love to paint

For Christmas, I gave my husband the game, Settlers of Catan.  We had talked about getting it for a long time.  It was on sale at Target just before Christmas and so I was glad to be able to get it for him. We sat down to play it with our girls yesterday and had a great time!  But, I noticed a few things about our game. When my younger daughter wanted a particular resource card, I said "okay."  My husband looked at me with incredulity and said, "You're not supposed to do that!"  I watched us reaction.  A minute later, she added another section of road and took a card from my husband that gave him some points towards winning.  Both my daughters and I responded by going "Ahhh..  Oh, we're so sorry.  It'll be okay."   That's girls.  I sat there for a minute and realized what had happened.  Then, I made an announcement to the group.  I said, "This is what happens when girls play this game!  If it had been a group ...

My little boy is in kindergarten.  He's sitting beside me looking at a dinosaur alphabet picture book.  He loves the pictures.  Teaching a child how to write their letters sound like a very simple thing, but I've discovered over the years that it isn't.  Especially if you have children who track from down to up and right to left instead of up to down and left to right!  All three of my children have found their own ways of writing some of their letters.  My oldest daughter is now in fifth grade and continues to write some of the letters the way she taught herself--not the conventional way.  My middle daughter has followed the same pattern.  And now my son...  Well, I began thinking about my middle daughter and youngest son this past summer.  I came to a few conclusions with the help of fellow classroom and homeschooling teachers. Conclusion #1:  Children have learning differences.  Not all children's brains are wired the same...

I did actually think about it...  A few weeks ago, my electric pencil sharpener died.  I was honestly sad.  It was trustworthy and faithful.  It had survived twenty plus moves all around the country and kept sharpening pencils for me through seven years of homeschooling.   But, it died.  At first, it sputtered.  Then, it really died.  I couldn't fix it.  I didn't know what to do.  I needed a new one fast because of all the pencils my kids write with every day.  As a bandaid fix, I went to Walmart and bought a $7 Xacto manual sharpener that used suction to stay on the table.  Ugh.  It was a disaster!  $7 completely sadly wasted.  So, I started looking around and came upon a sharpener that a lot of teachers seemed to love.   I was skeptical.  It was a manual sharpener.  It didn't look like anything that special.  Was it worth the price? It was comparable to a good electric sharpener.  H...

Right now while I'm writing this post, there is a documentary playing in the background.  It is called Raw Faith.  It is a documentary about Marilyn Sewell, a unitarian minister.  It is honestly just what I expected.  My heart hurts for the pain of her childhood and family life.  But, I hurt too for some of the choices she made--like leaving her husband when her children were toddlers.  She talked about it--and didn't say there was abuse--only that he didn't feel like "the right one".  Interesting.  She talks over and over about people being "good" people.  She mentions having a "calling", but not WHO that calling is from or where that calling comes from.  She mentions love over and over, but not the source of that love.  She attributes that love to the beauty of people.  Her ministry took her from her children because she hasn't had much left over for them.  Several people, including her two boys, talk about the role that...

Sometimes curriculum works and sometimes it doesn't.  I think it has to work for both the parents and the children. Here are the conclusions I've come to over the past thirteen years since I began teaching.   For the parent, it has to "make sense".  It has to be easy to follow and give the parent the information they need in order to teach the material.   For  the child, it has to "make sense".  They need to be able to understand the material, process, and remember it.   Learning is much easier when both parent and child also want to study the curriculum and enjoy it.  If this is missing, learning can turn into a long, grueling period of pulling teeth.  Not always, but it can happen.  Sometimes you just have to plug and chug away knowing that there is a subject that neither of you enjoy and you just make the best of it.   Yesterday in the car on the way home from art, my middle daughter said to me, "Mommy, I don't like our s...

In homeschooling, there are so many different ways to approach spelling.  Many people choose a line of yearly spelling workbooks that their children work through each year.  Others use Spelling Power as a guide. Last year, I wrote a post with my spelling plan.  I use Spelling Power as my foundation for my oldest daughter.  For the words that she misspells, I use a plan similar to what my students used when I taught in public school.  Spelling Power includes a long explanation of how to teach spelling in the beginning of the book (in very small font!).  This program has worked wonderfully for my oldest daughter who rarely gets a word wrong from the lists. My second daughter is a different speller and so she needs a different approach to spelling to help her.  I wrote this post   in August as I prepared to tackle spelling in a different way this year with her.  Much of it has been successful, but some of it has not.  I discovered as we...

