Why not encourage your child to keep a journal/diary during the summer months? Your child could write about the activities he/she is involved in - or maybe chronicle a family vacation. I would suggest getting a notebook which interests your son or daughter. I’ve noticed my students are carrying around really nice journals their parents have possibly bought from the book order or maybe at Target, Walmart, or a book store. They LOVE writing in them, where they aren’t always excited about writing for school. I would suggest this is a great time to have your child concentrate on CONTENT and VOICE. You could check occasionally for mechanics, but don’t discourage your child with correcting them to death - encourage creativity. Your children could even write stories in their journals/diaries.

This might also be a time to buy your son/daughter pens (which they usually can’t use in school). They really think pens are awesome for some reason.

Whoa - maybe you could even keep your own journal and share what you are writing with your child occasionally. Maybe even make some mistakes to see if they notice (-:

Have fun and write up a storm this summer!

One of the problems my students have with writing is that they were taught “invented spelling” in kindergarten and first grade.  One way to help them move away from invented spelling and move toward conventional spelling (or book spelling) is to make them a copy of their own spelling book.  Whether we like it or not, spelling is important in writing.  Even though we have spell check and mostly use computers, it is still important to know how to spell words correctly.  A personal spelling book can help develop this habit.  Staple several sheets of paper together to make a 26-page booklet.  Help your child write a letter of the alphabet (in order) at the top of each page.  You could add some commonly used words to the spelling book right away.  When your child writes, encourage him/her to open their own spelling book to the page with the first letter of the word they want to spell.  Write each word on its corresponding page, and have your child repeatedly refer to these words throughout the writing session.  Encourage your child to grow as a writer by using his/her own spelling book whenever he/she writes.  This lifelong skill teaches independence as well as spelling correctly!  Independence means that they have the skills to find words they cannot spell without depending on us!  Happy writing!

One of the most successful strategies I have used in teaching my second graders how to write a friendly letter is having a penpal class in another school. My students write to other second graders all year - not in our school but another district school - and they LOVE it! The children really get into this - and it gives them a real-life purpose for writing. What I love is when they find the mistakes - although they never seem to find the mistakes in their own writing…

I would recommend your child writing to a friend in another state, a cousin, or any family member they don’t see often. If you don’t have anyone in mind, you could google children’s penpals - you could find a penpal in the U.S. or overseas. I hesitate to recommend a website because I haven’t used one, but I know there are plenty of these sites out there in cyberspace. Maybe your child could write to a missionary’s child in another country. You could get some ideas at your church or another local church that supports missionaries.

When our daughter was in high school, she had many penpals from all over the world. I know you can also find penpals for younger children online. This is an awesome and fun way to encourage writing! Make sure they know and use the five parts of a letter: heading, greeting, body, closing, and signature.

Happy writing!!

Getting your child off on the right foot in writing will save heartache and power struggles later on. Why not begin by giving your child a bag full of fun writing supplies? You could add such things as a variety of fun pens, pencils, and erasers, a lamp for his/her desk, different types of pads of paper (a teacher supply store is a great place for this), stationery, envelopes, stamps (or stickers he/she could pretend are stamps), a notebook for a journal or diary, and a child’s dictionary and thesaurus (check with Scholastic). After the initial gift, you could continue giving one fun writing gift for birthdays and holidays. After giving the gift, model how to use it. The time will be well spent. Have fun!

Recently I asked a friend to loan me any parenting books she might have. I had not read any in awhile, and thought it might be nice to get some new strategies and hopefully be encouraged in my role as a parent. She loaned me “Children: the Challenge” by Rudolf Dreikurs, M.D. Dreikurs premise is that the parenting strategies that had worked for many years and were passed down from generation to generation are not working in our present day democratic society. Parents and children are equals and because children sense their equality, they cannot be forced into submission. Children should be “stimulated and encouraged into voluntarily taking their part in the maintenance of order.” He then goes on to describe the 34 (!) new principles of child-raising that the parent can learn and use in order to achieve this goal.

As a Christian, there are a couple of very basic disagreements I have with his philosophy. One, he presupposes that children are inherently good. They want to behave well and do the right thing. This presupposition denies a little thing we Christians believe in called “sin nature” which I happen to believe is very real. I have three children of my own and it is true that they often like to behave in a way that is pleasing to their parents. They like to be useful and good. But children, like the rest of us, are selfish. Now what does this have to do with parenting? Well, many of Dreikur’s principles of child-raising depend of the supposition that children, when given the opportunity, will do what is right. For example, he tells the story of two boys who are neighbors and are constantly fighting. One of the boys always ends up getting hurt. Dreikur’s recommendation is that the parents stay out of it completely and let the boys choose to continue fighting if they will or to find other ways to amuse themselves. His premise is that if the boys are given no attention for the fights they are having, then the fights will cease to be fun for them. This might be true, and it might work . . . but it might not. He also suggests that parents basically stay out of all sibling fighting - the children need to learn to handle conflicts among themselves and usually their fighting is used to keep mom or dad busy with them anyway. I guess I think in both examples above that children might need some tools in order to be able to manage their conflicts. They might need a little more guidance and even firmness than what he is suggesting.

