? How’s the schedule going? Are you meeting your goals?

I have learned the hard way to keep these meetings short and sweet, and more conversational, less business like. I try not to vent or complain about what is wrong, instead we are focusing on the positives as much as possible. It becomes self evident when a goal is not being met and most times there is no need to even voice it out loud. My goal is to keep the joy present. If the energy starts to shift negative, we shift the conversation, switch topics and return back when an opening arises.

I don’t want the children dreading our Mentor Meetings, I want them to be a time when they get full of inspiration and sweet family juice!

 Once we are done and before we move on to the rest of our day, I sum up what we decided the plan for the week would be for all of us, then we go to our calendars and put reminders in if needed.  

 

I am modeling this habit of summing up our talk for my daughter and in the near future I will start inspiring her to be the person who sums the meeting up, since she is showing signs of needing ownership of our meetings, plans and ideas. I’ve already started inspiring by pretending I don’t remember something and asking her.    

 

Many times these meeting turn into a fishing expedition, as I like to call it, and we find sometimes that we have spent the entire time just doing a bunch of brainstorming. At first this felt like it wasn‘t productive that we didn’t get a schedule in place, etc… but I learned to trust the process and once I started honoring the fishing expeditions (brainstorming) we became more productive, just at a different time and my daughter owned the lessons and process more. 

 

I now believe that putting feelers out and trying different things on is just as important for life learning as the organizing of time and studies is.

How to know when your child is ready for Mentor Meetings?

She will begin to set goals and stick to the goals for more than a couple days at a time.

She will show determination and endurance toward goals.

She will start using lists to accomplish daily tasks.

Her curiosity and desire to know about things will increase.

She will start developing a sense of her own future.

You will notice a decrease in daily play that is replaced by more reading, practicing of an instrument or art and more projects that are being done.

She will start organizing her social life, home school and learning environment on her own more and more.

Once you decide your child is ready to participate in Mentor Meetings, I suggest introducing the concept of a meeting slowly. Unless of course you are starting while you have wee little ones that you can condition a ritual of coming together for talks as natural part of their life. Remember keep it joyful and something you and they will want to do and that everyone gets “juice“ from.

If you don’t have a time when you gather naturally, try setting up a date with your child.

In the beginning make it mostly about praising her efforts and studies.  
 Ask her how she is doing, what is she interested in… make it all about her and make it a great time. Use stories, telling about how you set goals and accomplished them. Tell her how  excited you are for her. That you see her changing and growing and that sometime in the near future she will be a scholar. And how she will fall more deeply in love with studying and learning, Oh yeah, and feeding her, her favorite foods while meeting doesn’t hurt either. LOL    

Do a few dates like this before you start getting into the meat of organizing, digging deeper into her studies, character development and daily planning. Move at your child’s pace and when the time is right suggest she make a list of her goals for the next year. A gift of a daily planner might be good at this point. Write her “big year list” in it and then the monthly and weekly goals.

Receiving a daily planner as a gift (some would say it can be inspired as a rite of passage) worked really well for quite a few families I know. For my daughter this just scared her into what her previous conveyor belt education looked like, busy work. Something about organizing that way felt like giving up control, so I let her come up with how she organizes herself. It is also a good idea to use classic books like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens and other adult Mentors to inspire the same tools you are.

Our daughter is ever so slowly, moving away from that thought, that a daily planner is busy work and she is getting a little bit more comfortable with planning for success in traditional ways, using common tools.  

It was some trial and error that we had to thank for the change in understanding. I have also learned not to “run a meeting” with her. That a friendly chit chat with some inspiration goes a long way to her authoring how to manage her life and goals.

Inspiration is key to her owning the lessons of goal accomplishment and time management, So more and more I am stepping back and allowing natural consequences to teach lessons. Doing this makes it imperative that we meet weekly, so we don’t fall to far in another direction and develop possible self image issues and/or bad habits. Also, it is very important that her father and I have pre-determined, where we want to lead her and what we want her to discover.  We want to have solutions and ideas already in our minds before we talk to her.

