Thursday, September 11, 2008

What you teach your children

Every weekday I take my kids to school. My wife has the much more time consuming task of picking them up...

We live one mile from their school and it usually takes about ten minutes from the time we get into the car to the time they get off. Ten minutes. Not much time. Or is it? Maybe the absolute time only ads up to some 40 hours per year, a very small fraction of the time I spend with my kids. But this also represents some 200 opportunities to teach my kids something...

A few months ago I started an "experiment": I would use each 10 minute session to teach something to my kids. Or at least to discuss an interesting topic. The results so far have been terrific. What used to be a burden has become the best part of my day. While I used to get frustrated if traffic increased our commute by five or ten minutes, now I worry that if there is no traffic at all we wont have time to finish our conversation!

I started this blog to write about the discussions that I am having with my kids every morning. If you read it I encourage you to send me suggestions for topics. That has been the main challenge thus far: must days I come up with a topic within a minute or two of leaving the house. But occasionally, I struggle to come up with something appropriate. I guess I need to do a bit more planning that I have been doing...

Anyway, I wont try to remember all the conversations from the past but will start with this week.

1 comment:

Bill Dwight said...

Just stumbled upon your blog and read some of the entries. Love what you're doing with your kids! Awesome. Look forward to reading more.

Cheers,
Bill

P.S. Also happen to use Textmarks at FamZoo.com to allow our customers to access their online accounts. They love it (those in the U.S. that is).