This is my six-year-old and my four-year-old at our very first “tea and poetry” last fall.
We snipped a rose from our garden for the centerpiece, and our tablecloth is made of baby blankets with the printed side turned down. My son and I read from Now We are Six, and my daughter picked something from A Child’s Garden of Verses.
We’ve kept this up every Friday afternoon, and they love, love, love it! (We have since acquired a “real” tablecloth, by the way!)
~Beth
Image (cc)
Writing Starts Off the Page: Saturation and Incubation
You don’t want to ask for writing before your kids are good and ready to spill over onto the page. All of those writing books that give your kids topics are a waste of time (unless you happen to be one of the lucky ones with a child who loves to write and just needs a gentle nudge and away she goes!). Topics don’t generate writing. Having something to say does…
Writing with Teens: How to Begin
Without an essay guide, you might feel you can’t even begin to teach your students to write them. Hogwash. Let’s look at some ways that you can start essay training right now…
Essays: Not Just a Gateway to College
The word essay means “to try.” It comes from the Latin root. (In French, the word “essayer” is the verb “to try, to attempt.”) I think it helps to remember that an essay is an attempt, it’s your “best shot” at looking at the materials and giving a reaction (sometimes a strong opinion, sometimes an exploration of the issues, sometimes how that material relates to your life and background, your experiences and beliefs)…
Brave Writer’s Guide to Writing for Exams
I remind students to make a plan, follow the plan and stick to the plan because initially it is tempting to run off after some mental flurry of activity and think that is the same as good writing. It usually isn’t. Clarity and organization trump flights of fancy in timed assessment essay writing…
Why Academic Writing Doesn’t Come Naturally
Essay writing is like learning a brand new sport while playing the game. There are steps to take that make the process less daunting and that will prepare your kids to be successful with less stress. The actual format itself is not difficult to teach or understand. Learning how to bend the essay to the writer’s purpose, to make the essay form work for the writer instead of against him is something all together different…
Enjoy!
Check out Brave Writer’s Help for High School. It’s a self-directed writing program for teens that both teaches rhetorical thinking in writing, as well as the academic essay formats for high school and college.
Do you wish you didn’t have to ask your family for help?
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.
Go forth and be helped!
Top image by Paul Ashley (cc cropped, text added)
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:
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:
When 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)
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.
