Cleaning the House in 40 Minutes a Day? Or: How Running Made Me a Better Housekeeper.

Behold, the sparkling clean trash can of day 2!

My history with housekeeping has been a long and messy one (ha!). I've never been the greatest housekeeper, though the months we were selling our house, I really kicked it up a notch and pulled through, but BOY was that a lot of work.  I've typically been terrible at following schedules, so all the fly lady stuff never really worked for me.  Especially since her #1 focus seems to be waking up each day and shining your sink.  I just don't care if my sink sparkles, as long as it's not disgusting, I guess. 

I recently stumbled on this thirty day cleaning schedule from Apartment Therapy.  Well, to be honest, I ran across the kitchen one, first.  Twenty minutes per day?  That feels doable!  I decided to start the kitchen cleaning schedule on June 1.  I'm thinking I'm going to do both, though, I just need to catch up on the house cleaning schedule by spending a little extra time today.

This brings me to my first problem: I'm terrible at following schedules (at least, when no one else is specifically counting on me for it).  Here's the thing, though.  After following my half-marathon training plan, following a cleaning plan actually feels like it's no big deal.  I think I can commit to 30 days, and I honestly think I'll be pleased enough with the results that I'll want *WANT* to continue. 

Let's hear it for learning discipline!  This gives me hope of managing to get myself on some kind of homeschooling schedule.

Reading (or Vocabulary) Charades

My 5 year old is THIS close to reading. He gets the basic gist, can sound things out well, but struggles with paying attention long enough to do so on words he doesn't already recognize or that are too long.  He has a fair number of easy sight words under his belt.  Things like "up" and "is" and "and" are pretty well integrated.  Unfortunately, he is completely uninterested in books at his level.

The books he wants to read, of course, are his sister's Goosebumps series, which were popular with her during the "spooky halloween" stint.  He wants spooky books, too!  We didn't have any spooky books at an appropriate level.  Or even mildly spooky books.  Or even a book about vampires.  So I looked around online and found these easy-to-read spooky tales and ordered a few from amazon, but they were still beyond him.


Finally, after struggling all weekend on 3 pages  of the level 2 Star Wars book that he was enthralled with (he loves those droids... and really all robots), he gave in and let me try easier books with him but he wants to pick them.  Does he pick them in order?  Noooooo, that would be too easy!  Anyway, I got him to a point that I can work with him on it, at least.  In order to give him some success with reading, I decided I'd start with reviewing the harder words on flash cards.  Many of these he could say on the first guess, and others were harder for him to decipher.  After adding each word, I had him go through all the previous words he had done, pointing to each word as he said it, until we had all the tricky words practiced multiple times.  Next, I planned to have him read the book, but he kept getting caught on a few of the words.  Instead of just pushing through, I thought maybe doing something with a bit of kinesthetic sense added in would help him to remember the words more easily.  So, I came up with the idea to have him act out each word after saying it.  I held all the cards myself and would show him one and he had to say the word and then act it out.  Of course, this lead to giggling by both of us and I think he had a great time with his final practice for the words.  Some of the words (like pond) were harder to act out than others, but that just really added to the creativity and fun.  It also made sure he knew what words like "trot" meant, since it's not a word that comes up in our daily lives too much.  I think this would also work great in a classroom, and could even be fun into the upper elementary grades for spelling or vocabulary words.

When we finally read the book, he flew right through it, only getting mildly stuck once.  WOOT!

DIY Reusable Montessori Dot Game

I think the dot game is yet another brilliant method of  teaching high level math to kids.  Maria Montessori seemed to have a special kind of brilliance for taking difficult concepts and making them concrete.  The trouble is that it seems they're expected to use their dot game paper for one single math problem... and then what?  Recycle it?  This gets expensive (AND WASTEFUL!) very, very fast.  Especially when your daughter thinks the dot game is about the coolest thing ever and wants to do it all.the.time.  That's what you want, but not when it drains your pocket book!  I had been just printing it off and letting her use it that way, but then we went through a phase where she was sort of uninterested in doing any school at all and since it's summer I just let it be for a while.

Starting up again, I wanted something fun and exciting and nice to look at.  So I broke out my old scrapbooking stuff and found a pretty "dot" paper.  I printed off a copy of the dot game paper from this site and cut it out.  I stuck it on with tape because I didn't want to take the time, but if I had it to do again I'd use a glue stick or something to stick it on since it does seem to pop up a little funny in the middle of the paper.  Then I stuck on the letter stickers to say "The Dot Game".  Finally I used self adhesive laminating sheets to laminate it and then cut off the excess.

She's using embarrassingly large dry erase markers in the appropriate colors, but I'd like to get some that are a better thickness for the size of the dot game.  These are just what I happened to have on hand.

I love that I don't have to print off a thousand copies of the dot game paper and my daughter can math to her little heart's delight!

The Sneaky E

This past school year, I have been working in my kid's tiny school, helping out teaching various things.  One day, a few months ago, I was working with the kids on labeling various classroom items and this required sounding out the words.  Every time, the silent e on the end of a word caught them up, so I realized they needed a bit of an explanation on what the silent e does.  After a moment of thought (and completely on the fly...) I realized that I could make this concept interesting by describing the silent e as being a little bit sneaky.  Kids love when things are sneaky!  So I explained that on the end of some words, there's a "sneaky e" and it pokes the vowel and makes it say it's name.  So, it pokes an O and make's it say "OH!" or maybe it pokes an A and makes it say "AY!"  The kids thought this was pretty funny and thus went about focusing on finding the "sneaky e's" and discovering what letter it could be poking!.

