Training Time, Schedules, and Kindness

We just finished our training time for today on Kindness. This brings up a point I wanted to make about scheduling your day...don't be legalistic about your schedule or you may have a really hard time sticking to it and/or be so frustrated about it. For example, this morning when I typically do training time, I had actually dropped the kids off at the sitters while I was at our Moms' Group Meeting. I don't let our schedule rule over our day. If something comes up, we do it and either try to do training time later during the day or there are some days it just gets skipped...and that's no big deal. The important thing is to make sure you have a schedule and you do stick to it the majority of the time...there are so many benefits for you and especially for your kids when you have a schedule. And if you're one of those that have a hard time sticking to one, just start doing the same things in the same order a couple of weeks and then all of a sudden your kids will remind you "Oh, after breakfast mom, we need to do our training time!".

So this week's moral training theme is on kindness. Today we read a the book "God, I need to talk to you about hurting others". Both my kids were so into this book. I changed some of the wording (yes moms, you can do that to fit what you are trying to teach) to really drive home the point of kindness and unkindness. Our memory verse for the week is "Be kind to EVERYONE!" and the kids LOVE shouting the EVERYONE part. We played "Kind or Unkind" and I really stressed some of the unkind things I see Owen do when his friends are over to play. We talked about the "Golden Rule" and how we need to make sure the way we treat other people is how we would want them to treat us. We really love the Toddler Virtues Book and they have "Kitty Shows Kindness" and both kids liked telling me what the Kitty was doing that was kind. We ended training time with watching the DVD Auto B Good on kindness called "Bully Bully". It really helped drive the point of being kind to others, even if they aren't being kind to us.

I know that seems like a lot to cover with an almost 4 yr old and a 2 yr old, but I honestly think outside of the DVD it was around 15 minutes reading the stories and playing the "Kind or Unkind" game.

Hope you are getting some ideas on how to teach your kids about kindness. Oh, I typically save the Uncle Aurther Bedtime Stories for, well bedtime (go figure, huh!). It's a nice close to the day and I like how usually we start our morning with training time and our moral virtue for the week lessons then right before bed we revisit what we learned in the morning with stories.

How are some ways you are teaching your kids about being kind to everyone?