We go over the big list, to see if the main goals are being accomplished based on the monthly and weekly goals. It becomes very clear if there is anything that needs attention, and that issue is what our Mentor Meeting will focus on.

For instance this week we wanted to inspire her to see that she really does have more time for reading than she thinks. She has a list of certain books she wants to read this year and is moving through it ever so slowly.  She will not be able to accomplish her goal if she doesn’t tweak how she manages her day. We started hearing from her,  some excuses, and unclear thinking about what it takes to accomplish this goal.

We came to the conclusion that all she needed was a clearer vision of how and why meeting this goal was a worthy effort.

We decided to use a project she just worked on to show her she had time in her day to tie in the need for a great education that teaches you to think. We praised her accomplishment of the project, told her how impressed we were with the way she managed her days and,all that she learned going through the process. We reminded her that since the project was over she had time for more reading now. What happened next was the size of the books became daunting to her, think War and Peace and Les Miserable’s. We took the amount of pages in Les Mes and did the math to figure out how many pages a day she would have to read to accomplish finishing the book in two weeks or one month. Not so daunting once it was broken down and the pages were lumped together, the visual really helped. 

In the end she was excited to get back to reading more. She picked a new book to read this week, we broke it down into so many pages per day, which would take about two hours each day in order to complete the book in a week. We picked completion in a week after determining that she would need to read one book a week (with lots of days off which happens a lot in our home school) for her to get through her book list. She is going to try and read the amount of pages we estimated and we’ll re-evaluate how the reading flowed into her day based on her experience this week when we meet next Sunday.

Note that we didn’t then tell her to read for two hours at a certain time every day. How she manages the flow of her time every day is up to her, we want her to learn form our inspiring, our modeling, other Mentors in books and in person... but, most importantly, to learn through failing! 

What I do require is that she follow our family schedule of going to bed and waking at a certain time each day. That chores be done by a certain time and that from 9am until 9pm, minus meals, chores and any scheduled classes is when the allotted study time is.

She decides what she wants to accomplish in that study time and designs how she will do that.

The hardest part of this for me, is that I can see already that she will not be successful this week and I want to just go in and tell her to do it this way, and that way,  and, all will be well. But she hasn’t asked, and she needs to OWN the learning and this process will teach her to think for herself.

So my mantra these days, is PATIENCE… Frequently, the title of a book that inspired me long before this daughter was born, comes to mind: What Is It You Really Want For Your Child?

And I answer,... I want her to own her own education.

Chores: Do you give an allowance for them?

We don’t believe in giving allowance for chores anymore! Our first hand experience with our now adult son taught us valuable lessons. Our family had developed habits that were hard to break. When our son started to exhibit entitlement tendencies in his character, we stopped giving him an allowance and re-evaluated our approach. We decided on shifting our parenting from one of requirements, to inspiring natural consequences instead.

As part of our character building and life skills education everyone has a purpose in the family and is expected to pitch in! I have written often and in detail about the importance of young children, even toddlers, having a family purpose- that is just a given, just what we/they do everyday and each person no matter the age does something to support the family. Each of us is responsible for managing and nurturing the family as a whole, and for the up keep of the environment.

By inspiring and conditioning a purpose (doing chores) the family culture nurtures a character trait where it becomes a privilege and not drudgery to do the work of a family. Work naturally becomes a part of who we are. This culture of working together leads to family harmony and excellent study skills that are internally driven later in life, eventually the discipline of the work and study that was built on it, leads to an understanding of that persons true mission in life. In our family we learned early on that giving of an allowance for chores creates the opposite scenario of self reliance in a child’s core character development and does not prepare them for adult hood.

