Habits at Home

Bringing the Leader in Me Home

Visit the Leader in Me blog for great Leadership at Home examples or theleaderinme.org/parents for other resources.

The Importance of Setting Goals

At school, your child may write his or her academic and personal goals in a Leadership Portfolio. You will gain a lot of information on how your child is doing if you ask your child to tell you about his or her goals. The goals chosen are meaningful to your child so be sure to practice Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood.

The Leadership Notebook idea can also be used in your home. Create goals such as reading together, eating dinner at the table, or doing an activity together. Involve everyone in the family in choosing a meaningful goal and action steps. Post the goal and the action steps in a visible place and be sure to track and celebrate progress!

Does your child need some motivation to reach new goals?

-Create a goal menu here

-Figure out what really matters by setting a WIG (Wildly Important Goal)

Leadership Roles at Home

Each new school year brings opportunities for academic growth and growth in all areas of development. Although children must be knowledgeable when they graduate, they must also be healthy, engaged, responsible, and caring people.

One of the best ways to help your child realize his or her worth and leadership potential is to provide an opportunity to lead. Most Leader in Me Schools offer student leadership roles as a way to teach:

• Responsibility

• Leadership

• Contribution

Leadership roles can also be used at home.

1. Talk with your child about the leadership role he or she might be interested in at home.

2. Discuss why he or she is interested in the role. Ask what leadership qualities your child has that will help. Ask how he or she will handle homework or other commitments with this new-role responsibility.

Give your child a week or so to adjust and then discuss how it’s going. This may open a conversation on how to handle things that are too easy or too difficult. Express appreciation and celebrate success!

Habit 1 at Home

Adolescents can be an emotional time for many students and families. How can we use the habits to create positive actions and healthy outlets for these emotions. How can we practice this at home? What does this mean?

Encourage your child to think before they speak/react. Say the words "I am in charge of my weather. I can choose to have a sunny day or a stormy day." Talk to your child about positive behaviors and how to keep their head up when a situation doesn't go their way.

Real world scenario:

using words to express feelings or frustrations, not temper tantrums
asking for help with difficult tasks
praise progress

Habit 2 at Home

Family Mission Statements

Mission statements have long been a part of organizations; they provide a clear path for what the organization wants to accomplish and how they plan to go about doing it. Yet, seldom does a family take the time to write a mission statement, and what organization is more important than the family? By establishing who you are as a family, how you want to be known, and how you plan to do it, you are practicing Habit 2: Begin With the End in Mind. The process is a great way to practice all of the 7 Habits.

Step 1. Ask yourself these seven questions: How do we want our family to be known? How do we want to treat each other? What is most important to us as a family? What are some of our talents, gifts, and abilities? What makes us the happiest? What makes us unhappy? What kind of home do we want to invite friends to?

Step 2. Write your Family Mission Statement. Consider all four areas:

• Body (health and physical welfare)

• Brain (learning)

• Heart (relationships)

• Spirit (inspiration)

Keep it simple, one to two lines, so the youngest family members can memorize it and find it meaningful. Examples: “We are builders,” “No empty chairs,” “To serve others,” “All for one and one for all,” etc.

Step 3. Stay on course. As parents, you are the role models. Keep smiling and getting back on track.

By writing a Family Mission Statement, the message to your children is that your family is important—you know what you stand for and how you are going to work together to accomplish it.

Additional Parent Resources:

A site for parents actively supporting kids' social and emotional development
Exercise and sleep
Relationships
Personal Responsibility
Positive Thinking
App: Here Comes the Bus-An app that tracks the location of the school bus so your student never misses the bus again!
App: Study Stack-Make memorization more hands-on and fun with the Study Stack app, which enables your child to create her own unique flashcards — on any topic she likes — and turn them into an exciting game that makes studying its own reward. Students can share flashcards with each other within the app, too, making group studying more productive than ever.
App: LaLa Lunchbox-Medication side effects, picky palates, and sensory processing challenges all conspire to blunt your child’s appetite. But research suggests that kids are more likely to eat meals they get a say in planning, which is where the LaLa Lunchbox app comes in. Parents and kids work together — with the help of fun monster avatars — to plan healthy lunches and snacks that even picky eaters will devour. Children with food allergies or sensitivities will benefit from special nut-free, dairy-free, vegetarian, or kosher meal suggestions, each one of which is curated by a registered dietician.
App: Class Tree-Your child is expected to bring home the permission slip, remember it, secure a parent’s signature, and then return it to the teacher — all without losing or destroying it. That is asking a lot of a child with ADHD or poor executive functioning, as you well know. To relieve some pressure, ask your child’s teachers to download Classtree, an easy-to-use app that allows parents and teachers to share permission slips, information forms, and other documents — totally digitally. Plus, the app allows teachers to remind forgetful parents in private — perfect for Moms and Dads who have ADHD, too.
App: My Study Life-The My Study Life app is the perfect digital organizer for any smartphone user, promising to be “everything your paper planner is — and more.” Your child can track upcoming assignments, get impending test notifications, and back up all her assignments to the cloud — making it much less likely she’ll lose her homework. If your middle school student is struggling to master a complex schedule, My Study Life can help her keep track of what class is coming up next, which ones have homework due tomorrow, and which exams she should start studying for tonight.
App: OneNote-For anyone who doesn’t love Evernote — or who needs a note-capturing app that works on more than two devices without incurring a fee — OneNote is an effective alternative that boasts many of Evernote’s features. Students can use it to snap pictures, store and categorize files, and jot down ideas — all accessible from any device they choose. Plus, the app can record lectures while students take handwritten notes — allowing them to check back over anything they missed later — and back their notes up to Microsoft’s OneDrive or Office365.
App: CamScanner-School comes with lots of paper — which means a disastrous backpack, lost assignments, and one miserable child. Conquer your paper pile with CamScanner, which turns any smartphone into a scanning device. A child who loses homework assignments can snap a picture and email it to himself or his teacher, making it possible to print a copy later in case of emergency. CamScanner makes studying for tests easier, too — instead of re-reading the whole textbook chapter to remember where he saw a specific fact, your child can just snap quick pics as he goes. Later, he can search his PDFs of the chapter to zero in on the correct page and refresh his memory.
App: SeeSaw-School praise is rare for too many students with ADHD, who suffer from low self-esteem, shame, and embarrassment. But you know your child is smart, creative, and resourceful, and you love to see her victories — no matter how small. Seesaw is an app that can help, by allowing students to create “portfolios” of all their best work. From a successful presentation to a teacher’s kind comment, Seesaw allows parents to see the fruits of their child’s hard work — and add in some genuine praise of their own!

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