Ready for school yet?
Nope.
Ready now?
Nope. Let me ride my bike for a few minutes and we'll do it then.
Are you done? Can we do your schoolwork now?
(No comment.)
Dinner is over and now he is wondering why I am so mean as to bring out the books now.
I'm thinking that although this technique may sink in the principle that school needs to be done each day no matter what, no matter how much he procrastinates, I'm still thinking that I don't like this approach at all. I barely have enough patience left after dinner to get everyone ready for bed without killing someone. This is not the time to be attempting schoolwork. This is my blog time. My dishes time. My glass of red wine time. School needs to be done before 2pm. No exceptions.
What can the family consequence be if we don't? Taking away tv and such - though it seems like a horrible consequence at the time - just ends up resulting in very fun imaginative play, so that's not much of a deterrent. In fact, for me, when we don't get school done early in the day it's usually because they've been playing so nicely that I didn't want to break it up!
So I guess the punishment, for all of us, would be this - to do schoolwork after dinner. We finally got through the math worksheet that wasn't finished yesterday (20 minutes for 5 problems, sigh) and a phonics lesson (10 minutes for that, not too bad). Then, the History reading went much better than expected. We read Seeker of Knowledge: The Man Who Deciphered Egyptian Hieroglyphs and the kids were really enthralled with it. They instantly wanted to go try to decipher some hieroglyphs themselves, but I told them that we'd have to wait until tomorrow. Very cool thing to look forward to though because DH's aunt used to teach 4th grade GATE classes and passed down boxes and boxes and boxes of materials on Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, and China and there's lots of stuff on hieroglyphics for us to explore. We've got a soccer game tomorrow evening so that's an incentive to get things done nice and early tomorrow so we have all day to play Egyptian.
PS To the lovely lady who sent us clay: Cassia now has very short bangs because clay does not come out of hair. We also have nice little clay shadows up and down our walls where they were bouncing big balls of clay down the hall. *sigh* Thanks again, so thoughtful of you. :P
2 comments:
Uhm, yesterday you were happy with me. Today, you're not? LOL
Oopsy with the clay.
LOL, happy with you, not happy with Rose Art. Not happy with the darling children. You would think that "don't throw balls of clay at the tv!" would extend to the walls too, but they figured that was safe since it wasn't electronic. Darn kids and their creativity.
They did make some very lovely jungles for their dinosaurs and then quite a variety of "blood pressures" - don't ask, I don't really understand myself. It was a good thing for so long and then it just got so bad. So very, very bad...
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