Sep. 21, 2005

Oxen, Children and our Homeschool Day

We are listening to:   by Laura Ingalls-Wilder on tape.  This morning, we heard about how you can not overload a young team of oxen.  If you do, they will learn that they can not pull the load, give up and be useless.  They will never try again.  I thought, "It is the same with horses."  A young colt running in his pasture learns he cannot jump the fence.  So when he is older, he doesn't even try, although he should be able to clear it easily.  The same idea keeps huge adult elephants tied to a small stake by a small piece of rope.  The elephant could easily pull up the stake, but he doesn't even try.  Why?  As a young calf, he was chained securely.  All his fighting was to no avail and he gave up.  Even as an adult, if he feels that loop around his ankle, he "knows" he cannot move and therefore will not try. Then I thought about that in regards to children.  When I was young, I had a difficult time understanding math.  I memorized math facts.  When I got older, I memorized formulas.  I got enough right answers to pass courses...even get A's in some, but I never had a clue what I was doing or why.  It wasn't until I was an adult, getting ready to teach very young children about our counting system, that some pretty basic concepts became clear to me.  Why?  I think I was overloaded at too young an age.  I moved too quickly from concrete to the abstract and was lost.  I learned that I couldn't do math and therefore stopped trying.  Now I need to just be sure I don't do that to my daughter.  It is easy to confuse "high expectations" with "pushing too hard."  The bible has this to say on the topic: Eph 6:4  And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. So, we should raise by the Lord's nurture and gentle correction. Our day was again pretty typical, at least for us.  We did a bit of biblical reasoning, again, but this time it was a bit different.  We had two verses (from her Sparks book) and we compared them and I asked questions until my daughter got the link between the two.  The first was, "Whoever shall keep the whole law and yet stumble in one point, he is guilty of all."  (James 2:10)  The second was, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved."  (Acts 16:31)  She basically came up with the fact that it is impossible to keep the law in its entirity.  Even "little" sins separate us from God.  We all need forgiveness.  That is available only through Christ.  She didn't put it quite like that, but she got the point.  She even pulled in some of the stuff she heard from Ray Comfort (my husband listens to him a lot.) She is very excited that we will be getting our first spelling list tomorrow...ooh.  That reminds me.  I better get it together!  She actually jumped up and down and began clapping when I told her that she would start spelling.  In math, we started subtraction.  We defined subtraction as counting backward and she did the exercises well.  She needs to work on paying attention to the sign (plus or minus) but I suppose that will come with practice.  I think tomorrow we will talk about John 10:29 in relation to subtraction (take away).  In history, we again reviewed the definition of history.  We discussed that God works through individuals (individuality is the principle we are working with at the moment.)  Yesterday, we worked on why Noah was selected by God (he was just, perfect in his generations and he walked with God.)  We discussed what it meant to "find grace in the eyes of God," and whether that meant that Noah "deserved" the gift God gave him.  She knows the story of Noah, and there really is nothing else I want to draw from this at the moment.  We did a little craft project to include in her notebook. For this project, you need a  paper plate cut in half, a picture of the top of the ark, a rectangle for the door and a little Noah.  She colored all the ark parts brown and colored Noah.  We glued the top onto the paper plate and Noah in the middle of the top part.  Then we glued the door on such that she could open and shut it ("Just like God did," she shouted.)  We also printed off our verse and glued it on (Gen 6:8  But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD. ) Here are the basic directions we followed, with some modification as noted above.

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