Comic Updated! Schools almost over!!

The comic has been updated!! YAY!!! Also Valentines day is on Sunday and school is almost over for me and the kids!!! I could cry happy tears!! Q^Q I love being able to have the privilege to home-school my children and I’m grateful for having K-12 help us along the way! Also our new computer should be arriving since the others have come to an end unfortunately (both batteries have swelled and have been removed to avoid any more damage and right now they are running on their power cord with lowered CPU)

I’ve learned so much about myself and also my kids and I learned what frustrates them and what also makes them happy or anxious and I learned how to help them get past that anxiety and have faith in their ability instead of being frozen by that fear of failure. I don’t want them to not try because they’re afraid of messing up and I don’t want them to get down on themselves just because they made a mistake. Mistakes mean that you are learning, how can you know what to do if you don’t try first.

That brings me to an article that I read after having had a bad emotional day with my son and trying to get him to not be so afraid of spelling and handwriting. He was getting so upset that he would just sit in his chair crying and that flashed me back to the days when I was so stressed and frustrated in our English class and I just wanted to ball my eyes out and felt like such a failure. I ended up stopping the lesson and had him leave and I sat in my chair wanting to cry (which I did end up going upstairs to my room and started crying but I was already stressed out because of some family news about my Great-Grandma) After taking a minute to cry and pray I ended up stumbling across this article that was covering the exact thing that me and my son was going through. Here’s some excerpts of what it said:

The urge to shield and rescue can be strong, but it’s important to empower children with learning disabilities so they can internalize the fact that they can overcome challenges.
Children’s displays of incompetence may not be a strategy, but cries for help from a genuinely overwhelmed or over-stressed child. The trick, for both teachers and parents, is know when to hold back and let children struggle a bit, and when to help out when a task is truly beyond their ability.
Our job, as parents and teachers, is to guide them away from the temptations of dependence and toward a sense that they themselves can take on most tasks — and that when they’re not yet fully competent, they’ll learn.- “

Reading this helped me to realize something about myself and also what to do to help my child. I realized that a lot of times bad things may happen or things that may push us to the edge or build up so much anxiety within us, is there for our good. If we never went through any hardships or dealt with any pain then we would never be prepared for the storms that will come down the line. We’d become like that parrot over in New Zealand:

The ancient, flightless Kakapo is the world’s rarest and strangest parrot. It the only flightless and nocturnal parrot, as well as being the heaviest in the world, weighing up to 3.5 kilograms (8 lbs).

The birds live in New Zealand, an island country which had virtually no mammals living on it for millions of years. It was a place inhabited by birds and reptiles. The only types of mammal were two species of bats. The Kakapo did not learn the defense mechanisms to combat or escape mammalian predators. This made the parrot very vulnerable when new animals started showing up.

The arrival of Polynesian peoples thousands of years ago, of Europeans in the 1800’s, and ultimately the pets and livestock they brought with them resulted in the massive decline of Kakapo populations from hundreds of thousands to a mere handful of birds.

Once common throughout the three main islands of New Zealand, there are now approximately 62 Kakapo left. These remaining birds have been relocated to six predator free island habitats, where the birds are relatively safe and have been breeding!- ” The Fabulous Kakapo“

You definitely don’t want to become like a Kakapo Parrot, when a predator comes after them do you know what they do? Hold very still….that’s it, they can be on the same blank rode, no foliage for shelter and that green bird will stand there and not move and get it’s poor self eaten by a cat or dog or whatever predator.

Because of their sheltered upbringing of peace and quiet, no predators, no nothing but food and fun, they aren’t prepared for the hardships that will come down the line and I don’t want that to happen to me or to my children. I want them to learn how to have confidence in them that even if something is hard they know that if they keep trying they can learn and overcome this. Yes it will take time but if they don’t give up and just trust and believe, then they can get past this and make it to the other side. Of course we all need help through those hard times but sometimes we also have to learn how to fight on our own.

I decided to have my son come back into the room (he was laying face down on the floor like a plank of wood ^^;) and I had him try doing his sentence again. It doesn’t matter if he wrote the words wrong, the objective is for him to know how to sound out or finger stretch the words and listen to each sound and write the letter sounds that he hears. Correct spelling will come over practice but as long as he know how to use his ears to listen and then have the confidence to write down what he knows he hears then he is equipped with the fundamental tools to help him improve his spelling as time goes on. No matter how old you get you never stop learning. Don’t be so concerned about the level that someone else is on. You’re doing just fine at the level you are at and you have the ability and power to get to the next level if you don’t give up and keep on trying!

I’m happy to say that now we the tears and a lot of the stress has stopped when it comes to handwriting and they are now going out of their way to just sit down and draw pictures and write their sentence describing the picture. I want them to know how fun learning is. We’re all different and learn differently, why should we all learn the same thing the same way when none of us are exactly alike? Let’s have fun, get creative, take fear of failure out of the mix and put determination, imagination and creative thinking back in the equation.

You got this! You be you and learn the way you learn, it’s okay if you don’t know the answer to something right now, just keep living and keep trying and you’ll get there. You only truly fail when you throw in the towel and give up.