Hey, everybody. Welcome to Bitcoin homeschoolers. Today's episode will just be me. Scott is away at a game conference mingling with other game designers, manufacturers. So it's just going to be me today and I've got a very exciting announcement to make, which is that my daughter and I have. Partnered together and written the first book in a series of children's books. So I'm going to go a little bit in depth into why I decided to write this series and what I'm hoping to accomplish. The idea for writing this early readers series actually started a couple of years ago. I had a vague notion that I wanted to convey some lessons that I learned through 20 years of homeschooling the kids and what I observed, not only with my own kids, but what other families experience in the homeschooling community. It took about two years for the ideas to solidify. I remember reaching out to my niece two years ago and asking if she was free to draw some pictures for me, because she's a very wonderful. Illustrator. And she said, what is it that you want to tell? And. I was not able to verbalize what I wanted to say. It took about two years of the idea percolating in my mind before it finally just download it all at once. I wrote the first book and then quickly wrote four books after that. I reached out to my daughter, Brianna, who is available. The summer. And she agreed to draw the pictures for me. And very quickly, within a short time, we were able to finish the first book Flowers for Mom. The. Idea that I'm trying to convey with the series that I'm calling the Super Kay Adventures.Is I really want to get back to the roots of the good old fashioned values that. that we used to teach our kids. I feel like today with a lot of Those social media, like the young influencers and The woke agenda, et cetera, we have veered away from. Values that actually bring a lot of self-confidence to children. When we tell kids today that they can be whatever they want and give them no boundary. We imagined that it would give them more freedom and more sense of self worth and self validity. But actually what I have seen, I'm not a psychologist and I'm not. I'm not a philosopher or anything, but I'm just, I'm seeing what I. I'm telling you what I've seen over the last 20 years is the kids that have a firm boundary set by parents with good intentions. They tend to be more secure in themselves because they know that. That there are people looking out for them and they know where the line is. When you give no lines and. In the name of, complete free self expression for the kids. They end up. What I have observed is that they end up being extremely insecure. They don't know. They don't know, right from wrong necessarily. And they can feel like they may not be able to verbalize it, but they can feel. Something amiss. They can feel people's reaction to them. That are unspoken, but still there, for example. Some families we used to interact with adopted. The idea that. Parents shouldn't ever say no to their children that's a way of limiting their children's freedom of expression. That sounds really great on paper and maybe in the books that some popular psychology authors would talk about, but in reality, what you S what you observe. Is that these kids can't get along with anybody because nobody has taught them how exactly to interact successfully in social situations. They are very difficult for other parents to handle. So when we co-teach. They are the kids that we don't want in our class because we cannot control them at all. And other kids don't want to play with those kids either because they don't know how to compromise when you have more than one person trying to play, they have to compromise on some level. And these kids are never said no to. They don't know how to compromise. And there's actually, in the Bitcoin space, we talk a lot about FUD around money and FUD around energy and FUD around food health. I think there's actually also a lot of FUD around parenting. When I had the idea to write a Super Kay Adventures one of the main goals that I had was to just come back around to The good old fashion, I call it Good old fashioned values, but really it's just really common sense values. That was my original intent. But. As I was preparing for this podcast and. Actually planning to talk about. Values like integrity and honesty and self responsibility, et cetera. It struck me through a recent conversation, that there was actually something even deeper that we're missing. So very recently a friend of my told me that her daughter attempted suicide. Which was a very huge shock. Because the family is very loving. The family is very close. They belong to a church community that is also very supportive. So it was very shocking it was very shocking that someone from a social environment like that would think that life is not worth living. Because I always in the past was, I would assume that if somebody's. would try something or even contemplate an idea like suicide. They would either be mentally unstable or they came from a very harsh environment that stole their hope for life. But that's not the case from the personal stories that I have heard. For example, a friend a few years ago actually did succeed in taking his own life. Again a loving family, part of a very supportive church community. And I went to the funeral and I stood there and I just was so confused. I just couldn't wrap my head around why this child. would. think that his life was not worth living. A few years back. I don't know if you guys remember those or watch those, but there was a show on Netflix called 13 reasons why. And it ran for three seasons. And studies show that during those three years American teen suicide rate increased by 25%. I never watched it. But my understanding is that they almost glorify doing that like exiting life and leaving a mark that way. I live in Kentucky and the State of Kentucky started an initiative to combat the what 13 reasons why was doing with teens. And so they started this project. It's a teen suicide