Tomatoes and Time
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For many students, challenges are the tomato slices in a salad whose lettuce is familiarity and whose cucumbers are support. When some students are judged as not being able to handle challenges well, often the unacknowledged context is that their salad is entirely tomato slices and blue cheese crumbles.
My kid is still unwinding habits and emotions from all the ways school didn't realize how many tomatoes she had every day. A lot of my homeschooling energy is going towards designing salads that are mostly lettuce and modeling being a very easy-going cucumber. (That analogy was brought to you by the fact that our local pizza delivery place hasn't had salads in like three weeks and I miss them.)
This morning that included working together on reading the instructions for seed starting mix, gathering implements, experimenting with dividing the brick, and planting a few old cat grass seeds. Since we're growing them inside there's no deadline. Since the seeds are old, there's no expectation of success so failure isn't a worry.
This morning that included working together on reading the instructions for seed starting mix, gathering implements, experimenting with dividing the brick, and planting a few old cat grass seeds. Since we're growing them inside there's no deadline. Since the seeds are old, there's no expectation of success so failure isn't a worry.
Sunday (2/27) I set myself a challenge to spend more time doing homeschooling stuff together in more of a time-based routine without significantly increasing my kid's stress. My intent is to use easy and engaging activities to form firm schedule habits so that later that schedule will support us during difficult or boring tasks.
Good job, past me! That was a great idea! But this was a lousy week to start it in because three things early in the week took us out of the house for long periods of time. Even so, today (Thursday) we were pretty close to the schedule.
Things I've been reading recently:
- "Four Ways To Reduce Behavior Problems" is sort of a QuickStart guide for how to teach gifted students
- This heart rending essay includes mentions of suicide "For gifted children, being intelligent can have dark implications"
- "How to Give Your Brain the Stimulation It Needs" is an eight minute video that talks about literally making a menu of dopamine-producing activities and touches on increasing or decreasing the steps depending on whether you want to discourage or encourage yourself to do something
- "Homeschooling pedagogy nerdery" recommends a FB group and a brand new work book on the current invasion of Ukraine.
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