Month: October 2018

This week the sermon at church was on Haggai and the rebuilding of the temple. The people were discouraged from a lack of progress and here’s what God tells them, ” …’Be Strong all you people of the Land,’ declares the Lord, ‘and work. For I am with you,’ declares the Lord Almighty.” Haggai 2:4.

As I was sitting there with my kids, I was reminded of how many times in raising and teaching them I had to “be strong, work hard and trust God’s with us”. I was reminded of how many times I had to sit with them while they were struggling with math or spelling or just not feeling smart enough and tell them that our job is merely to, “Be strong, work hard and trust that God is with you.”

It’s not rocket science, it doesn’t take special skills, He just requires us to be strong and take the next step. We don’t have to stress about high school when our kids are in elementary school, we just do the next thing. Worrying about things that are to come do not help us. We just need to do the next thing. Like the Israelites who just needed to put the next brick on the wall and not get frozen by how big the job was, we need to focus on the job at hand. That might be introducing letters or teaching multiplication or training our kids in first time obedience. Walls, temples, (children) get built by being diligent and doing the next thing.

I needed that reminder. Even though it’s the last year of homeschooling for me, I need to keep focused and work hard. That’s how I managed all these past years. I got up, I got ready and I did school. I stayed focused and diligent and just did the next thing and God created a wonderful testimony in the lives of my kids.

Some days are just not great. There is no good reason why they are bad, they just are. Today was one for me. It wasn’t horrible, it just wasn’t good. My homemade bread looked like it was stepped on by trolls, the soup in the crockpot didn’t cook in time, my hair is bad and I swear my eyelashes are trying to blind me. Bad days happen. Unfortunately, when you are homeschooler, you generally don’t have the option of going back to bed and hiding from the world. The world finds you and wants you to make them breakfast.

My advice? Know your limits, know your have to’s and for goodness sake, have a written lesson plan or work boxes or some kind of independent work pre-planned for your kids.

Today, I knew my limit was Trigonometry. I just could not work through an extra set of trig identities today, so we did the minimum and moved on. I knew I could do extra history so we spent extra time on that and Bible and got a little further so we could make up the extra trig later.

When my kids were little, I had folders with quiet independent work in them filled with daily handwriting pages, spelling work, math fact memorization and maybe copywork. On bad days, I might just have them do those things and then we might read extra in our read aloud. I also had math programs like a Life of Fred or Mathtacular that the kids thought of as the “fun, extra math” and we might just do that for math that day. On really desperate days, we might just do math and LA and go for a very long nature walk.

Bad hair days and bad homeschooling days happen to everyone. Having a plan in place to mitigate those bad days will save your sanity and possibly, stop you from having to apologize to your kids about losing your cool over fractions that day.

I am working part time as a preschool teacher (and a substitute teacher for grades K-8th) in a Charlotte Mason Classical School, which is lovely. I am consistently reminded that we have to train good habits in our kids, minute by minute, day by day. They have to be gently reminded to obey right away and directed to do the right thing. They need taught to be diligent, even if we need to sit with them in those early years and teach them to stay on task. They need to be stopped as they are interrupting and taught to wait to patiently. It requires training.

I think we often just expect these habits to happen or we think we taught it once so we need not do it again. Habit formation is a daily task. Remember that Charlotte Mason says that, “Education is a Discipline”.

Discipline is defined as, “ practice of training people to obey rules or a code of behavior, “.

We need to get in the practice of training our beloved children to obey, to be diligent, to do everything without whining or complaining, to persevere. It’s not easy and it’s really exhausting but that’s all apart of educating our children properly. Training in habits will, eventually, make your academic training go much smoother but it takes dedicated time in those younger years. It’s as important as learning to read or how to count. Our teen years have gone so very smoothly because of those earlier years of training. Those early years were hard and draining and seemed to last forever but all that hard work was worth it.

If you haven’t read, “For the Children’s Sake” by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay, start today. It helps to break down those vital habits and gives a great foundation in the tenets of a Charlotte Mason education.