prevention series. And my daughter was cast the show and because she was a minor, I went to the shoot every single day with her, and I was able to converse with people. Who have been brought in as a teen mental health consultants and I was able to interact with the crew. And a lot of the. The community the school teachers, the local school teachers. It was a huge endeavor. A lot of people came together to make this project happen, but. Prior to that. I didn't really have very much exposure personally, to people who experienced loved ones trying or succeeding at suicide, and I was shocked.To hear. Almost everybody onset. Saying that they knew someone who did that. So anyway, so tying it all back to the Super Kay Adventure. So my original intent when I wrote the Super Kay Adventures was for fun. And have a money literacy young readers series, but I. I accidentally stumbled on this idea that maybe what we need to do as parents, what we can add on top of, emphasizing money literacy is. Is to start shifting our kids eyes from external rewards to intrinsic sense of value. So originally I wanted a young reader level book that is similar to William Bennet's big book of Virtues that came out 25 years ago and it was a collection of stories that were listed by the virtue they highlighted in his book. That was a very thick. Volume and then he created a book specifically for kids. So I want it to follow in those footsteps and highlight virtues, like honesty, integrity, and bravery, because I feel that a lot of entertainment today glorify getting away with things. It's almost like if you're, if you do right things, you are a goody two shoe and you're boring and you're a nerd. But if you break the rules, if you get away with doing wrong things you're almost heroic. Which is to me, such a strange backward thinking of what is good and bad. So anyway, so that was my original intent. But because of what I heard from my friend about what her daughter tried to do last week, it brought my attention back to the confusion that I felt when I was standing in the middle of my, friend's funeral wondering what happened to our young people that they would think life is not worth living or that they are so worthless that nobody's going to miss them if they took themselves out of this life. Please bear with me. I know I'm rambling a little bit, but there is a connection with everything that I'm saying right now. I promise. Okay. So I'm going to go into super K ventures, but I really want to emphasize the hero's journal that goes with it. So the Super Kay Adventure, the first book is Flowers for Mom. And as I mentioned before, I originally wrote it so that we can start to gently I introduce money literacy concepts, and then also to highlight traditional virtues, taking responsibility for your actions being honest, having integrity, being brave, facing your mistakes and making amends, that type of thing. So in the book Flowers for Mom our little guy, seven year old, Kay, he accidentally breaks his mom's vase and they sell flowers that his dad gave his mom and he is in a dilemma. He wants to lie about it. He wants to blame his dog, but eventually he does tell the truth. And not only did he tell the truth. But he also offered to replace the flowers. He did not ask his parents for money. He did not go to his grandparents for money, but he decided to to take responsibility and do what he could as a 7 year old boy. So he transforms into his alter ego, Super Kay and of course, Super Kay can do super things. He goes to his mom, dad, grandad, grandma. And he offers to help them with things, helping with chores around the house so that he can earn money. So over time, he's able to earn enough money to replace...well in his mind, he, there was an amount. He asked his dad, how much do I need To earn so that I can buy mom the flowers to replace them for her. And he said $10 well. Kay works very hard over a period of time and he's able to save up $10. He's very excited. He's about to go and do what he promised his mom would do. And bam. Price increased. And the flowers are no longer $10. So in that way. Yes, I'm sliding in a little bit of the inflation concept. I'm not going to spoil the ending for you. So I'm not going to go all the way to the end of the book, but

that's,

that's sort of the setup of the story and every book following Flowers for Mom will have some kind of adventure for this 7 year old boy and his three siblings and yes, they are based on my memories of my four kids and when they were very little. And so it, the stories are fun and the stories are meant to sort of a bridge to express various real life happenings kids should be aware of and maybe not being told explicitly is happening like inflation and. And such, so the stories are fun and the fonts I decided purposefully to make them very big because when kids are just learning how to read they really need the words to be to be pretty large. If we give them a fine print, like the regular 12 point print it's actually very difficult for kids to focus their eyes that way. You can read up on the vision changes of kids as they mature. But for younger kids words it's really needs to be quite large, like larger than what we would be used to reading. So I set the font at 28 point on purpose for the kids, but also for the grandparents. So that they can read the books to the kids and not have to look for their reading glasses. So that's one thing. And the other thing is I want it, the words, the sentences to be quite short. Because I do want these books to dual purpose as early reading books for kids. It would serve as a. As a book that, the parents would read to them first, and then they should, they will.read to themselves. So those sentences are short. Intentionally. The other thing is I also want it the pictures to be very relatable. I didn't want it to look the lines to look very clean, and I didn't want the colors to be uniform because if we if you look at a book like the Blue's Clues, I think most people know Blue's clues style. It's digital