Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Restraint and Scheduling

I read a blog post not too long ago about giving up responsibility to our kids (I can't remember the blog now, darn it). It got me thinking about how much responsibility I hoard for myself in our house. How I barely portion it out to the kids at times because frankly, it's easier for me to do it myself. What a shortsighted and petty thing to do.

My first thought was to have some kind of big discussion with the kids on responsibility and portion up chores and have lists and...Go overboard. Thankfully, I've noticed lately that I tend to go overboard for a day or two and then nothing comes of that. Instead I started Monday with restraint.

Catherine and I talked about what she wanted to do next in math. She decided she'd like to go back to decimals. She's halfway through Key to Decimals book 2. We sat down and counted out the pages left. 20. She thought she could do that fairly quickly.

"This week?" I asked.

"Yep."

We divided the pages by 5 and she took out an old student planner I picked up last fall and wrote down the pages she had to do for each day. Then she decided which days she'd like to do Greek and Grammar and wrote those down. We didn't go any further and that's pretty much where her formal work stops. And I'm trying to be restrained. No awesome grand plan that covers everything.

We'll see how it goes.

1 comment:

molytail said...

My first thought was to have some kind of big discussion with the kids on responsibility and portion up chores and have lists and...Go overboard.

haha, that's so me. I have a hard time implementing changes by little bits and always tend to just go flying off the cliff, feathers flappin'. Rarely works out the way I planned LOL