Turning Squirrels Into Boys and Boys Into Men

I have to start this subject off with a shout out to my favorite man.  When I met him he was a twenty-year-old man not a twenty-year-old boy.  That is because he had parents that raised him to be a grown man not a grown boy and because he has a Savior that forgives and saves.  My husband is a Navy Recruiter.  He talks to boys all day who are on the brink of becoming a man.  He talks to boys that were raised to be men and he talks to boys that have been raised to be boys and will probably remain boys for most of their life.  Maybe they join the Navy and the Navy turns them into men in spite of their parents raising them to be grown boys.  He sees these two opposites walk in and out of that door ALL DAY LONG. 

 He tells me all the time…

“Wife of mine, we are raising our boys to be grown men NOT grown boys.” (paraphrased)

 At this very moment...I…well…

 I feel like I’m raising SQUIRILLS…

 They’re.  Just.  So.  Squirrelly.  And naughty.

If you follow my Instagram you see all the clever, silly, wonderful moments.  Every other moment they’re being naughty squirrels!  I don’t Instagram that because that’s just rude but it’s true!  The other day we were in Winco and two of the squirrels took turns slugging each other in the stomach as hard as they could.  Then when we were in Costco an hour later they were taking turns says ‘I love you.’  A lady stopped and told me how wonderful it was to hear them and how well-behaved they were.  I smiled at her and smiled at them.  Inside my head I was thinking, “Yes, the little dear things.  I’m going to take them home and ground them for life and then I’m going to eat an entire bar of chocolate with no one touching me or talking to me.” 

 Yes, those little dear squirrels. 

 How do I turn the squirrels into boys that turn into men… 

 I don’t know.  How am I supposed to know!  My oldest squirrel in only eight!  You tell me how in the world I do this.  If you saw me in Winco you could plainly see that I have no idea what I’m doing.  Moms ask me boy advice all the time.  I give it freely and then I go home to my boys and feel like I need to call that mom back and tell her I actually have no idea what I’m talking about. 

Here it goes anyway…

I know these three things to be absolutely helpful.  They have proven themselves over the eight years of raising my boys to be absolutely fruitful.  I know they are a vital part of raising boys to be grown men and not grown boys.  When it comes time for them to walk through the doors of a Navy recruiter office, or a job interview or their own front door to take care of their wife and kids it WILL BARE FRUIT, darn it!

 I said FRUITFUL not FOOL-Proof. 

Fruitful: you garden goodness into their souls and God grows the results over time.

Fool-proof: I gardened into those squirrelly souls all year so there is no way that they would or should disobey.

 I know my boys are going to make foolish choices.  I still do.  They might walk away from everything I taught them.  I know God will give them the choice.  I put all this spiritual work in so that their lives may be fruitful for Jesus but it will be their choice when they leave my home.  Ephesians 2:8-9 says, “For by GRACE you have been saved through faith and that not of your selves.  It is a gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.”

 It does NOT say, “For by my parents I have been saved because they didn’t let me get away with anything.”

 Please, please, please stop freaking out….raise your kids the way God says to because it will be fruitful not fool-proof.  You change that mind-set and you will do a lot less freaking out.  God gives you grace every day.  He’ll do the same for your kids when they’re grown.

I know these three things apply to your girls too.  My girl is calm and quick to please (though there’s trouble hidden in that but that’s a different blog post).  My boys are wild and squirrelly.  My girl takes up about a square foot of space.  My boys need an acre if you want to keep your hearing and your sanity. 

These three rules are instrumental with keeping the squirrels from taking over your house.

1NO TALKING BACK.  No negotiating.  You give an instruction, they do it.  You say sweep the floor.  They say “Yes Ma’am” and get off their keester and do it. Remember I said this will be fruitful not fool-proof.  My kids still talk back and then I usually say “Drop and give me thirty burpees” and then we move on with our day.  Don’t you let them talk back and if they do, give them a consequence.  I teach your squirrelly boys.  I can tell the ones that get to negotiate.  I can also tell the boys that don’t get to negotiate and are just squirrelly like mine.  Can’t hide a negotiator.  They are the crazy rabid squirrels.

