Teaching your kids to enjoy life-Priority and Privilege

There is such a beauty in the gift of being able to home school. You have a great opportunity to cultivate deeper relationships with your children than you would if they were off under the care of the public school system for the bulk of the day. This is a special reason we choose homeschooling. Through each subject taught and every moment enjoyed together, there are moments that we can make it count. Every day through teaching my children, I shape the way they see the world around them. Whenever I feel like I am not doing enough to “change the world” for the better, I remember that I am building up and training a generation of young men and through my influence and teaching, I hope that they will be changing the world to the glory of God.

One important thing I make sure never to neglect to teach, is teaching them to enjoy this life that God has given them. I want them to never take for granted, the beautiful things in this life, like a beautiful sunrise or sunset, the sound of the rain falling, the big round moon and all its changes, how the trees seem to have hands raised up to heaven, the lovely sound of the birds singing their morning song and the crickets singing a lullaby. It is so important that they are aware of these beautiful things in a fallen world that threatens to drown out the beauty with all of its seemingly inescapable noise.

I make sure that as we go about our day, I do not neglect to point these things out. It shapes the way they see things, when my 5 yr old exclaims with great joy, “Mommy! Look at the beautiful sky God painted for us!” or when my 3 year old, who incidently is supposed to be sleeping, but is instead staring out his window at the moon, comes to get me urging me to come and look at the big round circle in the sky, “The moon, the moon, what color is it mommy?” It happened to be yellow this particular night. “we have to wake up Joshua, he needs to see the pretty moon.”  afterwards praying, "Thank you God for the stars and moon in the sky." 

I love to take these moments and make them personal, I believe it is important to bring life into the classroom, and take thier learning to another level through hands on activities. For example, since John Carlos was so fascinated by the moon, the next day we did a learning activity about the phases of the moon, where we scratched them into the cream of an oreo cookie. (see previous post moons over my oreo in the food for thought series) Since Joshua had been so amazed by the beautiful sunset, we made our own finger paint and painted sunsets with them.

Today, we are going to just go and enjoy Gods creation by being out doors in the beautiful places, observing and taking it all in. Who knows what kind of teachable moments will come out of our time together, there are always teachable moments, you need to be aware of them, and never let them pass. Being together, enjoying life, it’s such a privilege of homeschooling.

Apples to Apples-Food For Thought Series (3)

Can you compare apples to apples? Absolutely! That’s exactly what we did with Todays history lesson on archaeology. Last lesson, we talked about history, and that it is the study of what happened in the past, we talked about how you can learn history based on what people in the past have written about. But how do we find out the history of a given time, if there were not any letters written. We talked about how studying the things people leave behind, can tell the story of history too.

We learned about Archaeology and did a backyard dig, that they were not as interested in as I had thought they would be. So I brought them in to do another activity in which I had dumped out an entire bag of apples on the table and told Joshua to choose one…He chose one and began eating it…not part of the plan…so I told him to choose another one. I told him to tell me in detail every single thing about the apple he had chosen (the uneaten one of course) I wrote down each distinguishing characteristic he told me

1.       It has a dent on the bottom of the flatter side of it

2.       The stem is brown and skinny with a rounded top

3.       One side sticks out more than the other

4.       Its green around the top

5.       Its green on the bottom with pointy leaves

6.       It has a lot of dots all over it

7.       It is red

Then we placed the apple in a bowl with all the rest of them and I read him back his description and he had to find the apple based on his description. That is what archaeologists do they carefully examine every detail of things to learn about history of a person, place, or thing in time.

We enjoyed the lesson and plan to try it out on daddy!

M+M=MM MM Good Math Time Fun-Food for thought series (2)

         

My Joshua was feeling less than challenged by the way I was teaching his math facts. I was following the teacher’s manual to a tee and he was frustrated with the repetition and boring way it was being presented. He said, mommy, I need something more challenging than this.

That is the beautiful thing about homeschooling, and also the reason I LOVE it! You have the freedom to teach a lesson any way you want.

For today,  I just taught the basic math fact concepts outlined in the teachers manual, but instead of having him do worksheet after repetitive worksheet, I Pulled out some colorful coffee mugs and a bag of M&M’s and had him create math equations for each of the math facts that he learned.

