Employment Thursday

Ok, this might seem to sound quite strange but I am looking for ways to let my kids earn a little bit of money to show them the power of saving and the value of work outside of their normal house jobs. I find it hard to pay them to do daily jobs that are expected to keep the house running. Putting away your clothes is just a part of life. No one is ever going to pay you to do that.

So as part of a Mentoring class that I am taking through Kathey Mellor (her site is unleashingyourvoice.com ) I was coming up with a list of ways I could improve my relationship with my 7 year old. Consistency was one of my number one things I came up with. So I developed a list of paid jobs he could do.

Clean out garden box $1
Vacuum one room $.15
Pick up hall tiny trash $.10
Rake hay into a pile $.50
Move Rocks $1
Clean out car $.50
Sweep Bathrooms $.25
Dust Picture Frames $.30

These are all jobs my husband, John, or I would do.

So Thursdays from after lunch till 2pm he can do as many of these jobs as he would like to do (and do them at a high level of quality) and be paid to do it. This will help him with time management also, one of his major challenges. He could earn quite a bit of money or waist his time and earn very little.

Where is the money coming from?
We have a large jar that we put any change in that is found on the street or in the house. Sometimes I even pitch in change from the store if it sits in my pocket or purse for a long time. Hey, we live on a budget. So this is how we are doing it. Plus this makes it so he can divide his money among his different places of saving.

For instance he raked up some hay yesterday (snow day and Daddy was working with the kids in the back yard) and after Daddy said his work was good he earned his $.50

This is how the money went
10% to tithing
20% to mission
Then Milton chose the following
10% to fun
60% to college

We will be learning about he stock marked on Monday and will be working on the idea of investing money so that will become a part of it also I am sure of it. With a generation of lazy people being raised right now I see this as a very valuable lesson for him to start learning now. If you want something you earn it not just ask people for it.

Liturature Wednesday

So on Thursday I have decided to put more focus and the classic book we are reading. Classics are very important, Key, in leadership education. You can learn so much from older literature. So many values are obviously displayed in the characters of the books. We have been learning about Honor this last month and decided to read Robin Hood.

Wednesdays we attend our local libraries reading time. The boys enjoy the stories and Milton does a little volunteering during craft time. I found a couple more books with Robin Hood stories to supplement our current book.

So what I have started out with is a few different pictures of Robin Hood to include the Disney version. I also found maps so we can follow where his adventures lead him. The one you see on top is of the Sherwood and Barnsdale area of Nottingham shire.(county). This not only shown the towns but the location of many historical Robin Hood events. Under that are two other maps. One of just the County of Nottingham  and where it is located in the country of England and and older map of old England. This is to help incorporate geography and to help the life of Robin Hood to come alive.

The packet of paper has a real timeline of the documentation and oral history of the hero of the people. It also has an pretty extensive history of Robin Hood and some of his other Merry Men to include places lived, marriages, burials and geographic locations of events. Also the history of King owned forests. I even found pictures of the head stones of Robin and Little John.

So how is this exciting to a 7 year old? It makes it real. He was a real person. After just sharing these maps with him the afternoon he was already able to point out the location of Nottingham on a different England map in a book about knights.

Then this afternoon we watched the Disney version of Robin Hood and pointed out parts of the story that was the same and ones that were different.

What now? I plan on having Milton locate and plot the places on the map where Robin Hood and his Merry Men go so we can see all of the places they go and to identify places that are still existing today from their adventures.

The New Bulliten Board

So I have this big Bulliten board in our dinning room and in the past months it has just become a catchal for drawings and other random thing that the boys had decided to put up there. I have decided to reclaim it and have it help me with my "Structured time, Not content." Now granted it will seem like structured content but it is all based on things that my children have shown a spark in or I would like to introduce them to to see if it will create a Spark.

What is a spark? It is a glimmer of interest in a an area that my children have shown an interest in. For instance, my kids LOVE outer space. We have a telescope, tons of books on space, a glow in the dark solar system and stars in their room and even a clock that projects some real life images in space. My 7 year old has been into space for about 3-4 years and we have even made up our own song to learn the order of the planets to include everyones favorite pluto. My 3 year old has know this song for almost a year already. With that said, It is my job to take these Sparks and expand upon them. There are many ways for me to do this. The bulliten board is just one more way for me to enforce and remind myself what they are interested in.


So here is my newley organized Bulliten board. My kids love it when things look new and frankly so do I. It is devided into 5 sections. This keeps it organized and prevents me from craming to much in one subject area. I just used ribbon and thumb tacks to divide up the board.

