Three strategies to end bedlam and enhance family togetherness!
Tea with Julie

Welcome to "Tea with Julie," a weekly missive by me, Julie Bogart. My wish is to give you food for thought over a cup of tea to enhance your life as an educator, parent, and awesome adult. Glad you're here. Pinkies up! P.S. Was this email forwarded to you? Add yourself to the list and get your own!

Cincinnati, April 4, 2020

Hi Friend,

My kids are 9 years apart top to bottom. The idea that I could run five grade levels each day became a joke-on-me quickly. Certainly there are skills that are child-specific, but once I stopped thinking of pushing the rock up the hill called “individual work” and thought about my crew as a unit, my life got easier and theirs got happier.

During this time of enforced togetherness, it's even more critical to round them up and work as a team. You will find it easier to manage the little rascals when you gather rather than scatter.

Here are three ideas to help you one-room schoolhouse it.

Same Topic, Different Levels

Focus on subject area, not grade level.

Why study five different historic periods or five different science concepts or five different grammar terms? Everyone can learn about fingerprints or the red-tailed hawk or Colonial America or the Lakota Nation or adjectives at the same time.

Sure, your older kids will bring more detail to the table (though your curious youngsters may surprise everyone), but the littles also bring down the house with giggles. The connections they make are off-beat, charming, or super silly—refreshing the cool elders. Each kid can do a project scaled to that child’s skill, but all on the same topic.

Read aloud time ought to be all together when possible (memories get made here!). Start with the read aloud novel (whole family), followed by silent reading for older kids and reading library picture books for younger ones.

Same Skill, Different Levels

The 3 R’s (reading, writing, arithmetic) may seem like they are more grade-level bound, but that doesn’t meant you have to stretch yourself thin like a taffy-pull to get them in each day for four or more kids.

We had math time (everyone working on math at once). If a child needed extra help, I focused on that child while others worked individually but as a group (same time of day, same table). If my littlest ones were too small to “do” math, they had blocks, games, or puzzles reserved for math time. 

Set another time aside for when everyone does copywork. Light candles (we used a tea light per each child in a candle holder) and tell everyone—this is the time for copywork. You might be amazed that the youngest kids sustain a longer attention span when they are writing at the same time as the older ones and looking forward to lighting and extinguishing a candle.

Once a week, kids can pick copywork for each other (knock knock jokes, riddles, favorite passages, or quotes from a TV show). Sharing the burden is possible—perhaps the older kids help the younger ones find passages that they would enjoy. Perhaps the younger ones can offer to decorate the writing of the older kids with stickers or artwork.

One Project, All Contribute

Pick a family project: building a small medieval town, or writing a family newsletter, or hosting poetry teatime. Each child can help—scaled to skill. Final project is a combination of everyone’s efforts.

  • For the village, big kids build it, little kids add decorations.
  • For a letter, youngest kids contribute drawings while older kids write the content.
  • For a party—you know who can bake, set the table, arrange flowers and books. Enter in together.

Some independence is good too—especially as kids start to become teens. But any time YOU feel frazzled, the best way to reset the dial is to come TOGETHER again—even baking cookies or flipping through Netflix or making crafts.

To Sum It Up

The idea is to do things together—as much as is possible. When a child needs your undivided attention, pick a time that doesn’t compete with someone else’s similar need. Put your child on the calendar with a date and time—be present. The tendency is to attempt to teach important concepts in the midst of bedlam and then to wonder why the child isn’t making progress.

If you keep the family together for most of the day, you also build momentum. You won’t be juggling kids who are restlessly waiting for you to help them. There will be productivity happening throughout the morning and into the afternoon. Dinner time will involve talking about the immersion in WW2, rather than each child having a different area of history to discuss and no one to discuss it with!

Home education is about a culture of family learning. Focus on shared subject area learning and group projects when you can.

Happy Home Educating!

Warmly,

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Julie Bogart
© 2020 Brave Writer LLC™
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