A Glimpse Into This Weekend

I have the privilege this weekend of speaking at ENOCH of New Jersey State Homeschool Convention. I am having a blast. Yesterday I spoke about "Taking the"School" Out of Homeschool: Homeschooling as a Lifestyle" and today I will be presenting, "Ten Things Every New Homeschooler Should Know."

I had a full room yesterday and there is nothing like connecting with those homeschooling families in person. God has blessed me abundantly with this opportunity.

I will share more after the convention is over, but here are some fun snap shots from yesterday:

The kids were soooo excited to meet Steve Demme. 

The Miracle of Spring

My own backyard is bursting with God's glory these days. It is amazing to see miracles all around- we have a beautiful robin's nest right in a low bush- easy to observe. First it was a nest, then the next day there was one egg. The next day another egg. Today a third egg! Simply beautiful. Thank you Lord for this science lesson that reveals your handiwork.

Our garden started sprouting this week! 

Seedlings popped up through the soil. Perfectly timed as we study botany.

Heard in our discussions..."Isn't God simply amazing? He takes a dead seed, and He brings it to life!  He awakes the life inside with light and sun! Its roots go down in the soil...and it grows, lifting so high to reach the sun!' 

Isn't that the picture of us- we were once dead, yet He made us new.

We burst forth through the dirt, and reached for the light. He gives us a place to let our roots go deep, and then we bear fruit...beautiful fruit that only comes from him. (Gal. 5:22-23)

Thank you Lord for the miracle of Spring.

Distractions

An oldie but goodie...reprinted from last year...

It's so hard to focus these days. There is noise everywhere. There is stuff everywhere...pulling at us.

I sit even now, writing this with no one home but me. This.never.ever.happens.  And I don't know what to do with it.
The dryer is buzzing, the clothes are overflowing the basket.  The dishes are needing to be put away. But I want to sit. In the quiet. Yet almost don't know how to anymore.

In the mornings I rise an hour before the children. The quiet of the house is a blessing. The stillness. It's just me and the Lord. It's our time. Yet as the clock ticks closer I begin to feel the urge rise in me. The feet will soon be heard pitter-pattering across the floor. Every minute the sun is up longer, is a minute closer to the noise.

Oh Lord, I want to give my full attention to you. Not the ticking clock. I want to be in the moment. The noise of the house will be here soon enough.

The Lord of all the universe deserves my utmost attention. 

Not half hearted. 

Maybe I need to get up an extra half hour earlier? Is that solution? No.
The solution is to focus, on Him.  No matter if I am in a train station with crowds abound, I need to focus on Him.
No excuses.

I want Him to be at the front of every thought. Yet there are those distractions.

Messes are made. Children fight.  Things break. Schoolwork needs to be redone. It's loud.
I am distracted.

Yet, the ironic part is, in all of that, He is there, just as He is in the quiet. He hasn't gone anywhere.
My mind has.

The distraction online is too much for some. There is too much to see, too many things to read. Why, oh why are we distracted by what everyone else is doing?  We need to focus.

In this world full of distraction, let's go back to simple. Do we need to be so plugged in? Do we need to focus on the futile?

I want to focus on the fruit. On people. Relationships. My family My kids. So much more matters than this world.

Eternal focus. I want to look up and not all around me.

Our best homeschool days are when we focus on Him in everything:

Wow, we did that really hard math. Praise Him. 
Do you see His hand in History? Marvel at Him.
Wow, we have a sunny day. Praise Him. 
We can't find the Legos. Pray to Him.
We have an argument. Ask Him for forgiveness.  
He is there. In it all.

As Spring approaches I am pointing out Him in the creation. Things are blooming. The dead trees are bursting forth again with life. Feel the warmth of the sun-the plants need it to live. We feel the Light of His Son. We need Him to live.

He is everywhere. 

Be so distracted by Him, it takes over every lesson.

He deserves our undivided attention.

I say this for your own benefit, not to lay any restraint upon you, but to promote good order and to secure your undivided devotion to the Lord.

