Any Thoughts on Teaching Diligence?

That is certainly a good quote to use! I just thought of a few things you may want to consider. Though I do not know the ages of your children, I’ll just sort of blurt out what I was thinking.

Are you keeping the class periods short enough? One minute per year old is a good rule of thumb for the younger years. You can revisit subjects more than once a day if need be.

By all means, have them re-do the assignments that are not up to par. We moms can be tempted to lower our standards (and that happens by degrees through the years) and it only builds a lack of initiative and excellence. It also does weird things in our relationships with our children; one that becomes based on disrespect and a sense of superiority.

Keeping up this same standard in their chores would build a notion of ‘mom is being consistent.’ Routinize everything that you can and work with your child until you know that they know how to do it well. Then check it regularly.

Make sure you notice and comment on progress but do not flatter the children over the top. Again, the temptation is to make them feel like they are super heroes simply for a job well done; but neither do we want them to feel like they can never measure up.

Model the reading of directions in your own life. I say that tongue-in-cheek because my husband will sometimes say to me that my philosophy seems to be ‘when all else fails, read the directions.’ I had not connected that to my example in front of the children until recently. When a child makes a mistake I will sit down and read the lesson over. It drives them crazy because they just want the answer and insist that ‘they didn’t teach that.’ But I make sure I am very deliberate in this and voila! there it (typically!) is. Well, actually, I often cannot resist a comment like, “Thousands and thousands of these books have been sold. If the information was not in there, they’d be out of business.” But I do try to control myself.

Stories – for young children, you have about 30 seconds to no more than 3 minutes to stop and tell a story regarding the character trait you are working on. It can be a true story, or on made up. You can purpose to do this a couple of times a day. Also select read alouds that support diligence. Beautiful Feet actually has a character building curriculum; perhaps a look at their book list would garner some ideas. Carry On Mr. Bowditch is a must read for tween and teen boys. If the Lord ever puts into your hands Character Sketches, that is a beautiful set of three scripturally based books with nature and character qualities woven together. They are probably quite expensive now; I purchased them years ago.

I do hope this helps; just pray about it and talk to your husband and perhaps the Lord will use one or more of these ideas in your precious family!

Blessings,

Cindy