Daily Writing Practice
How can you incorporation meaningful writing practice into daily life? Writer’s block tends to crop up every time students are given a time limit and a short writing project. They do well with week-long projects where they can think through things, but the short writes seem to stop them in their tracks. Getting started tends to be the biggest obstacle! Here are five suggestions for working writing into everyday life for students. Practice restating the prompt as a way to get started. One can always go back and strengthen the hook or opening statement at the end, but just get started by turning the prompt into the first sentence. Write often, even little things. Consider dictating your grocery list to your child or have them write down a phone message or note. Practice writing summaries of daily classes (great to use Cornel Note style and write a summary at the end) as a way to study. Use key vocabulary to strengthen the summary (great way to study for a test). The New York Times has weekly writing prompts for students. They can keep the writing in a journal or submit it online. (You don’t need a subscription to access the…
20 Read Aloud Books for the Middle Years
What was your favorite read aloud as an elementary or middle school child? Most parents think of read aloud as something you do at bedtime for preschoolers, but read aloud is valuable at any age. It is especially helpful during the middle years as upper elementary and middle school kids are learning to think critically and to make sense of the world around them. Reading aloud and discussing it helps you guide and stretch their thinking. As a fourth grade teacher, my students and I loved read aloud time. It was a great way to teach across subjects and objectives, and it leveled the playing field for the wide range of reading abilities in my classroom. The discussions were rich and the “five extra minutes of read aloud” was a highly coveted prize in my weekly ticket drawing. I often found my parent volunteers listening to it as well. There are so many new books and books lists available by categories online, but I tend to favor older forgotten books that not every kid has read already. I look for books that have a strong character and often a topic that’s a bit of a controversy so we can have…
Disciple Your Children
How do you make discipleship a natural way of life? Whether it’s the younger years, the middle years, or the launching years, choosing to disciple your children can easily be woven into the natural rhythms of family life. It can start with simple questions about the beauty around you in creation or reading Bible stories at bedtime. You can discuss the right choices or natural consequences of bad choices. You can talk about school and life through a biblical lens. You can do a book study with your teens, host a backyard Bible club this summer for your elementary-age neighborhood kids, or read Bible stories to your little ones. It does not have to be hard or complicated, but it does have to be intentional. Talk with your children when you wake, when you walk, and when you wind down to sleep (see Deuteronomy 6). So that pretty much means disciple your children all throughout your days. Do not leave it up to the church. The church is there to partner with parents, not replace biblical teaching in the home. In order to disciple your children, you want to open the doors of communication so it is regular and natural,…
Teach Kids to Advocate for Themselves
What are some reasons you should teach your child to advocate for themselves? No matter your parenting style, teach your kids to advocate for themselves. It will nurture their independence and give them ownership of their problems. In the younger years, you can give children language for asking. Teach them to politely ask for something they need or want and encourage them to tell why they need it. In the middle years, role play difficult situations and how to self-advocate. This gives kids empowering strategies and the language to express themselves. With my tutoring clients, we often talk about how and when to ask a teacher for help or a parent for project supplies. This is a good age to allow real-world experiences like ordering in a restaurant or paying for something at the store. Provide support for critical thinking and problem-solving. When a high school tutoring client tells me he needs to ask his teacher about a missing assignment that he thinks he already turned in, but he might not remember to ask, I suggest he write an email to the teacher. I have him draft it and then we edit it together. This gives a quick lesson in…
Setting up School Year Expectations
How does setting a homework schedule build life skills that impact the workplace? Just as a classroom teacher sets expectations, parents can also use the start of a new school year to set school year expectations for homework and chores. As children grow, so should their responsibilities as these life skills may impact their future workplace performance. During the younger years, they can be expected to put their backpack in the designated location and put any “parent homework” in a certain spot everyday. Homeschoolers can be expected to return their daily supplies to a designated location. As they get to the middle years, these school year expectations can grow. To avoid the morning rush or get a few more minutes of sleep, bookbags can be packed the night before, lunches can be made, and clothes laid out. All of this can be done by the children, with some initial supervision by the parents or caretakers. By the launching years, these school year expectations should be firm and there should be little need for reminders or follow ups. The start of a new school year is a great opportunity to revisit the expectations. “Each night after you clean up the dinner…
