Looking at Family Relationships

Strong people skills is one of those things that I have always said is a priority in educating my children. It is also a priority I feel I am falling short of all too often.

Today we started a project to evaluate our family relationships. The idea came from Say Goodbye to Whining, Complaining, and Bad Attitudes... in you and your kids by Turansky and Miller. 

Each family has more relationships than we may realize at first glance. 5 family members is not 5 or even 10 relationships.

We began by putting each family member's name on the white board. To make it a little more fun everyone got their own color. We included God, so we have 6 people in our relationship map.

Next each person is connected to every other person. We drew their relationships in their color.

We are also in relationship with ourselves. That is 6 relationships per 6 people for 36 relationships! Give yourself some grace, that's a lot to manage!

We talked briefly about only being able to directly control your relationship with someone, not their relationship to you. We can influence another to improve their relationship with us, but not control their response.

The writing assignment was:
List everything good about one relationship. 

What needs improving in that same relationship?
What could I do to work toward making this relationship what I would like it to be?

We'll do one a day until we've gone through them all, including our relationship with ourselves.

 

My hope is we will each see insights into individual relationships by examining them one at a time. 

We'll have more discussion and hopefully set some goals of things to improve on while realizing there is good in every relationship, even if they sometimes hurt us or frustrate us.  With younger children simply talk through the concept. It's easy to see how we relate differently to each member of our family if we pause to look at it.

How do you help your children work on relationships?

Vocabulary Spelling City Review - Part 2

Vocabulary Spelling City Review - Part 1

I accepted an offer for a month free trial of full features of Spelling City. We’ve been using it for about 3 weeks.

The Toolbox is full of great features. I can manage students, create lists and assignments, and track the progress of each child.

I have chosen several activities that I want each child to do for each list of words I enter. I entered words from our reading curriculum. Words lists can be added one word at a time, in a batch, or cut and paste from another document. Not only can you save custom word lists you can save sets of assignments. This makes getting ready for next week simple.

One activity requires them to write sentences with the word list. They can have their sentence read back to them by the computer to see if they typed what they meant or left any words out. They can edit their sentences before submitting them. They go to the writing section in your Toolbox for you to grade.

On the vocabulary side they can play games with lists you make or lists already in the system. There are math, science and geography lists ready to go.

Besides the online games you can print many of the activities for off the computer use.

They also offer lesson plans and a wealth of language education related articles and links.

At just under $30 a year for 5 students it’s a great value.

What's in My Heart?

I want my children to know and experience the God of heaven. God who cares about them enough to speak to them. One way He speaks is in our imagination, through words or pictures. Listening for His voice takes practice and discernment. This is an exercise we do from time to time. I've used it in classes of children as well as with my own. It can be a great opportunity to connect and minster to their needs.
We made a very simple book of folded paper (8.5 x 14) stapled at the edge, no cover, no binding. I love the creative options of making books, but today the focus was on our hearts. 

We looked at what was in our heart and entered it in our newly made journal.

I saw doubts, failure, and confusion raining down.

Then we asked God how he saw our hearts and entered that in our journal.

God saw he sent blessings as water for me to grow and all is for His glory.

 

I drew and wrote. One son writes, one draws. My daughter draws.

Heart of negative emotions, but God sees a strong man of God.

How they saw their heart.

How God saw their heart.

Vocabulary Spelling City Review - Part 1

Practicing spelling words can be a boring task. It also can be quite time consuming with three children who need practice. Since we homeschool it is sometimes good for someone other than me to help them with things.
I have used some of the free features on Spelling City in the past. I like to enter my own list or just to change things up a bit with some learning games.
Now I'm excited to try out all their new features. You'll see why and how in the following disclosure:

I've been given a Premium Membership to VocabularySpellingCity.com for a candid, personal, online review.

VocabularySpellingCity helps students study word lists using 25 different learning activities such as Unscramble, Hangman, WordFind, and Crossword Puzzle. Parents can create their own spelling lists, find published lists already available on the site, or use any of dozens of free teaching resources on topics such as Multiple Meaning Words and Possessive Nouns . Be sure to come back in three weeks to read about my experience.
There might be more free memberships available for bloggers. If you're interested, find out how you can review VocabularySpellingCity.com. 

Looking forward to trying it out.

Cooking Extravaganza ~ Gabby Mom Review

A bundle of short helpful little books is the subject of November’s review. The bundle contains 7 e-books and the bound version of What’s for Dinner, Mom? There are ideas for breakfast, bulk cooking, salads, pizza, and more. You can read my review of What’s for Dinner, Mom? This bundle is $19.97 at Eternal Encouragement. If you want it by Christmas be sure to order by December 12th.

I used Lorrie’s idea for making a breakfast and dinner menu. Very simple yet flexible. Pick a theme of some kind for the day – Mexican, crock pot – and then list family favorites for each category. If you can come up with four in each category you have 4 weeks of menus, or at least a really good start.

Here’s a little more idea of what you’d be getting:

Bulk Cooking Tips & Tricks: Lorrie has a very simple approach she explains in detail in What’s For Dinner Mom?” This little gem shares a little how and why.

Fill ‘em Up: Most of this seemed like common sense to me however if you have kids who are never full and you need help Lorrie has lots of ideas in here.

Healthy Sanity Saving Breakfast Ideas: Simple meal plan – reduces decisions, great sounding recipes

Pizza Primer: Must read! My children like homemade pizza so if someone can tell me what I could be doing better I’m all for it!

In full discloser I am giving my honest review based on reading these books. I have tried some of the planning and bulk cooking tips. I haven’t actually gotten around to trying any new recipes, though they are on my list to make, just not where I remember when I running behind and have to get dinner started, those nights it’s the ones I know by heart that get made, and that’s been most of the time lately.

See more great resources from Lorrie at Eternal Encouragement.

Lorrie's doing a giveaway at Randy's Rib. Be sure to visit and enter before December 1st.