Tools for (Home)School

I’ve admitted before that I think I could have homeschooled any child but my own, so I feel for and applaud all of you who’ve been homeschooling these last several weeks. While the end of this crazy school year is in sight, most of you have at least another month ahead of you. That’s where Ready, Regan? can help. The toolkit that is at the heart of the story is based on a real life lesson I used with my gifted & talented enrichment groups when I taught elementary school. The idea was to help them see that they already had the tools they needed to be first rate problem solvers. I hadn’t read Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset back then, so I didn’t have the label for what I was teaching them. Giving them tangible tools to understand what it meant to have a growth mindset, in turns out, was exactly what I had in mind. Four simple tools that say “you’ve got this” and help kids add the all important “yet” to the end of “I can’t do this (yet)'“ and “I don’t know this (yet).”

A huge, somewhat unplanned bonus was the toolkit is OBJECTIVE and a great way to redirect a struggling student. Instead of saying, “Your attitude is getting in your way,” I could simply say, “I think you need your battery today.” I found students didn’t get as defensive when I approached any challenge using the tools. This should work at home too. Every job has specific tools that make it easier to get the job done. These four work in a lot of different arenas of life but students seem to understand how they fit with school. Tomorrow, I’ll write a little bit about how I’m using all the tools this week & working hard to stop creating obstacles for myself.