The Middle Years: The Consequences
What consequences are appropriate for the middle years? When it comes to consequences for kids, I know that some of the typical ones felt like punishment for me as a parent! The emotional roller coaster of the middle years was also accompanied by the hard task of establishing appropriate consequences. Restricting all television meant you had to give up the half hour of dinner prep calm. Taking my kids driver’s license away for a while meant I had to rearrange my schedule to drive her places. I tried to find creative solutions that either directly tied in with the problem or took away something the child valued. There might need to be different consequences for each child. If you are looking for a list of consequences, this blog post won’t give you one. Each child is a unique individual and it takes time and conversation to figure out what works for your child. This is the hard and necessary work of parenting. Digging to the heart of the issue will also help you get creative about the consequences because you will begin to understand what behaviors need to change. If you look back at the blog post about the put…
The Middle Years: Calming the Chaos
Have you ever wanted to get off the middle school roller coaster of life, either as a parent or a child? Parenting middle schoolers isn’t for the faint of heart! The middle years are a roller coaster of emotions for both the kids and the parents. Recently a friend asked for parenting advice for these volatile days with her tween. I’ll share advice in a 3 part series, but you can get started today with these nine tips for calming the chaos in the middle years. If you are new here, I describe the stages of childhood as the younger years, the middle years, and the launching years. I also try to keep each blog post as a short read and vary my topics often. This month will be focused on the middle years. Tips for calming the chaos in the middle years: Teach your kids the “why” behind the rules. How does this rule protect them? Allow your kids to discuss/ask for exceptions but teach them to respect your final authority. Point them to one or two acceptable people they can talk to if they feel they cannot talk to you (close family friend, youth leader, mentor, relative, etc.).…
Put On Put Off Chart
What area of disobedience do you find yourself nagging a child about? Have you seen a put on put off obedience chart? It’s common to tell children to “stop doing that” but less common to take the time to tell them what to do instead or to probe into the heart issue behind the problem. Even with our own faults, it’s common to focus on the fault not on the flip side of what we could do to change it. When my kids were little, I happened upon an obedience chart that gave suggestions for replacing bad actions with good ones. It gave Biblical principles and verses of what to “put off” and what to “put on” in an easy to read chart. I used this idea over a few years, making similar lists according to the top few problem areas for my kids. This obedience chart is still available on the internet as Wise Words for Moms. It also gave heart probing questions to ask, which are useful in the moment of discipline or as table talk conversations in general. Many types of “if-then” consequence lists are available, but this one is great for the younger years and will…
Waiting Games
What waiting game can you easily play while waiting in line? Waiting games are invaluable resources for every parent and teacher! Waiting is part of everyday life. We wait in lines at amusement parks, at appointments, and in traffic jams. We wait for events like ball games, symphonies, and movies to start. My list was curated when I was a 4th grade teacher and we went every year to the North Carolina Symphony. Our students had to dress up, ride the bus, and sit quietly waiting on the performance to start. Kids get restless! And unless you give them resources, restlessness can easily turn into ruckus! I created a list of ideas my students could quietly use with their seatmates. Soon, other teachers wanted to know my secret! Why were my students pleasantly occupied without me having to fuss at them? High expectations and tools they could use. This also became helpful when I took high school students on service trips around the world. They could entertain themselves in airports and vans. They could also entertain younger children waiting for Vacation Bible School to begin or parents to pick them up at the end. Most of the games require little…
Learn to say YES
Do people automatically expect you to say NO faster than you say YES? “Learn to say yes easily” was a piece of wisdom and parenting tip I came across as a young wife and parent. The wisdom behind this was that when you did need to say “NO”, it would be taken well knowing that it was not your usual answer just to avoid extra work or expenses. If possible, say YES to your kids asking to have a friend over, your students occasionally asking for more time on an assignment, your coworker asking you to lunch, or your spouse asking to play soccer one night a week. Then, when there’s a good reason to say NO it will be less of a shock or disappointment because you are known for saying YES to reasonable requests. Because our usual reason for saying NO to things with our children was typically due to scheduling conflicts, our children learned to check the family calendar before asking. This led to fewer conflicts and whining in the middle school years because it was not us saying NO because we were annoyed but because it was a schedule conflict. It also helped our children learn…