Right now, my printer is working really hard.  It's printing off a bunch of phonics worksheets from one of my favorite sites that's of course--free :)  Yay!  The site is:  http://www.carlscorner.us.com/   I realized that I had good goals for my middle daughter's phonics instruction this fall, but it has fallen far short of what I'd hoped becuase I didn't have an assembled packet for each week.  My plans were good ones, but the execution needed help.   So, this morning I set to work to get things together.  I came across an older boxed set of Hooked on Phonics, levels 2-5 at a book sale last week.  I did use the newer version of Hooked on Phonics with her already, but I need to accompany the sounding out with writing out the sounds.  So, we're doing the reading form the older books (which she hasn't seen before) and then following it up with worksheets from carl's corner.   (There's also a link to little book lane on the site that...

A few years ago, I wrote a post about the different translations of the Bible.  In the process of reviewing many books over the past few years, I considered different translations and the importance of what Bible I choose to read.  I had read the NIV translation for years.  Then, the ESV was published.  The church we attended at the time switched over to the ESV .   When it was time to choose a Bible for my children, I was puzzled.  I ended up choosing a NIrV Discoverer's Bible for my oldest daughter's first Bible when she was seven.  Then, she grew into the Grow! Bible ESV translation.  A year or two later, that Bible became my younger daughter's Bible and my older daughter acquired the ESV Seek and Find Bible .  Both girls have enjoyed both.  And for their needs and ages, these have been great Bibles.  They're both the ESV translation that we read in church so they can follow along easily.  But, both have notes and ad...

Pierced ears... Going to church with a friend in someone else's car (non-family member)... going shopping for clothes... talking on the phone... Ah... Growing up.  My oldest daughter is growing up.  On Sunday, she had her ears pierced.  I was the same age she is when I had mine pierced.  We went shopping last week for the first time for clothes.  I explained to her that many moms and daughters do this a lot.  She looked at me incredulously, "Really?" she asked. And then added, "I don't think I'd want to do that."  She surprises me. Then, last night came the phone.  A friend of hers had asked her to call at a certain time, so she did.  Her friend asked if she could talk for half an hour.  My daughter replied that she didn't think so.  That would be too long.  But, then she proceeded to talk.  I overheard bits and pieces as the two of them figured out what to talk about.  My daughter asked about her friend's lizard ...

Last week I read a book that I enjoyed.  I began reading the book cautiously, but with curiosity.  The author's unique life experience intrigued me and I wanted to hear what God had taught her and what conclusions she arrived at along the way. The book is a surprisingly popular book.  It has unexpectedly gained national recognition because of three interviews with the author on Family Life Today in September and there are over three hundred reviews of the book on Amazon with only five reviews giving the book under 3 stars (and one of them isn't a real review because the review doesn't agree with the rating).  That says something about the book. The book is The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor's Journey Into Christian Faith by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield.  The book has been talked about by John Piper, Family Life Today, World Magazine, and many other Christian media sources.  I'm sure it's all over the blog rolls, actually. ...

Sometimes I watch a movie that leaves me feeling...  well, I don't really...  just weird!  Someone asked me this weekend about the movie Silver Linings Playbook.  The person thought I might have seen it.  I hadn't.  I knew the basic plot of the movie and I felt like it could go either way--I could either really like it or really hate it.  There were some details of the story that you know going into it that made me a little uncomfortable about the characters. So, I watched it today.  Granted, I did fast forward some clips.  But, I watched most of it.  At the end, I didn't feel better than I did before I watched it.  I felt puzzled.  I am still trying to figure out the message in the movie and what the author and director believe. Here's my thought.  The movie seems to say that we just have to take people as they are.  Our world tells us this constantly.  I am who I am.  Love me the way I want to be loved...

I've known many women who read all of the books in a series.  Karen Kingsbury is known for writing book series with five to eight books in them.  Series typically drive me crazy because they leave me hanging at the end of the book and I have to wait for the next one.  That happened to me with the Cedar Keys novels.  The books were released so far apart that I couldn't remember what had happened in the other books and who was who.  It was quite frustrating for me.   When Jen Turano began her series of books that began with A Change of Fortune , I wondered how the series would go.  The first one was a funny melodrama and I had high hopes that this would be a fun, lighthearted series to read.  The first book turned out, in my opinion to be the best one of the series.  The others seemed to all follow the same kind of formula revolving around the same families (which I did like), which seemed to be entirely (entirely!) predictable.  I misse...

