Adventures in Dad Land

What do you do when the kids have a hard time staying focused on their schoolwork?  You have two options.  The first is to constantly nag them, get frustrated, tell them to get focused, get frustrated again, and generally spend a lot of school time annoyed.  This was my approach for quite some time.  We do school at our kitchen table.  Most of the time the two kids are not all that interested in the other kids work.  But here and there, one of them will be doing something that is seemingly far more exciting than anything the other could be working on.  On those days, you have to have a plan.  We finally came across one in Family Fun magazine, and we took it, changed it to fit our needs, and have been living in relative peace ever since!!

We purchased one tri-fold display board, the kind you would use for a science fair, and cut it in half horizontally.  We used paints that we already had and allowed the kids to paint the background.  The kids asked Melissa to help out with this part.  They were smart not to ask me, as it would probably look better if they did it without me!  We let them each pick out some stickers to decorate them with.  Kyle, of course, chose farm stickers, and Megan chose dance stickers.  Lastly, the kids went to work putting the stickers on! 

Now, when those times come where one lacks the ability to focus, we pull one or both boards out, put them up, and go on in peace!  The first time or two that we put them up, the boards were a new distraction themselves.  About the third or fourth time however, the boards were already old news, and the kids were able to focus on their work without paying attention to the boards or their sibling…

So what do they look like you ask?  Here they are…

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