YOU are your children’s greatest educational resource
In all your planning to please, educate, and entertain your children, don’t forget that YOU are their greatest educational tool, resource, and role model. Your lifestyle teaches them more than you realize.
- Do you read in their presence for your own self-education or pleasure?
- Do you get off the computer visibly for a chunk of the day doing other activities that require your hands, your creativity, and your self-will?
- Do you discuss ideas freely, with your curiosity leading?
- Do you find other people and their ways of life fascinating and involving?
- Are you quick to assume the best?
- Are you likely to help and support?
- Do you consult experts when you are in doubt?
- Do you credit others for their contributions to your understanding, or for their corrections of your assumptions?
- What defines your living space: order and space to explore? creative mess for risk? tools available to use? noisy and quiet places?
- Do you give full attention and eye contact to someone each day? Do you rotate who gets that full attention?
- Will you apologize when you are wrong, mistaken, or hurt someone, without being prompted to do so?
- Are Shakespeare and poetry, math theorems and science projects, gardens and laptop computers freely explored/used in your life?
Think about the person you are as the primary curriculum. The best education you can give your kids is the one they witness every day.
As you live, so they learn.
Top image by Rosmarie Voegtli (cc text added)