My other basic disagreement is that Dreikur believes we can no longer demand submission from our kids - they are our equals and have a right to choose how they will behave - though of course the whole book is then focused on how to guide our children into proper behavior and of course he would not say that children should just do whatever they want with no consequences. But I do believe we can and should demand obedience from our children. (Though their questioning us, their right to make mistakes, and their receiving and giving lots of forgiveness and mercy is a part of that as well). But how better to learn obedience to God than by first learning obedience to one’s parents? We are their authority for a time and sometimes “because I said so” should be all that’s necessary.

Now, with all that said, I will say that I really did find this to be a useful parenting book. He spends a lot of time on the importance of encouragement to children and some of the ways we as parents discourage our children without even meaning to. He talks about respecting the child, having confidence in the child. One of my favorite chapters was on using logical consequences. In other words, instead of a punishment such as spankings or time outs, the child should face the consequences of his disobedience. I’ll give an example I recently used. I found my middle daughter coloring on the newly painted wall in her room. At first I sent her to the corner for time out, but then I remembered what I had been reading about logical consequences, so I changed my mind and called her out of the corner and told her that since she did not choose to use her crayons correctly she would not be allowed to use them in her room for a week. She would only be allowed to color at the kitchen table. Now she had not responded at all to being sent to the corner. She went without a word. But that consequence did not really fit her misbehavior. One had nothing to do with the other. Her new consequence brought a rush of tears. I knew I had gotten through. Then it was important to encourage her with “but in a week you can try again to use them in your room and I know you will use them correctly.”

This post is getting really long, so I will just finish by saying that I do recommend this book. There are many other helpful child-raising principles such as - talking less and acting more! I think we as parents sometimes get in the habit of lecturing our children when what we need to do is close our mouth and show them we mean business. Instead of the constant “stay with me, stay with me” (which they then learn to tune out), we quietly take their hand and keep them with us. He also recommends taking time to train our children (so important and yet so hard for those of us impatient types!), talking to them instead of at them - and listening to them too!, and making sure to take time to have fun together as a family. I will definitely be trying out some of his principles in the raising of my girls and I hope those of you who are parents will take the time to consider this book.

Finding time to read to my kids first became difficult for me when I had my third child. When the first two were little, we literally read dozens of books a day (or, some days, one book dozens of times!). Our time was our own; we made our own routines. But then the oldest started school and the littlest was born. Time became tighter. We now had to follow a school schedule. But it really became difficult when the oldest started going to school full time and the baby, who used to sleep hours a day, now became a crawling and then walking toddler. She was much more interested in trying to turn pages then listening to a story; more interested in dumping over the basket of books then choosing one to look at. I still really wanted to read to my older girls. And I wanted to read to them books at their level - something that would challenge them, something new. So I had to get creative. How can I still manage to read chapter books to the older girls without the toddler begging for attention or grabbing the book away? Here are a couple ideas I’ve had, please feel free to add you own ideas!

1. It was important for me to realize that we didn’t have to read a whole chapter at one sitting. Two or three pages at a time will still get the story read over time, and it is better than nothing.

2. I started putting the toddler to bed just 10 minutes earlier and used that time to read to my older girls.

3. How about reading aloud at the breakfast table? Two or three pages over cereal in the morning is a great way to start the day!

4. Bring the book you are currently reading along with you when you have to take the kids to doctors appointments or wherever you may have to wait. This doesn’t always work as well with a toddler in tow, but for those of you with older kids it will make the waiting time more enjoyable.

5. If you have more time on one day of the week than the rest, you could consider reading a chapter a week. I could use this with my older girls on Friday nights. They could stay up a bit later to listen to a chapter since there is no school the next morning. You might just have to do a quick review of what was going on in the previous chapter before doing the reading for that week.

I find time to continue reading to my girls because it is important to me. I love sharing stories with them. I love being able to refer back with them to particular words or incidents or jokes in a story that we found funny or interesting together. The girls and I have “private jokes” that are from books we’ve read - no one else may get why they are funny, but we do and I love sharing that with them. So I encourage parents to continue reading to their kids even when the time doesn’t seem to be there or it is a sacrifice of time to do so. It is worth it!