Parenting
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What skills does my child REALLY need to be successful?
This was a question that I asked myself when I first started my homeschooling journey. At the time, I was teaching Algebra 2 in my local public school, and I realized that most of the skills that we were teaching in that class were not relevant or useful in real life. So I started to research about which skills are required in order to be successful in today’s modern world, and these are the top 5 skills that I found: Effective Communication Critical Thinking Problem Solving Collaborative Teamwork Character and Soft Skills In every article that I read or scientific study that I researched, I kept coming back to these…
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15 Ways to Release BIG Emotions
One of the most challenging aspects of parenting is learning to deal with our children’s BIG emotions – and our own. Oftentimes, we label emotions as “bad” or negative – like anger or sadness. But we need to remember that BIG emotions are not BAD emotions. Perhaps you were punished for expressing a BIG emotion as a child, so you learned to suppress those emotions now as an adult. Perhaps you only saw people around you expressing BIG emotions in unhealthy, destructive, or even violent ways – like yelling, cursing, insulting, isolating, threatening, breaking things, punching things or even people. Perhaps you find yourself expressing your BIG emotions in those…
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The Broken Rock
I was washing dishes this evening when I heard a loud BOOM on our sliding glass door. My seven-year-old daughter Sophia was playing in the backyard, and when I looked outside, I couldn’t see her anywhere. All I saw were pieces of rocks broken on the pavement. My knee jerk reaction was anger. I could feel the rage bubbling up inside me, but instead of screaming at her, I took a deep breath and stepped outside to look for my daughter. She was hiding underneath some bushes on the side of our house. I gently asked her to come out. She said that she was scared that she was going…
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My Three-Gift Christmas
When I was growing up, I absolutely loved Christmas! On Christmas Eve, we would read the Bible about the birth of Jesus, and then we would be able to open up one special present – our Christmas pajamas. This was the only night that we were excited to go to bed early because we knew that by morning, our house would be transformed! We would wake up early and go into our living room to find mountains of presents below our beautifully decorated tree. We spent most of the morning opening up each gift one at a time and most of the afternoon playing with our new toys and trying…
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The Call to Peace
In light of everything that has been going on recently regarding the death of George Floyd to the violent riots that have occurred in the aftermath in cities all over the world, there has never been a greater time to issue a call to peace. As a teacher, I have always been taught to be “data driven.” It is important that we can honestly look at the numbers in order to have an honest conversation about them. So, let’s take a look at the number of people who have been shot to death by police by race from 2017 to 2020. According to the Washington Post, 1,004 people were shot…