1 Corinthians 7:35 ESV 

Called Home: Finding Joy in Letting God Lead Your Homeschool  Available for PDF download or Kindle at Amazon. com just $0.99!

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Simply Homeschool is now just $0.99 for download or for Kindle at Amazon.com Click here for more info

Simple Spring- Soak It in and Enjoy These Days

Simple Spring is my favorite time of year. I have been refreshed and renewed with the sunshine and warmth. The flowers blooming, the trees budding...it all reminds me of our Savior's great love for us.

As we read this morning of God's Creation and how beautiful and intricate everything He made is- I reminded the kids how all of Creation points to the Creator. He is creative, unique, and simply beyond comprehension.

For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. 

Romans 1:20

So take time to enjoy the simple. Bring the books outside...surround yourself with His Creation. Remember He makes all things new! This time with your kiddies passes oh so quickly, sit awhile and soak in the laughs, the smiles, and the joy...that all comes from those little hearts as they learn as a family immersed in His Creation.

Here is how we've been spending our days:

Our classroom on sunny days...

Our first red strawberry!

School outside!

Birds nest down in a low bush-thank you Lord for providing this easily accesible lesson!

Our biography reading this week

Reading from Apologia's Exploring Creation with Botany

Garden journals

Simplify Meal Planning...While the Kids are Learning REAL Life Skills...A Reader Shares Her Story

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I am so excited to share this with you. I had a reader write me and tell me all about this God-given idea for simple meal planning that is also teaching real life skills. I just love it! She did not want to be credited but wanted the idea to be credited to God alone! What an awesome testimony of God's hand in all the details of our lives. 

So here is what my reader sent me:

First of all, everything involved with making meals was  not fun for me.  Coming up with the ideas was very hard.  And I had to do it three times a day, every day, every week, every year.  Then to top it off, I can’t stand shopping.  Cooking was not fun either for me.  I want everything to be healthy for my family, but I love junk food type eating.  Every meal was drudgery.  I wanted to do the right thing, take good care of my family, make our meals pretty and tasty and healthy, on time (as we eat our meals together), and stay in our budget.  Add to that the dishes that needed washing at the end of the meal (we don’t have a dishwasher), and I did not look forward to time in the kitchen.

I finally prayed about this problem.  God gave me a fantastic idea.  Praise HIM!!  He is so good to me.

I have two children.  Each of us has two days we are responsible for. A bigger family could work on a two-week or monthly schedule.

Monday - Youngest Child
Tuesday - Mom
Wednesday - Youngest Child
Thursday - Oldest Child
Friday - Mom
Saturday - Oldest Child
Sunday - Leftovers from the week’s meals

One day a week we go through recipes (or not) and come up with a meal plan for our assigned days.   Then we write down all the ingredients on our lists that we will need to purchase after checking in the pantry to see if we already have some of the ingredients.  This has taught us to use up ingredients we already have and not let those cans and bags and boxes sit on the shelf in our pantry and get closer and closer (and pass) the expiration date.  This wastes money and food and just wasn’t good stewardship.  This was also something I needed to implement, myself, so we learned this together. : )

We then go to the bank and get out $30 each ($15 per day).  They see me taking money out of the bank every week.  We go in so they can see me interact with the teller, and they watch as she takes my ID and fills out slips of paper and hands me the money the way I request it (6 tens and 6 fives).  Sometimes they ask questions about what they saw and then real-life learning takes place.  We put our $30 in each of our own envelopes. Then we get a free cookie our bank offers on the way out.  It’s a good time.

I can see more learning taking place at the bank in the future by letting them fill out the withdrawal slips and making the actual transactions with the teller.

Now, comes the part my children really like and where a lot of learning takes place.  We go to the grocery store.  We each get our own cart (but usually they like to share a cart and divide their piles onto their own side of the cart.)  Trying to practice Masterly Inactivity, I sometimes watch them make a poor choice or obviously overspend their budget, but I keep it to myself.  The mistake will soon appear to them, then we can work on how to fix it or make better and healthier choices the following week.


