Teaching Children Diligence

The 4 Moms have each drawn a winner for the Large Family Logisitics book we are going to be blogging through during the month of August.

The Smockity winner for that book is this commenter from 10:34. Don’t worry if you didn’t win, though! You can still order the book and join our book club! We will be blogging through the chapters and inviting you to join us by posting your thoughts and linking up on all The 4 Moms’ blogs.

Today The 4 Moms are discussing teaching our children diligence, specifically in the area of homeschooling. Be sure to check out what the other moms are saying about how diligent their children are. (Smockity sneaks over and secretly hopes her children aren’t the only ones who go out to feed the chickens and come back only after someone goes looking for them because they are missing at the dinner table.)

• Raising Olives
• The Common Room
• Life in a Shoe

As for The Smockity Children, they, like most children, occasionally test the bounds of what is permissible when it comes to diligence.

Every now and again, one of them will decide that they should try to pass off random numbers as math work or EXTRA. LARGE. WIDELY. SPACED. PRINTING. as a full page of journal writing.

Remember when you tried to sign your mother’s name to your failing spelling test in 2nd grade? And then you erased it because you thought it might be mispelled? And then you erased it again because you remembered your mother doesn’t sign her name in large, ill spaced, printed letters? And then there was a hole where the signature was supposed to go from all the erasing? So you put a piece of tape over it and signed her name on top of that? And then you were shocked, SHOCKED I tell you, that your teacher immediately knew what you had been up to?

No? Huh. That must have just been me.

Anyway, my point is that fortunately for me, my children are not very good at pulling the wool over my eyes. And fortunately for them, I try to make it very undesirable for them to try.

I have been known to throw away papers that are sloppily done and have the child do it completely over, or give extra pages of math work when a child has written down random numbers instead of doing the problems.

In addition to the very clear expectation that there will be extra work when it is done well the first time, we also read and memorize scriptures on diligence.

Proverbs 13:4 ”The soul of the sluggard craves and gets nothing, while the soul of the diligent is richly supplied.”

Proverbs 10:4 “A slack hand causes poverty, but the hand of the diligent makes rich.”

Proverbs 22:29 “Do you see a man skillful in his work? He will stand before kings; he will not stand before obscure men.”

Proverbs 12:24 “The hand of the diligent will rule, while the slothful will be put to forced labor.”

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