February 2015 - Page 4 of 5 - A Brave Writer's Life in Brief A Brave Writer's Life in Brief
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A Brave Writer's Life in Brief

Thoughts from my home to yours

Archive for February, 2015

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Are You Training Your Kids to NOT Help?

Don't Turn Down Help

Do you wish you didn’t have to ask your family for help?

  • with the dishes
  • taking out the over-flowing garbage
  • changing the toilet paper tube (why this is difficult, I still don’t understand)
  • clearing a table
  • putting away the dozens of pairs of mis-matched shoes strewn through the halls
  • moving a wet load of laundry to the dryer and a new load into the washer
  • shoveling snow
  • unloading groceries
  • replenishing the food and water bowls for the dog and cats

And so on…

Let me flip this around on you. What do you do when someone offers to help?

Think about it for a moment. Imagine this setting. You’re in the kitchen unloading the dishwasher and preparing to load it. In a surprising instance of charity and awareness, your teenager who is watching TV says, “Do you need help Mom?”

What do you say?

Do you tell the teen that yes, you need help, and that he can turn off his favorite program to take over for you at the sink? Do you do then walk away leaving him to it while you go get a bubble bath or hop back onto the computer?

Or do you think to yourself, “That’s so nice that he asked, I’m going to reward him by saying he doesn’t have to help me and he can go on watching his program”? Some unconscious version of this one—you turn down help because you feel generous when you do.

Another instance: You’re folding laundry and the five year old wants to help. The five year old will offer five year old skills to the job. Do you accept that? Or do you send the child away to play so you can get it done correctly and quickly?

Another time: You’re making dinner and it’s the favorite meal of your 11 year old daughter. She offers to peel or chop and you send her to set the table. She doesn’t particularly want to set the table—she wanted to help by peeling and chopping. You know she will slow you down if she peels and chops so you ask her to do what feels helpful to you: setting the table. She does a poor job with the table and you feel resentful that she isn’t being helpful… perhaps.

If any of these resonate—take a moment to consider this idea.

When you turn down help (whether you do so out of a desire to be generous, or because you are better at it, or because the offer doesn’t match what you thought you needed), you train your family to NOT HELP you.

In other words—if you want helpers in your family, accept the help they offer with enthusiasm, support them in being helpful by teaching them the skill that they want to offer, and if they are capable of doing the task without you, walk away and let them do the whole job so that they see they were helpful (not merely supervised and scolded). Let them see that you are relaxing and enjoying the help they are giving you.

It’s not easy.

It’s a reflex to simply take over, move quickly, do what needs to be done, and leave everyone in the status quo space of not helping.

Then what happens? Resentment builds. We start believing that no one cares about us, when in fact, we may have trained our roommates to let us do everything for them!

How do you get back to offers of help if you’ve already extinguished them? You ask for help! You say things like, “Who wants to help me make dinner? I’ve got sharp knives and electric tools for anyone who wants to hang out in the kitchen with me. I’ll set the table while you frappe and slice.”

You ask for help like this:

“I’m exhausted. Anyone willing to do the dishes for me tonight? I will be eternally grateful. I just need one hour to unwind in a tub? Anyone? Anyone?”

If no one offers, you do them and keep going and ask again another night. Over time, your vulnerability in needing help will reappear on the radar. Someone (one of your kids) will recognize that he or she can actually make you happy by helping (not make you worried or annoyed). And that child will offer, freely, out of the blue.

People want to be helpful. Sometimes we train them to lose that desire.

We can turn it around.

Principles:

  • Always accept the help being offered (don’t change the offer to something else).
  • Help your helpers be helpful—give them lessons, show them how, appreciate their efforts.
  • Get out of the way—competent helpers should be left to help, not hovered over. You should benefit from the help by not being there, doing something else you enjoy.
  • Thank them. Not effusively, but genuinely. “Thank you for cleaning up. That was helpful.”

Go forth and be helped!

