Team Work (Reason #12)

In a house of six people, there’s much to be done.  Keeping everyone clean, fed, clothed, making the house neat, clean and otherwise pleasant to live in all take time and effort.  But in our house, it’s a team effort. 

Like most little ones, the girls were eager to help out with the household chores.  I must confess, I was very lucky and both were enthusiastic about helping much longer than most kids are.  Gee continues to be a little clean freak.  She begs for more ‘grown-up’ duties like washing pots, scooping the litter pan or cleaning toilets…  Ok, I’m extremely lucky. 

But I suppose things wouldn’t look much different even if they constantly balked at chores instead of only occasionally.  I really believe that we all live here and so we all must help maintain it.  So like it or not, we share the load.

One of the things I love about homeschooling is that our togetherness makes us all feel even more like a team.  When we get going, it’s amazing how neat and pretty we can get this place.  I think the girls appreciate that feeling too and that’s why I so rarely hear them argue about helping out.

Most mornings we clean the kitchen up before starting our work.  This makes sense as working on a crumb-filled table isn’t pleasant.  But it has another benefit.  It gets us in the teamwork mode.  Then when we sit down to work on something more academic, we tend to approach it with a ‘tackle it together’ mentality.  That goes a long way toward making our school day go well.

Reason #12: I love homeschooling because we can take the ‘team work’ approach to our school work.

How do you foster a ‘team’ feel at your house?