Giving the 'Happiness Advantage'

This weekend I read an interesting article in the Times about 'Dolphin Parenting' Which was Shawn Achor's reply to 'Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom'.

If you haven't heard of Shawn Achor I highly recommend listening to his TEDtalk on 'The Happiness Advantage' in the video below.

I've never been comfortable with the Tiger mom style principles, and although it's a little corny, I do love the 'dolphin parenting' idea. We have been able to implement a few of his ideas into our daily  homeschool routine and I'm already seeing positive outcomes.

So, if you want to join me in 'Dolphin Homeschooling' here are the ideas we are using so far:

1) watch a funny video on youtube and laugh about it together. 
Yes, daily. Laughing together is not only fun, but it releases endorphines which help you learn faster and retain information for significantly longer. Plus it's bonding.  

2) write down three things that you are grateful for. 
Teaching your child to scan the day for positive outcomes, within 21 days this becomes a habit, so make a month (or longer) of daily gratitude journalling.

3) One happy memory.
Also in our journal we write out one happy memory/favourite thing that happened today. I write this for Cosmo, as I don't want his emotional experience to be limited by frustration of spelling etc... I let him tell me his happy memory and then I ask leading questions like 'what happened next?' and 'how did you feel about that?'

4) An encouraging/positive note.
My children have facebook accounts. Don't worry, they don't know their own password and they are only friends with family members. It is useful for this exercise though, where I ask him to send one encouragement or note of praise to somebody.

Shawn Achor points out that IQ isn't really a great predictor of success or happiness. How positive you are and how well connected you are with your support network are much more important predictors of both. These exercises done daily will build habits, and habits become character and destiny, according to someone much smarter than me.

'Sow an act, and you reap a habit;
Sow a habit, and you reap a character;
Sow a character, and you reap a destiny'
                                                      -Samuel Smiles
 
 In just three days my son is already way more positive. He is finding all kinds of things to be grateful for, he's stopping during the day to point out that 'this is going to be my happy memory when we journal!' and he's saying encouraging things to me and his sister.

This stuff works, so let's give our kids the Happiness advantage :0)

Photo credit

Freebie: Daily Learning Notebook

I just had to share with you Confessions of a Homeschooler's Preschool Daily Learning Notebook. I think it's awesome and we will totally be printing this out for Cosmo to use this term. Here's why I love it:

1. It follows the same format every day. My boy loves routine, and so do I. All round winner.
2. Because it follows the same format, he can work on it independently and take responsibility for getting it done. Great skills to practice.
3. It has handwriting in it, getting him to write is like pulling teeth, but this has a small, finite amount for him to practice everyday.
4. It's short. Because it doesn't take too long, we can easily fit it in everyday, even when we have other plans (like pirate day or a  trip to london).

Go get yourself a copy , you won't regret it!

Domestication

Today, recognising that it was a tuesday, Cosmo pointed out to me that we needed to tidy up for our cleaner. Unfortunately she is ill this week, so I told him that she wouldn't be coming today.

'But who will clean our house for us?'
'We will.'
'I don't think you know how...'

Ouch.

Epic parenting fail.

When he was younger Cosmo did all the chores with me, but since we've employed a cleaner to help keep on top of things, I've relegated all the chores I still do to early mornings, nap times and bed times, or to when he is quietly working on something else, so that when we are together I can be doing something 'constructive' or 'academic' or just having plain old fun.

The reality is, that unless my children see me doing these chores on a regular basis they assume that they are done magically and that I have nothing to do with it.

With that in mind I started some domestication with Cosmo today. He helped me take apart the dishwasher and clean it with vinegar and bicarbonate of soda. He was impressed with the smell, and didn't want to touch any of it (in his defense I was wearing rubber gloves) but he did watch me do it and knows that we have to do it to keep our dishwasher in good working order.

Similarly I've made him help me with sorting laundry.

We invested in a cleaner because we thought I would be able to dedicate more time to schooling, but the reality is that I've lost the importance of why we are home schooling. I want my children to see real life and understand how it works. I shouldn't be shielding them from the day to day stuff in order to teach them how volcanoes work or what vaccinations are. Those things are important, but not more so than how to run a house. The reality is they will definitely run a house, but the chances of becoming a geologist or a medical research assistant are much slimmer.

2012 Seven Steps Curriculum Planner

If you haven't come across the newbeehomeschooler that is something I intend to rectify with this post. She's based in Texas, but her advice and support are beneficial to any home educator, particularly new ones like me.

She has a step-by-step guide on how to build/customise your own yearly planner which promises to make planning your home school experience run a little bit smoother.

This week she has posted some new designs which are just beautiful.

I don't know about you, but I know I'm much more likely to use something if I think it's pretty :0)

There's weekly planning guides, reading logs, child or 'class' scheduling, teacher scheduling and so much more.

So what are you waiting for? Go take a look!

2012 Planner

Shana Tova

We've been celebrating Rosh Hashanah, although we are Christian, we believe the Hebrew festivals are a shadow of Christ's life and of things to come.

