It all gets to be easy.
Life is so easy. Homeschooling is so easy, it’s so easy, it’s so easy. (My affirmation this morning.)
Truly, life is meant to be easy. We make it hard.
In everything I do, I try to repeat this mantra and move with ease and lightness, doing my best not to make things be a big deal. Teaching my kids to do the same.
This was not always the case. Often, I would come up with all of the reasons why something would not work, instead of just getting started.
Here’s the thing though, the mind is so powerful, and if you let it, it will convince you to stay where you are, make you immobile, complacent and safe. Why because that is precisely the job of the mind, is to keep you safe. And while this served us when our very survival and the survival of the human race depended on it, it’s just simply no longer the case.
I have been homeschooling my boys for 13.5 years and I have seen A LOT during that time. My oldest and I went through a period where he was convinced that he was not good at math and used to cry at the dining table. Math would sometimes take over 2 hours! I remember being completely surprised by this because math is something I’ve always been good at. It just came naturally to me.
I remember telling him that “You can’t be bad at math, because I’m not bad at math.” I remember reading a book by a math professor with a PhD in math from UofT. He found, through his research, that children/adults are good at math if they BELIEVE that they are! How incredible is that.
So that’s what I did and continue to do with all of my 3 boys. Make sure that they believe that they can. Now my son, the same one who felt he was not good at math in on the math team at his school and has had an A in every single one of his math classes.
When my youngest struggles with now, currently in Grade 3, I just keep things super light and relaxed. If he does not understand something we go over it, again and again. Sometimes, I will do the math problem on the worksheet and just have him watch.
Keeping it light and simple. “See look how easy it is. You don’t understand, okay, no problem let me show you another one.”
And it goes without being said that if you are not able to do something, simply outsource it. My youngest sister was tutored in math for years. Money well spent as far as I’m concerned.
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