Once a week, we take a day to do reinforcement activities to go with what we have been learning in our curriculum.
The verse that has been our theme verse for the character quality, "Attentiveness", is Proverbs 20:12. It says "The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, the LORD hath made even both of them".
Attentiveness is something that I want my children to grasp. I think that most parents struggle with getting their children to truly
listen and
watch.To go along with our "attentiveness" theme, we completed a poster project today. I took a huge stack of magazines that Grammy gave us and searched through them for pictures of people with nice eyes and ears. I tore the pages out for the boys to cut pictures of eyes and ears to paste to a dark blue poster-board.
We cut out so many eyes and ears that it just about completely covered the poster board. Then I cut out different colors of slips of construction paper and had the boys write one word of the verse on each slip. We then glued the words on top. After gluing the verses on top of the pictures/poster, I typed out words like "listen", "pay attention", "look", "don't get distracted", "concentrate" and "hear" in various fonts on the computer and cut those strips out to paste randomly on the poster. It is quite interesting looking and hangs in the dining room.
A few things we all learned:
1. Don't give up, your efforts will be rewarded: after cutting a few pictures out, they (and I) were ready to be done but I made us finish :-) It was tedious because it was so time consuming!
2. We must use our ears & eyes to pay attention.
3. Use art to glorify the Lord!
4.
Everyone's eyes and ears are different
We are still reading a biography about Helen Keller. I think I have one or two chapters left. I was able to find braille and sign language books at our library. Of course the boys loved that.
Another project that the boys are doing (we started today) is writing their own story books. I bought some of those 3-brad paper folders to put their stories in. They love writing the stories and drawing a picture to go with it. It helps with their penmanship, writing logic, spelling, grammar/phonics, & creativity. After having them write their story, I had considered erasing mistakes and have them re-write the story. After trying that, I decided to take a more gentle approach and allow them to put their story into the folder the way it is. Then I can see what needs work without destroying their efforts, and assign those misspelled words on workbook days to improve their writing. I am giving a folder to Ryan too so that he can included his artwork.
Last night after church, I bought an inexpensive analog/digital clock resource to help me teach the time concept. I remember struggling as a child to grasp the differences of late p.m. & early a.m. Well, it IS dark early a.m....why would that be?
I think that it is so confusing for an young children to grasp (especially since they are always in bed in the late p.m. & early a.m. hours). I found
this game on the
internet to help us, and then I am using the clock from
Wal-mart to reinforce the idea.
Has anyone ever heard of "buddy school?". I saw a home-schooling blogger that talked about buddy school in larger families. I thought it was a great idea to help children get along with each other and work together as a team. Before I had even introduced this idea to my kids, they did it anyway! Justin has been showing Ryan how to write his letters! Ryan thinks it's just great. I love the sweet voice Justin uses to teach. It is so important to me that my children build strong relationships with one another. At this point, they are teetering daily between fighting and hugging. It's like a roller coaster some days. The Lord is helping us though!
I love it!
