(And All My) Work Be Praise

At our church in Cincinnati, a high priority was placed on teaching children the basics -- and more! -- of our faith. (This is not at all to say that there is not such a high priority at our current church; the ways and means simply differ.) There was great emphasis on memorization of both Scripture and catechism, and an accountability/reward system in place to help parents stay on track. ( This is a good article on why to catechize our children, along with other arguments for regular family worship.) For several years, the whole church used the Fighter Verse program  for Scripture memorization, children beginning with a shorter set called Foundation Verses . It varied from family to family, but most were able to start working on Scripture memorization with their children as early as two years old. Levi completed the 75 Foundation verses before we moved, and last month we started from the beginning again as part of our morning table time. (More on that later.) 4-1/2-year-old ...

What I'm Cooking Gluten-free banana waffles . We do not eat gluten free -- not even a little bit -- but sporadically throughout the past year or two I've been convinced that we should try. (Silas in particular has an auto-immune condition that I suspect might be alleviated by going GF.) As a result, my pantry is filled with jars of random flours -- sorghum, potato, tapioca -- that don't get much use. We've made this specific recipe several times, though, and it always turns out well. Chocolate chip granola bars . I needed a snack on hand to keep me from just eating straight-up chocolate chips all afternoon. :) Parmesan-crusted chicken breasts . I usually keep a stash of these on hand in the freezer -- just flash freeze on a cookie sheet, then throw in a Ziploc bag. Thaw before baking. What I'm Reading Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend . A dear friend sent this to me last month in a care package. It's a quick, easy read, but the premise is unusual and theref...

This is one of my favorite easy activities, as you can tell by the fact that this is my third blog post about it! A big piece of paper, a marker, and a set of letter magnets is all it takes for a quick 5-10 minutes (depending on the child) of letter recognition. It started with Silas and upper-case letters two years ago , and then upper/lower case matching last summer . And now, here we are with Toby! He knows most of his capital letters by sight, so after a day or two with the capitals I'll probably try to get him to match some lower-case letters. It's never something we spend gobs of time on, just a few minutes here and there while a brother finishes up breakfast or something. Funny side note: if you clink the link to last summer's blog, you'll see that Silas (last year) and Toby (this year) are wearing the same jammies in these pictures. :)

Around the beginning of August, I realized I'd fallen into my usual summer Bible reading slump -- as in, I wasn't doing any at all, outside of Sunday morning sermons. Bible Study Fellowship keeps me accountable during the academic year, and I always have great intentions for summer self-study, but, well, you know, all the usual excuses. Anyway, as I was saying, around the beginning of August, I decided to read through all of the Psalms before the baby arrives. It's an ambiguous goal, obviously, since the end date is unknown, but I found an approximately-two-month-long plan and set in. (When Levi asked to read through the whole Bible, I downloaded an easy "Reading Plan" app that has dozens of plan options.) I'm already two weeks behind but determined to keep going. I read from the ESV app on my phone, which has really easy-to-use features for highlighting and note-taking, plus I can grab it off the nightstand and read in the dark as soon as I wake up. I try ...

About a month ago, I explained to you how I obtain and store all the homeschooling freebies I come across. And as you can plainly see, I often DO use what I have gathered. All the same, today I came across an article that was so obviously ME that I had to own it, laugh it off, and share it with you. It's long past time for a desktop purge, I believe! Read it here: Table Life Blog Disclaimer: I've never read anything on this blog before, so I cannot attest to its general content. This post resonated with me, and we happen to use the same history curriculum. That's all.

Silas (4) asked to learn how to read back in March. The same week, I received an e-mail about a free trial of Reading Eggs , so I went ahead and signed up. I'd never pay for it (because I simply don't pay for things like that), but it was a fun and easy introduction to phonics and sounding out words. By the time our four-week trial was up, he was ready to jump into BOB book s.  A week or two ago, I remembered a long-time friend of mine having used a learn-to-read Bible with some of her kiddos. I didn't find what I was looking for on Amazon (since I can't remember exactly what it was called), but I did stumble upon this Early Reader's Bible . The reviews were excellent and the price couldn't be beat ($0.01 used, plus $3.99 shipping), so I bought it on a whim. It's perfect  for him. On any given page, I estimate he can read about 60-70% of the words, so it's enough for him to feel confident, but it's not going to be too easy any time soon. Alr...

As I mentioned a few weeks ago , I'm trying to pick up on some kindergarden-ish things I might have missed with Owen (5.75) using the ABC Jesus Loves Me 5-year curriculum . Over the past month, we've done a week-at-a-time overview of the four seasons: simple information like what months are in each season, what the weather's like, what holidays are included, and which family birthdays fall at that time. To go along with this, Owen read through the Poppleton series by Cynthia Rylant , even though they're a bit under his reading level (and even though there is no Poppleton in Summer).  It also gave me an opportunity to do a special craft with just him once a week. All of my kids like to do projects, but Owen is particularly artsy, and it was nice to spend a few brief minutes connecting with him over this each week. The first week, I painted his arm and hand brown, and we made four hand/armprints on four pieces of paper. Each one eventually became a tree, decorated fo...

In following the ABC Jesus Loves Me 4-year-old curriculum , I've been doing some activities to introduce Silas to the different coins. For reasons unbeknownst to myself, he recognizes and weirdly loves nickels, but the rest are new. First we did some coin rubbing with crayons. He struggled a little bit at first to hold the crayon on its side, but as you can see in the picture below, we eventually got a good outline to show up.  The following week, as a fine-motor activity, I buried some coins in balls of playdough. The boys (Owen joined in this activity) had dig them out without using their thumbs. It's great for strengthening other muscles of the hand, which in turn helps with handwriting (or, in Silas's case, violin bow-hold). I didn't take any pictures, but here's a token "we play with playdough in our jammies" photo just for fun (messy kitchen counter and everything). Last week, we got a litttle more specific and sorted a pile of co...