How to Get Your Child off the Refrigerator and on to Learning - Carol Barnier

How to Get Your Child off the Refrigerator and on to Learning

Carol Barnier

*From the back of the book

Which child is yours?  The super-wiggly? The highly charged? The focus-challenged? The impulsive? The spirited? The passionate?
However you define the qualities in your special child, it’s obvious that the methods used to teach quite, compliant children don’t work for these energetic or just plain distracting kids.
. . . .
Direct those wandering thoughts and bodies into educational success with:

• Creative reproducible activity aids that you’ll want to use right away
• a phonics program where every lesson is a quick game kids love
• instructional games, manipulatives and motions that will help you work with, not against, your child’s learning style
• math strategies that make even a workbook fun
• many more effective, fun solutions to the daily dilemma, “how do I teach my child tomorrow?”

My thoughts

First of all, let me say that I have 5 children, and I’m only officially homeschooling one (but working with two more, and playing with the others).  And my oldest is a mild version of the super-wiggly, highly charged. . .  so this book will help us, but we are by no means dealing with ‘on top of the refrigerator’ energy.  Second, I heard Carol Barnier speak at our local homeschool convention, and knew that some of her ideas would really help us out, so I went and bought it.  Many of her speaking ideas are in the book, just with a bit more detail.
The book has lots of ideas for helping with learning, but all are very ‘mom intensive’, so get ready to work!!  Most can be reused, but all will take time to set up. Lots of tips to make games that help make learning fun and actually happen!
I liked the chapter “I can’t take him anywhere” where she talks about how energetic children multiply the energy of the kids around them! (Mine does that, even just with siblings, which is why we tend to keep a tight rein on energy levels)
There are 13 different pages that have reproducible pages (some of them are two pages to one activity) but they are all activities that she talked about in the book.
If you have a distractable child, then this is a good resource for you.  not all of it will be useable for everyone, but I’m sure you will find something to help!!
*Note:  This book was purchased by me, and Carol Barnier, Emerald Books, and Amazon.com have no idea who I am.  This review was written because I wanted to