The second instrument is discipline. When you hear the word discipline, you probably imagine a one room school house with a class of students lining up to recite their lessons, and the teacher standing there with a wooden paddle to “help the students learn their lessons” with a few quick smacks on the bum.

But when I say the word discipline I mean careful execution of a skill over and over until it becomes a habit. Skill-based subjects—like sports, math and musical instruments—are especially suited for this type of learning.  Charlotte Mason said it this way,

By “education is a discipline,” we mean the discipline of habits, formed definitely and thoughtfully, whether habits of mind or body. Physiologists tell us of the adaptation of brain structures to habitual lines of thought, i.e., to our habits.

By the way, I’ll refer to both skills and habits in this post. There are differences between them, but in the scope of education they are both important. The goal is for foundational skills to become habits.

Before you can really understand mental habits and skills you need to understand how the mind works.

Cognitive Science 101

Your mind has a working memory and a long-term memory. 

The working memory, or short-term memory, holds all the information you are currently working with, like tabs on a web browser. There is a limited amount of space here and it takes a lot of energy to juggle all the things in it, so your brain prefers to keep it clear as much as possible. We don’t actually enjoy a lot of mental effort, which is why the brain develops habits. A habit is something your brain does without having to think about it. Habits are in the other parts of the brain and don’t take any working memory space, freeing it up for more important things. Think about driving a car, you don’t really think about all the little processes of turning on your blinker, pushing the brake,  so you’re mind is free to think about all the things you need to get at the store, or referee your kids disagreement in the back seat. 

When we have foundational skills turned into habits we free up working memory to think about more interesting things, like that problems at work, or the book you just read. For example, doing long division is easy when we have the multiplication facts memorized. Writing an essay is a breeze when we know how to spell the words we’re thinking of. If we had to spend time thinking about how each word is spelled our working memory would be overloaded and we’d have a meltdown for the simple task of writing a few sentences. Or if we had to spend time working up to 7×6 our working memory would get exhausted quickly and division becomes an insurmountable task. Does this sound familiar? If your a child is having meltdowns, anxiety, and becomes overwhelmed with a school topic it usually means a foundation skill is not a habit, or is not understood. 

So, how do you turn foundational skills into habits?

[Perfect] Practice, Practice Practice

First, perfect practice makes perfect. The skill needs to be done intentionally and correctly every time. If your child is doing handwriting over and over again, but doing it incorrectly or sloppily then they are creating a BAD HABIT. So you want to make sure whatever they are doing is done right the first time. And this means you’ll need to slow down and do less work, but do it well. 

Small and Simple Things

Second, start small. My favorite motto with habit training is “by small and simple things are great things brought to pass.” Always start with the most basic skills first. If something is too difficult for your child, break it down into smaller and simpler skills. If your child is having trouble writing capital letters have your child practice straight lines, both horizontal and vertical, before beginning the letters.

It also helps to do small amounts. For example, instead of having your first grader do a whole page of letters (which will exhaust their hands and cause sloppy work) ask them to do three perfect T’s today. Once they are proficient at that, ask them to do five perfect T’s.

Retrieval

Habits are like rails laid down in your mind. The more they are used, the easier it is to travel down that path. In cognitive science this is called retrieval. Charlotte Mason called it “narration.” Whatever you call it is the most important learning tool you can teach your children.

When you retrieve knowledge, or a skill, you strengthen that neural path and make it easier for your brain to access when it’s needed. And a little space in between practices is actually helpful – Forgetting is a part of learning, surprisingly! 

So you want to constantly retrieve skills to keep them fresh in your mind. You can retrieve historical ideas, poems, soccer drills, math facts — every subject benefits from retrieving foundational knowledge to keep it accessible! I devote 5-10 minutes of lesson time in each subject to retrieve past knowledge. A lot of studies have been done on how often you should do this, and it seems that you need a least a few days, but a couple weeks or months is even more beneficial! 

It’s super simple, too. For example, devote 5 minutes at the end of each lesson for your child to tell what they’ve learned about. Here are some prompts:

• Tell me what you learned about in your reading today. 
• Tell me what you remember from our last lesson 
• What did you learn about yesterday?
• Tell me two things you remember about _________
• Brain dump! Write down everything you remember about _________
• Give them a variety of math problems from topics they’ve learned about in the past.

Habit of Attention

Charlotte Mason said the most important habit for school success is attention. Which is why she recommended short lessons instead of long ones. Did you know the longest a human is able to attend to a task, without distraction, is 20 minutes? While the average is 8 seconds! 

It is absolutely ridiculous to expect a child to focus for longer than 20 minutes. Any longer than 5-10 minutes and their brain becomes tired, overworked and daydreams, which creates the bad habit of inattention. This is why short lessons are SO IMPORTANT!

Parents express their concern to me all the time that the are afraid their child will just waste time in short lessons, If they do, it’s because they’ve been conditioned to daydream and waste time with long lessons beyond their capabilities. 

Short Lessons

I don’t begin any formal lessons until 6 or 7 when they are able to focus and work well. And I begin  with 5-10 minutes so they get in the habit of sustained attention. One of my children had a very hard time focusing for even 5 minutes, so we started at 1 minute and as his attention muscle was strengthened I increased the time. Two minutes, three minutes, until he can focus for 15 minutes at a time. This is SO IMPORTANT to successful, smooth homeschool days. My children work independently so I don’t have to micromanage their every minute. This starts when they are in first grade and I spend a lot more time with them instilling good leaning habits, just like I did when potty training.

My homeschool lessons are short because my kids have learned to focus and work hard for a short amount of time. We get so much more done and we have time to play, adventure, and work on hobbies. And if you’re wondering if short lessons really works out, I can tell you from experience that it does. All three of my boys, of various personalities and learning abilities, learned to read quickly and easily. They were all reading chapter books at 7, even though I didn’t formally teach them to read until 6. We didn’t do any formal math until 6, and my 7 year old just started a third grade math book. My oldest tested in the 90th percentile for 6th graders. And he only does 30 minutes of math a day. My kids aren’t gifted and it’s certainly not because of my teaching. It’s simply because they were allowed to play and move while they were young to develop the cognitive and motor abilities they need to learn and were trained to pay attention when it was school time by having short lessons.

Homework Assignment

Homework will be assigned at the end of the week with the final post/video.