Meant To Teach

My youngest daughter learns so differently from my oldest daughter. With my oldest daughter, she's never had a problem with spelling. She can look at a word one or two times and know how to spell it by the end of the week...without even hardly practicing. Its crazy! That's also why she is in a homeschool spelling bee the middle of this coming month. But as for my youngest daughter, she learns differently. Spelling is not her strong point. I can't just have her write words x amount of times. She doesn't get it that way. She just copies and moves on without even remembering how to spell the word. She's more of an auditory learner. She has to constantly spell the word out loud. Word searches work good for her, because she is having to FIND the word. For instance, when she is looking for the word "snow". She is constantly saying the spelling out loud..."S", "N", "O", "W". And she continues to do this until she finds th...

We've had fun this month with Christmas...and we're not through yet! We've been doing lots of activities such as mapping out the trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem, to making a pretend budget and going through ads for the girls to get things as Christmas gifts, to learning about what a census is. And ofcourse, we can't forget making ornaments! So far, we completed a Nativity lapbook (the girls love lapbooks) and The Christmas Day Kitten lapbook. Below is a picture of my oldest going through magazines and ads for her pretend "Christmas Shopping" and making sure she stays within her $200 budget. And who can forget Christmas traditions...this week we'll be doing a Gingerbread lapbook and A Legend of the Candy Cane Lapbook !

My eight year old has discovered the truth about Santa. "He's not REAL!" is what she keeps arguing with my six year old. This morning, Ashlyn, my youngest and I were up all alone in the house and she came to sit on my lap and just flat out asked me, "Is he real, Mommy?" We didn't want to force this question from her, because we've wanted to let her have her childhood and pretend. Well, when she came up and asked it - I had no choice to tell her the truth. And this is what I told her... "His name was Nicholas, and we call him St. Nicholas, because saint means someone who belongs to God, just like we do. In St. Nicholas' town there were many poor children. They didn't have enough food, clothes, or toys. St. Nicholas used his money to buy food, clothes, and toys for the poor children. He didn't want them to be embarrassed by his gifts, so he gave secretly." "St. Nicholas also told everyone about Jesus and how much God loved...

As an adult, I've gathered so much myself from teaching my own kids about Thanksgiving. I think that growing up, we have just taken it for granted. But it really is amazing to me, learning about the pilgrims and realizing that they came to this country so they could have the freedom to worship God. WOW! How we take that for granted! Yet, today - its disappointing that not enough people want to worship God. Our country truly was founded on Christianity. Somewhere along the way and through the years - it seems we have lost that. Now, we can't even say Christmas in a store! The first Thanksgiving, after half of the pilgrims had died from sickness, the other half had the chance to go back to England and they chose not to. They, instead, chose to stay here and thank God for their blessings! What a great group of amazing people. If only we had more "William Bradfords" today! Over the last month, we've learned about pioneers from Spain, England, Holland, and France. I...

This week and next week, we are learning about Native Americans. So far we've covered the Woodland Indians and the Plains Indians. We've had fun so far learning about the different kinds of houses for Indians...such as wigwams, longhouses, etc., along with learning about wampum and warshields. We even went to the Red Clay Pow Wow and found someone with wampum earrings on and the girls got to see what wampum really looks like and the man told us that the shell that it comes from was cut under water. He told us about wampum being used as money for the Indians as well. We finished up the lesson on Indians with doing Hopi hairstyles and making Navajo fry bread. Learning about Indians was much more interesting than I remember as a little kid! This is our Indian Lapbook. The girls made a key and mapped out where the different kinds of Indians lived.

The shortest verse in the Bible is "Jesus Wept." A lot of us already know that. But what does it mean? We know the story. Its when Jesus came to the tomb of his friend, Lazurus. Even though Jesus knew in a matter of seconds that He was going to raise Lazurus from the dead...He stood at the tomb with Mary and Martha and He wept. Why would He cry for that? Why would He cry when He knew He could fix everything? He was crying because He felt the pain of what Lazurus' sisters were going through. He cried because the fear that Lazurus must have felt right before he was dying. He cried because of all the pain that everyone felt. He felt that pain, too. Jesus wept. Jesus cried! I believe He did it to show us that God knows our pain, shares our pain. Every tear we cry - He knows it. Why? He loves us. The depth of His love is so much that I don't think I can even understand. I often think of my husband's love for me and his children and my love for him and my children. ...

She was a little slower than Kylee (only two weeks to be exact), but she's two years younger. My 6 year old learned her states! We took the girls to Pinstrikes to celebrate. We were celebrating that Ashlyn learned her states and Kylee learned her states and capitals! Yet again, I am a proud mommy!