At my group at church the other day, a new friend practically gaped at me when I mentioned we homeschool. I only said it because we found out we both have three children at nearly the same ages, and she was laughingly saying she wouldn't have made it out the house if she had to bring all three (we meet on a school day). I didn't want her to think I was being a snot and dashing off for no reason, when I was really going to get Levi from the homeschool group that meets in another building, so I said we homeschool.
I think a lot of people think it must be really, really hard to homeschool. And, yes, it is work, but there's a definate trade off work-wise. So I thought today I'd take you on a little peek behind the scenes around here, at one thing we do.
After reading Swiss Family Robinson, I decided that I really liked the idea of a family starting their day together with prayer. Plus I wanted to teach my kids how to pray His Word. So I wrote out some scriptures, and put them in a binder... First we do the prayer the Lord taught us...
...and then we flip to the verse of the day, which has our calendar things stuffed into it. Levi reads the verse, and then we pray it back to God, and then the boys do their morning jobs (one does the calendar and one feeds and waters the dog)...
...(you can tell it was Micah's day to do the calendar - he likes to put the day of the week upside down) The last thing we do is flip to the back of our book and Levi reads a poem. Last time he did The Lion, by Jack Prelutsky, which is funny, so this time he's learning a piece by William Blake. If he reads it once a day, it only takes a couple of weeks for him to memorize it.
My two favorite things about this are: first, my little sponges are memorizing verses with practically no effort. Micah was spouting off "Our Father..." by himself within 8 or 9 days, and quite pleased with himself. (Course, he insists on pronouncing heaven as "Kevin").
The second thing I love is that I can pick out verses that apply to issues we're dealing with. Laziness? Toss in a proverb. Trouble admitting when you've done wrong? Toss in "if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us..." We do verses that are praise verses, too.
The boys are learning that Scripture actually applies to their everyday lives, and that God cares about the way they live.
All that in about five minutes. Pretty cool, huh?
No comments:
Post a Comment