It all begins with the child as an infant. Immediately meeting the needs of the infant positively and lovingly teaches the child to trust the caregiver adult and develop a sense of security with the people around it. As the child grows, it becomes easier to introduce the concept and practice of patience. A secure child can practice learning patience with positive anticipation of needs met.

It is important, however, to be very familiar with the milestones of development of different age levels of children. The teaching and modeling of patience must always revolve around what the child can and can not yet do.

How do you teach a child to exercise patience? In just about any situation a parent would want his child to exercise patience, endurance or forbearance. There are so many creative ways this can be done. First let’s take a peek at the parent who models patience. Babies can sense, see and hear reactions. Toddlers watch and those children who are already very much aware of their surroundings are more sensitive and alert to actions and reactions adults make.


Let’s say a toddler asks for water and mom’s hands are tied for the moment…well, mom should attend to the toddler! No question about that! Toddler might even be choking on something and just seems to be asking for water but actually needs help! Now a three year old asking for water can be challenged to count while waiting for mom to get water. A four year old can be asked why he needs a glass of water while mom needs more time to get it. How he would just love to try to explain why he needs one .

When my son Andrew was five years old, he loved hanging around the shop with me. He watched the curls come off the wood as I planed a board and wanted to try it himself. I showed him how the plane blade was adjusted, demonstrated how sharp the blade was by shaving hair off my arm, and explained how the plane straightened a crooked board edge. I was reluctant to let him handle the tool because of the sharp blade, but his enthusiasm and excitement convinced me to give him a chance. I told him to keep both hands on top of the plane and to put the plane down as soon as he was finished, figuring he couldn’t cut himself if both hands were away from the blade. Over the next several days he spent hours using every plane in my shop, churning out curls, rounding corners, and straightening boards at a prodigious rate. From planes he moved on to saws. This experience taught me that even very young children can be trusted to use real tools. Fifteen years of woodworking with kids has confirmed this initial experience.

There was once a teacher who asked two students to do a research about a community helper. Student A set out to do an interview with a fireman. Student B set out to do an interview with any community helper available. Student A had a difficult time locating a fireman so she went back to her teacher to ask if any other worker can be interviewed. And teacher said “Yes!” So student once again set out to locate any community helper and did find an available postman. Proudly, student A went back to teacher to tell teacher about the postman and to ask what types of questions can be asked. Teacher helped student A formulate questions to ask. But when student A finished interviewing the postman, she also found out that the postman had another special community task assigned to him during the evening. Excited about this, student A went back to teacher to ask for more questions to ask about the special task of the postman, and once again student A went back to interview the postman. How many times did student A go back and forth to her teacher to seek help? In the meantime, student B went out to observe different kinds of community helpers and sat down to think about the most significant helper possible and available for an interview. Then student B made an outline of interview questions to ask, a basic skeleton of an outline. Then student B also made a web of other questions to ask just in case…other interests arose from the interviewee. Student B made sure that the questions could be flexible to all the available community helpers should changes be made. After the interview, student B went to see teacher to present the proposed questions, open to suggestions of course.

Teaching kids to read opens the world to them. They can go anywhere and do anything through books. But in today's age of high-tech gizmos and video games often the last thing our kids want to do is read. But there are some easy and fun ways you can share your love of reading with your kids. Implement these few simple ideas and your kids will be engrossed in a good bok before you know it.

What does a homeschool language arts curriculum need to have to make it useful, interesting and comprehensive? Are there language arts lesson plans which I can use over a number of ages?

Well, firstly we need to consider what language arts lessons makes a language arts curriculum? It would need to include reading, writing, speaking and listening. Getting to finer details, it would need to teach writing skills from handwriting to written sentences and paragraphs. It should teach interesting use of words, sentence grammar and the use of a variety of sentence structures. It should include listening, reading aloud, discussion of character, themes, actions, morals and personal application.
Quite a range of skills!

President Obama is pushing for so-called national standards. I worry that if the Education Establishment has its way, we’ll have one type of government school--all mediocre, all overflowing with social engineering and indoctrination. I think everyone should resist Obama’s plans. States should have their separate standards; and every citizen should support as much diversity as possible. Support vouchers. Support charter schools. Support private schools. And support homeschooling.