Monthly Archives: August 2012

Long Story Short: Adam and Eve Disobey God

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Last week we talked about the first real pivotal story of the Bible: the Fall of man and the introduction of sin into God’s perfect Creation.  I continue to be impressed by our devotional, Long Story Short by Marty Machowski.  It is deep enough that Eric and I are getting something out of it, yet simple enough that Elijah (not quite 3) is learning as well.  Our nightly Bible time is a highlight of our day, and while we’re still working with the boys on how to be good listeners and not distract each other, both of them are eager to participate.  I especially like the prayer suggestions each day.  Every night Elijah continues to thank God for creating all the animals, and now after this lesson he’s been adding, “Thank you for hiding my sin.”  It always fascinates me to see what stands out to them.

Go-Along Books

Some of the books we had out for the lessons on Creation included the story of the Fall, so we kept those out for reading at looking at throughout the week:

Reading Practice

As far as books for Ian to read himself, we continued the same books from last week:

He also practiced with our Bible verse cards (see my last post for how I use them).  This week our verse was “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Romans 3:23.  We had a few songs to go along with it (see our “Listening Lesson” below), and both boys memorized it easily.

Bible Notebook

The word “sin” in both Hebrew and Greek means “to miss the mark.”  It was an archery term that described something off target.  God’s perfect law is the standard to which we are all held (“Sin is lawlessness.” 1 John 3:4), yet we all fail to hit that bullseye.  As our memory verse says, we all “fall short of the glory of God.”  For our notebook page, I had the boys glue concentric circles to make a target, then we put an X to the side to show we had missed the mark.

Activities

Beacause this year is Ian’s official “Pre-K” year (if there’s really anything “official” about Pre-K), I want to put together at least some sort of portfolio for him in addition to his Bible notebook.  My plan is to have him use the Bible ABC pages from Christian Preschool Printables as copy work.  By the end of the year he’ll have completed the whole alphabet.  This week the “A” page was perfect for our lesson.

I also printed and laminated sequencing cards from mini-book at Christian Preschool Printables.

Multimedia

As I said, this week’s story is a pivotal part of the overall gospel story, which means there are many crucial concepts to understand within this one chapter.  Consequently, our “Listening Lesson” this week continued to include a lot of catechism songs from the Questions With Answers series from Songs for Saplings. We’ll be continuing to listen to these for a while to plant these truths in the hearts of everyone in our family. Here was our iPod playlist for the week:

Posted in Bible lessons, Long Story Short, Preschool, The Gospel Story

Long Story Short: God Creates Man

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There is so much fundamental truth packed into the first book of the Bible.  Our devotional, Long Story Short by Marty Machowski, goes through the Old Testament in 78 stories; the first 26 are from Genesis.  That means it’s a pretty crucial book for understanding the overarching story of the gospel. This week took us through Genesis 2, and even just this one chapter contains so much. You’ve got God creating Adam from the dust and breathing into his nostrils the breath of life. Then there’s the Garden of Eden, including the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which will play prominently in the next chapter.  You also see Adam being alone and how it was the first thing about which God said, “It is not good.”  Then Adam named all the animals but none of them were right for being his helper, so God took one of Adam’s rib and created Eve from it.  And so the chapter ends with a picture of the first marriage.

The Gospel Story Bible: Discovering Jesus in the Old and New TestamentsOver the course of the week we read through the entire chapter during Bible time before the children went to bed.  The devotional covers 5 nights, which provides a lot of flexibility if we’re getting to bed too late one or two nights.  However, we want to try to keep the habit of doing Bible time every night we’re home at bedtime, so I’ve been jotting down ideas for additional readings when needed.  This week we needed to fill both extra nights, which we did by reading the corresponding story from The Gospel Story Bible (also by Marty Machowski) one night.  As I said last week, this one’s a little wordy for preschoolers, but it was really easy to read “conversationally” with the boys.  It’s not just a retelling of the story, but it also discusses some of the concepts that are in the devotional and helps point to Jesus.  I may or may not use it every week, but it definitely works well to fill in when we need another night of material.  Tonight we’ll finish out the week with Psalm 139:13-16.

