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Monday, January 11, 2010

Priority # 1: Self esteem


“To establish true self-esteem we must concentrate on our successes and forget about the failures and the negatives in our lives.” (Denis Waitley)

Today was a really long day. It started at 8:00am and ended at 2:30pm. Today was the first day JD had homework. I say that because Math and the journal bucket lesson were both extremely long and I‘m tired of scraping lessons for lack of time.

Jeff noticed I was a bit stressed today. (I wonder how he knew?) I was not stressed with anyone in particular, just thinking of ways to defeat this poor self esteem that JD is carrying around with him like an overloaded backpack. (Have you seen that commercial where the little boy carries that HUGE backpack through he school hallway?) JD gets mad when he answers a question incorrectly, spells a word wrong, types a letter wrong, and such. I had to stop the lessons many times today to work him through these issues. I said, “It’s just me and you. No one knows that you made a mistake. Why are you getting so upset? Who taught you that making a mistake was a bad thing? It wasn’t me, it wasn’t daddy, and it’s certainly not God? “ He was unable to answer why he was getting upset or who taught him making a mistake was a bad thing. Jeff reminded me that it took Kindergarden-5th grade to tear it down, so we shouldn’t expect it to change overnight. JD’s self esteem will have to be my #1 priority if I intend to make any progress with this home school adventure. Jeff looked up an article about Edison.

Did you know Edison failed over 6,000 times trying to perfect the light bulb? In Edison’s own words he was quoted as saying he, “had successfully found 6,000 ways that light bulbs won’t work.” Jonathan said, “He tried 6,000 times?” The moral to that story is perseverance prevails!

Brief overlook at today’s lessons:
Devotion and reading went well. We learned about Jesus at the temple at age twelve. The discussion at dinner was rather funny. See JD and I used a commentary to decipher some of the verses for the underlying meaning. (Commentaries have lots of nuggets of info you know?) Now we were armed with information to dazzle his daddy so he doesn’t think we just hang out in our PJ’s all day drinking coffee and Ginger Ale. So I prompted JD with “this was the first time Jesus…” (an acceptable answer for this question would have been…recognized and told people that he was the son of God) but his eyes sparkled and he said, “Told his mother off!”

Math was a tough one today. Tough for me because I needed to know the terms associative, commutative, distributive, inverse, blah, blah. JD was a whiz at this and put my meager math skills to shame. After we identified the correct names to the type of problem written out we moved onto multiplying 3 digit #’s by 2 digit #’s. (Well…I know he knew how to do it but getting him to write it out again. Ugh!) I made a deal with him on the quiz. You answer two correctly and I’ll do the rest because I know you know how to do them. Well this took a REALLY LONG TIME! He was frustrated when he would not get the right answer. So I had to go over it with him and find the error. Small mistakes…but huge self esteem issues.

Keyboarding went well. I noticed more frustration her when the British octopus kept saying, “Pick me.” But he got through it without even looking at the keyboard. There was an option to add it but he refused. I’m proud so proud of him!

Journal bucket was somewhat easy today. I kept the writing to a seven sentence paragraph again. I had him either pick a topic from the jar or make up his own. He chose his own topic of “When I grow up I want to be a Special Forces soldier.” He did a fine job of moving his thoughts from his head to his recorder with the assistance of a seven word outline, but when he played it back bit by bit he found more distractions than stars in the sky. The thing with writing for him is he can’t think it and then write it without loosing many wonderful details. So this will be a baby steps project to build his self esteem. He also hates that he can’t spell correctly and he won’t even try to write. I reassured him I don’t care about spelling today. He tried the play it back bit by bit and write what you hear method for about 20 minutes. After 20 minutes he had only written…“What I grow to be wein I grow up is a speshil forecis solder.” I finally played it bit by bit and typed it out. He then had to copy it from my typing to his journal in manuscript. This turned out to be homework and we didn’t officially end the school day until 2:30pm.

Art was a complete success. Oh thank goodness, because I needed a break bad! He painted a snowman that his PaPaw cut out of wood. I was right in the middle of trying to shower and get ready for Jeff’s arrival home. I don’t want to let myself go just because no one sees me through the day except Jonathan. So when I left JD he was painting the snowman. When I got out of the shower he had moved to painting his new remote controlled tank. (Hey as long as it wasn’t my walls. Been there done that already!)

The last lesson we had was spelling. I gave him 10 prefix words to study. There will be a test on Friday. I wanted to see if he could spell any of them so I quizzed him. Every time he got a word wrong he would get so mad. Frustration BREAK!

So I printed out the graded areas of his lessons and he’s earned a 100% in Language Arts (2 quizzes) and a 93% in Math (9 quizzes.) So the good news is he’s currently on the “A” honor roll and well on his way to earning a perfect attendance award.

Until tomorrow…perseverance prevails!

1 comment:

  1. I will pray that tomorrow will be a less stressful day for both of you.

    ReplyDelete