Top image by Paul Ashley (cc cropped, text added)


A Gracious Space series

Posted in Homeschool Advice | Comments Off on Are You Training Your Kids to NOT Help?

Happy Birthday, Laura Ingalls Wilder!

Laura Ingalls Wilder blog

Beloved author Laura Ingalls Wilder was born February 7, 1867, and to celebrate we’re offering the Arrow based on her book, Little House in the Big Woods:

Half price through Monday at Midnight! ($3.95) OFFER HAS EXPIRED

Laura Ingalls Wilder was encouraged by her daughter, Rose (an author in her own right), to chronicle the pioneer stories of Laura’s childhood which were filled with both hardship and love. Editors rejected her first manuscript. It was reworked and expanded into its present form and published as Little House in the Big Woods.

An excerpt from the book:

Little-House-in-the-Big-WoodsWhen the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, “What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?”

“They are the days of a long time ago, Laura,” Pa said. “Go to sleep, now.”

But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa’s fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the firelight gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.

She thought to herself, “This is now.”

She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.”

―Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods

So, take advantage of this special Arrow offer!

P.S. This issue comes from the early years of Brave Writer’s Arrows so it isn’t as robust as more current titles (that’s why the lower price). It’s an oldie but still a goodie!

Also, if you’d like to buy a copy of the novel, it’s available through Amazon: Little House in the Big Woods (affiliate link).

The Arrow is a monthly digital product that features copywork and dictation passages from a specific read aloud novel. It’s geared toward children ages 8-11 and is an indispensable tool for parents who want to teach language arts in a natural, literature-bathed context.

Little House on the Prairie Museum image by David Hepworth (cc cropped, darkened, text added)

Posted in Arrow, BW products | Comments Off on Happy Birthday, Laura Ingalls Wilder!

Friday Freewrite: Hide and Seek

Hide and seek

Explore the same event from two different points of view! Describe a hide and seek game from the perspective of the one who hides then from the one who seeks.

New to freewriting? Check out our online guide.

Image by Dplanet (cc cropped)

Posted in Friday Freewrite | 1 Comment »

Stealth Attack Learning

Stealth Attack Learning

Rather than teach, lead. Rather than talk, act. Rather than following the curriculum or opening the book, express what it is you wish to be known.

The secret of a vibrant homeschool is not in a book. It’s you. You are the secret weapon. You don’t have to be a good teacher. In fact, it helps if you are not.

It’s better if you are an enthusiast—someone for whom the feast of ideas is so compelling, you sneak time to follow up on the material you read to the kids to get the adult perspective. You are the best home educator when you can’t wait to make dinner because that’s when you park the kids in front of PBS to watch Arthur while you listen to Jane Austen on Audible.

There’s no magic here apart from the contagious energy that oozes from your engaged, fascinated mind! This is why home education actually works! It’s why you don’t need teacher training. Yes, you might learn something about how to impart the mechanics of writing or the formulas of math. Of course! But you don’t need to know how to give lectures or prepare worksheets or organize data into incremental chunks to be mastered through quizzes and grades.

You get to lead by passionate example.

We wonder why our kids don’t jump on the train with us? Usually it’s because we take that raw energy for the material we are about to learn with them and turn it into something schoolish. We say things like, “Let me check the lesson plan book” or “Go get me the teacher’s manual” or “I wonder what X curriculum has us doing today.”

When we delegate the work of homeschool to a company, we dilute the natural curiosity and energy with someone else’s prescriptive expectations.

But what would happen, say, if you read the manual before bedtime? What if you committed 10-15 minutes a day to simply looking at the material you hoped to cover the next day? If in doing so, you could authentically lead with that material the next day without referring to a program or a schedule or a system, what might happen?

Here’s what I mean.

It’s one thing to open a Brave Writer writing program in front of your kids and to say, “We’re going to do Project Six which is called Body Art. Come here. I need you to lie on the floor.”

It’s another entirely to get up from the breakfast table and say to one of your kids: “I’m going to lie on top of this long sheet of butcher paper. Would you mind tracing around my body with this big Sharpie? Thanks.”

