Bedtime has been getting later and later. Since my kids are now responsible for putting themselves to bed without being told, they have to watch the clock closely when the time is getting close to 8:30. They do ok with this but not as well as when we first made the rule. Bedtime might be closer to 8:45 by the time they finished getting ready.
But the mornings? HORRIBLE. I have a schedule. I have a list. They know what is expected. BUT. The mornings were continually a struggle and this week I had had enough. So I shot an email to their daddy and turned it over to him.
And let's just say that the boys were glad it was Wednesday and Dad would have youth worship and maybe he'd forget when he got back home especially since they'd be in bed. Except it didn't happen that way.
He got them all out of bed for a meeting in the living room. They got a big long speech about what it means to respect and love their mom. What it means to CHOOSE the right thing and get up when you are told. Being IN bed is not the same as getting ready for bed. And how 8:31 is NOT the same as 8:30.
And this morning was PERFECT! They were up. They were cheerful. And they were ready to work without a word from me. Oh thank you Honey!! As the day went on I noticed that I was way more productive and we had a lot of school behind us by 10am. It made me realize that I had been starting my day with a feeling of defeat. Every morning was a battle. My attitude reflected that and I didn't look forward to the work ahead. I'm so glad we've made a change.
A picture of our grammar work.....
Just a sentence from our Bible reading written on a white board. We label parts of speech and pick out various words to talk about. It takes about 10 minutes and we are done with grammar. I write this in cursive because I'm also working with them on their penmanship.
My kids needed some preposition practice so we've been playing this preposition bingo game. They love games. I also printed off a long list of prepositions for them to copy and memorize by Friday. The first one to pass it off got a Sonic drink. The rest got no screen time until they did.
This article about making lists has changed it all!
Every week I print out an individual daily schedule for each kid that looks something like this.
And it's ok. It makes them responsible for their own work and helps them keep track and work independently.
But when I started keeping my own list BY HAND it made me so much more involved and aware of exactly where everyone was and where we'd be tomorrow. She does such a great job explaining how simple and necessary this is. I hope you'll hop on over there and read it for yourself.
My list also highlighted what we needed to do tomorrow. Friday is catch up day and house cleaning day. But instead of just checking off history I could see that Joshua would benefit from doing a quiz on Friday instead of being hit with it on Monday after being off for the whole weekend. And since ZBoy only had one more lesson in his vocabulary book, he could go ahead and finish it off so he could start a brand new book on Monday.
And while I'm happy with the amount of work we got done, I'm even happier with how much more motivated I feel because our mornings are going to be so much easier!
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