love to paint

I think Language Arts is a complicated subject to teach children. It focuses on the skills of reading, writing, speaking,  and listening.  This translates to a long list of skills and content to be taught.  I have been contemplating what reading skills to teach and how to them a great deal since the beginning of this past summer. When students are in kindergarten and first grade, the primary focus of reading instruction is on read alouds and phonics skills.  Beginning reading comprehension is instroduced.  In second grade and then third grade, children are able to read on their own and need to develop comprehension skills and strategies along with vocabulary.  With each year, children must develop the skills that will help them understand what they read on a deeper level. For phonics instruction, I start with Hooked on Phonics PreK to teach my children the alphabet.  It is one of the few curriculums I've found that really helps parents learn how t...

A few weeks ago, I realized that I needed to tackle PE and come up with a short-term and long-term plan for my kids (and me).  During the summer, they take swimming lessons and in the past during the school year, I've enrolled them in dance and gymnastics, but we didn't want to do that this year.  I had planned on signing my kids up for soccer this year, but I missed the deadlines.  So, I made plans with a friend and her 2 kids to get together for PE once a week. Of course since I'm a planner, I felt like I needed to come up with a big, overarching plan.  I'm definitely a planner.  A friend at church had mentioned to me that she and her girls were running this fall for PE.  I think that idea stuck in my head.  And that's where we started. The first week, we ran around our house 4 times (one lap is about 75 yards), stretched, and started learning how to do jumping jacks. Here's the routine: Stretch:      1) Reach up and then reach ...

This Sunday's paper contained the Parade magazine as usual.  The cover article is this one:   http://www.parade.com/health/2012/10/07-why-so-many-parents-are-delaying-vaccines.html  on vaccines.  I think this article is well written and not extreme.   I have been concerned about the increase in the number of parents who are not vaccinating their children.  Honestly, this article expresses my concerns well.  I remember visiting a church a few years ago where I knew many of the parents were choosing to delay or not vaccinate their children.  I was quite anxious about my children being in the nursery.  One thing most people don't realize is that when they choose to delay or not vaccinate their children, they are not only putting their own children at risk, but also those who are unable to be vaccinated for health or age reasons.   Our culture is so self-centered.  We are encouraged to think more of our own families than of the gre...

While I was expecting our oldest daughter, we attended a small church in Georgia for a few months where I was the oldest person in the congregation (even older than the pastor and his wife!).  It was an interesting few months for us.  We learned a lot.  We were humbled, too.  We went to the church thinking that we needed one thing--contemporary worship and found that we needed quite another--we needed to be where God wanted us.  That isn't always going to be where we would first choose, though.   One of the things we noticed at that church was that because the church was missing mature Christians, there wasn't anyone walking alongside the very young Christians in the congregation.  There weren't any Bible studies going on and they didn't understand how the Bible applied to their lives.  They understood the sermons which were preached expositorily, but were struggling and didn't understand the basics of the Christian faith.    In ra...