Listening exercises

January has gone by in a blur!

Connor turned 6 years old on January 7th and on January 9th Chase was admitted to the hospital with RSV (a respiratory virus). Three days later we came home and Chase completed recovery at home. Then I completed my first home school review with the county public school system...this was a success and by far the most worrisome event of home schooling. I now realize I had nothing to worry about. We had a trip to my parents house in NC and upon returning home we have had snow and a visitor from across the country.

As we've tried to recover from a busy month and sickness, I've been working on some lesson planning and addressing areas that we need to focus on as a family. One of the biggest frustrations for Allen and I is that our kids don't listen to us...I know, they're kids and we're parents and they are very young. But I thought we could work on some listening exercises to get the kids thinking about the importance of listening.

Each night for a week we discussed listening. We would have a listening exercise such as playing Simon Says or I would give each child a set of instructions and ask them to complete as many as they could remember. My favorite was listening to nature sounds and asking the kids what they were hearing (we of course had to stress the importance of being quiet to hear such soft noises).

We chose some recorded material found on the internet. The first we listened to you could hear the soft ripple of water from a stream, leaves rustling in the wind, birds softly chirping...typical nature sounds. The next was a bit more interesting.

I asked Connor what he heard and he said, "I hear frogs."

Isabel stated she was hearing birds.

Lillee heard something completely unique...she stated that she heard, "Crickets having a hoedown!"

God love her!