My 5 sections are
Family Jobs & Employment Thursday
Stock Market Monday
Crazy Tuesday
Liturature Wednesday
A place for the boys to display recent projects

Right now I will go over the Family Job section.

Here is the Family Jobs Section

In each of the small boxes the e names of the family members are listed in one of the colored boxes (Daddy, Mommy, Milton, Quentin)

Then I made lots of little cards to represent jobs that need to be done Daily, Weekly and Monthly.
These are the extra jobs each family member must do on top of every day tasks.

Boys must every morning
Go potty, Make bed, say prayers, get dressed, Pledge of alliegnece and eat breakfast, clear their dishes & brush their teeth.
Milton also washes the breakfast dishes every morning and Quentin puts away the silverwear.
These jobs are listed on a simple chart in their room and kitchen

Once all of this is done then they do their extra jobs and these change every day. They are all tasks that they are learning to master and maybe one new job to learn. Today Milton learned how to clean floor boards.

Their evening jobs are extra jobs to help keep the house clean before bed. We are still working on getting this down (to include my husband). After dinner we are all to clear our dishes. Then we do our evening job before doing any last minute picking up and getting ready for bed and book reading. We have a ticket reward system for completing ones jobs. I will explain this in another post.

In my job area I also included a picture of a well set plate setting for the boys to observe.


How to keep your jobs organized

I use a 3X5 card holder froma system I was using before. It has
12 Month dividers
31 Day dividers
My little  job cards.( I wrote a letter in the bottom right corner of the jobs indicating if it is to be done daily, weeky, monthly, bi-weekly or by-monthy. You could also do seasonal.)

1.So using a calender decide which days you wont your weekly things done (mon, tues, wed...)
2.Place these job cards in the day to be done. Once you reach that day and the jobs are done put them in the following weeks place and they are ready for you when that day comes.
3.As days pass move days number to the next month

As your system becomes complete you need but pull down the days cards, move them to their next day and pull out the next days and assign them to a family member.

Even or Odd

So people ask me all of the time what curriculum I am using and I always say "We actually don't use one. We learn from things that happen everyday." I am sure some people think I am crazy and I am not to worried about this. So here is an example of how it works.

Now I am not a big game person but we do have Reader Rabbit for the Wii and it is 100% educational. So Milton was not able to pass a part of it because he did not know what even and odd were. He really wanted to pass this part of the game of course.so a couple of days latter I wrote on a 3X5 card the numbers 1-40 having all of the even and odd numbers lining up in a column. Then I wrote the lever "E" over the even columns and "O" over the Odd columns.  Then on the back and just wrote some random numbers, mostly two digit. So after explaining to him the we look in the ones column of a number to determine if its even or odd and then I had him flip over the card and circle all of the even numbers. I also gave him a ditty to remember. "2,4,6,8, who do we appreciate? 0!" That took about 4 minutes. We have talked just as short about the numbers when the opportunity comes up about 3-4 other times. Tonight at the table during dinner I asked him if he could remember his even numbers. With little thought he rattled them off. Then I asked for the odds and he was able to figure it out without any promptings from me.

He wanted to learn it and now he has. No matter how many places are in the number he can tell me even or odd. No hours of work sheets drilling it into his little noggin. Super M was ready to learn it.

GREAT DAY!

Last night and this morning I started reading a book titled The Children You Want with the Kids You Have by Marie Ricks.  As far as I can tell this falls right along the TJEd ideals of kindness and teaching our children how to work and in a loving way. So I have learned that I need to retrain my children. She claims that children can learn to listen the first time. Today I have implimented the first step and on Monday we will be having a Family Home Evening on the subjuct of Obedience. This works out perfect becuse this month we are focasing on Honor and we havent touched on Honoring your Father and Mother yet. Sweet! All I have to say is paciance is the name of the game.

Ricks also talks about how to train your children to work. So off to the store we went to build each child their very own cleaning kit. This will also help witht he chores thay are already doing. Their kits are now under their bathroom sink and they will be able to get to their stuff all on their own. I also picked up an apron pattern to make the boys a hopfully more manly vertion of what is on the pictures. Maybe more toolbelt langth and super hero cloth of course.

So here is Quentin cleaning kit (3 years old). He has a feather duster (for quick dusting) Magic eraser, spnge, cloths, water spray bottle and a container of Scotch Brites new non toxic sanitizer wipes.  Quentins simple cleaning jobs during the week include cleaning door knobs, adn wiping the dinning table. He will now also be helping with removing his scribbles from the wall and occasional dusting. 

