The story behind our day today :)
On Monday I woke up at 4 am and could not get back to sleep. About 4:30 I got up, but my brain wasn't ready to read or exercise. I decided instead to play a game on my Ipad until my brain was more awake.
I pulled up a game and it just so happened on that day there was a new mini game within the game. I played it and quickly an hour whizzed by.
I made myself put it away and pulled out my book to read and study. I always pray in the morning so I stopped to say my prayer.
As I was praying I felt this voice say "Do you see how lit up your brain is right now? Your pleasure center?" (This month at school we are studying dopamine). And yep - I sure could see how lit up it was. Then I had the thought how hard it was going to be to sit and read after playing that game for an hour.
Then this thought:
THIS is what you need to teach the kids.
How to play hard and fun and then shift to calm and focus. And to go back and forth like that for several hours so they could see the difference between regulation and excited/fun dysregulation.
Both the good and the hard of it.
Rules were: They had to say YES to academics.
We had 17 missionaries here today! So we had 7 doing academics/regulation and 10 doing the games and excited dysregulation.
Missionaries took turns doing academics and then the outside stuff. Weather was stunning and the kids were so happy.
The kids were mostly great about doing their school work. A few did give the missionaries a hard time or try to make them feel guilty. But it was super cute to see them sprinting back to the park after doing group or 1-1 academics.
We would love to hear if your kids loved it, if they did great at home after, or if caused meltdowns to increase at home.
