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Showing posts from February, 2022

Stress Level Is Important

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  What I've been reading: The Stress Continuum  might be the best thing I've read about how continual stress, all by itself, can lead to anxiety, depression, and thoughts of suicide. It was written to help assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on health care workers.  Multitudinous book synopses. My 13-year-old is extremely discriminating in what she's willing to read. I created a spreadsheet to start tracking which ones I've read, whether and why my kid might like them. (video) What Does It Mean to Have "Burnout"?  also relates to continual stress. Emphasis on speed or competition engages some students and stresses others.  It’s time to stop using Kahoot as a whole class review tool. Since I don't spend all my time parenting and thinking about parenting, here is a blog post about sewing from 2013 which, believe it or not, was nine years ago!  Tutorial: Altering Sleeves That Bug You This video has excellent, very solid examples of learning and coachin

Concise Update

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 What went well: Wordle, spelling (!), looking at code, drawing, D&D, stress level, eating. What went badly: Cutting cardstock, Mom's sinuses.  What I've been reading: Load Bearing Habits  Related to this, my kid asked to do more bike riding but I have not yet checked tire pressure Autism Checklist of Doom   Recipe Books and Learning  This post and some weekend fire pit use got me thinking that we don't learn in an orderly way, we follow instructions, we ignore instructions, we experiment, and all these things help us understand the concepts more deeply. People almost never go directly from learning concepts to successful implementation.

Separate Your Axes

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A lot of sticky parenting problems get easier to work on if you separate things that we assume go together. I feel very smart for having delineated twelve double-ended axes of parenting, but really I just said "examine your assumptions" with a lot of extra steps.    There's a lot written about autistic children needing routine provided by their families strictly adhering to a planned schedule every week, every day, every hour. But the actual support some autistic people need is being clearly notified of changes ahead of time, like a breakfast discussion of, "We'd planned to go to the lake this afternoon, but the weather forecast means that will probably be unpleasant so we'll try again Wednesday" and easy-going  acceptance that they will show some emotions about it.    Sometimes we avoid yelling at a family member by keeping our voice quiet , but we're still trying to chastise , control , or judge them for breaking the plate or spawning too many

Small Hurdles Versus Weather Crisis

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  Early last week I was pondering a meme  “We can’t ‘train’ a child to have different responses to disappointments, we grow it through personalized, customized co-regulation” by Dr. Mona Delanhooke. If my current goal is to lightly guide my 13-year-old through small hurdles while I am calm, maybe I should pick something neither of us have school associations with. I had just settled on tablet weaving when weather and power worries took over.     I aspire for homeschooling to become so routine and engaging that doing it is a comfort during a crisis.  But right now everything is novel and many aspects are still being trialed and decided.   Last year during February 2021, Texas suffered hundred of deaths, billions of dollars of damage , and a huge disruption to school, work, shopping, pretty much everything. Repairs in our home weren't finished until like September and we're still (slowly) unpacking and rearranging from all the rooms we had to empty.   So with forecasts for simila