Once the child has done it, you get the scissors and begin cutting your body out. Your kids are going to wonder what you are doing at some point. In the meantime, you keep going. You clip words from Pottery Barn Catalogs and you glue them to your body-butcher paper.

As you work, you ask for help: “Hand me the glue stick, would you?” and “Do you think the word ‘sparkly’ describes me?”

Before you know it, someone is going to want to have their body drawn and clipped and words stuck to their elbows and forehead too.

This is leading and immersing and playing and learning all rolled into one. Stealth attack style—the same way you taught your kids to kick a soccer ball or play peek-a-boo or decorate a Christmas tree. There was no moment where you said to your 8 year old: “Now let’s see—the planner for childhood says you need to learn how to hold a kite string and it will take six steps.”

Kill the atmosphere

The quickest way to kill the atmosphere of learning is to suggest that it’s time to learn!

What do you do with those pesky skills that require some incremental work? You do the best you can to support a rich atmosphere—you add treats, you rub shoulders, you sit next to your struggling second grader, you give encouragement, you try the process yourself in front of your child, you use calculators, you use Spell Check, you add brownies and candles and nature hikes before or after.

LIFE is appealing to everyone. Everyone. Life is learning. Invest in what feels alive and good and curiosity making.

If what you want to learn is not on the agenda of your child, YOU go learn it in your off minutes. Read an extra chapter. Check out the adult version of the event from the library or online (book, DVD, podcast). Your appetite need not be held back by an 11 year old’s boredom with the abolition movement. You are free to read all about the Underground Railroad now—without your child coming along.

Trust me: if you become passionate about the topic, you will naturally talk about it in your children’s presence and at some point, they will find it interesting or they will have absorbed it simply by sharing oxygen and square footage with you. Perhaps as teens. Perhaps as college students home on break.

If you’re looking for a way to start a new trajectory, stealth lessons are the way to go. Set the table with the materials or stack up the books, all after the kids are in bed. Get up and begin, without a word, without explanation or mission or objective or preamble. No one wants to be told “We’re going to have fun today.” The moment they hear the words, they want to prove you wrong! So simply begin.

If the lesson today is all about homonym confusion in the editing process, resist the temptation to talk about the problem your child is having with homonyms. A surefire way to kill any interest in learning about homonyms.

Instead, what if you tried this? Before breakfast, fill a white board with homonyms (as obscure and surprising a set as you can find) and then play a game—ask everyone to make the meaning clear of each word on scratch paper with either drawings, synonyms, sentences, or definitions. Can they Google? Of course! That’s how adults learn everything!

Get back to enthusiasm, creativity. Remind yourself of that tedious classroom where you watched the tick tick tick of the clock desperately waiting for the sentence-in-your-seat to end. That will help you remember to keep it real at home—open, direct, clear, interesting—HOME.

You can do this!

Image woman and book by Amy (cc cropped, text added)


Brave Learner Home

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, Homeschool Advice | 3 Comments »

The 2015 Spring Calendar of Classes is posted!

Spring_Class_2015

Mark your calendars! Registration for Brave Writer’s spring online classes opens on Monday, March 2, 2015. It’s not too late to get your writing in for the year!

Here are the classes that will be offered:

Expository Essay
High School Writing Projects
Kidswrite Basic
Kidswrite Intermediate
Literary Analysis: Shakespeare (Twelfth Night)
Movie Discussion Club: Sherlocked!
Nature Journaling
Passion for Fiction
Photography and Writing
SAT/ACT Essay Prep
Shakespeare Family Workshop
Write for Fun I
Write for Fun II

Check out the schedule here!

And parents of teens, don’t miss the SAT/ACT essay class which will get your kids ready for the June 6 test date.

P.S. Registration is still open for certain winter classes.

Image of student by Brave Writer mom Kelly (cc)

Posted in Online Classes | Comments Off on The 2015 Spring Calendar of Classes is posted!

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