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OT: do you ever cancel school when YOU are frustrated?
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If you do Pinterest you can also search on “Brain Breaks” and there are tons of ideas that take just a few minutes. Great tools for adding to your “this isn’t working right now and I’m going to blow” arsenal!
Sometimes Timer School works for us in frustrated situations. We’ll set the timer for 10 to 20 minutes then do school for that time period, clean for the same time, then play for the same time. We cycle through that all day. We get a lot of school done as well as much needed cleaning/decluttering and they get a mental break too (and so do I).
Well, how about if you haven’t even started and you are frustrated???
I was sending my son with his dad to work this morning and I was preparing his lessons and Wow! I had the negative blow up from him. My husband got to see the major melt down in action. I told him this has been going on and it makes me a nervous wreck.
After he left I had almost the same negative attitude from my other son. It seemes as though he repeated the same thing without the same intensity. I had to correct his bad behavior and lets hope we don’t have the same out of him tomorrow. Now I am not sure what to do about the first son’s behavior because it doesn’t seem to make a difference whatever I do. He is the one that frustrates me the most. Usually when he gets intense I walk away and let him mull over the work I gave him. ALONE. After I have calmed down, usually by doing some laundry, dishes,ect… I come back to see what he is doing. Of course this is without siblings to mess with. 🙂
This is my method. If I took off school every time we had a meltdown we would never get anything done. My kids are smart enough to figure that one out. I have at times even piled on more work just because they complained. My problem is we didn’t even start school and they were already on the rampage!
I sure hope we get a grip on the negativity here. Hope you have a better day tomorrow. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how many years you have been doing it. Sometimes there is a stage they go threw or a crisis of rebellion for some reason or none at all… 🙂 Mine had a break and now I too am thinking even a break is not a good thing. :)I needed the down time though. My fault ! bad me!!!
I can’t remember how old your kids are, Chocodog, so this may not apply. When I get serious attitude from my boys (that timers or brain breaks/resets don’t help with) I do one of the following:
1. Hit only the basics. And then maybe add some extra independent stuff like watch Bill Nye or read a few extra chapters in a book. Do a hands-on science experiment I’ve been putting off. Art project. Nature walk.
2. Workbox work only. Then I don’t even have to deal with them.
3. Add LOTS of extra work, a bit at a time, letting them know that if they continue with the attitude they’ll lose play time. Each attitude problem that needs corrected gets another 10 to 20 minutes of ‘homework’ to be done during play time.
4. Scrap school and assign tons of HARD chores. If they don’t want to learn they can prepare for a career in hard labor.
5. Take away all electronic privileges for at least a week. Sometimes a month or two. Or at least until I see an improvement in behavior.
6. Go to my room and cry and read a book or take a nap. Wish that I had a secret stash of chocolate in my room. Or a mini-freezer full of ice cream.
And with all that, make sure they’re getting enough sleep, eating right, all the stuff that keeps you healthy. I also try to find out if something happened with a sibling/parent/friend that has upset them and that they need to talk through. If we take off longer than 2 or 3 weeks it’s super hard for them to get back into the school mode. Often we’ll slowly work back into it, a few subjects at a time until we’re back to the full load, other times we hit it all at once and deal with the fall-out!
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