Category Archives: training children

Teaching Self Government

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For Christmas Dadzoo gave me a wonderful gift, one that I have been eating up since I opened the package Christmas morning.

It is a book and a seminar on CD about teaching children self government.

I love it.

Love, love, love it!

I first encountered Nicholeen Peck when a friend forwarded this link to me:
http://teachingselfgovernment.com/worlds-strictest-parents-video-part-1_482/
Nicholeen Peck and her family were asked to be on a BBC show called “Worlds Strictest Parents”. They hosted two out of control British teenagers for 10 days. Well I watched the hour long program on my computer and I was moved, to put it mildly. Actually I was moved to tears. I knew I had to learn more about the method this family used to create peace and harmony in their home.

I went to Nicholeen’s blog (http://teachingselfgovernment.com/) and poured through the archives trying to glean as much information as I could. I was able to get quite a bit and I started to use it in our home. However, it just wasn’t enough, there were some holes and some ideas in the whole philosophy as it was presented on the blog (her blog is more of a question answer format for people who have read her books or listened to the seminar). So Dadzoo for Christmas got me the seminar on CD and the book.

Our lives have changed.

Dramatically!

Our home is happy, peaceful, loving.

My tough kids aren’t so tough anymore.

Everybody knows what to expect and Dadzoo and I know how to handle everything that pops up.

We are teaching, not tricking our kids into behaving.

The kids are smiling, and speaking nicely to their siblings.

We have a family government.

We have a family purpose.

Most importantly, all this points us towards our Heavenly Father.

I highly recommend everyone to peruse her blog, purchase her seminars and books, or find them in the library and start teaching your children how to govern themselves.

It’s Working!

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My oldest daughter has struggled for years with reading. She has always on the lowest levels of where she “should” be. When I decided last year to take her out of public school and give her the one on one attention that she really needed, reading was one thing I really worried about. I am not a trained teacher or specialist, how was I ever going to help her? Would I do more harm than good? Would she get even farther behind than she already was? I struggled with this question a lot and after a lot of soul searching I came to a conclusion and you can read about it here.
This weekend Dadzoo and I took all the kids to the book store to pick out a book to read. They had been working on some goals and all of them had done an amazing job and as a reward they got a book. Punk #1 picked out her all time favorite book. They funny thing about this book is that she had never really read it all the way through, in fact, when she had tried to read it before it was way too hard and she had to give up. A year ago when she was in school she belonged to a reading group and they had picked this particular book and she loved listening to the other students read the story, she talked about it all the time, however when it came to her turn to do the reading she couldn’t, and so her teacher switched her to another group and she was devastated! She was able to borrow the book from her teacher so we could read with her at home and honestly she couldn’t read it at all. When we started to homeschool the book was returned and while she never finished it, she talked about it all the time.
When we were paying for our books Punk #1 confessed to Dadzoo that she was afraid that it would still be too hard for her to read, he told her that he was sure it would be fine and that we would help her if she needed it.

Today when it was time for reading I assigned her two chapters in her new book and while she was in the middle of her reading she blurted out “Hey Mom, I CAN READ THIS! It is kind of easy!”

I said a silent prayer of thanks…..

Homeschool and Family Relations

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In studying different methods for homeschooling I came across many suggestions having to do with older siblings teaching the younger ones. This made a lot of sense to me, anyone who has had to teach others knows that the teacher learns more than the student.

While I certainly don’t hand over all the teaching to my older children, (they have their own studying to do), when there is a question asked that I know the other knows I refer to them.

This works really well, my oldest two are studying grammar and language arts out of the same book and one of them seems to grasp the concepts better, so she is in charge of helping the other when help is needed. I think it helps to solidify the concepts in her mind.


My 2nd grader is working of fluency in her reading, I have given her the charge to teach her younger sister sight words. So far it seems to be working, both of them are learning the things they should be.

A great side benefit to all this helping out, is that they are fostering strong sibling relationships, and that is always a good thing.

How To

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When establishing a family schedule you have to figure out what your priorities are for the space of time you are scheduling. For example, in the evening, our priorities are family dinner and scripture study. If, for instance my son has Karate practice from 6:00 to 7:00 on Tuesday night, my Tuesday schedule would look something like this:
6:00-7:00 Karate, Bathe small children,Homework
7:00-7:30 Dinner
7:30-7:45 Scripture Study and family Prayer
7:45-8:00 Family Read out loud
8:00- Bedtime, Karate Kid shower and bed
9:00- lights out
Or something similar to that. To make scheduling work you need to be flexible (I know that sounds weird when talking about schedules) and adaptable. Figure out your priorities and family goals and work your schedule around that. Be willing to try different ways of scheduling and tweak things as you go along.

I find my motivation by keeping my eye on the goal: a quiet, mostly picked up home with kids tucked into bed by 9:00. Seriously, that is my sanity. Does it happen everyday? Nope, but we probably hit it 90% of the time. There is no magical trick to making and keeping a schedule, it takes sheer dogged determination and a lot of really good chocolate.