Ha, I've downloaded some from your thread already. When I have a specific need, I will let you know - thanks for the reminder. 🙂 Thanks, this one is pretty good.

I just need to bookmark a good one instead of having to look through all the google results every time I want to make some extra practice worksheets. The one at education.com is pretty good, but you only get three free downloads a month. In return, I offer this nifty time line (and other) generator I just found.

Some of our favorites: Geraldine McCaughrean has a lot of mythology and folktales - ancient Greek and Roman stories, an Arabian Nights retelling, among others. Virginia Hamilton's three collections, The People Could Fly and Her Stories (Black American folktales) and In the Beginning (creation myths from around the world) - these are all beautifully illustrated, the first two by the Dillons and the last by Barry Moser Julius Lester's Brer Rabbit collection Padraic Colum's Children of Odin and The Golden Fleece Roger Lancelyn Green's Tales of Ancient Egypt Sanjay Patel's Ramayana Ludmilla Zeman's Gilgamesh trilogy and her Sinbad retellings This collection organizes folktales geographically and this one, edited by Jane Yolen, by genre

I hope the reading is fruitful for you! Feel free to jump in and discuss whatever you'd like, of course!

Hm, I wouldn't say I've done a lot of this, but maybe a little more with the current 3yo. In the spring, I set up a bin of activities that she could only access while I was doing lessons with the bigger kids, but I let her pick which activity from maybe 5 or 6. When I'm working in the kitchen, I will often get out a pot or bowl with some water and some measuring cups, etc, to keep her busy, but I've never really thought of that as assigning specific play materials at specific times, though in a way, I guess it is. I wonder how this would develop the work habit beyond regular chores? I agree that it was unclear whether this was advice for a child who wasn't playing well on their own already (maybe more common among oldest children? I can see how it might have been good for my oldest, at least) or for all children in general. I thought this was good advice that I should take more often: "Do not let them play too long at a time, else they will get tired and certainly make trouble. At the first symptom of discord, separate the children, no matter whose the fault, for it is possible to be entirely too judicial in settling children's difficulties and after the trouble has started it is hard to decide who has been in the wrong. Besides, the children are laughing inside themselves at your particularities in this respect, knowing instinctively that it was a mere chance as to who was the guilty party at that moment. The natural consequence to quarreling is to be separated, and will impress the children as just and fair. No child is too young to learn that he must either control himself or suffer deprivations. If a child's idea of playing is always to take the part that he particularly likes, he should learn to 'take turns.' Let him learn to fit in, to adapt himself, to take his place among others, to give and take." (p. 146) I am totally going to hand the kids some bags stuffed with rags this week and send them out to try and knock each other off a board. EFL speaks often in this chapter of supervising your kids' play but not too closely - this seems like a very tricky balance to strike in practice. I probably am a little too hands-off and wait for kids to come to me to complain about each other rather than keeping an eye on things and stepping in before it comes to that. We've never had a dedicated playroom in this house, but after reading ELF's discussion this time through, it occurs to me that our current guest room/grown-ups' library would work well for this purpose. It used to be a carport before it was enclosed and added to the house, so there is actually a window over the kitchen sink that looks down into it. I've always been kind of annoyed by this odd feature of my kitchen, but maybe it would work perfectly for keeping a not-too-close eye on the children's play. Hm, I would have to convince DH, and maybe move around many, many books.

I had seen it cited many, many times, but never actually got around to reading it til this summer. I'd like to find more discipline-specific work on PCK now, but it is somewhat laborious sorting the rare wheat from the abundant chaff in education research. Yes, exactly. It seems to me that, assuming I can handle these situations tactfully, group learning offers other educational opportunities beyond academics. Thanks, Elizabeth - reading was the one "R" that I had no ideas for! I've used your syllable materials for the well-taught phonics student with great success for two of my kids and was about to start the third and fourth, so now would be a great time to try this.

Those are good tips - I had already moved to calling on specific children for some questions, but also using the order they get called on for different purposes in different contexts makes a lot of sense. The different pedagogical strategies available in the group setting really interests me. I picked up Building a Better Teacher from the library recently hoping it would have discussion of concrete teaching practices in it, which it does a little, but not in any great depth. I might look up some of the citations, though. One other thing that I realized reflecting on this is that I tend to get more out of my most laconic child in group discussions. One-on-one with mom, I get stereotypical, minimalist "boy" answers - one sentence, no elaboration - but with his siblings, it is easier to draw him out and get him to explain and defend his thinking.

