First Home School Lesson

I am not a sold-out home schooler. However, I love to learn and know that my daughters are just like both me and Erik. We are knowledge addicts! (Him mostly technology, me everything...) Therefore I decided to start home school lessons with Reagan for pre-school. (Also, I don't really have the money to send her to a pre-school outside of the home.)

Today, we started with the letter 'K'. Why 'k'? Well, simply because I happened to pick up a Koala book at the library last week and thought, "Why not? Let's start with Koalas." So today I drew dotted lines of the letter 'k' and taught her how to trace it. I found a neat site with letters and corresponding coloring pages, but couldn't print them off. (hint, hint, Erik.) And then we did a seek and find page from a Highlights magazine. Overall, the first lesson was great! I loved sitting down with her, at an unhurried pace, and teaching her. It was fun. Furthermore, there was a bit of bonding this morning; if anything I was more patient with her for the rest of the morning because we had spent time together.

On Tuesday I went to my mom's group at church, 2 Hour Time Out (which Reagan has called 2 hours of time out). The speaker was Donna Otto who runs a fabulous ministry called Homemakers by Choice. There were two things she said that were extremely profound for me. First, that as stay-at-home moms we must be careful about what environments we put our children in. When I drop my kids off at the gym (which I love!), I am putting them in an environment that has all sorts of people's home lives spilling into it. A melting pot of home lives. There are perhaps attitudes and behaviors that I don't want the girls around. Or vice-versa. Her point is that dropping our kids off really needs to be a conscious decision.

Secondly, she said that we can not raise kids in crisis-mode. Sure we can get them to school or dance or church, but to really raise them to be the kind of children we hope they will be takes a calmer environment. I am a crisis-mode person. Sure I get things done, but I'm always trying to rush through it or just get it done. Today I made an effort to just do one thing at a time. And I found a lot less frustration during my morning.