art and the lines are very crisp. And the coloring is very perfect and it's clearly not a human made kind of art it's. Very clearly like digitally made. And when my kids were little. Aye. Notice that they almost never reached for those books. They always reached for books that looked like a human hand drew the pictures. Even though to the adult eyes. I those pictures are not even that great. The pictures are not perfect, their proportions are maybe not true to life, but the, I noticed my kids at least always reached for the pictures that that are closer to their own level. So like the old the old Clifford the Big Red Dog. The older Curious George type of books, the hand drawn the hand colored in kind of style. And I think one of the reasons might be because they can see themselves able to draw something like that. Whereas if it's something like Blue's Clues, they know that it is just not it's so far away from what they're doing with their hands pen to paper kind of thing that they I don't know. I don't know why they just didn't, they weren't drawn to it. So I when I talked to my daughter, when we were brainstorming about how we wanted the pictures to look, I wanted it to be raw and a little bit, rough around the edges and. Just very much at the level that a five-year-old can relate to and go, oh, if I tried a few times, I can maybe draw a picture like that. so I was recently at the Bitcoin conference in Nashville, and I was able to observe the kids reading Flowers for Mom. And I remember I walked by there's a little girl and she was reading it with her mom. And she turned and said, who drew these pictures? And I pointed to my daughter, at the time, she was across the way and talking to someone and I said she did. And the little girl said, how did she get so good? And I said, with lots of practice, but what I loved about that statement was like, She knew it was. Ah, let's see, how do I say this? She knew that it was something that a person can draw with some practice. Does that make sense? That it is not like hop on the computer and drag your mouse around. It's like she, she asked the question, how does she get so good? Meaning she understood that there was a progress that needed to make, but that it was possible. So I loved, I love that question. And she read them the book with her mom. And when she was done, she walked up to my daughter and said, excuse me, And. She said. I love your pictures. And I just, oh my gosh, it made me feel so good because I knew that we chose the right. art style for these young reader books when she said that. So I was very glad. So big font. Short sentences for young readers. And pictures that are relatable. And I'm going to get into the hero journal, which kind of ties back into what I was saying before about our young people's mental health. Okay. So the hero journal. The hero journal. Each day has four entries. The first entry is just recording the day. For the reason that this hero journal is meant for young kids. I print it out the weeks of the day so all they have to do is circle it. So really they're just recognizing the words. I didn't want them to have to write it out because at that age early reader age, their dexterity in their hands are not great yet. the purpose is just for them to practice names of the weekdays and then practice the names of the month and write their numbers in. So you circle the day of the week. You read through the months and under the month the appropriate month. So right now it's july they would write under the month the day. So for example, today is July 31st. So you would write three, one, and underneath that will be 20 24. So very simple. The first page. The second page is for them to draw a picture of something heroic that they did themselves. So it is one thing for them to read the Super Kay Adventures and read the 7 year old boy being responsible, being brave, taking responsibility, et cetera. But it's another thing to see themselves that way. Our hero culture today is all about the hero being somebody in a costume So whether it's Superman or Batman or whatever marvel or DC or any other superhero the story out there the hero is somebody else and they solve the problem for everybody else. But I wanted the kids to start to see themselves as super. So the second page in the hero journal is very important. It is a way for them to form the habit of seeing their own good deeds Life is fast and we are always, running in and out. And especially if the kids are young, they might be doing sports. They might be going on field trips, depending on what you're doing with with the kids. If they're going to school, if you're homeschooling. But life is fast paced and there are a lot of things that we don't see because we're so quick to we're so quick to move on to the next thing. The purpose of this page is for the parent and the child to sit down together and reflect if you're into meditation at all, you would know that reflection is very important. Are we teaching that to our kids and when they reflect, what do they remember? If you reflect and you think of only the things that you did not like, how was your day? Well, Johnny broke my pencil. Okay. That's like emotionally intense moments. So probably that's why it comes to mind first. How was your day? I fell down on the playground. Also emotionally charged experience. But then heroic things like the good deeds. They may or may not have a very strong emotional charge. And so they, without deliberate intention to bring it back in into your mind you pass them by, you don't even realize it. So for example, when you're talking to a five-year-old six year old, seven year old, what's something that's heroic that they can write down on their hero page. Well, if they were playing on the playground. And they fell. But they got back up. that's heroic. Heroes they get knocked down, they get back up. So you can draw a picture of just the boy at a playground. If his friend or his sibling fell down and he stopped to say, are you okay? Or he stopped to help the other