The concept has really stuck with my almost-5-yr-old year old son.  He LOVES those sneaky e's!  It's been months and he still talks about the sneaky e and laughs about how they poke the other letters.  Earlier this week, he was practicing some of his sight words and we realized that the sneaky e on the end of the word "have" was not doing it's job.  This was hilariously funny to my son.  He looked at me very seriously and said "I have an idea.  We could write the words and then draw an arrow going from the sneaky e to where it pokes the other letter!"  I got him some paper and this is what he did:

The most interesting thing to me, though, is that he is normally pretty averse to doing any fine motor development, but was willing to write this.

DIY Montessori Globe

Last week was my kids' last week of school at their tiny montessori school.  We can't afford next year's tuition for my kids, so I am officially starting homeschooling now.  I'd like to keep within the montessori style mostly because I LOVE the montessori math curriculum.  It's just so brilliant!  Also because my kids are just sort of used to that style now.  I'm not married to the rest of the curriculum, though I do like it.


Anyway, I was scouting out Michaels' looking for ideas for things and came across this globe:

It's just a small (maybe 5 inch diameter or so?),  presumably paper-on-cardboard globe that has just light brown for the land parts, though it has some darker and lighter areas to show the mountains and such, as well as the names of the various countries and borders drawn in black.  The kids saw it immediately and were all excited to have their own globe at home, and my immediate thought was "hey, I could make this all sorts of montessori!"... and it cost me all of $1.

This project was super easy.  All you need is permanent markers in the appropriate colors and then carefully color in each continent. I think if you didn't want to see all the borders and country names, you could probably use paint pens, but they're much more expensive and I sort of like being able to see what's underneath.  I already had the sharpie markers in the right colors, too, so that was lucky.

Colors you need:
Europe -  red
Asia -  yellow
Africa -  green
N. America -  orange
S. America - pink
Australia - brown

Antarctica did not need to be colored because it was pretty much white to begin with.

Family Harmony

fightless, whineless tv zombies

So, this week was the kids' week-off for spring break.  I have to admit, I was terrified.  They wear me out just in the hours they are home from school.  This is how I usually deal with their fighting and whining:

1. Turn on TV. 
2. Enjoy fightless, whineless tv zombies.
3. Berate self for not being a "better" mother.
4. Rinse, repeat.

Pretty sure I'm not the only one.  However, this week I promised myself I was going to do better.  Private school is expensive and I am hoping (perhaps to my own detriment) to homeschool them next year, since I'm not that thrilled with their private school, either.  I decided we would have a no-tv week, to try and practice/prepare for homeschooling.

My first plan, to compensate, was to start them on a bunch of chores, to give them a sense of ownership in our house, so a couple days ago we sat down and talked about what  chores they'd like to do and came up with way too many for them to be expected to do daily, so I scheduled it out over the course of a week.  My kids are 6, nearly 5, and 2, so we had to scale back a bit from the grand chore scheme they had come up with.  I made sure that the chores they had were age appropriate things that I knew they could do (and had done in the past).  I wrote the chores on a chalkboard, and change the chores daily (except make bed and help clean up, those stay).  It seems to be going well so far,  but I was still getting a lot of whining and fighting.  That would be when I came up with something sort of strange and shockingly simple out of the blue.  It could be something brilliant, but possibly it only works with my kids... or possibly only for a few days, we shall see, but so far it's worked beautifully.

So, what is it??  WHAT???

I realized what we needed wasn't my screaming at them to stop screaming at each other.  This seems like a no-brainer, but this is what it had come to in our household.  What we needed, I thought, was some way to impress upon them that when they're whining, or arguing for the sake or arguing, or whatever, it was ruining something that could be great.  It was ruining our family harmony.  So we sat down and I defined "family harmony" to them and talked about how great it would be if we all worked together and had some wonderful family harmony.  They agreed that it would be awesome.  So then I explained that family harmony is something we all have to work on.  If we all just argue for the sake of arguing, or start screaming when someone does something we don't like instead of discussing it reasonably, we'd never have any family harmony.  Beyond that, sometimes we have to actually compromise, that is, do something you don't WANT to do or not get everything YOUR way every time, just for the sake of family harmony.  I pointed out times that I had done it in the past, and times that I recall that they had compromised and things went more smoothly than other times when they didn't.  We have discussed compromise before, but only from an individual perspective... not from the family harmony angle.  So after a nice long discussion about family harmony, I asked them if they thought we could all work toward this this week.  They seemed sort of excited at the prospect!

Since that discussion, whenever they start fighting or whining (with the older two, the 2 yr old still doesn't get it, of course), I go to them and say "but, is this worth fighting over or is family harmony more important?"  or "do you think you can compromise on this one for family harmony's sake?" or something along those lines.  The kids are responding astonishingly well.  There's only been a couple times when we had to figure something else out, but *gasp* I actually had the energy to work with them on it because I wasn't so exhausted from dealing with all the fighting!  I'm thrilled!  I totally have my fingers crossed that this will work long-term.

Hope that helps someone else.

Montessori websites

Ok, I realize this blog kind of jumps around a lot, and I really haven't had tons of time to update frequently, but with three kids under 6, it happens. Anyway, I'd like to do a montessori based homeschooling with my kids, so I've been looking up montessori information. Figured I'd post it here so that I don't lose it. :)

http://homemademontessori.blogspot.com/
http://montessorird.com/index2.php?cPath=1
http://www.montessoriforlearning.com/FreeDownloadIndex.html