Don’t put it off
The nagging issue that you keep avoiding in your homeschool? Go ahead and tackle it tomorrow. You don’t have to do it perfectly. You don’t even need to purchase curriculum.
Get online tonight or early tomorrow morning, and figure out how you might address the one area that’s bothering you a little bit tomorrow.
You might feel you’ve completely forgotten to teach the Pledge of Allegiance, or the names of the states, or your address to your youngest children.
Perhaps one of your kids doesn’t know how to spell her complicated last name and she’s already 9!
Maybe you want to show your kids the continents and you haven’t bought a globe yet. Enter the Internet!
What if your child isn’t reading and you haven’t been successful teaching…so worry is your substitute teacher. You let her babysit the child, and you opt out of figuring it out.
Tomorrow, do one thing that moves you closer to reading instruction. Maybe you spend fifteen minutes doing research. Maybe you spend ten minutes talking to the late reader and find out if she’s ready to try again. You ask her to look at reading programs with you. Maybe you try a totally new approach: you read to your daughter putting your finger under the words and never ask her to do anything but follow along. Maybe you make play-doh from scratch and shape the lowercase alphabet and say the sounds as you do.
Whatever you choose, do a tiny bit of it. Tackle some part of the nagging concern.
- Skip count in the car all the 7’s until you get to the doctor.
- Listen to your son explain the video game to you.
- Have poetry teatime in the middle of the mess with your iPad instead of poetry books.
- Spend one hour cleaning the family room so that you KNOW where the math books are and you don’t ignore that problem another day.
- Schedule the dentist teeth cleanings.
- Fill out the FAFSA (yes, that’s mine!). Drat I hate the FAFSA.
- Make one healthy salad and eat it for lunch.
- Get the analogue clock and spend 45 minutes with everyone learning how to read it. Or tie shoe laces until everyone can tie their own without help (except the really little ones). Or teach everyone 4 feet tall how to do their own laundry.
There are just those things that nag at you, that you wish you could address; tomorrow can be the day you say, “Enough. I start today. I do a little bit toward that goal today.”
Then do it. Congratulate yourself tomorrow night, and pour a glass of wine or eat a half mango with lemon juice or savor a square of your favorite dark chocolate or go for a run!
Do whatever it is that celebrates your commitment to doing that one thing—whatever it is. Let’s make a big long list of what your one thing is and if you need help thinking of a single day’s way to address it, ask! We’ll help you.
Ready? Go!
