The Luckiest No Matter What!

This is my second summer at home with four kids- I kinda can't believe it.  I remember, when Preston was a newborn last year, being MOST anxious about the summer. What were we going to do all summer? How would we all function? How would I keep everyone relatively happy? engaged? interested? alive? How would I be able to give all four individual attention?  Because of who I am, I needed an anchor of some sort to keep things with a bit of structure to help my brain and I was also looking for a way to help myself make sure each day wasn't the same thing over and over again.  My kids' preschool teacher runs several summer camps each year and always has a theme attached to them like Junior Scientist or Toy Story or Obstacle Course. I really find that nice being able to pick and chose based on your child's interests and it also helps keep their time at camp grounded in some kind of theme- helps keep things engaging, interesting, and super fun! She inspired me to have ou...

A couple of weeks ago, my sixth graders and I were crafting false apology poems after looking at William Carlos Williams This is Just to Say . If you're unfamiliar with the poem, it's essentially a sticky note left outside the fridge of him saying that he ate his wife's plums that she was probably saving for breakfast. He says 'forgive me' but then goes on to talk about how delicious they were. It's the first #sorrynotsorry. My students wrote AMAZING poems, many having to do with a quarrel between siblings where they knew they should BE sorry and should SAY sorry, but many of them faked it because they really weren't actually sorry. Before they wrote, I asked them to raise their hands if they've ever given a false apology before- you said sorry, but you totally didn't mean it... every.single.hand. was in the air. We've all been there. This made me think about the way we facilitate our own children dealing with conflict. We all, as parents, wa...