Rosh Hashanah celebrates the anniversary of creation, and one of the things we have been doing is telling the creation story at breakfast and dinner each day by candlelight.


Cosmo is now very good at telling the facts of the story (the order things were made in, what Adam and eve did) but still struggles with questions like 'how did God feel when they disobeyed him?' or 'what do you think Adam and Eve felt like when they left the garden?'

I know it's in part because of the ASD, but it still always surprises me how well he can memorise facts, but how difficult he finds interpretation.

We've really enjoyed making a trumpet out of paper mâché and decorating it too. You can find directions on how to make the basic trumpet shape here. Cosmo especially likes waking daddy up with his trumpet in the mornings!

Israel enjoy fruits dipped in honey, a reminder of sweetness, as they wish each other a 'sweet and good new year'. We had fruits dipped in honey, and chocolate sauce, because nothing says 'sweet' to my children like chocolate!

Cosmo helped make the sauce, by melting chocolate in the microwave and stirring in double cream and milk. He's actually getting pretty good at using the microwave without help and can stir without spilling everywhere now. Hooray for fine motor improvement!

Most excitingly, he also wrote hi own name in a 'Shana Tova' card we made to send his cousins. Lychee painted the front and he wrote inside. It's the second time his managed to wrote his name, the first time being nearly two months ago, with no attempts in between.

It is frustrating to know that he can, but won't practise. He's still very unenthusiastic about writing or colouring, but lychee is the complete opposite. Colouring and painting are her two favourite activities.

Later today we shall go and perform our 'tashlikh' or 'casting off'. We are going to throw some stones in the river as we confess our shortcomings, to remind us that God will wash away our sins. This has been cosmos favourite part of the festival in the past, and I'm sure he will enjoy it this year too.

So, have a sweet and good new year, may your name be inscribed in the book of life!

Daily Devotionals

Okay, so things have been a little hectic recently (buying a house, serving an eviction notice on the previous owners who refused to leave, renovating said house, car breaking, christmas, new year, relatives, house guests, sick children, etc...) and I have had much chance to be blogging, so my apologies for that. I haven't forgotten you and I will try to do better!



I'm sure I've blogged before about devotionals, if I haven't I certainly intended to. We have a family devotional time, which my husband leads, at breakfast and dinner. But I want my children to regularly build into their routines their own devotional time (quite a tall order for a 5 month old and a 3 year old!)

Still, even though they probably can't manage entirely alone yet, I want to have the habit set. So we are going to start visiting the Kids 4 truth website everyday. If you've never been on it I encourage you to. It really is a great resource. There are new devotionals put up every day, written in a style that is simple for children to understand, and for non-readers (or lazy readers!) they have audio files with the devotional read out to you. They are well produced and short enough to keep the children interested.

There's also some great little animations for older kids, the watchmaker would make a particularly interesting study alongside some basic apologetics.

We've also been enjoying the very silly, but fun and wholesome jellytelly from Focus on the Family. It introduces and explains bible verses, but also fun facts about 'God's amazing animals', 'Missionary stories' and much more. There's new free content available weekly, but you can also register for free and subscribe to get more content.



With the kids being ill it's been a real blessing to have access to this kind of material instead of nickelodeon or cBeebies on all day. What's great about content like this, is that there is a start and a finish. When the show is over, it's over - and I don't have to deal with nagging about being allowed to watch the next thing which has been advertised.

I'm still looking forward to warmer weather, stronger immune systems and longer days to get outside though!

A Spring in our steps...

Today Cosmo had his first ever session at gymnastics club! Some Home educating families near by invited us along to MK Springers with them where he was the youngest (by quite a long way!) but the coaches were brilliant at keeping his attention and keeping him involved.

Towards the end of the session he got a little tired (it's an hour long) but I was impressed. Not only was he exerting a lot of energy physically, but he was being mentally challenged and attempting to co-ordinate his body in ways that were completely new to him. He learnt forward rolls, backward rolls, balancing on a beam and several positions on the bars.

I'm sure he is going to benefit massively from this activity.

There is another gymnastics club which is on at a more appropriate time, and is aimed at children his age, which is located on the other side of town. It's slightly more expensive (50p a session) but I'm not sure yet if I'll make the switch. The other mums at MK Springers are really nice, but it really is a bit to close to nap time. I think we'll keep going for the four weeks that we have paid in advance for and see what happens. If it turns out he is exhausted every week then we will try the other group.

My concern there is that the other group is not specifically for HE'd kids, so when they hit school age he will be the only one left :-(

Flexi-learning

It's taken me a while to get around to writing this, but I thought I'd best share in case anyone else is going through it too.

I recently approached a school to talk about flexi-learning. For those who don't know what this is, it's kind of like part-time school. My motives for this are a) keep other people off my back - if the school can see he is doing well I won't get loads of hassle about home schooling and b) I think it would be nice for him to spend some time experiencing 'school' without it being so many hours that he become peer dependant or starts to have his character formed more by their culture than our own.

You'd think this was a great option for the school, as they receive full time funding from the government for having him there, yet only require half the resources.

