If you've read this blog before, you know that we have an extra student at our home school this year. She is the niece of someone my husband goes to college with.
I have mixed feelings about how it is working out.
I thank God that I have the opportunity to be a missionary in my own home. She and her family are not Christians. In fact she has very little exposure to anything from the Bible. Our entire curriculum is Christian, so she is being surrounded by our worldview.
However, the negative things she sometimes brings into our home make me nervous. I realize I can not completely protect my children from negative influences always and forever. But, when it is inside our house...it is worse than if it were coming from an outside source.
One example is Halloween. She has my children wanting to go trick or treating. I guess we have never opposed Halloween as strongly as I would like. We go to one of the local churches for their Fall Party, and we dress up and get candy. But we do not go door to door…and I do not allow monsters or witches etc.
But the other day as we were talking about the history of Halloween – my daughter began debating that there is nothing really wrong with the holiday . .it’s just an excuse for kids to have fun and go begging for candy. (This is almost a direct quote from our new student.)
I don’t believe that anymore than I believe Christmas is just an excuse to get presents.
Another example of how she is influencing my kids in a negative way is with learning. My kids are naturally curious…and sometimes when we are studying something we can go completely off on some tangent that is not in the lesson plans. I love this….I enjoy just going with the flow and allowing my kids’ imagination to lead us. They can take me places I would never have dreamed of in a million years of researching.
Today we were reading about Venus…and the fact that this planet’s day is longer than its year. I was reading while the girls were taking notes. My daughter asked me to stop reading so she could get the calculator. She was so excited doing calculations about how many hours in each planets’ day/week/year. She wanted to make a chart to see it all on one page etc.
She tried to include our new student in her project. But the new student said
“If it’s not going to be on the test I don’t want to hear about it.”
Wow…now there’s a public school attitude that I hope my kids never adopt.
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Posted by Colleen