I've been in the car lately and that means that I've been doing a lot of reading.  I finished up another book on my Kindle last night.  I had looked forward to this book because of a book I'd read in the past-- June Bug .  It was Chris Fabry's first published book and I enjoyed it.  I didn't enjoy the next two books that he published quite as much as the first, but I still saw him as a good writer--worth reading. A new book by Fabry came out in August-- Every Waking Moment .  It isn't a romance or historical fiction novel.  It's plain, old realistic fiction. There's a touch of the supernatural to it, but I'd still call it realistic fiction. The story centers on Treha and her gift with older folks beset by dementia and alzheimers.  I found myself drawn into the story as it began and slowly meandered along its way.  At the beginning of the story, Miriam Howard is being forced to retire.  Ms. Howard has been a protector of the elderly in he...

Yesterday, I called a good friend of mine to discuss a quandary I was puzzling over.  I finished reading Carry On, Mr. Bowditch recently because Autumn and I are discussing it for her literature right now.  I was inspired by Nathaniel Bowditch's life as I read.  He was independent, creative, determined, a seeker of knowledge, hopeful, and didn't give up.   But, my ideas of this man began to change a little when I assigned Autumn a worksheet for historical fiction.  Her assignment was to identify five factual statements from the book and five statements that were fiction.  I realized that she needed another biography of Nathaniel Bowditch to compare to Carry On, Mr. Bowditch.  I found two different biographies online.  They began to paint a different picture for me.  One was that this man was a Unitarian.  Here is a quote from one site " When asked about his religious beliefs he answered, "Of what importance are my opinions to anyone? ...

I hate delete!  I just had to get that off my chest.  I just spent a half hour sorting out my emotions and then my finger accidentally hit the delete button.  Crummy!   So, here's the jist of it.   I read Becoming Myself by Stasi Eldredge.  I thought I could read it and it would not affect me.   I was wrong. A week and a half later, I was struggling to find contentment in the place God has put me in my job--as a mom, homeschool teacher, and wife.  The tears hovered behind my eyes continuously.   I was wrong.  I knew that what Ms. Eldgredge's book went against what I have felt God convict me of--that I need to be content with his plan for my life and not my own.  Still, my heart was unsettled. Many believe that you can read books you disagree with and they won't affect you if you know the truth and are strong. I thought I was strong. I was wrong.   I'm climbing back up, humbly.  I'm working to forget the ...

Recently, I had the chance to read several ebooks while we were on vacation.  I wrote several years ago on this blog about how I was dragging my feet when it came to reading on a Kindle. I am old school!  I love printed paper books.  But, last year we purchased a basic kindle for $30 (with coupons) for my husband.  Then, we decided a few months later to purchase a basic kindle without the ads, which costs $20 more (current price $89) because it was going to be for our kids to use.  This is also the kindle that I use and I'm so glad we paid the extra $20.  It was definitely worth it not to see the ads for adult books that usually come up on Kindle's screensaver.   I have discovered that there are books that are perfect for reading on a kindle and others that are not.  Books that are more challenging to read, like Dickens' Our Mutual Friend, or books that I need to flip back and forth in are not ebook friendly for me.  But, light, easy to rea...

Fifteen years ago, when I was teaching computers to grades K-5, yahooligans was the popular, safe search engine that I used with my students.  This year, I tried to use yahooligans with my kids and quickly got frustrated because the search didn't bring up any results.  Bah.    I don't know why I didn't think of this before, but I just typed in "kid safe search engine" on google and came up with a result.   Google has developed a safe search engine filtering technology that is used by several other sites.  I found one that is the primary site: http://www.safesearchkids.com/ If you scroll down, there is an explanation of what is filtered and what isn't. Then, I found another one called KidRex.  It uses the safe search technology and then goes beyond it to add their own list as well.   http://www.kidrex.org/ I googled for "consumption illness" while writing questions for Autumn's Carry On, Mr. Bowditch unit.  I came up with several res...

Sometimes I come across books that are hard to review. I, like other reviewers, fear negative remarks and attacks. So, why even write a review that isn't positive and what people want to hear? Well, because of concern--concern about how ideas and words can get twisted. I like to read some of the books that I think will be popular in mainstream Christian circles, so that I'm aware of what people are reading and thinking about.  So, I decided to read Stasi Eldredge's new book Becoming Myself .  It was published a month ago.   My husband and I have read several of John and Stasi Eldredges' books over the past years. We've noticed that there are some good ideas in their books, but that the points can get carried away.  I discussed their books with our pastor this morning and he used a phrase that I thought was very apt to describe their books.  He described their approach as being very "emotionally charged."  I agree.  It is.   As I started out r...