We questioned:, why we would give money for an allowance when that is not how money comes to us in the grown up world. No one pays us for keeping our adult home or managing our lives. Why wouldn’t we model and condition good work ethic, and the joy of giving and participating in the work of life, using real life scenarios when our children are young? Especially when there is an abundance of everyday opportunities that teaches how adults make money, why we do it, and what the value of monetary gain is.

We have a very well known check list of life skills that we make a big deal out of around here. Many skills on the list are everyday household chores. Frequent talk at family gatherings with siblings and cousins has the older kids saying things like, have you done this (life skill) or that yet? Then the stories come out, some are pretty funny... The first time I changed the oil it spilled everywhere, my first un clogging of the toilet, cleaning the gutters on the roof…. As the kids learn housekeeping, the other adult skills (see list attached) and then business/entrepreneurship skills, they get to check the accomplishment off the list in the book. Getting a check mark next to a skill is something we take pride in around here. Even some of us adults are still learning life skills; I just learned how to change the oil in the car and got me a new check mark in the “book of life“, as we like to call it.

I like our “book of life” skills but lately I am thinking of the growth chart on our kitchen wall instead. All of the kids in our life love coming into our house and going to that wall to measure themselves, even the older ones who are mostly done growing. One day watching my two year old grandson put his back to the wall, trying to see how tall he was compared to his cousin who is two years older, I started contemplating… Why not create a life skills growth chart right along side the height lines. Each skill would be noted on the chart as the kids progressed through them. These youngsters and young adults would be able to see themselves and their accomplishments, as well as what is happening with the others in their life. Since, not only do we mark our own family unit on this chart, but all of our kid’s friends, our cousins and their children have a place on our wall chart. .

The skills we require them to learn in our home usually end around the time they are getting ready to go off to college. I should note, college is not a given at eighteen. It’s when you have completed the life skills required for independent thinking and self reliance that determines your readiness. This could happen before age eighteen or after and it really is not important when, it is just important that independence happens.

The mantra is that we are equipping you for the real world.

 

There is a wonderful book: Life Skills for Kids by Christine Field that I recommend. Also TJEd has much writing about this subject in their books and on their sites, especially when talking about the core phase of child development.

Since we didn't want to have that fight every time we went shopping... you know the one, mom can I have ____ fill in the blank, we recognized that the kids needed to have their own money in their pocket, but they needed to value it.

So we asked family and friends to give money as gifts when appropriate. We encouraged them to say when giving this is for school, or your future investment and business plans. Since this culturally is a Jewish tradition, it was easy to condition in our circle.

We also encouraged many businesses endeavors throughout their young lives. Even if they were too young to really do anything we pretended they weren’t and set up creative situations that taught them money lessons.

We switched our son around age eight from getting paid for chores to inspiring him to be self reliant in his money making. It was hard, when he wanted something we would say sure you can have that, you just need to pay for it… the hope was to inspire him to overcome his obstacles. Then on our sons tenth birthday we gave him an investment property (real-estate investing has been our family business for 25 years) that was the beginning of his real life lessons in self reliance and entrepreneurship. Through and error, some big failures and some real success, his core belief about money changed.

No longer entitled, he learned to pay us along the way to help him run and grow his investment portfolio. This switched his core entitlement belief. This lesson in entrepreneurship also enabled him to live for free all during his college years and gave him the freedom to not have to work while receiving his higher education. We have a rule that we won’t pay for college either.

When our second child came along we had learned some more parenting lessons about instilling the value of money. We decided not to give her, her first investment property like we did her brother. Today she is fourteen and will have to save for it herself or take a loan from us to begin her investment career. If she so chooses.

As the children in our circle of influence grew we would loan them money to get started on a business or if they wanted something they would have to pay back a loan. They would "hire" us grownups or older kids to help them in their small business or with their tasks until they were able to do it on their own. Everything from running a lemonade stand, to dog walking, paper routes and car washes were a part of their natural consequences lessons in life.

