I was recently asked to write a guest post on Kathie Morrisey’s Character Corner blog about encouragement. (You can read that article here on the blog!) When I sat out to write encouraging words, I came back to what I always come back to–prioritizing leads to encouragement. I can encourage myself by setting my priorities and following through on them. It’s true….it has happened to me countless times during my thirty-two years of homeschooling and continues to happen to me now as an entrepreneur and online teacher. So I wrote my article for Character Corner–and decided to make a video to follow it up. I hope that this prioritizing help encourages you as much as it has me throughout my parenting years.

Before I give you the outline, I’d like to leave you with some other tools to help you in your encouragement and prioritizing journey:

1) Podcast: Overcoming Obstacles in Parenting

2) Wondering Wedensday–Foundations for Becoming an Efficiency Expert in Your Home

3) My Organization Beginnings: Do the Dailies!

4) 5 Influences to Determine Your Priorities

5) Video: How to Prioritize

Here’s a short outline for this video, Finding Encouragement Through Prioritizing:

A. Introduction–Priorities are what I did that day

1. I did my priorities

2. I did my dailies

3. Priorities are not always exciting and grandeur

4. Priorities start with the things we do every day to make our home a success

5. Aristotle: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

B. Prioritize Your Day

1. Most important things first each day

2. Put things that need done every single day in the first part of the day and don’t do anything before them

3. Delighting in Dailies Part I (here) and Part II (here)

C. Make list of Priorities and Attach Actions

1. Priority is a priority if we do it; if not, it is a wish

2. Priorities are the final outcomes; list of habits/actions are the way we will reach priorities

3. If we do not do something consistently, it is not a priority–only the things on our calendars and checkbooks are priorities

D. Put the Actions That Help Us Meet Priorities in Daily Schedule

1. Daily, weekly, monthly priorities need actions to make them happen

2. Put these actions down in daily schedule, calendar, planner, etc.

3. These actions should come ahead of everything else

The post Video: Finding Encouragement Through Prioritizing appeared first on Character Ink.

I also remember the teacher giving my paper back to me and telling me to divide it into paragraphs. What I don’t remember is any lessons on paragraphs. I think those would have come in handy! 🙂

When new students come to my writing classes, the first “writing” problem they encounter is that of paragraph breaks. And I would expect no less. Paragraph breaking is difficult. We tell them that when they change topics, they should change paragraphs—but the entire paper is about the same topic! We tell them that each paragraph should be a unit of thought—but the whole paper feels like a unit of thought to them!

Poor kids!

I love kids too much to leave them stuck in that continuous cycle of “I don’t know how to break my paper up into paragraphs!”

And the way I have gotten around that in my classes and all seventy of my books is to teach students to commit ahead of time as to what each paragraph will contain. Then they label each outlining space with each paragraph’s topic. Easy peasy. This approach works. (Check out two week samples of Meaningful Composition here to see how I use this outlining technique in all of my lessons.)

I have been enjoying Facebook Live and have gotten a lot of good feedback on my teaching videos. Thank-you for your encouragement!

So to demonstrate how to teach Paragraph Division, I created a video of me teaching this concept to some amazing fourth through sixth grade students. We had a lot of fun—and it clearly demonstrates how committing to each paragraph’s topic ahead of time really works!

The post Dividing Paragraphs appeared first on Character Ink.

This is a special episode as the question came from a young mama who was a student of mine several years ago in language arts and writing classes. When I get a parenting or homeschooling question from a former student, I run, not walk, to get it answered for them. It brings me such joy to have helped these students with language arts, writing, speech, or debate—and now to help them with parenting.

Here is the YouTube description of this week’s episode. Feel free to pass it on to a friend! 🙂

“In this video, Donna Reish of Character Ink Press, Plexus to Feel Great, and Donna Reish.com, answers a reader’s question about bedtime with toddlers. Donna addresses two foundational beliefs/practices for parents—not rushing into the next stage too quickly for each child and fulfilling your parent responsibilities in each situation that you are trying to remedy or improve in your home. Then Donna moves into the exact steps that can be used to correct/improve toddler’s bedtime behaviors. Donna and her husband have raised seven children, ages eighteen to thirty-four, and have homeschooled all of them for over thirty years. Donna has written seventy language arts and writing books and dozens of parenting downloadable products.”

Love and hope,
Donna

The post [Video] Toddlers & Bedtime appeared first on Character Ink.

“A good tomorrow starts tonight!”

– Ray and Donna Reish, Character Ink Press

This week I have created a video in which I answer moms’ questions about scheduling their school day, specifically the importance of a good morning routine, using morning charts, night people vs. morning people, what you do the night before, block scheduling, order of your day, and more.

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The post [Video] Wondering Wednesday: Scheduling Q & A appeared first on Character Ink.

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In this Wondering Wednesday video, Donna Reish (author of seventy curriculum books) teaches parents how to teach propositions with meaning. Using her downloadable e-book, the Preposition Practice Packet, Donna explains the importance of understanding what prepositions do in order to memorize many of the over 200 prepositions out there.

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Aboard, about, above. Along, among, around….

Whether your kids sing them, recite them, chant them, rap them, or write them…prepositions are important.

I learned them in chant-like form when I was in school. However, I never knew WHY I needed to learn them.

My newest downloadable product will teach kids prepositions—in a way that focuses on the WHY, that is, what prepositions really do!

Our kids (and we!) need to learn prepositions for a few important reasons:

(1) They are the beginning of prepositional phrases

(2) Prepositional phrases can be mentally eliminated from a sentence in order to get to the bare bones of the sentence…since the sentence’s main subject and main verb are not usually found in prepositional phrases

(3) Prepositional phrases are good to use as openers—especially lengthy ones—as they vary sentence structure and rhythm.

I’m all about songs, jingles, rhymes, recitation, and mnemonics for learning parts of speech (and really anything).

However, when prepositions are learned in songs or recitations, the real reasons for prepositions are overlooked. (Not to mention that they learn about thirty of the over two hundred prepositions….not enough memorized preps to adequately recognize them in sentences and use them for sentence openers!)

Click here to learn more and to download the Preposition Practice Packet!

The post [Video] How To Use the Preposition Practice Packet appeared first on Character Ink.

Subscribe to our Wondering Wednesday episodes on iTunes and YouTube!

Have a question you are wondering about for a future Wondering Wednesday?  Email Donna here.

Not signed up for our Freebie Fridays?  You can do that here! 🙂

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The post June’s Wondering Wednesdays & Freebie Fridays appeared first on Character Ink.

Welcome to one of our May Wondering Wednesday posts! This is the time of year that I get questions about putting kids in school next year! 🙁

Sorry for the frowny face, but you have to know that a woman who is wrapping up her final (and her thirty-second!) year of homeschooling would have a frowny face about not homeschooling! 😉

Yep…I’m pretty crazy about it.

So this video is my answer to a reader’s question about whether her son should come back to homeschooling or stay in school—with some other circumstances (siblings are homeschooling, child wants to come home, parents like the accountability provided by going to school etc.).

I hope it helps some of you see the amazing opportunity we have to homeschool—and that it doesn’t have to be school or free-for-all. We can do this thing! (Persevering she was!)

Love and hope,

Donna

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LINKS

Summer Series
[Podcast] From Chaos to Control; Rowdy to Routine
[Podcast] Five Homeschooling Problems and Solutions
[Podcast] 30 Tips from 30 Years

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Have a question you are wondering about?  Email Donna here.

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