My favorite part of using Long Story Short for our Bible curriculum is that even if all we do is our ten-minute devotions at night, the boys are getting solid teaching and growing in their knowledge of God.  Still, I try to take time during the day to reinforce the lesson with various activities.  Here’s what we did this week.

Go-Along Books

I’ve started collecting picture books that go with specific Bible stories. Some we read over and over, while others may only be flipped through.  My point is simply to keep the story in the forefront of our minds throughout the week.  We keep a basket of “school” books in a prominent spot in our living room and the boys pull things out to read several times a day.  A few of last week’s Creation books included this part of the story, so I kept those out:

I also added a new story:

  • Adam & Eve’s New Day by Sandy Eisenberg Sasso (not part of the biblical account, but a thought-provoking story from Hebrew midrash that makes you consider what things were really like for Adam and Eve)

Reading Practice

It seems to me that learning to read has a bit of a snowball effect.  The more success a child experiences, the more he wants to read, and all that practice makes him even more successful.  Ian has begun to pick up some momentum and is really excited about starting to be able to read on his own.  Here’s what we used this week for practice:

The Bible verse cards I made last week were so helpful in encouraging Ian in his reading, I decided to make them a regular part of our lesson each week.  I wasn’t sure if they’d be as successful this time, since the verse was unfamiliar to him until this week.  (“It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” Genesis 2:18) I followed the same steps, however, and I was amazed how well he did.

  1. I laid all the cards out in order and read them to Ian, pointing to each one.
  2. He read them out loud as he pointed.
  3. I mixed them up and had him find the words in order.  I didn’t read any of the cards for him, but I would recite the verse if he couldn’t remember what came next.
  4. He mixed them up and put them back in order all by himself.

Going through these steps meant reciting the verse over and over to himself, which was great reinforcement.  He was having so much fun Elijah wanted to join in, and Ian enthusiastically read words for him and helped him participate.  It was a great learning experience for both of them.

  

Bible Notebook

I’ve been working on Ian with his drawing skills (until recently I couldn’t get much other than a scribble out of him), so I decided to do a little lesson on drawing people (well, stick people).  He did really well with it, but this was definitely a week where our notebook page was beyond Elijah.  I just drew his people for him (don’t laugh, I was drawing upside down).  Ian got really into to and decided to draw some plants (roots and all), since they were in the Garden of Eden.

  

Activities

I usally try to print out a few activity pages for Ian’s “workbook,” but this week the only thing I found was a maze.  We found plenty of other things to do though!  I printed and laminated the “Adam Names the Animals” file folder game from Christian Preschool Printables, though I skipped the folder to make it work with my storage system.  Ian blew me away with his reading ability on this game.   I didn’t read a single word for him.  (Looking at his picture when he’d completed his board, you can see he was almost as proud as Mama!)  I laid out all the animal names and both boards and told him to find the matches.  After he’d completed his board he helped his brother by reading the card and then letting Elijah find the correct picture.  It has been great to see such cooperative learning this week.  It helps boost Ian’s confidence and it drives Elijah to want to learn more to keep up.

  

This story offered lots of chances to learn a little about our bodies.  The opening activity from the devotional involved feeling for our pulse. Neither boy was familiar with the word “nostrils” when we read it, so we talked about that and then reviewed it through the week as we re-read the story.  The creation of Eve also led us to a discussion about our ribs. I found a cute picture from Little Blots to illustrate.

One night our devotion talked about husbands and wives, marriage, and creating a family unit.  We pulled out our wedding pictures and enjoyed looking through them, talking about what a special day it was and what it means to be married.  We’ve been to two weddings this summer, so Ian especially enjoyed seeing the pictures with us in the leading roles.

Our favorite activity, however, was making gingerbread couples.  There’s a delicious recipe at dltk-kids.com. (I substituted 2/3 whole wheat flour and used organic whole cane sugar instead of brown sugar, and they were still the best gingerbread cookies anyone in our family could remember.) We called the flour “dust” and formed our gingerbread people.  (We added “hair” to some of them to create girls.)  Ian went a little crazy decorating them (definitely not “naked” like the real Adam and Eve).  He loved every step of the process and kept asking, ” Can we do this again sometime?”

