Day 113--Julie Bogart's 6 C's of Connection

I wrote this blog post a while ago and hadn't published it. Considering the migraine I've had for a few days (you noticed Rachel wrote yesterday's post), I thought this was a good day to put it here.

At the Brave Writer retreat this summer, Julie gave a talk called “The Invisible Education,” about how the feeling in our homes effects our kids’ education. She gave us the six C’s of Connection. Six ways we can foster connection in our families, because connection is the key to learning together.

First, compassion. Compassion at my house looks like letting Sam play with legos before school and not asking him to write more than he can stand with his own hand. It’s not calling Sarah in for math when she’s playing the piano for the 14^th time that day, and asking Rachel to clean the living room instead of doing dishes when her hands are dry and cracked. I like to look for ways they’re showing me compassion too. It makes me feel loved.

Next is Collaboration. We love collaborating. When one of us has something important going on, the others are all there cheering. When we’re doing a project together, each one is aware of what the others are doing. Like when we make pizza; we all have our usual jobs. Sam makes the sauce, Sarah sautees the vegetables, and Rachel and I do crust and cheese. It’s so much more fun than making pizza alone. Faster too. We do almost everything together, but even when they’re working on something separately, they tell each other all about it. They each have their own science book, and they’re always talking about what they’re reading. Most of the time they’re telling each other how much the other will love it when it’s their turn to do that book.

Communication is next. Oh, this is our favorite. All we do is talk all day. Some days I ask them what we’ve done that I can put in this blog, and talking all day is always on the list. I love that about our family, because we’re not afraid to say anything to each other. We might even say too much, but I’d rather do that than not say enough. All this conversation leads to tons of laughter. Tonight we were talking about how we know what each other is thinking without even saying anything. I guess we don’t need to talk because we talk so much. That makes us laugh too--mindreading. We’ll have to do one of our comedy sketches about it.

The fourth C is Creativity. I’m not creative in a crafty way or drawing or anything visual, but I’ve always been a dreamer. The best advice I’ve ever gotten was, “Don’t be afraid to do things other people wouldn’t do.” I may have taken it too far, because I’m not sure I do anything other people would do but it’s fun that way. As far as homeschool goes, I try to see the educational value in the things that interest my kids instead of thinking they always have to learn academic things from school-type activities. Like opening the etsy shop to sell photos they’ve taken, self-publishing that book on Amazon, making lego stop-action videos, or coming up with comedy sketch ideas. How are those things educationally inferior to writing a boring book report on a boring book they never wanted to read in the first place or filling in blanks in a workbook? Clearly they’re not.

Cognition is the next C. The online dictionary says that cognition is the “process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.” What a fun definition! Thinking, doing, taking it all in. This is how we do everything. I don’t mean that I set up experiments or activities or that we have contrived experiences designed to lead to a specific outcome. Yuk. We just do what we do and learn from it little by little. I like to give the kids plenty of space to do this. It takes a long time to see progress, but it happens no matter what I do about it.

The last C is Consistency. I have to laugh at myself here. We get up around 8:00, Sam sits in the recliner waking up while I jog on my trampoline and the girls eat breakfast. I know what’s going to happen every day. We have a predictable pattern and it feels good. We usually don’t start school until after lunch, but we have so much to do in the morning: eating, studying scriptures individually and together, creating something cool with legos, checking email, talking and laughing, watching videos of Eliza learning to crawl. We’re busy.

Julie says, “The priority of home is connection.” And I agree wholeheartedly

See you next week!