Even if it was just a quarter or a $1.00 that they paid us when they needed help, the idea was to teach them the core values that we earn our money it is not given to us and that money is used for good. When needed we ask for help in the making of money and because we value that help we pay for it (sometimes we encouraged bartering as well) and that we can be a part of a team and create win, win situations in our lives, our community and the world. That our parents, the community and the world does not owe us anything- is pretty much the character we are developing.

Our almost three year old grandson came in the other day and asked his grandfather for a job because he need some money (he sees business happening all around him and is in the mimicking stage) Obviously his daddy got the lessons we taught him and now is paying it forward with his son (she said with a smile). Grandpop got very creative and our grandson Isaac made $25 cents for moving a stack of papers in the home office, where we run our business out of, to anther place that made it easier for grandpop to do his work. Isaac received a hug, was told why the task was helpful, and that it was much appreciated. He then received the quarter, which went right into his pocket. With pride, he showed everyone the quarter he made that day!

The office in our home is conditioned to be a place of reverence. When grandpop and daddy are working in there we are quiet and we don't disturb. The idea of just being able to work in this revered place was a big boy thing for our little guy.

Later grandpop took him to the store where he showed him some quarters and told our grandson that by his working in the office, he helped grandpop make this money and grandpop was now buying something... it was a kiwi which Isaac loves!

Since we work out of the house we make it a point to talk often about how and why we make money. We discuss who works with us and what they do and how our work changes our community and the world for the better and allows us to experience this blessed life, we live.

This modeling has been a wonderful learning experience for the young people in our circle of influence. I believe whole heartedly that children should be allowed to be in the company of adults while they are working and not segregated as our public schools and society tends to do. When children come into our home our business and the people working in it is also in sight. When we host the TJEd KidSchool in our home on Thursday’s the kids get to see adults in their life working. Because we believe in modeling, we take advantage of the frequent opportunities that arise to mentor a young person in self reliance.

 

As our kids and friends kids grow, they are invited into our business for apprenticeships

Monday's Then and Now... A day in the life; What is you agenda for the day?

by Patti's Homeschool Mentoring on Tuesday, November 9, 2010 at 3:41pm

Monday morning has always been tough!

 

 I learned years ago when my son (now 32) and daughter (now 14) were younger to go with our natural flow and to not fight our nature's.  If our family rituals  were different from the rest of the family, the community or what we were taught was the way to be in the world or to school that needed to be OK!  Afterall, creating the best learning environment was why we choose homeschooling in the first place.   

 

So we decided to switch things around and have what I like to call a  Monday morning "be In" .

 

 We could sleep in,  lay around, read, whatever we wanted until 2pm. The idea was to just veg from the weekend activities, since we have a very social and active life and weekends are busy.  But I have to say, it took years for "me" to not feel guilty and to be able to  re-condition myself to "not" get up and go on Monday mornings.

 

Especially because I believe, as goes your Monday, so goes the rest of the week.  

 

So, I never scheduled anything on Mondays.  Plus, after 28 years of raising children and managing family life, I am in the habit of cooking and preparing food for the week on Monday's...

 

 I get the dehydrator going, make a big pot of soup, I'll cook up some meat and a grain to be used during the week,  make a shopping list, plan the weekly menu, etc...   I like to cook a bunch of stuff and get it over with.

 

 My daughter (last child home) is usually exhausted form the week and weekend, as waas I.  The, idea was to honor our natural flow so that we wouldn't dread Monday's. 

 

For years we started our home school on Monday's around 2pm with a little snuggling and reading time on the couch.  A wonderful way to start the week and to re-connect after a busy weekend.  We'd do one lesson from a favorite subject after our reading.   For us Language Arts is what we usually choose since our homeschool is Waldorf, Classical Liberal Arts inspired the lesson would end with a drawing project in our lap books, which we loved to do.  