  

Multimedia

Last week as I was planning this lesson I stumbled across a CD called Questions With Answers Vol. 1: God and Creation.  I was just looking for something to go along with our memory verse but I ended up downloading the entire album.  It’s formatted like a catechism, with a question posed and then answers that are usually directly quote from Scripture.  (Chords and lyrics are available on the Songs for Saplings website.) After listening just once I fell in love.  What a great way to introduce important theological concepts to children!  I was afraid the boys wouldn’t be into it, but instead they kept asking to “do that one again” after every song.  I wish we’d had the album last week, because it seemed a little overwhelming to put all of it on our iPod playlist this time around and many of the songs would have been a good fit with that story.  I chose a few songs to include with our current lesson, and I’m sure we’ll listen to the rest another time.

Our “Listening Lesson” this week:

Posted in Bible lessons, Long Story Short, Preschool, The Gospel Story

The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge

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We’re getting ready for a week’s vacation on the coast, so I decided to “row” The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge by Hildegarde H. Swift and Lynd Ward (even though there won’t be any lighthouses where we’re going).  Ian was reluctant to read the book with me on Monday morning, but by the end of the story he wanted me to read it again and enthusiastically joined me for reading it the rest of the week.

We did a lot of the discussions from the Five in a Row manual (Vol. 2).  It a good chance to talk again about personification, (which I’m still not sure he understands, but I figure multiple exposures will help it click eventually).  We also had interesting talk about the rivers in our area–where they start, where they end, etc.).  I’m not always consistent about using the story disks, but this was one I didn’t want to skip.  Ian really enjoys looking at maps, so it was nice to give him a connection to New York since it’s always just been another state in his USA puzzle.

I loved the two book recommendations in the manual.  Ian was fascinated by the pictures in My New York by Kathy Jakobsen. Oh, how I wish I’d read this book before I visited New York!  I’ve only been twice, and it’s been about 15 years since the last trip, but I feel like I know more about the city from reading this book than from both of those visits.  I would have gotten so much more out of them if I’d read this first.  Even if Iantake anything away from the book besides enjoying the sights and hearing the names of some of the landmarks for the first time, it’s a great addition to our home library.  I’m sure it will come out every time we read a book set in Manhattan, and hopefully someday we’ll get to explore the city itself.

I was also really impressed with The Bridge Book by Polly Carter.  It had a ton of information about the different types of bridges, how they’re made, what materials are used, and lots more.  Yet it managed to be simple enough that Ian was able to sit through while I read the whole thing.  He was drawn to it throughout the week.  I think as the boys get older it’s something that will interest them even more as they get more sophisticated in their block and Lego building.

The only other “go-along” book we used was one we had around the house called Who Sees the Lighthouse? by Ann Fearrington. It has beautiful illustrations based on real lighthouses in the United States, and for me it was worth flipping through just for those. The story leaves a lot to be desired, but Ian enjoyed counting the objects on each page.

Captain JanuaryIan loves Reading Rainbow, so we watched the episode “Keep the Lights Burning, Abbie,” which not only talks about this story at the end, but has some fun information on lighthouses and making a “ship-in-a-bottle.”  Ian watched it twice, along with Captain January, an old Shirley Temple film about a girl who lives in a lighthouse with a lightkeeper who loses his job when they put in an automated light.  Parts of it were slow for the boys, but other parts had them rolling on the floor with laughter.

There’s some helpful information about the real Little Red Lighthouse at nycgocparks.org and lighthouseinn-ct.com (some beautiful pictures of it on this site).  Looking at these sites and reading this story made me want to go back to New York and experience it all over.  And next time I go, we’ll definitely try to take some time to visit the lighthouse at Jeffery’s Hook!

Little Red Lighthouse & Great Grey Bridge DSC_8296  

To see what other FIAR books we’ve rowed, see my “Index of FIAR Posts.”  Also, a great place to see what other people have done with FIAR books is the FIAR Blog Roll at Delightful Learning.