Miltons Cleaning Kit (7 1/2 years old)
His kit includes cleaning gloves, cloths, feather duster, disinfectant wipes, Simple Green Cleaner (non toxic also), magic eraser sponge and a handled scrubber.

Milton is normally in charge of cleaning switch plates and dusting among many other tasks. He will also now start helping with the Bathrooms and "wall art"
Tonight I taught Milton how to scrub the tub and how to clean the sink in the bathroom. He used comet for the tub but I will not be putting that into his kit. He has a creative mind. Who would have taught he would be shouting through the house "THAT WAS AWESOME" over the excitement of scrubbing the tub. Hey, I'll take it!

My children listened to a Brite Music tape the other day about service. So off we went today to do some service. I am a member of a website called findagrave.com. Low and behold someone actually wanted a photo from our cemetery. I explained to the boys that this is service even though we are not taking food to someone and that we can do service for those we do not know. I took the boys and after walking around for an hour looking for the death year of 2008 we finally found it. The boys enjoyed the walk and we have decided to try and photograph all of the graves that have yet been added to the site. About 30 more names to find. We were extra excited to find 3 additional names today that we just happened to run across. We also had a conversation about when infants passaway. There was an entire section that was only little ones. I was able to share with Milton that the bodies are in the ground but every spirit returns to heavenly father and that all babies get to live with heavenly father forever. He said that he was crying inside but it was a good thing to be able to explain to my little growing man.

BOYs, boys and yet another boy

So I have a 7 1/2 year old son Milton, 3 year old Quentin and yet another boy along the way. Needless to say I see many adventures in my future.  In my eyes God has given me a very important stewardship over these boys to raise men who will respect women, uphold the law and to be very strong in their faith. So how do you do that now???

I would say faith is number one. Raising youth with strong core values is seriously lacking these days. As I have mentioned before I am a high school coach and I see what the world is turning out as "MEN". A little scary sometimes I must say. Boys who have very little thought for a girls or his own virtue, chivalry is pretty much gone, mouths that make we want to carry around a bar of soap and so much more.

One great resource I have found is a book titled "Raising Real Men". I would say I agree with probably 95% of it and it is a very entertaining book. It is available on audio book (how I read it) and will leave you waiting to see what is in the next chapter.


Visit their site at
raisingrealmen.com

You can also follow them on Facebook and get great little tidbits now and then. Being the oldest girl in a house with three younger brothers I am ready for the challenge. Love those boys and make them real men!

So what is TJEd?

So you may be asking yourself...What is TJED?

I would venture to say that it is a much more free, child friendly way of learning at age appropriate times. Working as a coach in a high school I see the effects of the children going through the "conveyer belt" of education and I am not impressed. Now don;t get me wrong. I feel teachers are doing what they can but there are now many more preasures in education than before which dictates students classes curriculum and more. Students come in as happy freshman children and many of them leave high school looking tired, depressed and unsure of what to do with their lives. I do not want this future for my children so after a year of trying different homeschooling ideas I finnaly decided to trust the TJEd philosophy and have been enjoying it ever since.

Granted there are ups and downs but there are also ups and downs in the public school system. My ups and downs are under my control and are up to me and only me. No administration or teacher dictating what my child can or can not do. THomas Jefferson Education is an education center on the concept of creating leaders of the future who are confident and not affraid to walk their own walk. TJEd uses the following as the foundation blocks of a childs education.


7 Keys of Great Teaching
There are seven principles of successful education. When they are applied, learning occurs for any learning style or interests. When they are ignored or rejected, the quantity and quality of education decreases.

1. Classics, Not Textbooks
2. Mentors, Not Professors
3. Inspire, Not Require
4. Structure Time, Not Content
5. Simplicity, Not Complexity
6. Quality, Not Conformity
7. You, Not Them

If you are interested in learning more visit tjed.org
and take a look around. I will admit that I read over this with my husband almost two years ago and we thaught it was a little radical but after trying both a shool at home model (work sheet and text books) and unschooling this started to make sence.

Our TJEd Journal

Balloon Regatta Weekend

Ok, I had one blog and did some stuff on it but wome things have changed and I like it so I decided to do anew Blog. So I am going to use this to document our activities and keep track of all of the things I do with my kids and to keep track of what we do and different resources we use.

Feel free to try anything you think is fun or ask about anything we do. I hope you enjoy following our educational journey.

And no, we don't stay in our pajamas all day.