Resources
- Plants Grown Up
- For Instruction in Righteousness
- Ten Commandments Poster
- Notebook for independent work
Independent Work
All these activities come from the huge selection suggested in Chapter One of Plants Grown Up. I chose the activities which I felt would be most appropriate to teach T14 the skill of judging situations justly, at this stage in his life.
- Read through the following scriptures given at the beginning of ‘Plants Grown Up’
- Learn the ten commandments from the poster. Place the poster in your bedroom in a place where you will see it easily everyday. Any time you are disciplined check out which of God’s laws you have broken. Make a note of how you could have prevented the situation:
- Address a specific area of sin in your life right now. What is the sin you struggle the most with. Talk with dad, and walk along side him, learning to makes strides at having victory over this area of struggle. For this use the ‘Instructions in Righteousness’ (T found this book very helpful to see things through God’s eyes):
- From your research, write out ten family rules which you know would be important and applicable for all of us to follow. Using Ribbet create a printout that everyone can have a copy of for their rooms and one for the kitchen. Here are the rules he came up with:
- Read through Moses’ problems judging the Israelites. make a note of lessons you can learn from him. Take over the disciplining of A and B, so that you are the first person they come to when they are struggling to agree on something. If you can not find a compromise or simple answer to the problem, then bring it to Dad or I and make a note how we sort it through with them.
Working Alongside Parents
This sort of happened naturally this week as our bath began to crack and really needed changing. T helped alongside Alan and Gary to take out the old bath, put in the new bath, clean up the taps of hard water deposits and help problem solve each time an issue came up (basically everything which could go wrong did go wrong):
As problem solving is very important for judging situations fairly I felt this work fitted in nicely 🙂
Another situation which happened naturally this week was to do with the amount of time T14 spends on his phone. Over the past few weeks he has been trying to reduce the time he spends online to less than an hour (his own goal, but one Gary and I wholeheartedly agreed with). He had managed to reduce his game playing (he only has a couple of games on his phone) with ease but was struggling to reduce his Facebook time. So I stepped in. He was not happy that I was trying to control his behaviour, and I was not happy that he was still spending so much time on his phone (we have Covenant Eyes which gives us a weekly report detailing ALL online activities of the family). T and I very rarely have even minor irritations with each other. We are too similar and understand each other waaay too well to fall out. However, I didn’t really know how to proceed. He agreed he needed to cut down his time on Facebook, but because it was the main way the youth group at church communicates he did not want to get rid of it. He also used Facebook messenger to chat to his home school friends during the day, which for him was very important. So instead of insisting he got rid of it (which I wanted to do) I asked him to go away and find a solution whereby I would be happy because his Facebook time was reduced, and he would be happy because he could still chat to his friends.
About half an hour later he came down and told me that he could get rid of the Facebook app on his phone, but still keep messenger. That way, he would only access Facebook via my computer, which is usually busy 🙂 therefore naturally reducing his time on it. He would still have Messenger and still be in contact with his friends. It was win win. He judged the situation and found a solution which suited us both. This incident really showed me that working alongside our teens is much wiser parenting than trying to control them 😉