OWN UP TO MISTAKES.  They will mess up.  Teach them to take responsibility for their mistakes.  Teach them that the people around them will always be affected by their choices.  Their mistakes could ruin plans, feelings, and things.  What they do matters.  They need to care about caring.

SQUIRREL MUST EXERCISE.  Get them outside.  Running, digging, gallivanting…maybe not the last one.  The couch will ruin lives.  I mean it.  I’ve seen it. When a boy is using his physical energy in sports and outside play that’s all the less energy he’s using on driving you crazy with the squirrelly-ness.  I put the boys in wrestling this year.  I know, right?  Nothing more manly than that.  I saw improvement in their self-awareness.  They are learning how to direct their boundless energy.  To get out there and conquer something with your physical strength should be VERY much encouraged in your boys.  Sometimes they use that energy to slug each other in the stomach in Winco but we’re going for fruitful, for crying out loud!

This list is not exhaustive but I’m exhausted.  It’s hard to live with squirrels.

Behold…

If they just learn the above three things what kind of grown up would walk into my husband’s recruiting office?  A grown man or a grown boy?  Does he respect authority?  Will he be man enough to own up to his mistakes?  Will he rise up in manly strength and fight the good fight? 

I say let’s do this!  I say let’s turn these squirrels into men!

Hold on.  I need another cup of coffee first. 

Okay.  Now let’s do this.

 

     

    

A Day in the Life of My One Room Schoolhouse

I’ll try to stay on track here.  This is about my one room schoolhouse not teaching styles, learning styles, the teachable child, or Sonlight curriculum. Stay on track, Rachel.  Stay on track.

 I like to think of my teaching job like a delivery service.  I’m the UPS guy and I am here to deliver this awesome box of information to my awesome students.  There are three things that I want them to get out of my awesome box:

I want them to RETAIN the information.

I want them to ENJOY the information.

I want them to COPREHEND the information.

Of course they are not going to RETAIN everything, nor are they going to COMPRENHEND everything, and they certainly aren’t going to ENJOY every single second of it but we’re going for mostly.  For laziness sake we’ll call this goal our REC.

If you don’t REC then it will be a WRECK.  I kill myself.

 

You best REC yourself before you WRECK yourself. Anyway…

Keeping REC in mind, how am I going to deliver this information to my children?  I have chosen to do that in a one room school house fashion which makes me as cool as Laura Ingalls Wilder which is really the point, am I right?  Instead of delivering the information in four separate boxes, we all get one box and we open it together and the awesome explodes in our faces at the same time. 

I have a daughter who is 9 and my sons are 8, 6, and 4.  My four-year-old isn’t quite there yet but he hangs out with us most of the time.  He plays toys quietly on the floor, he watches the kids do their math, he listens to the read-aloud or I tell him to go play in his room because he is being obnoxious. 

Math: My older three do the same math grade.  My older two have always been in the same grade.  They are 13 months a part so they started the same year because their teacher is a genius.  My third child just catches on to concepts very quickly thus they

are all doing 4^th grade math with Teaching Textbooks.  This is a computer based program that includes the lecture.  They all take turns doing their lesson on our desktop. This takes them between 10-20min.

Spelling: When it isn’t their turn on the computer, they are writing out their spelling words.  This takes care of writing practice and spelling.  We use Sequential Spelling.  This multi tasks as writing practice as well.  The older two have to write their spelling words in cursive.  During snack time I quiz them on their spelling list.  I go around the table and ask them to spell a word and when it’s Ben’s turn I ask him his phonics sounds.  I haven’t figured out if they are really retaining their spelling yet.  This is something I’m still working out.  I have yet to see REC from this program translate into REC in their compositions.  I might switch back to Explode the Code.  I’m open to your opinion.  This takes them between 15-20min.