They were, however, incredibly negative towards the idea. I thought they might be keen if they met Cosmo and saw that he was fairly advanced for his age. They were indeed very impressed, and made it clear that they would like to have him at their school (despite us 'technically' being out of catchment) but that he would have to go to school full time. When I brought up the fact that he would be too far ahead of his peers and become bored in class (possibly making him quite disruptive. We all know what bored little boys are like!) they agreed. The solution?

Move him up two years so that he is studying with intellectual peers rather than his own age group.

I'm not being funny, but this is basically the exact opposite of what I want from school! Part of wanting to homeschool is about protecting him from todays culture, not exposing him to everything two years early!! Can you imagine a 9 year old moving up to secondary school??

I told the headmaster I thought it was a horrendous idea and he told me that homeschooling was a horrendous idea.

I'm now more determined than ever!

Living in a Sukkah

When Cosmo was still fairly small I heard someone say that a Jews catechism is his calendar. My ears pricked up, because I was starting to think about ways to introduce the gospel to him. Sure I sang songs to him and we had a children's bible we read from, but I knew that I wanted to teach him the bigger picture in a way that he would understand.

The Jewish calendar of festivals is great for this. If you haven't tried it, I thoroughly recommend you do. It can seem a little heavy at first (particularly if you already celebrate Easter, Christmas, thanksgiving etc...),  so maybe try introducing one new festival a year and build up the traditions slowly. If you are going to do that, I recommend starting with the feast of tabernacles, or Sukkoth as it is sometimes known.

So many people jump in with passover because it sounds familiar to us as christians, and it should be. It's mirrored so perfectly in the Easter story, but this can be pretty heavy for small children. Sukkoth, on the other hand, is enjoyable for children of all ages.

We start buy building a tent or shelter (the Sukkah) which we are supposed to live in for 8 days. Now, I'm going to cheat a little (because I'm no longer bound by the law and I can!) so we built our 'sukkah' out of sheets in the spare bedroom. We tented pretty much the entire room and covered the floor with a mattress and pillows to make it cosy.

This temporary shelter is to remind us that we are only temporarily here. Jesus has returned to His Father's house to prepare a place for us. Our permanent residence is not here.

Next, we decorate the Sukkah. It's fun to put up bunting or any other autumnal decorations you have, kids can draw pictures etc... We incorporated pictures of some specific tree branches in ours. Traditionally the Jews would have processed with these four branches to collect water for the tabernacle.  Here is the symbolism:

Water - Jesus is our living water. It was on the seventh day of sukkoth that he announced this in John 7:37-38

Myrtle,  Willow, Palm and Citrus - one has no fragrance no fruit, one fragrance but no fruit, one fruit but no fragrance and one both fruit and fragrance. The Jews would say that the fruit represents knowledge of the Torah and the fragrance represents acting out the Torah.  If your kids are slightly older you can parallel these with the four types of soil found in one of the kingdom parables (Matt 13).

We made our tree branches scented by putting orange oil on the citrus branch and jasmine oil on the myrtle (I have no idea what myrtle smells like, and luckily neither does Cosmo!). Cosmo loves sniffing them all to double check that they have 'fragrance'.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="720" caption="Preparing our Sukkah for our first evening meal."][/caption]

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="720" caption="Cosmo explaining the four branches over breakfast"][/caption]

The Pros and Cons of learning to read...

Some of you may know that I started teaching Cosmo to read very young. I did this because I whole-heartedly believe that if you enjoy reading, no subject is closed to you. I'm also dyslexic, as are several members of my family, and I thought 'if he is going to struggle with reading, I want to give him a head start'.

I needn't have worried, because as it turned out he recognised his first words at around 10 months old.

By two years old he was beginning to sound out words and at 2.5 he is now reading sentences and paragraphs competently and even enjoying his very own toddler bible.

You would think this was only a good thing, and it should be. Sadly though, we live in a town where people don't seem to have very much respect for public property. I love to take Cosmo to the park where he can run and jump and climb and generally go wild and have a great time. Unfortunately the park is heavily graffiti-ed even inside the toddler area. So when Cosmo comes out asking me what f*** means or innocently announcing 'Mummy, that word is c***' I am forced to explain to him that those are naughty words and we shouldn't say them. The reality is that they are naughty words and he shouldn't have to read them in a children's play area either.

On the bright side though, this week we discovered where our town library is. Cosmo is taking great pleasure in selecting books to bring home and is, for the first time, enjoying reading by himself. His new bedtime routine now includes the light being left on for 30 minutes so that he can read some of his new books before he goes to sleep. It's a great way for him to unwind and he never complains about going to bed anymore, because he is excited to read a new story. Equally, by the time we go back up to turn the lights out, he has wound down and is ready for a kiss and to go to sleep.

I'm so glad we have been able to bless him with the ability to read so early on. It really does have such a calming effect, and seeing him so excited about going to the library is just too precious. I really can't praise the YBCR system enough.

Your Baby Can Read

As-Seen-On-TV! Babies Reading Using
Our Proven Learning System
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