Posted in FIAR, Literature Units, Preschool

Long Story Short: God Creates the World

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Well, here we are, back at the beginning!  I started this blog right after Ian turned 3, when we began going through the Bible lessons in the ABC Jesus Loves MeThree-Year Old Curriculum, which took us on a chronological journey through many of the best-known stories in the Old and New Testaments.  This past spring I wrote a post about what our next step should be, and I’m so excited about the route we’ve chosen.  This week we started going through a fantastic family devotional called Long Story Short by Marty Machowski. (Seriously, read the reviews at Amazon or Timberdoodle and you won’t be able to resist either).

The book is broken up into 78 weeks of stories from the Old Testament (the New Testament is covered in the sequel, Old Story New (scheduled to be released this Fall), which also has 78 stories, so together it will take us at least three years to get through all the material, probably more since I’m scheduling in breaks around holidays and vacations).  Each week consists of 5 ten-minute devotions designed to be used with kids from preschool through high school.  While the main story may be from the Old Testament, each week you also look at how it is part of the overall “Gospel Story,” so there are New Testament passages to read as well.  I wasn’t sure if our children were quite old enough for it, but if this week is any indication of how things are going to go, I think they’re going to get a lot out of it.  And maybe in the future we’ll go through it again and they can process things at a deeper level.

This week’s lesson covered Genesis 1.  We started Sunday night so that we could dive into some school activities on Monday.  Daddy read the Bible passage while I helped Ian follow along in his ESV Seek and Find Bible.  Then I walked us through the questions.  If the question was too hard, I just shared the answer as part of our discussion.  Then I told them what the suggested prayer topic was and asked who wanted to pray.  Usually we just had the boys pray, but sometimes Daddy or I would pray as well. They boys really enjoyed this nightly “Bible time,” and they were sad the two nights we didn’t do it.  There are only 5 per week, but it worked out really well because we were out late at a Bible study one night and playing miniature golf as a family another night, so it would have been hard to get more than 5 done.  On weeks when we’re not out late, I’ll use The Gospel Story Bible (also by Machowski) or a related Scripture to carry us through the end of the week.*)

After the first night, our Bible story was constantly on the boys’ minds.  All day on Monday they kept exclaiming, “God made ______ [dirt, trees, cows, the sky, etc].”  When we had lunch, I prayed, “Thank you, God for making grapes,” which led them to ask about the other foods, which taught them that even if God didn’t make something in the form we see it, He did creat the materials for it.  So then they started saying, “God made the stuff to make ___.”  This continued throughout the week!

The first night it was a little difficult to keep Elijah engaged, so after that I tried to come up with ways to keep everyone listening.  For example, when we read through the days of creation, I asked the boys to raise their hands every time they heard “God said…”  We talked about how even though only God can create by speaking, we also can create things.  We just have to start with paint, playdough, or some other sort of material.  (And then, of course, we had to get out our paints and spend one morning creating our own masterpieces.)

  

Go-Along Books

We have several Bible storybooks, but since there are lots of other fun books related to Creation, I decided to set those aside for this lesson.  Here are some of the books we read or looked through this week:

Reading Practice

I want to help Ian practice his reading skills by finding things at his level related to our Bible lessons.  This week I had two good resources:

  • We Learn About God from Rod and Staff Publishers (a beginning “reader” that’s right at Ian’s level)
  • The Young Reader’s Bible by Bonnie Bruno (still a little too hard for Ian to read on his own, but he got good practice following along as I read.)

The other thing I did was print out our Bible verse and then cut up the individual words.  (I laminated the cards to keep in my Creation file, but that’s just so I can use them again with the other children).  I did something similar to the reading lesson Charlotte Mason described in Home Eduction (Volume 1 in the Original Homeschooling Series) Part V, chapter 4 “Reading“.  He was already familiar with Genesis 1:1, and he knew a few of the words by sight already, so I didn’t read it in order to him the way I would have with something new.  Instead I just mixed all the cards up and asked him to put them in the right order.  I helped him recite the verse so he’d know where to start, but then I was amazed how quickly he laid out the whole verse.  After he was done, I had him read it to me, pointing to each word as he read.  He was so proud of himself and immediately mixed them up and did it again.  He also took great pride in repeating the feat for Daddy that evening.  When we did “Bible time” before bed, he turned turned to the first page of Genesis in his ESV Bible and read the first verse as he pointed to the words.  He was a little confused why it didn’t say “Genesis 1:1” after “earth,” which opened up the door for talking about chapters and verses.  I pointed out the title “Genesis” and the big and small numbers, and soon he understood.