child up. That's heroic to the person he helped. So you can draw a picture of that. If let's say mom had a headache. And the child fetches Tylenol for her and brings her a glass of water. Well that is actually a wonderful act of good deed for the mom, right? If the sibling had a bad day and the child gives his sibling a hug. That's heroic because that made a difference to somebody else's life experience. So parent and child can reflect on the day and highlight these passing moments and recognize that they're actually really important. So the second page is for drawing a picture. The third page is to describe the experience in words. So for example, In the example that the boy helped his sibling up after the sibling fell, you can say something like I helped brother up. That's four words. So a five-year-old can write that six year old can write that. Now if your child is not yet old enough to be able to write these words. Or even know how to spell. What I used to do was, I will write out the words, but in dotted lines. And then I would just tell my, my kids, I would just tell them to trace my letters. So that serves two functions. One is they're the practicing their dexterity. The muscle control in their fingers. And the second is they are actually seeing, like forming the words. And they may not consciously know that they are learning the spelling of the word or the identification of the word, but it's happening. The input is happening in the back of their mind. So depending on the child's age please do not make this into a quiz kind of thing. And. If they spell a word wrong, no biggie. Just write it correctly in a dotted-line have them trace. If you have heard our podcast from before our previous episodes, I mentioned the book called Learning with Love and it's by Suzuki the guy who started the Suzuki violin method. He emphatically mentioned in that book, how important it is to celebrate. Without correction. And yes, there is a place for correction, but in this case in the beginning of learning, it's important to celebrate and just show them the right way without correction. In the book Called How to Teach Your Child to Read to read that whole series, how to teach your baby how to read, how does he do a baby math? In that series. By Glenn Doman. Same thing. He says, if you hold up two words and say point to mom and the child points to dad, you said. Oh, that's very good. And then you hold out the board that says, mom, So you're correcting without the tone of correction. So if you're writing on the third page of the hero journal and your child, spells. Well spells dad with a D that goes backwards. You don't necessarily have to say the D is backwards. Let's write a correctly. You can just say, Hey, let's trace dad again and you write it correctly. They'll get the point, but you don't want that tone of correction in there because what we're trying to focus on is their good deeds. Correction, and all of those things that's get them a little bit like we can talk about that on another occasion, but the emotional experience for the child when they're writing the hero journal should be celebratory in every way possible. Okay, so you have the first page's date, the second page, you draw a picture. The third page you have them trace your words, or they can write their own words. And the fourth one is what I think is the most important actually. And it says, what superpower did you use today? Now. In the example that I gave in the hero journal. It's my smile. The child's smile. So you can draw a picture, write the word. Either one is fine. I think kids at that age probably would prefer to draw a picture. But again, if you want them to write words, Write the words out in dotted lines. And have them trace the words. Now. The superpower can be anything. This is a place to be really creative. So can this superpower be a soft touch? Yes, it can because it's very comforting. Can this superpower be a hug? A really good hug. Yes, it can. Can the super power be listening. Yes. can the I superpower be thoughtfulness? Yes. Can I superpower be just staying quiet when somebody is talking. Yes. All of these things can be good. So again, the point of the journal entry is to celebrate the good deeds and to spotlight moments that might be passing until you reflect on it and you realize that was heroic to the person who was on the receiving end of it. Does that make sense? So if you've held, so think long-term here. Right now, your child's five let's say, and you start this journal every day. They're forming a habit of reflecting on their good deeds. You're not saying, Hey, good job. I'm going to give you a piece of candy or you can have ice cream. You're not saying here's a sticker. If everyday you, you do a good deed you get a sticker. You're not saying if you're going to do a good deed, then you can have the iPad. There's no external reward. There's just internal satisfaction. Every single person feels good when they're able to help another human being. That's just true. Unless you have some kind of mental disability or something. You feel good when you make a difference, a positive difference in somebody else's life. It's human nature. And so if we help our kids form that habit they start to look at the world as for, or through the eyes of a powerful person. Through the eyes of a capable person. Through the eyes of somebody who matters. Okay, so getting back to this epidemic of teen depression. People talk about it being mental health issue. I wonder about that. Again, I am not a psychologist. I'm not a philosopher. This is just. What I see with my own two eyes. If we take the reward for a person and draw it completely outside of themselves. What do they have left with? So think about the way that our kids are brought up today in society in schools. Starting from even preschool. Everything is about positive reinforcement. And what is positive reinforcement? External reward. So if you're so just even in my own kids' experience, they did go, two of them did go to preschool. And it's