Lazy Creek Homeschool

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New Bible Conference!! Too Exciting!!!

7:23 PM - Mar. 11, 2009 - Wild Thoughts {1} - Add to the Wildness

For years, Dave and I have talked about starting up a Bible conference in our area. There are a lot of reasons for this idea.

--1--Need for Bible overview teaching. We were struck by New Tribes Mission's perspective on the need for people to understand the foundation of the Gospel in order to understand the Gospel itself. In their "Creation to Christ" Bible study guide, they talk about how numbers of people professed Christ, only to add Him as just another deity in their existing collection of idols. There's a truth in that for our own culture.

--2--Need for Bible teachers who "teach and leave." As one local pastor said to me, sometimes it's helpful for teachers come in from outside to simply teach a topic without any internal political agenda. Often, within a church environment, doctrine becomes part of the political fabric and the political fabric becomes part of doctrine. We've seen this problem deeply entrenched in our own church, where it has become impossible for anyone within the congregation to bring the much-needed teaching which could heal the church, because it's viewed through a distorted political lens. This is a particular problem in a small-town environment, where a shortage of people causes entrenchment in relationships and church roles.

--3--The response of believers to teaching ministries like Answers in Genesis. Christians aren't cowards. But there's a need for real-life answers. There's a type of ministry direction which attempts to connect with the culture by allowing the culture to dictate to it--what music, what attitudes, and even what spiritual content. Then there's a type of ministry that brings out what God's Word says about our culture's specifics. Because it's all in there. The Bible is sufficient.

--4--The concern of believers about the present world state. One of my husband's relatives happens to be a highly informed, world-class speaker, researcher and analyst who looks specifically at trends in globalization. He is excellent at making clear the connections between global politics, economics and religion, and showing how it affects individuals in their own corner of the world.

We also have a friend who practices Messianic Christianity and is an excellent resource for explaining things about Israel. Both the Middle East and world finances are at the center of the news...but what's the Christian perspective? We actually have local guys who know this stuff. But people don't know about them.

Anyway, the long and the short is, we're goin' for it.

Five men have stepped forward to serve as directors, and others have volunteered to help out with other aspects of the conference.
I've done a website and some graphic design, all to be released soon.
There is a host church in the works.
We have three guest speakers for our inaugural day--two regional resources and a national creation speaker.

I feel like Daffy Duck--"Woohoo! Woohoo! Woohoo!"

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© Copyright Cathi-Lyn Dyck 2005-2009

Schooling Online - A New Experiment For Us

2:16 PM - Jan. 16, 2009 - Wild Thoughts {0} - Add to the Wildness

Fact #1: I hate mornings. My younger kids love them. My older kids have to be dragged out of bed.
Fact #2: We have an underused family website that pretty much functions as our unschooling portfolio.

I'm going to combine the two and see if we can generate a positive effect. The plan is to use the main blog as an assignment launchpad. We can then continue "scrapbooking" online at our homeschool journal.

My (possibly naive) hope is that if I make the main blog our browser's homepage, the kids can pull it up in the morning while my brain is still mud and have some fun doing indirectly-directed activities together. As Bill Jack would say, "Buy time. Sell rope." (No, wait, that's out of context. Anyway....)

The assignment completion "prizes" will be YouTube videos or the like--maybe some "stealth" education through humour--that the kids can watch on the main blog. We've used YouTube as a successful bribe in the past. (You can see the "Engineer's Guide To" videos have made their way to our webhome.) I'd like to use the Internet more, but I want to know my kids are on sites that are totally safe for them, if I'm too fuzzy or busy to supervise. And, hey, look at that: I have a site I can customize to our schooling style.

The desired results: (A) Younger kids' time and energy occupied until mine catches up. (B) Older kids more motivated to get out of bed. (C) Mom (maybe?? sometimes???) gets to wait for the coffee to kick in before having to open the Complaints Bureau, deploy Law Enforcement, call out Animal Rescue, engage the Sanitation Department, deploy Correctional Services for transfer of inmates from the Horizontally Snoring Block to the Vertically Whining Block, etc., etc.

If anyone wants to try the activities for themselves and give me feedback on how I can do it better or easier, it would be much appreciated and highly motivating. I'm sure my first few assignment descriptions will need tweaking until I get better at designing the directions. And, hey, if you get good results with the project ideas, post a pic and let me know.

I'll let y'all know how it goes.

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© Copyright Cathi-Lyn Dyck 2005-2009

Cross-Canada Trip Journal

4:36 PM - Jul. 11, 2008 - Wild Thoughts {1} - Add to the Wildness

We began journalling our travel adventures in between the West Coast (2006) and the East Coast (2007).

I had so much help and enthusiasm, we were whipping through it (at a snail's pace--"Don't put scissors in your mouth." "Please don't step on the pictures...").

This was an idea from a homeschooling magazine I read--can't remember which one now. It was either Homeschooling Today or Homeschooling Horizons. The writer enthusiastically remembered scrapbooking her way through family vacations with her sisters. Not necessarily keeping a traditional diary, just making a collection of mementos and scattered thoughts.

We began by getting an old atlas and a hardcover journal. I cut out the provinces from the Canada map in the atlas. We decided to journal chronologically (where we actually went) rather than province by province, since we got to the coast last. It didn't make sense to start there.

I made a title page for the whole trip, then a title page for the first part of it. I glued Saskatchewan and Alberta in place and marked our travel route on them with contrasting pen and highlighter for good measure.

We printed off some of our digital photos, and I made several maple-leaf-themed templates. Some for photos, and one for them to write a few thoughts on. We trimmed pictures with great creativity (and new scissors! Joy!!), jotted down favourite events and memories, and created layouts before gluing them into place.

Even Brat Boy filled out his own entry, writing "bunny" and "T-rex." (The bunny came into our campsite on the second night. First the kids fed it, then they chased it. Typical.)

I went back to my old blog posts from last year and printed them off, with a few edits. These made up the actual travel log for our Alberta segment. To make sure I could glue it in, I opted to space the paragraphs wide, print it on half-pages, and do some artful paper-tearing to fit things in the journal.

The result is a family collaboration that looks lovely so far, and contains the individual thoughts and memories of each of us. It's not really Daddy's kind of thing, so I doubt he'll contribute. We may convince him to after awhile, just so as to have some of him in the pages too.

Skills have included:

creative writing

spelling (they each had a mistake or two and a question or two)

copywork (Squirrelly Girlie wanted to write "my favourite things in Alberta" just the way I did)

dictation ("Banana, tell Brat Boy how to spell T-rex while I print the bunny picture.")

art

co-operative tasking

fine motor skills for the little ones

(A friendly neighbourhood rerun from our unschooling portfolio at LifeLedLearning.Blogspot.com)

© Copyright Cathi-Lyn Dyck 2005-2008

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