Day 7/90, unofficially, because I haven't gone to bed yet

Is it still day 7 if I haven't gone to bed,  but it's after midnight?  Purely theoretical.

Anyway,  today I read an old favorite to Rosie. .... Everyday Graces by Karen Santorum.  Mrs.  Santorum compiled many classic stories and poems about manners and values.  Rosie loved it!   And there are such good messages about things like saying "please".  I also recently obtained a copy of Mrs. Piggle Wiggle's Farm by MacDonald and illustrated by Maurice Sendak at a cute little used book store in Stillwater, Mn. (Used book stores are so fun!  I always find good stuff at used book stores.  I got Hope a cool printing of Sherlock Holmes stories for Christmas.  I also got her a cuddly blanket.  Perfect combo gift for an avid reader. )  The children in the local town go stay with Mrs. Piggle Wiggle on her farm to correct behavioral issues.  She always succeeds.   I want to be like Mrs. Piggle Wiggle when I grow up.

Until next time, 
Blessings!
Heidi

What Would Jesus Do? (Day 6/90)

Today I was reading out of a book that Sam read last spring as part of his Notgrass American History course.  Notgrass is a publisher that has some great history books, including Economics and Government. There is literature recommended all through the courses, which is so great!  He was able to get credit for English Literature, History, and Bible all in one course.  (I had to keep reminding him that there was more work because it was three courses in one.)   I also love that the literature applies directly to the period in history that he was studying......putting some leaves on the tree, so to speak.

Anyway, the book....... In His Steps by Charles Sheldon.  If you have ever heard the phrase "What would Jesus do?" you have been part of the legacy of the pastor in this book.  I am only in the third or fourth chapter, but it is very moving.  The people in this pastor's church actually prayed for guidance from the Holy Spirit to make all of the decisions in their lives based on the question..... "What would Jesus do?"  More to come....but I believe it will be a wonderful book - a great one to read as we start a new year. 

Blessings,
Heidi

Happy New Year! (Day 5/90)

Another year is coming to a close.  I thought I would list a few monumental events for last year and the ones that will most likely happen this year......

2017

• Hope performed at AMTC Shine and we spent New Year's Eve in Orlando last year.
• Hope graduated high school, got her first non-babysitting job, started free-lance writing, and started an apprenticeship.
• Hope performed in Robin Hood by CB productions and Narnia with Youth Performance Company.
• Sam got his driver's license and is now able to take himself to workouts, co-op, math team, baseball practices, and more....by himself.  And he was enlisted to drive Rose around too.
• Sam is getting better at basketball!  He's driving to the basket and scoring some points this year!
• Sam has a real hair style which requires gel and a brush and everything.  For the first time in his life, the words "Don't mess up my hair!" have been heard coming from his general direction.
• Sam built an arc furnace and didn't burn the house down or get electrocuted!  (However, he plans on adding more power to the thing soon. Ugh!)
• Rose started playing basketball and then started paying attention while playing....these events were not simultaneous.
• Rose started auditioning for plays and was actually cast in Candle in the Window!  She also performed in a showcase of Frog and Toad with her acting class.
• Rose broke her arm.  It was very sad and traumatic, but now the brace serves as a very useful prop in the movies she makes!

2018

• Hope will complete the Praxis program this year, but not before she has to most likely move away for an internship starting in July.  :-(
• Hope will be going on a mission trip with All Grace Outreach as a reward for raising money for Operation Underground Railroad.
• Sam will be taking the ACT (he's so excited!) and finishing his junior year of high school.  He will most likely be picking a school where he will pursue a degree in something and play baseball.
• Rose will continue to make us laugh and want to pull our hair out at the same time. :-) J/K  There is no way to know what she will do.  Really.  Seriously.  Not kidding. LOL

Well - time to get going.

Happy New Year!