  

Bible Notebook

I really liked making a notebook as a record of our journey through the Bible the last time around, so I decided to do it again.  This time I’ll be doing them with both boys, so I’m going to try to do different activities than I did with Ian the first time. This week I printed out out the mini-book from Christian Preschool Printables to use for the boys’ Bible Notebooks.  I made up a page that had the Bible verse and a number for each day.  For Elijah, I cut out only the pictures and had him glue them next to the number on the page.  I had Ian trace the words and numbers for the day before gluing them over the printed numbers. (He’s been asking how to write letters a lot lately, so I want to start having some sort of “copywork” for him each week.  This seemed like a great starting place.)  It was nice being able to make the same activity developmentally appropriate for each boy.  They were both incredibly proud of their work, especially Elijah (“Grandma, I glued!”), since it’s the first official “schoolwork” he’s done.

  

Activities

There are lots of wonderful activities from Christian Preschool Printables, but I didn’t want to overwhelm the boys, so I tried to restrain myself.  I printed and laminated the Memory Match Game.  The boys did a good job just matching them up, but we never got quite confident enough to play “memory.”  We also each colored a Creation Wheel from Oriental Trading Company, which Ian loved turning to reveal each day.  Elijah only colored the top page and then lost interest.  I was a little irritated that they put a rainbow on it, since that’s a prominent part of the story of Noah, but we talked about how God created that too, just later on.

  

I really wanted to give the boys a chance to observe some animals, but with temperatures in the triple digits I just didn’t feel up to a trip to the zoo.  Instead, we took a field trip to a local pet store, where we saw cats, dogs, rats, hamsters, guinea pigs, rabbits, turtles, snakes, iguanas, and lots of varieties of fish (and even got to pet most of the mammals).  Both boys loved it, and they soon were back to their gleeful exclamations of, “God made ___!”

Multimedia

I found several resources online that Ian enjoyed playing around with:

Our “Listening Lesson” had a few more items on it than the last time we discussed creation.  This year I want to start being intentional about learning both traditional hymns and also some of the worship songs we sing in our Sunday services.  This was an easy lesson to incorporate a number of such songs into our iPod playlist:

I’m so excited to be starting this journey!  By the third night, Ian was begging for “more Bible time!”  By fourth night, both boys were eagerly volunteering to pray at the end of our time (when both have been extremely reluctant in the past).  Okay, so Elijah’s prayers in any setting are now about thanking Jesus for rocks, and the sky, and every animal he can think of, but I love that he’s excited about prayer!  “Bible time” is now something we all look forward to at the end of the day, and I love that they’re going to bed treasuring God’s Word in their hearts and minds.

—

*Here are a couple of ideas I came up with for filling in extra nights:

  • Psalm 19:1-6
  • Psalm 95:1-7
  • Romans 1:19-20
  • Psalm 104 (for older kids)
  • Job 38-39 (for older kids)
Posted in Bible lessons, Charlotte Mason, Long Story Short, Preschool, The Gospel Story

Composer Study: Ludwig van Beethoven

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Adding “composer study” to our school subjects was really a no pressure way to expand our learning simply by being intentional.  I enjoy listening to classical music, and it’s so easy to help my children become familiar with great composers just by choosing a composer for the month and listening to his music at least once a week.  I tell them the composer’s name, and then we listen to the music and occasionally talk about what it sounds like.  If that’s all we do, great.  However, for some of the uber-famous composers, there are lots of other great ways to help all of us learn more about the composers’ lives and music, so I like to take advantage of those as well.

Last month we studied one of the “giants” of classical music: Ludwig van Beethoven, and there were a LOT of resources available.  Here’s a list of some of the things we enjoyed as we learned about this incredible artist.