The issue of siblings comparing themselves negatively to each other is a good caution. This has not been an issue for us thus far, so I'm reflecting on why that is and if there's anything I can do to make sure it continues not to be one. I suspect the age spacing of my kids help (they are all at least two years apart), and also, this wasn't exactly intentional on my part at the time, but the group lessons we've done have been more exploratory or conceptual or have involved a game. We also don't really use programs from start to finish, so my kids don't have that kind of a yardstick to measure themselves against in comparison with their siblings. But definitely something to keep an eye on.

Wendy, this was all very helpful, but especially the above. I've slowly been moving to a more CI-approach to our foreign language study in part to be able to include all the kids, so I really appreciate your examples of how your kids are working at their own level in response to the same input. That is exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for. Thanks so much!

I'm interested in talking about how to combine kids for family-style lessons in areas that are generally considered "skill" subjects that have to be taught individually (math and language arts, mainly, but maybe also foreign languages). Here's an example: last spring we did a unit all together on fractions. I pulled activities and lesson ideas from Family Math and one of Marilyn Burns' books, and maybe two days a week we had a lesson all together, 11 year old down to the 4 year old, and the other days were "differentiated practice," as they say. It worked really well - I felt way more prepared even on the days I was still working one-on-one with each child because I was only preparing to teach one topic, not trying to be ready to teach a lesson on place value to the 1st grader and one on multiplication to the 3rd grader and another on ratio to the 6th grader or whatever. I had time to work through the fractions chapter of Elementary Mathematics for Teachers in an effort to improve my pedagogical content knowledge. My students benefited from being able to discuss and work together, and I think the group setting also took some of the pressure off for my less mathy student, who outperformed my expectations. So this year, I'm thinking about how to expand this approach to other subjects. I've planned a family grammar study, and am thinking about how to do family-style composition. One thing I am finding is that teaching this way is easier if I think about the curriculum in broad categories that get covered in increasing depth or complexity over time rather than thinking in terms of "1st grade skills" then "2nd grade skills" and so on. So elementary math is about the four operations, the decimal system, fractions, etc, and each of those topics can be accessed from an introductory and concrete level on to a more advanced and abstract level. For grammar, we're going to go over the parts of speech. My youngest students will be encountering those ideas for the first time, while my oldest student will be looking at how the parts of speech work differently across the different languages we study. And I've found some older "language lesson" and composition textbooks that are helping me think through writing skills in a more topical way (maybe topics like "the sentence," "the paragraph," "narrative," "description," etc - still very much working on this one). Has anyone else done something like this for "skill" subjects? Are there any resources that would be particularly useful? I've found it helpful to look at Montessori elementary curricula because it is organized for larger age spans, not single-year grades. Any thoughts about how to organize something like this? I think I want some kind of document that, for each topic, has lists of lessons and activities appropriate for whole-family time and also breaks out the specific skills that each age group should be working on to select from for the differentiated practice days, and those skills would be linked to a set of actual exercises, like lesson XXI in Ray's Intellectual or pp. 36-40 in some book in the Math Mammoth light blue series or whatever equivalent I can come up with for grammar and composition. Less of a graded scope and sequence and more of a plan for a multi-year rotation like you see for the content subjects.

I love EFL's advice about observation and sense-training, though I've never implemented it all that well. Still, I think I've done some things differently and for the better than I would have otherwise. It was kind of funny to look back over that Norms and Nobility thread just now - obviously, I found EFL the Aristotelian educator I had been seeking, lol. A few passages that jumped out at me this time around (ok, this first one has stuck with me from my first time reading this): The connection between quantity of reading and triviality of interests on page 88 was concerning and cause for some self-examination. 😬 It is also interesting that in this chapter she also briefly discusses the "power of imagination," which she links to "the power to construct or to enjoy a work of art" and "ingenuity and dexterity in adapting thing of the natural world to our own uses." I feel like home educators today could use a good fleshing out of the relationships between the power of observation and the powers of imagination and creativity. It seems very important, but everything I seem to run into about imagination these days is all about fairy tales and picture books or at most about the importance of the imagination for faith in an invisible God. One thing I was wondering about as I read through this time is if there is some kind of inverse relationship between observation and abstraction. Specifically, I was thinking about how my most observant child has been noticeably slower to draw abstractions than my other children. I'm not sure what to make of this, if I should make anything of it, but I wonder if it is at all connected to EFL's observations about "late bloomers."