So, this is some of the learning that has taken place from our shopping system:

-My youngest child has asked to carry a calculator in the store and tallies up purchases as they are placed in the cart.  (This is exciting because I don’t allow them to use calculators at home.)  This has stopped the overspending and finding out in front of the casher with someone else waiting behind us. 

-My oldest child likes to use up what is already in the pantry and not spend much of the budgeted money.  (I forgot to mention that the leftover money is saved in a crock for a “going out to eat” meal.  We all like to do this, and it’s quite an incentive to not spend the whole grocery budget.) 

-My children have learned how to interact and exchange money with different cashiers, as we each check out one at a time doing the whole transaction on our own. 

Then the best part for me is about to happen.  Going into the kitchen (did I just say that?).  Praise God for this plan, because I can say that.  We each put our groceries away where they go.  (One tip is for each of us to have our own area for our special ingredients in the pantry, so my oldest child doesn’t “shop”  in there and use it in meal planning.) Then we each take care of preparing the meals on our own day.  Most of the time, we’ve made it a surprise and no one else is allowed in the kitchen.  We do it up with great presentation to impress Daddy.  Oh, the learning that is taking place in the kitchen is abundant as measuring, direction following, using the timer, mixing ingredients in certain order, kitchen safety, and trying creative inventions is happening everyday. We’ve had quite an interesting variety of meals, too (spaghetti with mashed potatoes and gravy for one. :) Daddy loves it. (We are actually spending less than we have in many years on groceries and staying within a budget.  The extras that are necessary to run a house are budgeted in a separate envelope and purchased as needed.)   Everyone is happy and excited and guess what… I only have two days a week I’m responsible for.  So, now making meal plans is much easier, way more fun to prepare to impress, and the children are learning so much.

And just to end the day so much more enjoyably than in the past, the whole family cleans up the kitchen, and we do the dishes together.  My husband likes to wash, and the children and I dry and put away.

Thanks for reading this and thanks to God for answering my prayer better than I could have thought or imagined.

Called Home: Finding Joy in Letting God Lead Your Homeschool  Available for PDF download or Kindle at Amazon. com just $0.99!

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Simply Homeschool is now just $0.99 for download or for Kindle at Amazon.com Click here for more info

Lessons From Thomas Edison- A Homeschool Success Story

Yesterday we had the awesome privilege to visit the Thomas Edison Museum. My oldest boy is obsessed with inventing and read about Mr. Edison this year, so I promised him a field trip to the museum. We were all pleasantly surprised as there was so much to see, and I was inspired by the fact the Mr. Edison was a successful product of homeschooling! In fact, he was called "slow"at school, but went on to create 1,093 patents in his lifetime and much of our modern day comforts came from Mr. Edison's brilliant mind.

This article found at EdisonMuckers.org explains it beautifully:

The world’s greatest inventor, Thomas Edison, was home schooled by his mother, Nancy Elliot Edison. After performing poorly in the traditional one-room schoolhouse of yesteryear, his mother refused to believe the teacher’s assessment that young Tom’s “brains were addled” (mentally slow). Clearly Tom was experiencing the world quite differently from his classmates, and mother Nancy knew her son had quite a bit of capability from the things he was doing and experimenting with around the house. Through a great deal of nurturing and leadership, she gave him the basic tools to learn, both in the form of process and content; and empowered him to learn.

Nancy Edison encouraged her son to have both a head and hands approach to learning, allowing him to have his own laboratory in their small basement-a place where his father became quite concerned as various small explosions emanated, along with strange smells. Nancy endured over dad’s protests and imbued Tom with four life-long pillars of learning:

• Do not be afraid to fail, keep trying, learn from your mistakes
• Read across the entire span of literature, not just what you like
• It is OK to work with your hands and learn from life, not all important things come from books
• Never stop learning, keep improving yourself.