It is important for kids to understand the why about the math facts and not just memorize until they are blue in the face, otherwise they can have difficulty in later math when logic and other critical thinking components are more important than straight memorized facts. Therefore I had him create a word problem to illustrate each equation, which was quite comical at times. I also gave him word problems and he had to make the equation with the M&M’s. The bonus was, when he got it right he got to eat the answer! We did that until we ran out of enough M&M’s. Then split the lot J

Then I wrote equations on the board using the math facts we were covering and he had to tell me a word problem to go with it, and I would say a word problem and he would write the equation on the board. Then I even wrote an equation on the board and said he wanted to write the word problem out in pictures, "One beach ball bouncing on the waves, plus two beach balls bouncing on the waves, equals 3 beach balls bouncing on the waves." I love it!

He replied at the end. Mom, that was much more challenging, thanks!

Moons over my Oreo -Food For Thought Series (1)

This is my first post in my "Food for thought" series, on using food as a motivational and fun way to teach.

One great thing about home schooling is having the freedom to teach whatever you want, whenever you want, and however you want.  A great example of this is what I did today with my boys as a result of my 3 year old John Carlos fascination with the moon all of a sudden.  Last night, I heard some thumping around when he was supposed to be going to bed and found him staring out at the full moon. It was shining bright in a sort of yellowish hue. He was saying, the moon, the moon, I see the moon! What color is it mommy? So we talked about the moon and looked at it through binoculars, it was a moment to be cherished.  I told him it was time to say “Goodnight Moon,” but that we would learn more about the moon tomorrow.

So I found a cute lesson plan online at one of my favorite websites for free learning printables and ideas, www.teachmama.com  whereby you use the cream of the oreo to make the moon into all of the moons different phases. They had fun with it and Joshua, my 5yr old was fascinated by the way the phases are changed by the different positions of the sun, moon and earth, and practiced moving the sun and earth into the correct placements above each phase, using the sun as a vanilla oreo and another chocolate oreo as the earth.

It was a fun way to teach these things, I don’t think John Carlos Got it 100% but he enjoyed eating the cookies and frosting and we even crushed up the leftover oreo tops that no one wanted in paper bags by stepping on them…any boy will love that idea…we will be rolling our vanilla ice cream cones in the crushed oreos to make it look like our favorite phase of the moon, after supper tonight. Great times!

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Teachable Moment turns into "Kidspiration"

So as Christians we are always teaching and talking about the Word of God, whether in schooltime or not. The Bible says in Deuteronomy 11:18-19 So commit yourselves wholeheartedly to these words of mine...Teach them to your Children. Talk about them when you are at home and when you are on the road, when you are going to bed and when you are getting up.

In this one particular instance Joshua and I were talking about how God made each person with their own unique purpose. In his wisdom he designed each one, giving them each their own gifts in order to acomplish that unique purpose. We started talking about what we thought our gifts were, and how we could use those gifts to glorify God.

He stated that he believed that drawing was a gift of his...and it is...I asked him what different ways he felt he could honor God using those gifts. He quickly said he should make cards for sick kids in the hospital, and tell them about Jesus...and immediately got to work doing just that.

The more we talked about it the deeper the idea went, He said , we could do this regularly, not just this once, and we can write down their names and pray for them. We should help other kids try to think of ideas on how to use thier gifts to glorify God....Wow! I have been humbled by the desire of my 5 yr old to serve others like this. Its as if by this one conversation, we  have tapped into a well spring of ideas in his little 5 yr old heart.

So in examining my own areas of gifting, one of them being a joy for writing, I decided that the best way to put all of his ideas into motion, would be to start up a blog....or a dot com as Joshua calls it. So I started this blog for him, http://www.theboomerangang.blogspot.com/ So that we could post our journey as we embark on this new mission from God which has sprung up in my little boys heart. We called it The Boomerang Gang because we were created by God with these gifts, sent out into the world, and by using those gifts as they were intended, to serve others and spread the word of God, we bring glory back to God in heaven.

We will post a summary of our visits each week, as well as prayer requests for the kids whos parents permit us to, we will give them the information from the site so that they can visit and give updates if they would like. There is also a tab on there so that other kids and parents can be challenged to examine their gifts and how they might be using them for the glory of God. As they are challenged to put ideas into motion, they are welcomed to share their journey on our blog, so that we may be praying and supporting them as they step out in faith.

I am very excited and humbled by what God is doing in the heart of my little boy. I want to sew the concept of this way of thinking and living in his little heart early on and I cant wait to see how this "kidspired" idea plays out. :)