Hello, friends! I survived a 5000-mile road trip...and so did all my family members! I did keep reading ahead a bit on the trip, but I hope you all don't mind two last obedience thoughts that coalesced in my mind during many hours staring at various dry Western landscapes. First of all, EFL uses the phrase "drill in obedience," which I've been mulling over for a long time, and I finally realized that I haven't really been thinking about obedience as a habit - I mean, I would have said that I was, but really I think I'm still actually operating on the idea of obedience as mainly getting a kid to do a specific thing that I want/need him to do right now. But forming a habit is about repeating an action many, many times, so if we want our children to form the habit of obeying us, they need to practice obeying us many, many times, not just to do what we say right now. So initially, we want to make it, as much as possible, very easy for them to obey us, which might mean asking them to do things just for the sake of having them obey us, only asking them to do things at times of the day when they are better able to comply, etc, etc. A name for this process that might be more congenial to modern readers would be "overlearning." I think this ties into what you said about punishment, Eliza - learning obedience happens when children successfully obey and punishment alone doesn't teach obedience. This seems stupidly obvious as I try to articulate it, but I'm suddenly seeing the many ways in which my actions do not actually reflect this understanding. I was also thinking about the apparent inconsistencies we've noticed between EFL, Montessori, Landry, and so on, and I am reluctantly coming to the conclusion that for EFL's system to work as described, you might just have to start pretty much from birth. We all want to know what is the EFL thing to do if you are coming late to EFL, but maybe the answer is the EFL thing (or at least the discipline parts of it) is only a thing if you start early, and these other alternatives that seem to share some but not all things with her actually are what you do if you missed the "sensitive period" for EFL. I was specifically thinking about this in relation to Don Bosco's "preventative" method - I've seen many Catholic parents over the years talk about how they model their parenting on this great saint, but if you think about it, he was dealing with children in an entirely different situation and it's not at all clear that the exact methods he used to win over and influence older, neglected, and undisciplined children are the best guide for parents raising their own children from birth. However, if parents find themselves with older, undisciplined children through some oversight, ahem, not that I would know anything about that, then Don Bosco's methods might be suited to that situation. Does this make sense?

Oddly, now that you've mentioned it, Eliza, I'm remembering that I was once mildly scandalized to learn that in a family I admire very much, one parent and one child used to get up early every morning to have a bowl of ice cream together. DH and I were recently talking about how during times of stress, our sweets and alcohol consumption goes up and things despite our stated rule of saving those things for Sundays, feast days, etc. I've always tended to see the arrow of causality as going from stress to (moderate) self-medication, but we started talking about to what extent we actual avoid making some hard changes that could alleviate some of our stress because we can make the situation "tolerable" this other way. Add to that the fact that I don't seem to be able to take as much enjoyment as I'd from certain other things, like just being together or a job well done or what have you. For example, I've never quite been able to wrap my head around the advice to just sit and read aloud on homeschooling-days-gone-south because that doesn't sound like a break to me, it sounds totally exhausting, lol. I guess I am wondering how much of what you are talking about is a declining tolerance for discomfort or actually increased discomfort in some areas that we try to address by adding comfort in others. If EFL is right that maintaining her psychic energy is one of the mother's greatest challenges, are these the inevitable trade-offs that happen when, as you said it upthread, "we can't achieve the 'simplicity of surroundings' that's supposed to be a sine qua non"? Is the fast food family happier because of the MSG or because mom has decided not to spend any of her precious psychic energy optimizing their food choices? It doesn't have to be one or the other, of course.