In later years, a grown and very successful Thomas acknowledged that his mother’s discipline for a focused life was responsible for his great success. Today we hear a great deal of classroom interest in involving children in a head and hands learning environment. Renovated and new museums almost always involve head and hands exhibits or hands-on themes for learning.

Tom obviously learned differently from the standard rote learning and recitation of the day. It was fundamentally necessary for Edison to have a visceral feel for the information he was learning, especially for a need to experiment and react to the results of those experiments. Throughout his life Edison developed a love for literature and could quote many great poems and passages.

His life-long learning style motivated his strenuous recording of experiments, thoughts, and observations in thousands of detailed laboratory notebooks, which scholars are still mining today, 79 years after his death. So intense was his love of information, communications, and learning that he placed his own corporate office in his beautiful and well-stocked library. To him, a corporation was a continuous learning environment. In our Information Revolution today, symbolized by the ubiquitous Internet, Edison would be one very happy fellow!

I don't think it is by accident we have also been reading about Milton Hershey this week, who was also taken out of school because he wasn't doing well. It bored him. Ha! Look how successful he became!

We have learned that some minds can't be contained to a school room- in fact, none should! We have also seen the awesome character traits of diligence, perseverance, and hard work as well as a common trait of making a difference in the world is what helped these men achieve success.

Success for my children will never be defined by a test, a schoolroom, or a job even. 

May their learning never be stopped by a bell forcing them to move on. 

My son is free at home to explore his interests, spend his time discovering on his own, and creating. I would hate to stifle that. Just like Mr. Edison, he needs to experience his learning in real life.

It will be character that counts and character that aims to please the Lord. Without seeking Him first there is no success.

When Things Go Unexpectedly Wrong...

Photo By Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum via Wikimedia Commons

 Sometimes God really has a sense of humor. I had an enormous mountain of laundry to tackle this week. I was dreading it as the pile in my boys room grew bigger and bigger. I finally decided to tackle it, and as the last load was in, and the clean clothes were put away, I was feeling rather accomplished. I was feeling great!

Then as I walked downstairs and I saw water spilling out onto the floor from the laundry room, I knew I was in trouble. Opening the laundry room door, there was about an inch already of water covering the floor and spilling into our hallway. There was water coming out from underneath the machine.

By God's divine grace, my husband had just pulled in. I was panicing, immediately thinking of bills and cost, and the machine that was full of water...how would we empty it..how will we clean this up, what's wrong with the washer, etc. He calmly took over, as He always does, and got our shop vac (which pics up water- I had no idea!) The kids had been outside with our neighbors and they grabbed every towel in the house as we quickly worked to get the water up around our furnace and hot water heater.

Afterwards, the floor was dry and we were left with an enormous amount of sopping wet towels! The kids and the neighbors got fans and started wringing out the towels on the deck and placing them on the fans (genius!) They were also having a blast trying to run around the yard with them to air them out.  They were too wet to put in the dryer yet, and the washer was still full of water. A very light hearted time in the midst of panic. Much needed. Grateful for the innocence of children...

Not long into the situation, probably because of my husband's calm, I became very calm and peaceful. I knew this could be worse. It was a washer, not a child that was broken. The kids were laughing and making the best of the situation....It was OK. It was OK....

I have been known to go into panic mode in the past. Yet this time, I relaxed and saw the situation with calm eyes, knowing the Lord is in control of every detail of my life...even overflowing washers.

He cleanses. I can't help to think He uses situations like these to grow us. The water that could have destroyed actually helped me to in the moment, rely on Him.

Isn't it amazing that the God who created the universe still cares about us in the small things? Because the washer over flowing really is a small thing in the grand scheme of things. Oh, how it could have been a huge thing. Yet, it wasn't.

Simple things matter. And this time, a simple washer taught me more lessons that day than I could have ever imagined.

So when trouble comes, stop and relax and keep your eyes on Him. He takes us through the situation whatever it may be. 

phote source: Pinterest