Withdrawal Of Love To Change Behaviour…
I just want to point you toward a great post on Annie’s blog…
a few things I love about life learning…
No schedules…
I love not having a schedule… I love that the boys can have their own rythms and be either early or late sleepers/risers depending on their own biological rhythms… I love not having to get up in the morning at a set time and having to get all the kids ready to bring one to school… I love eating when we are hungry instead of because it is just “time to eat” and doing whatever we want whenever we want…I also love that when we do activities we can do it in the week when things are often cheaper and a lot less busy…
Less stress…
Not having schedules and deadlines, homework or pressure to perform among many other things makes our lives a lot less stressful… there is no expectation to know things because they “have to know them” and then know failure if they are not ready… nor are they held back from learning things because “they are not at that level yet”…
we live… we learn… we play and we take everyday as it comes..
“Socialization”
Not having kids in school means that they are not coming home with bad habits picked up from other kids… they are not in eternal competition with other kids wanting to have more or better stuff… There is less peer pressure… and again less pressure to perform… also… age is not a seen as a barrier… friendships can be sparked with younger kids or older kids and even adults…
In the end they will know more…
I trully believe that in the end my children, and those able to learn at their own pace will know a lot more than most public school kids… and I am saying this because having gone through the public system myself and talking to others over the last years… and as recently as a few days ago, the trend is to get the best test scores and “get things over with” only to be able to forget it the next day because often you will never see the material again… I learned a lot more when I persued my own interests then when I was in class… and I believe that in the end my kids will do the same…
Great list…
Amanda shared this link on her blog…and I thought it would be great to share here also…
I had seen it before but had forgotten about it… and like Amanda said she will do, it is going up on my wall also…
I condensed the list slightly because there are some things that come naturally, some things that don’t pertain to us at the moment and even a few things that I might not 100% agree with…
but overall it will be a good visual reminder at times that I might need it…
So what is new…
Well… first… I have signed up for NanBloPoMo so I have the challenge of writing a blog post per day for the whole month… So expect a lot of posts in the next 30 days…
what I realized though is that I haven’t given an update in a while…
The boys are on a video game kick at the moment… Lego Batman, Lego Starwars and Lego Indiana Jones are big hits along with Spore… Colin is more into the Lego games while Xavier is having SO much fun creating creatures and spaceships in spore and having his creatures live and evolve.. and I have to admit that I am enjoying that game also…
Colin has also been having fun on Starfall… not long ago he did not catch how to use a mouse nor did he have much interest in the computer… not like Xavier who was great with the mouse at 2… but when he caught on, he caught on quickly and frequently asks to play the “letter game”… and well he is good at it also… I have a feeling that he will be reading sooner than later…and the funny thing I find is that as much as Xavier wants to hide that he knows more than we think… he corrects Colin and reads things for him when he thinks we are not listening…
As I have said before though… he doesn’t like to show off what he knows if he doesn’t think that he can do it according to his own standards… So I have a feeling that he will not admit that he can read, or sit down with a book until he is certain that he can… yes… I am admitting that Xavier rarely, or almost never looks at books… but as I have been learning myself… books are not the only places where words exist and they have plenty of time to fall in love with books…
Another thing is that Xavier and Colin are fighting a lot less… they play together a lot more often, and make up scenarios, plan things and talk about things… they are not just brothers but they are also friends…
And Khéna… well he is growing and changing and becoming such a little man… I am realizing everyday that we no longer have a “baby” in the house… he follows his brothers everywhere, wants to have everything like them…but he also plays by himself a lot and has been doing a lot of pretend play… he loves to take care of his “bibi” (baby) and walks her around the house in a stroller and brings her to me to nurse… it is so cute! he is starting to talk a lot more and using more words to communicate everyday… he is such a little sponge…
halloween candy…
So I have been asked by a few people what we do for halloween and the candy…
well.. what we did this year… and will most likely do every year is that we went Trick or Treating quite early after supper and went around the neighbourhood to the little places that we like to see…
Then, when the boys were getting a bit tired we got home and quickly went through it…
All of the candy that they can’t eat went into a big bowl… In exchange I got some treats that they could have…and then we opened our lights and gave away all of the candy (along with some glow sticks/bracelets that I bought) to the ToT’ers that came to our home…
The boys had a blast opening the door and giving the candy and the glow sticks away…
They still get treats and sugar rushes that they don’t get often without eating anything that I don’t want them to eat, or that they are allergic to…