love to paint

At lunch one day this week, Autumn brought a book with her to the table.  She actually wanted to read it instead of eating her lunch.  So, what was this book?  It happened to be a new book that's coming out on Athanasius.  Yes, Athanasius.  This book is newest release in a series written by Simonetta Carr on figures from church history. Earlier this year, I reviewed one of the other books from the series on John Owen .  Reviewing that book challenged me to think critically about biographies and what we, and our children, learn from reading them. There is a saying that if we do not learn from history then we are doomed to repeat it.  There are also other sayings about history and why we study it.  I always told my middle school students that we studied history so that we could learn from the past and not have to reinvent the wheel over and over.  Both of these sayings apply to this series of Christian biographies for children. I asked Simo...

It's interesting to see how God begins to thread things together in my life to help me learn things and to teach my children.  I am continually amazed by how He brings to mind through conversations, articles, or things I've heard about different curriculums for me to use in homeschooling that together meet the unique needs and personalities of my children and me. One of the subjects I've been puzzling about over the past year is history.  I have to admit that I'm still on the journey, but I'm making progress.  History is my eldest daughter's favorite subject.  She loves to read historical fiction books.  When I was a child, I read the whole set of ValueTales about historical figures.  I found a set of them while I was teaching over 10 years ago and I've saved them all this time.  She started reading them this year and it was so fun to see her enjoy the books I loved when I was a kid. So, there have been a lot of pieces floating in my head that have...

Yesterday, I blogged about Church History ABCs and I wished for more--more context so that I could put the stories in that book into the big picture of history.  I was reading the blog from Hearts and Minds Books in Dallastown, PA, and Byron Borger mentioned this book: Pages From Church History: A Guided Tour of Christian Classics, also by the same author.  I read a few pages of it on Amazon and it seemed to be just what I was talking about.  I can't fully recommend it since I haven't read it (and I've definitely learned my lesson on that one), but I'm glad to know that there is a book like what I was thinking of out there!

I was excited to learn that a book about some heroes of the Faith of Church History has been published.  When I was growing up, I learned a lot about Quaker History--all about George Fox and William Penn as well as many others.  But, I didn't learn a lot about church history beyond Quaker History.  I want my children to have a more well rounded understanding of church history and more knowledge about it than I have. Stephen J. Nichols and Ned Bustard have published a new book called The Church History ABCs:  Augustine and twenty-five other heroes of the Faith.   Here is their website for the book:   http://www.churchhistoryabcs.com/index.html   The book begins with a short introduction and then a brief page on each of twenty-five people who lived as early as 110 A.D. and died as late as 1940.  (There is a gap between St. Patrick, who died in 461 and Martin Luther who was born in 1483.)  Each letter identifies a person important to chur...