summer time
My current dilemma: if we let the kids stay up late because they don’t have to go to school in the morning, the window of time between when they go to bed and when I fall into bed becomes increasingly narrow. When am I supposed to blog?
Just before bed, D showed us the digital slideshow of the first grade year. Overall, I’d say he had a good year. I don’t think he was challenged, but he didn’t seem to be bored either. He made friends, improved his self-control, decided that he likes science, and improved his writing.
The school said that you can submit letters about your child’s "learning style" to help them make class placements for next year. We’re not sufficiently hooked into the parents network to know who the second grade teachers are, and if there are code words that we should be using to try to avoid certain ones. (And yes, I sometimes think that I’d be more hooked in if I were the at-home parent, but I’m not sure that’s really true.) So, I guess we’ll have to actually write about his learning style. The main thing I’d like him to learn is persistence through difficulty, and I sure don’t know how one goes about teaching that. So far, video games seem to be our best bet.
June 18th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
‘Raising a Self-Disciplined Child’ by Robert Brooks and Sam Goldstein is what I happen to be currently reading. Seligman’s ‘The Optimistic Child’ is very accurate, if a little off from what you are looking for. Brooks and Goldstein found their ‘Raising Resilient Children’ and ‘Nurturing Resilience in Our Children’ to be good. Anyone else got some good, empirically verified parenting books along those lines?
June 18th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
Persistence through difficulty is a good one to work on. What kind of difficulty are you describing? I find my son is fine with things breaking, going wrong, etc. but he cannot stand when other people want to play an imaginary game differently than he wants to. (He’s 3 1/2.) He’s never played video games and I confess I hope he won’t get into them.
June 19th, 2008 at 11:31 am
I’m a stay-at-home parent who hasn’t a clue who the better teachers are for next year. But that’s probably just me!