Don't aim for perfection, just take it one step at a time. Home learning for the kids after Golden Week, and my eldest son's new challenge.
(*This article contains Amazon Associate links. Thank you for your continued support!)
Hello, this is Ao-mama!
It feels like the fun Golden Week is a distant memory... (lol). Our usual daily routine has returned, but how is everyone doing?
As for our family, perhaps because we paid the price for playing too hard during the holidays, the kids ended up exhausted and feeling under the weather right after Golden Week...
At this time of year, the fatigue from the new school term piles up, making it really difficult to manage health, doesn't it?
When the kids' energy levels are low, our family rule is to "not be too strict" with home learning. We lightly reduce the content and try to move forward one step at a time without aiming for perfection.
Even during such tiring times, "Z-Kai," which we highly recommend, continues to work for us without any strain just by changing how we use it.
Our way of doing Z-Kai is roughly 2 to 3 pages a day.
The key is for me to "open the pages to be done today and put sticky notes on them" in advance!
I also leave out their pencils and erasers.
That's all it takes (lol).
But just having this one step seems to make it easy for the kids to see at a glance, "Oh, I need to do this," and they have started to work on it proactively, saying, "I'll do this!"
I feel that it's important to lower the hurdle of that first step, which is just opening the textbook.
Besides that, both of them are continuing to work steadily on their 100-cell calculations every day.
While keeping an eye on their health, we make it a routine to do things that can be done quickly in a short amount of time.
And, I have some new news regarding my eldest son, who is currently in 4th grade.
Thinking that having a goal might provide some daily motivation, I plan to sign him up for the "Mathematics Certification" soon!
He is in 4th grade now, but I plan for him to take the 9th grade level, which corresponds to 3rd grade, hoping he can build confidence as he steps up.
When I bought the past exam papers and opened them up, I was relieved to see that he was surprisingly positive, saying, "I want to try it!"
It doesn't have to be a perfect 100-step journey, so I want to continue to keep the steps small enough to be done daily and keep building them up together as parent and child.
The fatigue from after the holidays hasn't fully worn off yet, but everyone, let's take it easy and go at our own pace this week!
Thank you for reading until the end today!
The reference books and past exam papers we bought are here↓