I wanted to post the ‘little’ lesson I wrote for BAR or Reading Comprehension using the NP models and forms. This lessons supplements the Bible Study for that particular week so we used the leading idea and principle from the Bible Study for that week.

Principle: Eph 6:1-Children obey your parents in the Lord for this is right

Leading Idea: Jesus submitted to and obeyed His parents, even though He was God’s son

Scripture: Luke 2:41-52

Memory verse: Matthew 5:16-Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven.

Day1:

Read scripture

Copy memory verse

Define obedience on Word Map

Day 2:

Read scripture

Define antonym(grammar)

Identify antonym to obedience=disobedience

Read Deut 28, 4:40, Psalm 1 to compare/contrast consequences of obedience and disobedience.

Fill in T-chart with observations from scripture

Day 3:

Discuss how we let our light shine thru being obedient

Here is what my dd did for her reading comprehension assignment. I used the Noah Plan’s form for a word map from the Reading Guide(2nd edition). This guide is packed full of resources to use to teach reading and all that is included in reading…fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, phonemic awareness. It recommends the WRR for orthography and spelling.

The second day’s assignment was a T-chart that I used to introduce the concept of antonyms and to highlight the consequences of obedience and disobedience. This was based on the scriptures I used….u can adapt these to whatever scriptures you use and to the ages of your children and their ability to reason, etc.

I absolutely love the richness, thoroughness and the detail this reading guide goes into and the tools it gives u to teach reading. The only hitch for me is in the implementation of it. I only have so many hours in a day to do what needs to be done and I can’t implement ‘half’ of what I want to do, what is in my heart to do right now. So I’ll just do what I can. This is the first and ONLY BAR assigment I’ve written…prayerfully I’ll be able to write more..also, this lesson came spur of the moment. This was not in my plan. While we were on this particular Bible Study lesson I felt a prompting to do a little BAR or comprehension lesson on it. As you can see it was nothing “earth shattering” but prayerfully God was able to use it to re-inforce and solidify and “imprint His laws” on my child’s heart!! If so then this simple lesson made a difference in my child’s life…to God be all the Glory!!

Today we studied the terrestrial earth.  We studied from this website…

http://www.geography4kids.com/ 

I just read to them from the pages on this website.  Today was not met with the same oohs and aahs from yesterday but I wanted to introduce these concepts.  I feel though that I can spend another day on this to insure understanding.  I think I may need to go thru GACE again just to make sure I am outlining this clear.  Or maybe I can just leave it at this for an introduction and move on to the individuality of the continents and living things in the next unit(which is Moses where we’ll take a look at Egypt and the continent of Asia…)

Yesterday we finally got to the Geography portion of our Creation unit. We started with these scriptures as our leading ideas…pointing to God’s Principle of Individuality….these scriptures could actually be principles in themselves.

Isaiah 45:18
For thus saith the LORD that created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it, he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited: I am the LORD; and there is none else.

Psalm 115:16

The heaven, even the heavens, are the LORD’s: but the earth hath he given to the children of men.

Job 26:7

He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing.

In the NIVr version of my dc’s bible it says that God hung the earth FIRMLY in place…and we discussed that and what all of these verses mean.

As suggested in GACE(p 269-270) we started discussing the indivduality of the earth in the universe, in the solar system, and the terrestrial globe. I tried to highlight the following(as I was amazed myself that)

1. out of all the galaxies and phenomenon and the vastness of space(there are galaxies and stars billions of light years away) that God made earth just for man.

2. the earth is special-why and how

3. That out of all the galaxies we exist in a galaxy(Milky Way) and are located right on the edge of the galaxy where we won’t burn up with radiation. Any closer to the center of the galaxy the radiation is so strong that no life could exist.

4. That out of all the planets in our solar system orbiting the sun that earth is the only one that has conditions right for life…perfect distance from the sun where we are not too hot nor cold; the perfect distance where the water can stay in liquid form…etc.

This was a wonderful study on the first day.

Overall I think it went well(mainly b/c I was not sure how to even teach these ideas but I got thru it and more understanding came to me as I was teaching my dc…understanding of how to make my points clearer).

I found these websites to supplement our scripture study…to illustrate the universe, solar system and terrestrial globe.

http://www.godandscience.org/love/design.html

http://www.kidsastronomy.com/deep_space.htm

http://solarviews.com/eng/homepage.htm

These are the drawings/geography-astronomy projects my dc made after our first lesson.

This nebula was drawn by the boy(5yo), written by his own hand, mom assisting with the spelling only. I thought this was an excellent rendition of a nebula from a 5 year old taught by a mom who had no idea what a nebula was or that they even existed!! We observed nebulas from this sight…

http://www.godandscience.org/love/tourjs.html click on the Orion Nebula from the slide show tour of the universe.

Or

Here is another good picture of it..http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap020213.html

He also drew Jupiter…(I wrote Jupiter for him

Ok, now my 5yo girl recorded this for her notebook…

Her scripture verse is Gen. 1:1. She added her own little commentary to the end of this…she says…that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth….(her commentary) HE WAS SO GOOD AT IT.

I thought that was precious!

In our last, ‘haphazard’, 3 weeks we had to take a more ‘relaxed’ approach to our homeschooling due to the many events/celebrations that occurred. I purchased some time ago A FAMILY PROGRAM FOR READING ALOUD developed by ROSALIE JUNE SLATER. This has been a wonderful, very rich resource of classic reading selections and how to teach certain categories of literature from the Principle Approach. I decided to go back to the beginning of the book and start there with my read aloud selections. We don’t read aloud as often as I want to..our days seem to get away from us. I guess I feel like Literature is not priority on our list of subjects to study but in the last several weeks we have managed to investigate several of the suggested books in this wonderful resource written by Ms. Slater.