Oh yeah, we used to have one of those can openers that doesn't leave a sharp edge which was great - I had totally forgotten about that. A hole punch is also a good idea. My kids get to hammer stuff outside, but the thought of that inside makes me feel slightly queasy. My sister-in-law sent us a huge set of scissors with different cutting edges (like this, except, no joke, there were about two dozen of them in a big scissors carousel) for Christmas one year, and it was horrible, so I do not recommend that, ha. Plastic stuff is really unaesthetic, but we also don't actually have any recycling pick-up or drop-off in our area right now, so letting the kids mess with it makes me feel less bad about it going into the trash. Here's my clever solution on the tape question: occasionally buy a lot of tape and give the kids free access. They quickly use it all up, mom takes forever to get around to buying more, and in the meantime, they are forced to resort to other materials. This all reminds me, though, that I've been meaning to get a dedicated kids stapler, because we currently only own one and my husband is basically Milton from Office Space about it. Another thought that occurred to me was yarn and a crochet hook or knitting needles. Or just yarn for finger knitting. This is fun! Can we do this same exercise but for a road trip? What would EFL bring in a big van for five kids 3-12 on a 4500 mile drive?

1) Blocks, a few small toy animals or other play figures, some old sheets or "play silks" or whatever, clothespins, colored pencils, a pencil sharpener and paper, one or two "how to draw" books, all the household's non-dangerous recycling (catalogs, cardboard, and plastic stuff), scissors, tape, glue, a stapler (maybe), maybe rubberbands, although they would be gone almost immediately, a small shelf of books that could be rotated, a CD player or ipod or whatever for music and audiobooks, a whiteboard or chalkboard or something, a broom and dustpan, and a trashcan. 2) I have no idea! That's a really interesting question! I'm curious what other people come up with.

Thanks for the comments about military discipline, ElizaG - very helpful. I know I can always count on you to keep me anchored in the concrete when I'm about to fly off into the ether of abstraction. 😆 I'm about halfway through chapter four, but I have a quiet hour tonight, so I thought I would come and start sharing the things that jumped out at me this time round. I was struck by how she first sets the stage on page 36 with comments like "It takes a long, long time to learn to respond to a command with mind and body" and "Watch the growth of the human plant. Sometimes it will unfold leaf by leaf with pleasing symmetry, and if it should dismay us by a seeming long period of dormancy, it is sure to burst out again in ravishing bloom." Humane discipline is not opposed to patience, which I personally have struggled to hold together with consistent expectations. This is a pretty good parent's examen on page 37: "Do I practice what I preach? Do I chastise my children for mirroring my shortcomings? Is my policy one of 'Do as I say, not as I do?'" And of course, "Much of the trouble and worry over children is really due to faulty domestic arrangements... regularity is the keynote of success, therefore be methodical. Systematize your household plans." I have finally learned that when we come out of a "survival" period of one kind or another - illness, new baby, whatever - that much of my panic about the children's near-feral state can be resolved by just focusing on getting the house back in order and re-instituting our daily routine, rather than running around trying to put out the fires of naughtiness (although, if the naughtiness caused an actual fire, a definite possibility around here, I would certainly put that one out). There may be a bit of push back at the beginning, but honestly, the kids seem mostly relieved for things to return to a state of predictability. I can remember the enormous effort it took to get us on a regular daily routine back in the day - I was totally exhausted by the end of the day and often just ran out of gas before the end of the week and spent Thursday and Friday at total loose ends. But now I'm looking back and...somehow it seems to have worked! Not perfectly, not always, but some things that did take enormous effort no longer do (outside of that periodic restarting phase, which I'm in right now - although I just learned I've been somewhat anemic, so hopefully some iron supplements will turbo boost our return to regularity, ha). I spent the very earliest years of motherhood reading all about and trying to practice attachment parenting, and I think that was good and necessary in many ways, but it left me feeling very anxious about provoking negative emotions in my children (turns out, I was also very anxious about provoking my own negative emotions! funny how that works). So this next one I remember very clearly jumping out at me the first time I read Bookless Lessons: "Be just! Do not, in the fear of alienating the child's love, condone faults and withhold punishment, for when kindly, strict discipline does not kill love" (37). Aaaannd, I just scrolled back up and saw I missed Eliza's post where she discussed the regularity question AND already brought in attachment parenting. I wonder how much of the baby-scheduling question is a first baby problem. I was the closest to by-the-book AP with my first baby, and I don't see how I could have done that ever again, definitely not by baby 3 or 4, even if I had wanted to. But I don't feel less securely attached to those later babies - maybe because their mother is less of an anxious basket case, lol, maybe because there was more of a overall plan that they could just slip into place in. I think I agree about the "package deal" thing though - I think it's this integration that has intrigued me about that way of life for years now, for better or worse. And I'm very interested in the ways that, as I see it, EFL is very much in line with parts of those traditional ways of life but also diverges at points.