Grammar: Honestly, this is an area that I have yet to really find something where I see REC happening.  I’m not a big fan of the Sonlight LA work pages so I’ve never really done them.  A friend, who is a high school English teacher, recommended a book to me called The Grammar Bible.  I just go it in the mail and started reading it to my kids like it’s just another one of our read-alouds.  They love it and I see a lot of REC happening.  I also made a grammar game for them, kind of like a movable adlib game, which they pull out every now and again.  I see them getting the structure of grammar but it hasn’t all come together in their heads yet.  I read the book to them while they eat lunch for maybe about 10min.  I know I can do better in this area.  There’s always room to improve.

Writing Composition: We started Institute of Excellence in Writing about a month ago.  It’s a DVD set of a very humorous and talented homeschool dad who just gets how to teach kids to understand and love writing.  I am so impressed with his concepts.  My kids think he’s funny and that’s a big deal since he’s competing with how funny their main teacher is.  The three older ones watch the lectures and I do their writing with them.  My 6-year-old dictates while I write for him.  This takes about 45min and we do this about twice a week.

Reading:  My preschooler and I are making our way through “Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Lessons.”  We make time for it maybe 2-3 times a week.  The other three are reading on by themselves.  They read a chapter a day out of their Sonlight readers.  Sometimes they read in the afternoon and sometimes it’s their bed time reading.  We all know that the Sonlight book list is the bomb.  I just love all the amazing stories they get to experience.  They each read for about 30min a day.

Science: I’m taking a break from Science right now so I can be more hands on with it during the summer.  Sonlight gives you a plethora of Science material that is very hard for me to make time for.  My kids get a lot of hands on stuff at our homeschool co-op and they do a lot of digging in the dirt so we’re covered right?

History and Read-Alouds: Sonlight…I love thee.  You are the Spring breeze to my cold Wintery foggy day.  Sonlight integrates their read-alouds with their history cycle.  Right now we are in early American history, my favorite!  I read to all four of my kids at any of these times…while they eat craft, play quietly on the floor, and right before bed time.  I rarely have them sit and do nothing while I read unless it’s more of a picture book.  We talk about life and read and talk and snuggle and read and my kids are my BEST FRIENDS.  I just love how our books have made us close and made the world open and made learning a complete REC.

Bible: We have devotionals together every morning.  We’ve done devotionals a million different ways over the years.  A lot of the time, I write a little devotional for their bed time reading.  Those are the ones I Instagram that always include my left thumb.  In the morning, we follow the stories in my four-year-olds Bible.  We read the Bible story in the storybook and then the older three take turns reading the verses straight out of their Bibles.  We each have prayer cards that we write out every couple of months that include a thank you, a prayer for someone else, and a prayer for ourselves.  After we read and pray, the kids draw a picture of the Bible story and the older two journal a sentence or two.  I want to start including something daily that has to do with missions.  I need your missionary ideas.  Devotionals take about 30min. 

Classical Conversations IPad app:  I love this program.  What a wealth of well-thought out structured information.  I see tons of REC coming out of this program.  We listen to the memory work while we fold our giant mountain of laundry.  The memory work is a perfect background of information that combines all the subjects they are learning.  They are skip counting for math, memorizing science facts, History sentences (my six-year-old was playing Legos the other day and perfectly quoted the 7 wonders of the ancient world in a conversation between two Lego guys), and memorizing grammar structure.  We take out each item of information from our box and then CC builds every item together into one awesome tower.  Dude, that’s a lot of REC.

Throughout all of this, the kids get their chores done and go outside and wiggle for a bit and eat.  They are always eating.  Always.  I don’t have us all sit down at the table and not move until everything is done.  Even I’m to hyper for that!  Most of their school takes place on the couch and sometimes I send a kid to finish on their bed because they get distracted by siblings and dust specks floating through the air.  This is what works for us because I’m Rachel Cook and that’s how I roll.  They get a lot of extra curricular fun time our our Friday homeschool co-op.

You can look up homeschool teaching styles and get an idea of what you might be.  I’m Charlotte Mason/Classical.  This makes me cool but not cooler than you.

We are together most of the day, laughing at the same stories, giving pointers on the same math lesson, writing the same composition story.  It’s my one room school house.  It’s my pride and joy.  Life is good.  It’s not perfect but it’s good.  

You guys stay cool.  God has big plans for your day and it’s doesn’t include freak outs.  Go hug a kid.