Wouldn’t it be nice if your child came home from school, and then started on their homework in a timely manner… without you having to remind them? With the start of the new school year, this is the perfect time for some tips on how to train your kids to be more responsible and independent, whether that means they regularly:
- start their homework on their own after school without reminders.
- practice piano on their own before dinner without reminders.
- do their nighttime routine on their own before bed without reminders.
Basically, the goal is to build a habit/routine in your child that doesn’t require you to get on their case about it. Sounds nice, right? Here is my guide on how to train your children to develop that independence!
Today, I miss my classroom.
I miss welcoming your children
and teaching them
and learning about them
and loving them.
I miss pulling into my parking spot,
the sun freshly risen
that apple skin hour
sipping my first-day-back Starbucks
as the cool morning air greets me.
If you lead a group of kids anywhere, they usually walk in clumps. This is fine if we’re trekking about on a field trip or headed out to the playground, but when we need to go from point A to point B in an efficient, orderly way, we need lines.
When I first started teaching, I had a student-teaching assignment out in East San Jose. It was a difficult semester for me, to say the least. I got stress rashes and cried in my car almost every day after teaching, and I can totally see why there’s a lot of teacher burnout in low-income areas. If you’re one of those teachers, I wish I could personally give you a high five and sincere thank you for serving this demographic!
In the meantime, I share with you a poem. An encouragement, and a reminder of who we are caring for as you dive into this next school year. I’m not sure it qualifies as a poem, actually… but I used to tell my students they could just change up the spacing and call anything a poem.
Almost anything
can seem
poetic.
…Right? =D K maybe not, hope I didn’t offend anyone out there. Well, whatever it is, I wrote this while I was in the thick of this challenging student-teaching assignment. Dr. Shierling, our Reading and Writing Curriculum instructor, had given us mini notepads and instructed us to write about “an unforgettable moment.”
I immediately knew what I was going to write about, because just the day before, I had experienced a moment I never wanted to forget. So I started writing…
Yesterday, I was brave. I was daring. I took a risk. A big risk. I let my students show just how much more they knew, than I did. I showed my students how little I knew. I let them laugh at me, and I did not get upset.
And, I realized just how brave they are– every day.
Here is a game that involves fractions, memory-strengthening, and a litttttle bit of gambling (…sort of… not really). It takes a little more explanation in the beginning than say, the game of 99, but once you get the hang of it, it’s very simple.
Although this is recommended for grades 4-6, if your child understands the concept of fractions (even just visually), then they might be able to play. They may just need some help adding up their totals at the end. You can also cut out fraction bars or circles to help them visualize the totals at the end. Then again, you could just wait until fourth grade. There are plenty of other games to play in the meantime! 🙂
***Congratulations to Charlama C., winner of the book giveaway!
Thanks for participating!***
This game is a little like Go Fish, where you try to match up cards and make pairs. Unlike Go Fish, however, you don’t just pick matching pairs of cards. Instead, you can make a pair if one number divides into the other. Well, that’s about it. There’s the game. You don’t need to read any further =).
…But go ahead. Cuz I went through the trouble of formatting it all nice for you and everything :).
>>>CLICK HERE FOR A PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION WITH THE SCORING TEMPLATE AND INSTRUCTIONS.<<<
8/1/2014 UPDATE: And the winner is… Charlama C.! (Winner selected by Random.org.) Congrats!
Click here if you still need a copy! 🙂
Thanks, all, for participating!
———————-
A week ago, one of my lovely blog readers reached out to me and asked me to read and review a book she had written on teaching kids how to understand and talk about their feelings. I liked it so much I offered to do a giveaway of the book on my blog! Just in case you were wondering, I was not paid to read the book, write the review, or host a giveaway.
I am pleased to share with you Yell and Shout, Cry and Pout: A Kid’s Guide to Feelings
This is probably the easiest, and arguably the most fun game of the bunch. This is always the first math game I teach, because students pick up on it very quickly and have a lot of fun. It leaves a good taste in their mouth for math games!
I should have introduced it first. Sorry. I started with my own personal favorite =P.
It’s mostly addition, doesn’t require too much strategy, and is closer to a normal “just for fun” card game than any of the other games. This is nice when you just want a low-key game! This is also the math game I most often see my kids choose to play on rainy day recesses or Choice Time. It just requires one deck of cards and a little bit of math know-how.
The hardest thing about this game is probably learning the special card values. I would recommend printing up the printable/instructions, then you can just set it out and refer to it whenever needed. Read on to learn this easy and fun game!
I’m a firm believer in consequences. Children should know that certain undesirable behaviors will result in consequences, and well, you can read my detailed thoughts on that topic here.
Have you read that post? Because if you have, then you’ll probably agree with me that it’s pretty long, and not the easiest thing to implement. I really do believe it can be extremely effective, but it takes a thoughtful plan and a lot of consistency, and I’ll be the first to admit that consistency can be hard!
Maybe you’ve been with me for a while and you read that post back in May, and now it’s July, and you’re thinking, “Oh man. I totally meant to try it, but… well, the end of the school year came… and graduations… and summer camps… and Grandma’s… and vacation and… ah what summer is half over?! It takes too much planning and now it’s too late…”
No, no, my friend. It is not too late.
Maybe that was too big of a project and you weren’t ready to commit to something so involved. Okay, no problem. I am still all for the cause of parents training their children up, so I have an easier alternative for you. It is still very effective (I wouldn’t share it otherwise!), and I’m honestly not sure why I didn’t share it with you sooner. Maybe because that post was already 23 pages (…size 12. Times New Roman font. Without the pictures. Yeahforreal.).
This is a simple addition game called 42. It’s great for younger and older kids, and again, offers opportunity to dig deeper and think about adding and subtracting in a fun way! While it seems very simple at first, it actually gives opportunity for rather complex thinking and many mental math calculations.
I recently shared some of these math games with a neighbor, and she said she couldn’t really figure out one of the games just by reading the directions on my blog. It got me thinking that I should probably just make videos of me teaching/playing them. Personally, even I don’t like reading through instructions to learn a game and would much rather have someone just show me. So I’ll try to go back and add videos for the last three games I posted (in addition to making videos for the future games). Here’s the first!
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