POETRY: We started with THE HOME BOOK OF VERSE FOR YOUNG FOLKS for our poetry introduction. We started with this in July. We are also using Abeka’s spelling workbook and they have a poem assigned for each month for the student to memorize, to use expression when reciting, to practice reading with alternately with Mommy. DD’s favorite poem in THE HOME BOOK OF VERSE is TREE’s by Joyce Kilmer. It goes like this:

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A treee that looks a God all day
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

We’ve also recited Robert Blake’s THE LAMB which is the poem in Abeka’s spelling and poetry text.
Little lamb Little Lamb Who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed
By the stream and o’er the mead;
………..etc.

We worked on this one also in Abeka’s spelling and poetry text…A THANK YOU PRAYER..author unknown
For milk to drink and food to eat;
For eyes and ears and hands and feet;
Thank You God

For mother, father, and their care
For our house and clothes to wear
Thank You God

For friends with whom I run and play
For sun and rain and night and day
Thank You God

For all the things You give to me
Help me to always thankful be
Thank You God.

We will study Psalm 23 as poetry as well as the other literary genre found in the Bible.

PICTURE BOOKS AND STORIES: We got from the library and read the following:

THE RUNAWAY BUNNY
THE GINGERBREAD BOY
**TIME OF WONDER
**THE BIG SNOW
THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULD
THE VELVETEEN RABBIT
MADELINE-this is turning out to be one of my dc’s favorite. We found a ‘pop-up, 3D’ version of this book’

** we did not read these as they were due back to the library before we any interest was aroused in these books. They were kind of slow moving I think for my dc. TIME OF WONDER was very descriptive(which is good) but at the time I started to read it my dc had blank faces and were not really interested…so back to the library it went..maybe we’ll try again with it later.

We also have ‘zoo-billion’ other picture books, easy readers, and easy chapter books on the children’s shelves and also in our schoolroom that have been given to us(free! Praise God!!) by other parents and such…some were going to be THROWN out by the school my dh works for…some of these were BRAND NEW, STILL IN THE PLASTIC books that my dh found in the ‘throw away’ pile at his school so God has blessed us to have a home library already. I just need to make MORE use of these books, i.e. take the time to look thru them myself b/c the dc choose the same ones over and over and when dd is feeling lazy she’ll choose one with as few words a possible

So that is the beginning ’smathering’ of our read-aloud program. Sometimes I wish we could do all of study from one literature book..I guess you would call that a literature unit. I wonder if somehow I could teach reading, spelling, grammar, history, geog, science, etc. from one classic novel. This is kind of burning in my heart to do this so I think I will look into how to write lessons for these subject areas after choosing a children’s classic…just something very basic but still cover the important areas.

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I totally forgot to mention that we got a new computer…how could I forget THAT excitement. We got a DELL Dimension E510 at a great price($649). It came with 1Gig of RAM and a 19 inch flat panel monitor…those were FREE upgrades. I found this a Dell.com under the Dell specials or Dell savings or something like that. We upgraded to an all in one photo printer…it is a flat-bed copier, scanner, and printer(photo)…So now I can make copies from all of these resource books I have and NOT have to go to the library and do it!! Woooo Hoooo!!! Thank u Jesus!! And what convinced dh to go for it is that with Dell financing u have up until October 2007 to pay it off before they start charging interest….Yippee!!

So that was something else that has been taking my time. I’m still trying to figure out how to get some of my important documents over here on the new comp.

Our old computer we will use for the kiddos to play their educational CD-roms on…Dh even suggested hooking the old one up to the internet so they can play games like disneychannel.com and cartoonnetwork.com.. They get these as a treat from time to time. But I don’t think they need internet access right now. I”m doing all the research and reading for their lessons…maybe later when they are older and begin to research for themselves.

..besides…. I think no internet access is the best parental filter there is…..:-)

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Wow! I cannot believe it has been 3 weeks since I last posted. I’ve had a pretty busy 3 weeks so I guess I need to update….

1. We celebrated baby boy turning 2 on July 15…
2. We celebrated our 9th wedding anniversary on July 25
3. We celebrated my 40th b-day on Jully 29

Between and betwixt all of these we managed to do get thru some of our lessons. On days where we did not get to everything I placed priority on Bible, Arithmetic, then Spelling/Grammar/Handwriting/Poetry….something from that group.

The second week in August was vacation bible school, which slipped up on me. I was all prepared to start our lessons full steam ahead and then my mil reminded me of VBS…so that was our ’school’ for that week. My dc had a very good time…they love VBS at their uncle’s church…(uncle is Pastor).

So the week after VBS, the beginning of this week on Monday, dd came down with flu-like symptoms, the next day so did ds5, ds2, and myself. I’ve been out of commission for about 2 days. My dc seem to have recovered and I’m just starting to come out of the swimming blur my head was in….thank God the awful headache I had left last night…it was debilating and crippling. My mom had to come over and tend to the dc-fix them dinner and put them to bed for me(and cook for me, too). I haven’t felt that awful in a long time. But I’m feeling better now.

As far as our history unit we are supposed to be studying Geography of Creation this week. Three days of that has been shot but I’ve decided not to stress. In the next few days I’m going to be researching some biblical principles on the earth(and it’s individuality in the universe and solar system). I don’t plan on getting to elaborate, just accessing some websites that have terrific pictures of such(when I find them I”ll post them and share them).

Well I’m gonna go and put baby boy back in his bed for the 10th time tonight….talk atcha later!!

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