 

 Then we'd have our weekly organizational meeting and by 4pm my daughter was done.  I got the rest of the lessons for the week ready and by 5-6pm I was all set for Tues, Wed & Thurs..  Fri was usually a playground or field trip day.   The best part of all we connected while learning what we both love and dinner was already made!    

 

Now that my daughter is a teen and is transitioning into her Scholar Phase things are different and sometimes we do dread Monday's.  She is in charge of organizing herself and her study schedule, with me overseeing it.   Since, as she likes to say,  she only has-four more holiday's four more summers, four more-(the list is a big one --tears), before she  heads out into the world, we are letting her learn by natural consequences more than ever.  As the saying goes, it is through trial and error that we grow.    

 

She wakes up to an alarm on Monday's and we head out the  door to tennis practice.  I go food shopping after I drop her off, pick her up when done and we head back home for our weekly organizational home school meeting, I go over what she turned into to me last week, we go over each subject and I give help and instruction where necessary,  Today's meeting runs a little longer because we have our "start the week off right   inspirational talk and/or read".  The topic today is what I am blogging and writing about this week, Learning Should Be Fun, The Fallacy.  The rest of the week we'll do a family classic book read with her dad first thing in the am.  

 

I try to time my homeschool mentoring blog topic and my book project writing with  the inspiration talk that she is needing each week, so the same topic is  on my mind and clearer because I am writing about it, making our discussions a lot deeper and more effective.  She also gets to read much of my writing because she helps with editing at times (she is my go to grammar girl).   My creative parenting move to get a lesson in these days, is to write about it and say hey honey can you check this piece for me.  She'll probably catch on soon, but I am working it until then!  LOL...

 

 After our meeting we have lunch and both of us eat while we hop online for e-mails and Facebook.    She heads into her "Self Organizing Learning Environment-SOLE - LOL- as we now call her bedroom, which looks more like a dorm room these days!  

 

Today in her SOLE she is working on an essay based on a book she read, preparing for her online meeting with her TJEd mentor who takes her through a classic read,  they discuss, she writes about the read and the mentor critiques her work.  This mentor also helps her with life and study skills. 

 

She'll  do some math preparing for her class with her math tutor tomorrow (he comes to our home).

 

 At dinner we'll read the weekly Torah devotional and we'll talk about it, preparing all of us for our family Torah class Tues evening at our local Chabad Center.

 

 The biggest part of the day will be spent writing.  She is participating in the National Novel Writing Month this November - www.nanowrimo.org- where she is writing 1650 word per day to be able to finish on time.

 

  She'll do a thirty minute exercise video (Insanity), shower and get ready for her piano lesson this afternoon (the mentor comes to our house).

 

She practices voice for at least a half hour per day (she has a voice lesson on Wed at home with her mentor).

 

 We spend our days and evenings listening to her singing  and playing the piano, today is no different.  

 

 She'll read for an hour and a half to two hours this evening as part of her daily commitment to read one classical book per week, while reading she takes notes so she can write and essay about it.  She doesn't always read the entire book in a week but always reads for that amount of time.    

 

Today she has to clean the four litter boxes (we foster baby kittens) and the ferret cage and she likes to watch her favorite talk show (DVR) in the evenings when all is said and done.  Lights out by 11am.  

 

As for me, after our homeschool meeting I made a bunch of  food for the week while putting the groceries away.  Made lunch along with a big pot of soup, dehydrating veggies and some beef jerky.  Baked some chicken and made a pot of Quina.  The house is smelling very yummy!

 

I started preparing the art lesson for our  Thurs KidSchool co-op have to finish up tomorrow after I make copies and pick up supplies.

 

Hopped on the treadmill where I have a desk attached.  While walking I mentored a mom on the phone, answered two homeschooling questions in my in box, popped on Facebook and participated in a few homeschool  discussions.  Did a little research and set up an few appointments.  Wrote this article.  

