As I visited Sharity and PlainJane the other day I found out there are some bloggers posting their thoughts on the HOWTA. Well, I commented on Sharity’s Blog that I might do a post with my thoughts on HOW. Here are some thoughts of how I came to HOW and my experience with it. Update: CanadaGirl and ThreeLittleLadies also posted a HOW post, see their comments below.
HOWTA - Heart of Wisdom Teaching Approach
I don’t have the book HOWTA yet, but I do have Robin’s Biblical Holidays, What Your Child Should Know and When, and her Unit Study Adam to Messiah.
I came across Robin’s material on my first year of Home school; I know it was of the Lord, because it was just about at the same time my husband and I begin to study and discover Jewish Roots. Our first year of hs was full of new adventures, excitement and also frustrating times.
I borrowed “What your Child Should Know from my local library. Plain Jane said on her post, she did not read the book, she devoured it; this is exactly how I felt. I could not put the book down; I reordered the book over and over again. I finally bought my own copy, which was a very good investment.
The HOWTA is God first, and everything else is taken from that.(This is what got my attention) I’ve seen too many curriculums out there saying Bible first; however it still has a strong sense of Western/Greek mind-set. We didn’t get her Unit Studies at first, but I kept visiting her site and looking into her wonderful articles, book suggestions, biblical studies…etc.
We finally, purchased the Adam to Messiah Unit Study when DD was in the 4th Grade. We did not feel that it was the time to start, though we did implement her ideas throughout our schooling.
Here are some things we did with our school since we found HOW:
_ Read directly from the bible, not using man made books for Bible study. We started our day with the Bible (still do), and from there we found lots of exciting topics.
_ Daily Bible copy work – DD would copy a Psalm or other bible passages.
_ Bible worksheets – DD did this everyday (these are great!) children.calvarychapel.com/site/curriculum.htm
_ Math.
_ Language (Grammar)
_ Science, this is something we read out of Abeka or another science children’s book from the library.
_ Since my DD was not ready to study Ancient History we concentrated on American History – Europe – Australia…Etc. She has a very good grip on this, which I am very happy for it. We both have felt in the last month we should start Adam to Messiah this coming school year.
The Biblical Holidays book is another wonderful HOW book. Oh, this is so full of ideas and interesting fun pages for children. Some of you already know that my family observes the biblical Feasts, so this has been one of those books we used, over and over again.
I would like to explain what I mean in my own words why it’s so important to study the bible from a Biblical Hebraic point of view.
As you all know by now I am from Brazil. Now, some people may say they know me. But do they really? Unless one can be familiar with certain aspects of my culture, they really don’t know me; they can assume and hypothesize. There are lots of things that my husband’s family does not seem to understand. Some days, I wish they would go out of their way to understand certain aspects of my Brazilian culture. When I came to America, I had to learn and observe the American way. I had to learn, so I wouldn’t appear foolish (which at times is easy to do coming from a different culture). In the same way, we miss so much more out of the bible, because we want to understand this Ancient Middle Eastern book with our modern western-American mind set.
Well, in a nut shell, HOW puts God first with a Hebraic Biblical point of view. I highly recommend and endorse Robin’s books.
heartofwisdom.com/
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