Search Results for: blog teaching your kids to be helpful

Great Math Apps for Primary Kids

It’s the time of year when outside becomes a lot more focus than inside, and so it should. It’s a beautiful time of the year, and the kids need to be outdoors. However, when they’re looking for down time on the computer, and they love math, where can you send them? Here are some of the top math apps that I’m looking at as teaching tools for the summer. My daughter and I both love Math Drills and Math Drills Lite. The lite version is free, and the paid version is only $1.99. While the app is not beautiful, it’s … Continue reading →

Teaching Children Financial Literacy

It is only natural for parents to want their children to have an easier time of things when they become adults than they themselves have had. No parent wants his or her child to grow up, become independent, and then struggle financially. Fortunately, parents are in a position to teach children the fundamentals of finance so that they have a better chance of having that easier time that their parents wish for them. Financial literacy is not something that was taught in school when I was a student, at least not in much depth. In a class called “Personal and … Continue reading →

Self-Paced Learning When Your Nerves Are Shot

In a previous blog post I had mentioned how I home schooled my kids using the Charlotte Mason method. I found it to be very thorough yet relaxed at the same time. It also gave me the opportunity to let my kids do a lot of the assignments on their own without me hovering over them every moment or answering a long list of questions that I knew they could answer on their own if they thought about it for awhile. Each weekend I would simply make a curriculum schedule for the week, get them started in the morning, then … Continue reading →

Is Your Child a Bully?

The dictionary defines bullying as: “When one child picks on another child repeatedly. Bullying can be physical, verbal, or social. It can happen at school, on the playground, on the school bus, in the neighborhood, etc.” My daughter is young enough that bullying hasn’t become a huge topic in our home, save for when she watches the “Arthur” episode, which features a gang of schoolyard bullies, that end up being a lot nicer than they first appear. Still, bullying is a real and dangerous issue for many children. The Oprah Winfrey Show recently addressed the widespread problem of bullying, and … Continue reading →

Teaching Your Toddler to Lose Gracefully

Yeah, right! Good luck with that. I know some adults (okay, one in particular) who explode when they miss a single shot at a mini-golf course, so the thought of having a toddler lose gracefully is somewhat of an oxymoron to me. Still, childhood experts say it is very possible for young children to lose a game without having a full-blown meltdown, provided you teach them about winning first. This, of course, opens an entirely different can of worms: When playing a game with your toddler (Candy Land, hopscotch, Memory, etc.) do you let her win all the time, or … Continue reading →

What Kind of Relationship do You Want to Have with Your Kids in the Long Run?

We can get so caught up in the minutia of every day—those details of feeding, cleaning, discipline and communicating—that we forget to keep at least one eye on the long term. The choices we make today, and the way we parent and interact with our children right now will have a lasting influence on the type of relationship we have with them in the long term. While we really need to parent our children as they are today, it can be helpful to put some thought into what we would like our relationship with our child to look like 5, … Continue reading →

Keeping Track of Attendance: Should You Fudge Your Records?

I realize this article addresses an audience homeschooling in New York State. However, more than a few of my friends have asked me to answer this question: how do you keep track of attendance and hours taught and how do you decide what counts as school and what doesn’t? So I’ve decided to write a few blogs addressing the issue. If you have to keep attendance or you have to keep track of your hours that you spend teaching, I hope that you find some of the information here helpful–even if you don’t live in New York State. If you … Continue reading →

Don’t Bail Your Kids Out

As parents, our initial gut reaction is to rescue our children. While in many instances, this can be a good thing. When it comes to money, it is usually better not to step in. Kids need to learn from an early age that managing money is their responsibility. Not that mom or dad will bail them out if they don’t have quite enough. Unfortunately this financial reliance on parents doesn’t always go away as children grow. When it comes to money matters, you usually need to teach them to be independent. No doubt kids learn quickly that money can buy … Continue reading →

Teaching Kids About Spreading Rumors

Now that school is back in session that means that many children’s social lives shift into high gear. One of the major developmental opportunities that comes from school is that children can learn how to interact with different people, make friends, resolve conflicts, and also learn how to get along in social situations. Many of those lessons (like so many of life’s lessons) are learned the hard way—through painful and bumpy experience. Learning about the perils of gossip and rumors is just one of the lessons of childhood socialization. Children need to be taught that spreading rumors is unacceptable. Spreading … Continue reading →

Let Your Child Be the Teacher

As parents, we know that we learn as much from our children as they do from us. It is the natural course of family interaction that we grow and influence each other. BUT, that’s not what I wanted to write about today, I am thinking about how helpful it can be for a child’s education and intellectual development to be able to “teach” what he or she has learned. As parents, we can encourage our child to teach us the things he or she has learned in school or other activities and by teaching us, the lessons will become more … Continue reading →