Habit Training Lists

There are lots of sites reposting the same information about what habit-training is, why you should do it, and how to (and the suggestions for how to are very similar and general: 1)Focus on one habit at a time, 2)Focus on it for 6 to 8 weeks, 3)Introduce it, talk about it, explicitly teach it, 4)Correct your child when they exhibit the bad habit every time it happens, and praise your child when they exhibit the good habit.)

The sites say you should begin with obedience, truthfulness, and attention. I agree that obedience is the most important.

There are the habits Mason writes about in her series, but she doesn't give a tidy list with bullet points, and I kind of like those.

And there's Laying Down the Rails from Simply Charlotte Mason. The author has meticulously gone through Mason's series, extracting Mason's ideas about each habit and grouping her writings. She includes questions for reflection for the reader, and a few additional quotes about the habit, but there isn't much in the way of how to. More useful is Laying Down the Rails for Children which has explicit lessons, including short stories, poems, quotes, and ideas about what to include on sticker charts.

Here are three habits lists I've come across, including one compiled from LDtR:

Mater Amabilis (Training in Habits of Virtue)

Grace Online Library

Homeschool-Life (compiled from LDtR)

Optimism

A second suggestion for training a sweet temper is teaching children to hope, or what Sonja Lyubomirsky calls "cultivating optimism."

As a child, I loved the Disney movie Pollyanna starring Hayley Mills. It's about a little girl who goes to live with her rich aunt Polly after the death of her father. Pollyanna brings hope to everyone around her by playing a game her father made up - The Glad Game. Pollyanna's father was a missionary. When the missionary barrel came, Pollyanna had hoped to find a doll inside, but what she found was a pair of crutches. She was horribly disappointed. So her father made up the game. He said it was always possible to find something to be glad about. In regard to the crutches, Pollyanna could be glad she didn't need them.

Last year, I read Pollyanna to my 4th graders, and both the boys and girls loved it. (Its grade-level equivalent is 5.8, its Lexile is 870, and Scholastic lists its interest level as grades 3 through 5. Ambleside Online includes the book as a Year 4 extra.) It's a sweet book, and I highly recommend it.

In another book on optimism - Learned Optimism - the author Martin Seligman writes that problems are temporary, external, and specific. With my daughter (three years old tomorrow), I remind her that problems are fixable (temporary).

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POLLYANNA: There are eight hundred happy texts, did you know that? 
REVEREND: No, I didn't know that. 
POLLYANNA: Yes, well there are. And do you know, my father said that if God took the trouble to tell us eight hundred times to be glad and rejoice, He must have wanted us to do it.

 -from Disney's Pollyanna (1960)