Audio Resources

The boys got a kick out of several pieces from the Beethoven’s Wig series, where silly lyrics are put to the tune of famous classical pieces. (There’s also a book that goes along with the title song, but we didn’t manage to get our hands on it.) All the albums are available on Amazon either on CD or for download.  Each album also contains the original song without words, so I recommend buying the whole album rather than individual songs, though I’ve also included links for each one.  There are pieces by many different composers, but these are the songs by Beethoven the we listened to:

Video Resources

  • Beethoven Lives Upstairs DVD (also available for purchase from Amazon Instant Video)
  • Pastoral Symphony (6th) from Fantasia (I don’t recommend this one if your family is extremely sensitive to nudity.  I don’t have a problem with it since it is animated and not graphic.  My kids didn’t even notice.)

Little Einsteins episodes that have music by Beethoven (always a favorite in our house):

  • “Brand New Outfit” and “The Missing Invitation” both feature “Ode to Joy” from the 9th Symphony
  • “Brothers and Sisters to the Rescue” and “Annie and the Beanstalk” both feature the theme from the 5th Symphony.  (Every time Elijah hears the opening of the 5th Symphony he shouts, “That’s the Forte Giant!”)
  • There are also 2 other episodes “The Christmas Wish” and “A Galactic Goodnight” (both feature “Fur Elise”) that we didn’t have on our DVR so we haven’t gotten to watch them yet.

Books and Other Reading

And for grown-ups:

Homeschooling is not just for the kids.  I try to did a little deeper and learn new things myself about the subjects we’re studying.  So I started practicing a piano Sonata I’d never learned before.  I may not do this for every composer (even the ones that wrote piano music), but after learning so much about Beethoven over the course of the month, it made the piece feel very personal.

I also enjoyed watching a couple videos about Beethoven online:

As always, if you have any suggestions of other resources, please comment!  I love collecting ideas!

Posted in Charlotte Mason, Composer Study

Caps for Sale

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Last week we were going to take a break, but Before Five in a Row beckoned us.  We had read through Caps for Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina during the previous week as part of our lesson on self-control, but the boys were enjoying the story so much I decided it need a good, honest “row.”  This is one of Ian’s favorites, and we did almost everything in the B4FIAR manual, as well as a few extras.

Ian got silly with one of Arianna’s toys and tried to balance them like the peddler’s caps.  (Pardon the not-so-charming scratch under his nose!)

I printed out a bunch of pages from Homeschool Creations.  Many just went into Ian’s “workbook” (a collection of worksheets or activities that I slide into plastic sheet protectors and have him do with dry-erase markers so I can reuse them), but there were also a couple activities I left out on the table all week.  One was a word sort with “-ap” and “-at” words.  I planned to use it just with Ian, but Elijah asked me first and ended up doing really well sorting the words into the right columns.

Their favorite activity, however, was rolling the cube that had pictures of the different kinds of coins on it.  In the story, the peddler calls out, “Fifty cents a cap!”  It was a great tie-in for learning about money.  My objective this week was for Ian to be able to identify a penny, nickel, dime, quarter, 50-cent piece, and dollar coin.  This game definitely helped us accomlish that.  We took turns rolling the cube, and then I had Ian fill in the graph to mark the results.  He loved learning how to make an X using the corners, and when the game was over (when one of the coins had been rolled 10 times), we practiced reading the graph.  We played this several times throughout the week because he enjoyed it so much.

  

(Yes, we do school in pajamas, diapers, and dalmation costumes.  Don’t you?)

Along with that game, I collected a bunch of coins and just let the boys have fun playing with them.  We talked about “heads” and “tails” and sorted them in different ways.  Ian liked clinking them together and commented on how the different types of coins made different sounds, which I thought was a great observation.  The money was a big hit, and I still haven’t managed to get it all put away because they keep getting it out!

Finally, in addition to a fun reading of the story on YouTube, we watched the Reading Rainbow episode “Three Hat Day,” featuring Caps for Sale as one of the books recommended at the end of the program.  Ian really loves this show, so I let him watch any I can find that relate to what we’re learning about.

