This A4 flyer, titled “I love my family”, can be hung in your child’s room or in a common area, such as your dining room, as long as it is visible and accessible for discussion. This is an educational table, a sheet of your child growing up (and, possibly, moments of your work on yourself), here your progress is recorded; here you, dear parents, write in a simple and understandable form what you want from the child, thereby setting new tasks for him. In this sheet you write more than one-time wishes, such as “clean up after yourself” or “go to the store for bread”, you write here the skills that your child should master.
Your child has mastered the ability and skill to write at school — excellent! Has he mastered the skill of waking up on time, doing exercises in the morning, smiling at loved ones, telling them “Good morning!”, “Thank you!”, “Please!”?
It doesn’t matter what you call them — useful habits, good manners or features of growing up, but your child must master all these skills sooner or later, and you will write these skills in this table when you decide that the time came. If you wrote down this assignment for your child on a piece of paper, this becomes his business, which he must master with your help.
By itself, the list of relevant educational assignments for a child is a huge deal: it is much clearer and clearer than the constant parental reproaches “You overslept again!”, “If only you did exercises, or what?”, “Why are you so gloomy” or Will you learn basic gratitude? Instead of all these reproaches, you set a specific task for the child: you can discuss it, suggest what exactly you expect, and agree on what kind of help the child needs from you. And when the task is written down, it will not be forgotten, and you will regularly discuss with your child his progress in this assignment.
We do not discuss here how the children feel about your assignments, whether your children do what they are told. If you have a normal relationship with children, this will not be a problem. They go to school (yes?), they do their homework one way or another, they can run to the store when you ask them about it … You taught them to do this, which means that you can set the following tasks for them.
However, upbringing is not only instilling vital skills in a child, it is also developing the right attitude towards them. It’s one thing when a girl is accustomed to wash dishes, but every time she does it «under duress» and with prodding; another thing is when she remembers this herself and does it easily, with pleasure. So, the educational table takes into account all these gradations, and when your child’s attitude to the matter changes to a more correct one, you are happy to put the “plus” corresponding to this on a piece of paper. In this way, a record is kept of what skills the children are mastering and how much they have mastered them.
By the way, see similar methods for your children to learn useful skills: I Can Do It and School of Good Manners.
If you understand the idea of the table, you will make it so that it is understandable and convenient for you. You might like this look:
Skills can be very different: simple (wash dishes) and quite complex (beautiful and technical swimming), very specific (learn how to peel potatoes) and very broad (I know how to love my parents). You can regularly update the list of skills with what has become relevant.
Attention: let’s make the loads feasible, do not overload the children with your tasks. Give one task — the child will cope with it, load it with a dozen tasks — the result will be not just zero, but negative. A variant of a reasonable load can be as follows: the child is eyeing two tasks, two tasks are in active work, and your child keeps two tasks in the background to consolidate the habit.
If you wrote a task for a child, this does not mean that the child took it. In such a table there is a column “I take it?”, where the child can write both “Yes” and “No” or put a question mark if the task is not yet clear to him or he is thinking. So, there is a topic for conversation.
How you will evaluate the completion of the stages of mastering the skills, you can also decide for yourself. The most understandable system is a rating from -1 to +3. Intuitively, -1 = bad. 0 = no rating. 1= something. 2 = good. 3 = great!
What age is this method suitable for? From 10 years old and above, especially since parents can also receive assignments here. At least adolescence is the most optimal. It is not age that is more critical here, but the relationship between parents and children.
Let this A4 sheet hang so that you and your children can always easily see what has already been mastered, what has not yet been mastered. This will be convenient for both you and the children: they can finally understand what you want from them, and it’s easier for you to convey to the children what you are trying to achieve from them. Instead of tense conversations, mutual understanding will come faster!
Dear parents, dear colleagues! Request: who will make such an educational table and run this experiment, share your experience. What happened to you?