 

Started organized a moms meeting for our KidSchool, (just trying to get a bunch of moms together in one place at the same time is a feat! LOL)  We are coming together to organize all of the science class lessons for the year.  

 

Once off the treadmill (two and a half hours today).... I will listen to a class I missed online last week while showering and getting ready.  I'll work on an assignment before dinner. I should mention in an effort to be the best mentor to my teen and to create family synergy in our home school, I am choosing to go back to school and study much of what my teen i  learning in her home school.   We are getting a classical liberal arts education together.  I  like to say I am just one chapter ahead of her.  I am going to school online working on my masters in liberal arts education, preparing for the day my husband and I are empty nesters (four more home school years) and the next chapter in my life begins.   The idea is to put all of this home school and alternative education experience to work in the future.  

 

Dinner is already made, , my daughter and I will do the dishes.  I'll pop online this evening for more mentoring and social networking, I really try to only get online twice a day for no more than an hour a day. Unless I am mentoring someone.  

 

I try to keep night time is for reading,  writing and study.  I try not to break my commitment to read and write for an hour per day, if not more.  I have some writing projects I am working on and must tackle them first otherwise my creative juices will surge and I will end up awake through the night creating,  I end my day reading for a couple hours usually for study and I finish up my evening reading for pleasure in bed next to my honey where we chit chat about our reading and life.  

 

Lights out by midnight.  

 

 

 

 

 

Comment · Like · Share · Delete

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    Michelle D'Agostino Thanks for sharing! LIFE! ;)

    5 hours ago · Unlike ·   1 person · 
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    Rachel Smith Fender I love your Mondays idea, wonder if that would work here? Our family, like yours, tends to have a busy weekend, esp. Sunday which is church all day. Worship and fellowship are very important to us, but Mondays everyone is always cranky from being at church late, this might be a good way to get the time at church we need spiritually but still meet everyone's physical needs for sleep!

    4 hours ago · Unlike ·   1 person · 
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    Vivian Hadding Sounds so wonderful. I remember those days, now I just work, work, work, study, cook, clean, drive, work, write and sketch when I'm not working and studying for work plus studies for classical and digital art, driving, cooking, cleaning....not easy being a single mom, but always a growing experience....

    2 hours ago · Like · 
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    Patti's Homeschool Mentoring ‎@ Vivian, yes we become laborers and taxi drivers when we have teens! But very soon, as you know, they will drive themselves and you will miss those car ride talks. My best memories are those days with our son driving him to school, it was like a slow transition of saying goodbye... I am so thankful for those days.

    about an hour ago · Like
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    Patti's Homeschool Mentoring 

    ‎@ Rachel, go for it! After all isn't this one of the reasons why we homeschool, we get to create the best environment for our family. My motto, change the environment not the chid! 
    
    And look what's happening in my family, my daughter ischoosing to schedule her teen life in a way that she was not use to as a younger child. The beauty of it is I don't have to police her, I just had to focus on developing good character and continue to inspire her in her studies. 
    
    So all the worrying I did that she wouldn't be able to function in a 9-5 job world was not necessary! 
    
    We spent our Monday's like that for years,,, even if we didn't get to a lesson the habit of doing the family read and talking about what we would do for the week was good enough. 
    
    Over the years I have taken in other people's children and home schooled them. 
    
    Last school year I had an 11, 9, 7 and 6 year old that came in on Mon, Wed and Fri 9am to 2pm. As par for the course Monday's they were tired, so I went back to what I know best, changing the environment.
    
    When they came in on Monday's I was busy in the kitchen making bread, soup or dehydrating for the week. They would join me and help. If they wanted to wonder off and play that was OK too, we'd have a slow conversational morning in the kitchen and we'd eat some of the bread or soup for lunch. During lunch we'd play a favorite math memory game and then go into our group read right after, from there language arts and spelling ended our Monday's. 
    
    In the end we all enjoyed our Monday's so much more!