Ack, I'm still a chapter behind but will try to catch up tonight. Eliza, I remember back in the day Jennifer Mackintosh writing a more detailed thing about how she teaches obedience to her littles from a CM perspective, but I cannot seem to find it now. I thought it was on her website, but maybe it was somewhere else. I'd like to understand more the difference between regular, "humane" discipline and "military discipline." Maybe EFL discusses this later, I can't recall at the moment, but it would be helpful to understand better what she is contrasting humane discipline with. My best guess is that "military obedience" is automatic and immediate compliance to serve some extrinsic end whereas discipline is ultimately about developing the disciple to eventually act on their own, and so obedience, while expected of the disciple, is subordinated to and meant to serve this larger goal. This perhaps changes both the type of things the disciple is asked to do as well as how he is asked to do them, though it does not change the fact that he is expected to comply. Thoughts?

Haha, yes, here is me and Mr. LostCove on a daily basis trying to psych ourselves up for this journey: Thank you for sharing about St. Benildus Romancon. This is what I need - patron saints of the terrible daily grind!

Ok, I am already a little behind thanks to the majority of my brain power suddenly being consumed trying to get us ready for an enormous road trip in less than three weeks. I'm glad you reminded us of the context in which to place the second chapter, ElizaG. There were fewer practical takeaways from it, but I was still moved by several passages, such as "all normal human beings are in one way or another equally gifted for useful, honorable, and successful careers, whether the work for which they were called to earth be with head or hand, and...it is our most sacred duty to find out what each child can do and then to educate him accordingly" (12). This was also a good reminder: "It is, of course, more pleasurable to teach children who respond quickly and showily to our efforts, but they who labor patiently, intelligently, and persistently to awaken the soul and mind of the little slow-witted backward child will be rewarded in due season with an unfolding of that soul and intellect as marvelous as the blossoming of the fragrant water-lily out of the dull brown bud that grew up from the slime" (17). I also thought when reading this about how I tend to find the kind of things the older children are learning more pleasurable to teach, and I need to make sure I don't neglect to labor patiently, intelligently, and persistently with the little ones. I'm so glad to be rereading EFL and getting back to things I've gotten out of the habit of doing - like a little observation lesson on the branch of a maple tree this morning while we were outside waiting for Mass. And actually, it was quite pleasurable, too!

So one question might be whether our homes have the same educational value as they did when EFL was writing, given the differences in how we perform household labor, prepare food, and so on (less "dirt and water," ha - I think we've talked about this a bit before in the context of dishwashers, I think). I think yes, of course, but it perhaps does require a shift in mentality, and one that goes against maybe our natural inclinations (glancing at my wonderful, very productive, and highly task-oriented DH here) and also cultural messages we receive about domestic life and work. The goal isn't for mom and dad to rush through the necessary drudgery as efficiently as possible (or for the happy set than can afford it, just outsource some or most of that labor) in order to make more time for leisure and "educational" activities. Instead, we can see the necessary "drudgery" as itself educational and we can even make that work somewhat leisurely. I think I used to do a better job of this but as my kids have gotten older, but I have slipped because I'm more anxious to have time to get through everyone's book lessons. Also, life has gotten more complicated - we have a few more outside activities, we have more stuff, etc, etc. I feel like I have to maximize efficiency to get to everything, but efficiency doesn't go with small children very well. I was already planning a big decluttering/house organizing project this summer, but this has me thinking about that in a slightly different light. I love the paragraph where she talks about the confusion over the words "education" and "educator": An error we see perpetuated by those who suggest classical Christian schools are the solution to all our ills... Here are the things EFL says in this first chapter that a mother needs: understanding "something of the laws of human nature," "sympathetic understanding of the child's needs," and "faith and courage." She doesn't accept a mother's "pleading lack of time, knowledge, patience, culture, energy, self-confidence, servants, experience, inventiveness" - a mother doesn't need any of those things to get started just "leaving undone some of the things she now thinks so important." So again, not greater efficiency doing all the things, but just abstaining from some things that seem right now to be really important. To me, this has interesting resonances with other things I've read, like Guardini's argument that asceticism is one of the most important virtues we need to cultivate in modern life. So I guess in addition to decluttering my house this summer, I also figure out what I should be leaving undone.