Posted in B4FIAR, Literature Units, Preschool

Fruit of the Spirit: Self-Control

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Well, we didn’t exactly finish our Fruit of the Spirit unit with a bang, but we did make it all the way through, and I’ll just have to be satisfied with that. 🙂 Certain things fizzled out along the way, like our “tattoos,”  the Fruit of the Spirit board game (although we did play this one quite a bit until just recently), and the Memory Match game from Christian Preschool Printables.  As far as the books we used throughout the unit, 9 Fruits Alive by Mindy MacDonald was a big hit, especially with Elijah.  He’s requested it several times a week for the last couple months. Jesus in Me by Dandi Daley Mackall, however, pretty much just sat in our basket after the first couple weeks.  (Truth be told, I forgot about it.  I probably could have pulled it out and they would have enjoyed it.  Oh well.)

For this final week on “Self-Contol,” we really didn’t do anything extraordinary.  In fact, it mostly consisted of videos. {*cringe*} I intended to watch the Pleasure Island scene from Pinocchio and discuss the consequences of doing whatever you want and not exercising self-control.  We may not turn into donkeys, but it’s definitely not good for us and prevents us from being all that God has made us to be.  However, we never got to that one.  We did watch the older storybook animation of the self-control from Character Builders.  I loved this line from it’s song: “Get yourself some self-control or self will give you trouble.”  So true!  And of course, Ian wouldn’t let us get through the week without watching the episode on self-control from our Auto-B-Good DVD Fruits of the Spirit.

We read one of Ian’s favorite books from Before Five in a Row, Caps for Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina.  This book was as much a hit with Elijah as it was when I first read it to Ian when he was two.  Both of them requested it several times throughout the week.  We tied it in with the fruit of the Spirit by talking about the man’s reaction and discussing whether or not he demonstrated self-control.  They enjoyed this book so much I might just have to keep it out and do some of the activities from the B4FIAR manual since we didn’t really “row” it this past week. (Post to come!)

Our “Listening Lesson” was shorter than it’s been, mostly because I’ve just about had my fill of some of the songs that we’ve used throughout the unit!  Here’s what made the final cut

I’m so glad we did this whole unit.  It was a great fit for summer.  It kept us in the Word without requiring a lot of planning time, and it laid a solid foundation for deeper study in the future.  I don’t think either of my boys will ever forget the nine traits listed in Galatians 5:22-23, and we’ve built a lot of fun memories along the way!

 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.  Against such things there is no law.

Posted in Bible lessons, Preschool

Composer Study: Igor Stravinsky

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In July we made our first venture into the world of classical composers.  My kids are no strangers to classical music, but it was first time we’ve discussed the person who wrote what we were listening to.  This first unit was much simpler than what I plan to do through the next school year, mostly because I wasn’t planning to do a true composer study.  We only did it because Grandma had just come from Russia and Stravinsky fit into the conversation, though he wouldn’t normally be one of my first choices for composers.

We started off by reading through the first section of My First Classical Music Book, which is about “When and Where” we hear classical music (in movies, at weddings, for dancing, etc.).  It’s a great introduction, and it comes with a CD that has clips to listen to for each page.  Then we turned to the second section of the book, which discusses a number of composers.  We read the page on Stravinsky as we played the “Russian Dance” from Petrushka on the CD.

Mostly we just listened to The Firebird, music the boys are already familiar with (thanks to Little Einsteins: Rocket’s Firebird Rescue) and talked about the fact that Stravinsky wrote it.  We also found some interesting information on the Classics for Kids website.  I love their podcasts because they’re really short (about 6 minutes) but have good information specifically presented to children.  There were four episodes specifically about Stravinsky and the Firebird.  Every time the boys heard the music they’d start talking about the characters from the story on Little Einsteins.  I’m glad the music has stuck in their heads!

The only other piece of music we spent any significant amount of with was The Soldier’s Tale from Maestro Classics.  I love the biographical information on these CDs.  The story was a little mature for my boys, so it wasn’t their favorite thing we’ve listened to, but after I had played it a few times Ian started requesting it.  My main goal in listening to this CD was to provide some exposure to the main piece and to hear the information about Stravinsky’s life, so I’d say it was a success.  We’ll come back to Stravinsky in a few years and then I think they’ll get even more out of it.

Although I have some background in classical music, Stravinsky was not terribly familiar to me.  I really enjoyed finding out more about his life and listening to his music more purposefully throughout the month.  Someday we’ll dig a little deeper into our composers, but for now a gentle introduction is just right for both the kids and myself.

Posted in Charlotte Mason, Composer Study