about walking on the line that's taped down in the hallway. And then the teacher saying good job. It's. You. Doing something well, and then the teacher puts a sticker on the board for everybody to see. In every interaction like that they're being told over and over again without words. That their value is based on other people. Other people's recognition. So if they were to take themselves out, Does it make sense that they would think that. Nobody will miss them. I don't know. Again I'm treading on waters that are very sensitive and I'm definitely not making light of what is happening in and people struggling with. Mental health issues, but I'm just, I'm asking questions as a parent. If you disagree with me. Just forget everything I said. But if you think there might be something to it start looking for data in the human interaction that you observe every single day. And see what conclusion you come up with. Okay. Let's tie it into homeschooling since this is a homeschooling podcast. When you are the teacher, counselor, nurse, school principal, cook driver. And will you have all those titles and you're responsible for all of them. It's really easy for us to live by the checklist. And as I mentioned before, life moves really fast to not pay as much attention to these non academic subjects. I have found that we are. So at least for myself, we are focused on making sure our kids can read and write and do math. the three R's,, reading, arithmetic, writing. That everything else happens rather unintentionally. I just know that if I had to go back and do it all over again. One of the things that I would do differently is to realize that the three R's are the easiest subjects they can learn later in life. But the way that they see, the lens that they see through the lens that they see through at life is much harder to adjust when they get older. I would encourage you, whether it's with Super Kay Adventures and the hero's journal or something else that you celebrate more often than not what your kids do right rather than to correct what they do wrong. I didn't understand when my kids were young how important that is. But I do now looking back. So that's, this is my encouragement to all the young homeschooling families out there. If you want to check out Super Kay both the book and the journal are available on Amazon as well as on free market kids. I did redesign the cover. So the original cover for the hero's journal is on sale on free market kids. If you go to Amazon, you should see the updated cover. It's blue. The one before was a lime green but the inside is exactly the same. And if you want to just print out your own hero journal. You can go to Super-Kay.com. It will be in the show notes and you can print out the pages yourself. You don't have to buy a hero journal. I just made that available because it's a keepsake. When I go through my memory boxes where the kids work, I, it just always warms my heart to go back and read their writings, even if their writings were almost illegible in the beginning, I still treasure those writing those drawings and writing so much. And so the keepsake book. Is. Yeah. Bound and nice and all that, but you, if you don't want to invest in that, then just go to Super-Kay.com and you can print out the pages yourself. I would rather you help your kids form the habit of seeing their good deeds than to sell you a book. Okay. So before I wrap up, I want to give you one last example to think about. In the book called Think and Grow Rich Napoleon Hill not only talks about how to. have the right mindset for making money, but he shares an incredible personal experience with his son who was born without ears, talking about the importance of setting a powerful paradigm for your child to see the world through. So his baby was born without ears. And he was told by his doctor that the baby will be a handicap his whole entire life, and basically will live a lesser quality life. And Napolean Hill, decided that was not the fate of his child. He was not accepting that fact. So he spoke to the baby for hours every day to tell him over and over again from the time he was newborn, but even as the child was growing up, that the lack of physical ears was not going to be a handicap, but that it was a gift. Because he would receive more kindness from everyone he encountered because of the lack of physical ears. And so he set that expectation for his baby. he shared that his son grew up expecting it and received it. So it just goes to show how important it is for us to to direct our kids' attention to look at the world through a paradigm that is self-empowering because he very easily could have just decided to, to agree with the doctor. And say, yeah, my son is handicap and yes, people are going to look at him funny cause he had no ears and he's probably going to have a difficult life Because he can't hear. And this is early 19 hundreds. And there weren't a lot of assistance for handicap kids, but he decided that that was not the way he wanted his son to see the world. So I offer that example as another thing to think about as a parent, when you're raising your kids showing them that they are capable of making a difference in the lives of other people, especially the people who are closest to them, their, their family members, their siblings, their parents, their grandparents, their neighbors. It is so powerful. It is so powerful. So anyway, I wanted to offer up the example for you to consider before we wrap up. that's it for me. Thank you so much for listening today. Sorry, Scott wasn't a part of it. In the next episode, I'm going to interview my kids and have them talk a little bit about their favorite books when there were young readers themselves, what they looked for when they're picking books, just to give you a little bit more information about early reading from the point of view of the child. My kids are grown, but they'll remember things that are different than I do for sure. So that's the next episode and I will see you then. Thank you So much. Bye.