r-e-s-p-o-n-s-i-b-i-l-i-t-y

I have just recently started to homeschool the Banimal and a friend loaned me a really neat little curriculum called Five in a Row. It takes children's library books and makes at least a weeks worth of lessons out of them. The first one I am going to do is called Katy and the big Snow.

Okay.... by this point you are probably wondering what this has to do with responsibility. Well, the theme of Katy and the big Snow is that Katy finally gets an opportunity to work and fulfill her responsibilities. As I was preparing the lessons and deciding how I would go about everything I realized that I should really get a concrete definition of what responsibility means. We use the word often with our boys, but I don't know that I have ever explained it to them.

I just couldn't come up with a defintion that I liked so I ended up lookiing it up in a dictionary. And then I had a blast from the past. I spent nearly every night in the 6th grade writing the word 'responsibility'. I had a teacher that would make the whole class write the word 500 times every time someone in class misbehaved.

I remember alot of writer's cramp that year.... but here is the sad part. I probably wrote that word over 10, 000 times in her class, but in a year's time she never took the time to fully explain what it means. We left knowing how to spell a word... which is great... but we had no clue what those letters stood for. Looking back, it seems like her time would have been better spent trying to help us to understand what true responsibility really meant.... personally, socially, corperately....

It seems like in our world there are way too many people that can spell it, but don't understand what it means.