Ha, yeah, that tip from AMS is not helpful at all. For example, the first thing that strikes me is that it assumes a parent-child dyad with no other family members around who also might have opinions about whatever "choices" are offered. And in fact, of the Montessorians I know, the ones with the most "Montessori" homes are also the ones with one child. Hm, random thought, but I wonder if our collective mothers' disinclination to teach us useful skills has anything to do with the decreased amount of time kids presumably spent with their siblings over the course of the last century. Maybe our moms had way less practice "teaching" younger children than would once have been the case (this might have also been true generation or two above them? I remember a long while ago we had a discussion of how the radio changed how families spent their "free" time together). That might explain why they learned those skills well themselves, but weren't as able to pass them along to the next generation. Are we going to follow any kind of a schedule for discussing Bookless Lessons? This weekend I am wrapping up a project I foolishly agreed to help with, but after that I will be starting my reread. Should be fun!

I don't think there is one either, so I'm trying to figure out what hidden assumptions I have that make it seem that way to me. 🙂 Thanks for helping me sort out what is confusing me. I was really struck by this part of that short quote I posted: "Failure results more often from lack of understanding the things to be done than inability to do what is required." I don't have a lot of memories of being taught things as a child - the things I remember being taught were academic subjects (I was homeschooled through 8th grade), but even then, as soon as I was reading independently, I was sort-of Robinsoned. I don't remember asking my parents for help when I got stuck or confused, nor do I remember them taking the time to teach to me to do other things, chores or whatever. I do remember impatience and exasperation when I or my siblings were slow or clumsy or couldn't do things well right away. So perhaps that's the cause of my lack of intuition about how to judge my children's abilities and lack of confidence that I've equipped them well enough to fairly hold them to high standards (but also why I feel slightly less clueless about academic matters than everything else). I also think I often attribute my own less-impressive-efforts to laziness or lack of willpower but at least sometimes I'm actually suffering from "a lack of understanding of the things to be done." In any case, I'm going to be particularly paying attention to what EFL says about all this on this read through.

I had some quotations from EFL's own writings I meant to add to the above, but got distracted. 🤪 Anyway, here's one I found interesting and I will try to come back and add the others later:

I don't know, guys, I feel like there is a big difference between the providing excellent examples and then having various carrots and/or sticks to try to get children to meet those standards. Montessori said that a drive for excellence was one of the basic human tendencies, so I'm just not sure that it actually requires elaborate motivational systems (which isn't to say that it is totally "natural" or will happen no matter what, of course). And in my reading about childrearing in traditional cultures, children seem to have be given a lot of freedom, but still contributed to the work of their families and became very competent at those tasks. Another way to say this is that, personally, I'm having difficulty squaring EFL's insistence on work being completed "exactly so" with her just as emphatic emphasis on how progress happens little by little with consistent practice every day, or her comparison of childrearing to tree pruning. Obviously I am missing something. Is it a better intuitive sense of what each individual child is actually capable of so that I could hold each child to a high standard that is actually possible for him to meet? Is it that I don't have an adequate grasp of the training that needs to happen before the child is made to do things "exactly so"? Or is it that, because of the greater simplicity of her times, the things children were asked to do were also somehow simpler than the things I ask my children to do and thus more within their abilities? Or at the very least, moms weren't mentally juggling as many things as I feel like I am and could be more attentive? Of course I can't find it now, but I remember reading one of EFL's columns in which she described giving lessons to the son of a neighbor in the Adirondacks, and you know, there was no switching or anything like that, lol, and you could tell how much she enjoyed his company and his childish efforts. My hunch is that in addition to some combination of the things above, EFL took for granted other, subtle, nonverbal ways of guiding and prompting children, of, basically, exercising authority, that are very hard to reconstruct once you don't have them any more, but for those who still have those skills are so obvious and natural that they also are barely able to talk about or describe them.

One last thought on the tech question: as far as I understand it, which isn't too well, the traditional Christian (and other?) method for disciplining the use of secondary goods is through fasting. I suspect most of us have maybe given up certain technologies or some of their functions for one Lent or another, but I increasingly suspect that it would be good for me to do a more regular, shorter fasting period throughout the year, "weekend luddite" style - every Friday? Sunday? after or before a certain time daily? Or even flip the model so that I'm not abstaining during certain blocks of time, but the default is non-use and there are only certain periods designated for the use of certain technologies.