Until next time - blessings,

Heidi

Totally Missed Day 4!! (Day 4/90)

I had nothing on the calendar yesterday, BUT I still missed writing yesterday!  Well, I didn't sit on the couch all day.  I went to Hope and Sam's workout at REDline Ultra.  This is the first time I have seen the new space.  It is really nice!  I had fun.  And Aaron is great with the kids.  He pushes them while smiling very warmly so you can't really hate him. :-)

Then I went grocery shopping because we had dinner guests coming!  Josh and Kimberly came over and we had dinner, played telephone Pictionary, and made some movies with Rosie as the director.  Which finally brings me to the relevance to home schooling.  Hope, Sam, and Rose have always been able to steal our friends when they come over, no matter their age.  Even though Rose's age and personality can make her overbearing at times, even she wants to interact and converse with people of all ages.  (To be fair, Josh and Kimberly are closer to Hope and Sam's age than they are to ours, but that is neither here nor there.) 

I don't know if the kids would be as excited about hanging out with Mom and Dad and Mom and Dad's friends if they weren't home schooled.  When I was their age, I preferred my friends or being alone.  My parents are great people and I see them every day now, but we just were not as close. 

I also noticed that for two days in a row, Hope and Sam have played Monopoly by the fireplace.  So cute!  I recalled watching them play years ago....when the dolls each had a turn as well. :-)  They reminded me that they do this every Christmas vacation during the lull in school and activities. 

Why do I think it is a positive that they enjoy spending time with their family?  It is really cool to have a close family, knowing that we are there for each other and cheering for each other.  Hope and Sam genuinely care that the other one achieves their goals and dreams and attends each other's games or performances whenever possible.  Home schooling is obviously not a prerequisite to having a close family.  I just think it would be harder to accomplish without it - for us, anyway. 

Until tomorrow....
Blessings!
Heidi

P.S. Today will have to be Day 4 instead of Day 5.

P.P.S. I know I totally sounded like I was making excuses for not writing yesterday, but I simply put it off and then forgot.  No excuses!

Book Review - The Child's Story Bible, by Catherine F. Vos (Day 3/90)

I figured I could get several posts' worth out of book reviews...since we have a lot of them. :-)

This particular book, The Child's Story Bible by Catherine F. Vos, has been a staple in our home schooling library ever since Hope and Sam were little.  We have read a chapter (or more) most days of school, before we read or do anything else.  It was recommended to me at a seminar by Carole Joy Seid.   She has a wonderful eloquent explanation and promotion of this book, but here is what I remember, combined with my experience.

We wanted to teach the children to say a prayer and read their Bible first thing before doing anything else in their day to place the importance on it.  If we place it first, we can make it the framework on which every other subject hangs.  We can see God in all school subjects, and we purposefully look for it and point it out.  This ranges from history to science, and everything in between. 

Catherine Vos seems to stay quite accurate in her version of the Bible and also points out connections and foreshadows events to show the significance of certain things that a person might not normally notice, especially the kids.  (I have personally learned a lot about the Bible from reading this book to the kids.)  Rose noticed a connection between the Promised Land Series and the Bible just yesterday!  Those mean Amalekites used to attack the Israelites, especially the vulnerable, and God eventually sent Saul to destroy them.  Making those connections helps her internalize and remember what she is learning!  Yeah!


Until next time!
Blessings,
Heidi

Book Review - Promised Land series (Day 2/90)

Rose and I have been reading the Promised Land series by Hope Auer.  She was home-schooled herself and has done a lot of secular and Biblical research to come up with a wonderful historical fiction book series that follows the family of Jarah. (These books were not published when Hope and Sam were little....it reminds me that new wonderful books are being written all the time. :-))  The first book begins in Egypt while Jarah and her family and friends are slaves of the Egyptians.  The author has done good research and has done her best to make the story historically accurate.  When I was going through the history of Egypt with Hope and Sam about ten years ago I remember having trouble figuring out how to line up the Egyptian history with the Biblical account - but it seems I am not alone and there is a lot of debate on the subject.  (I don't feel so dumb now.)  The author points out that the Egyptians didn't like to record things that didn't go their way...a kind of selective memory, I guess....so that helps decipher which pharaoh was in power at the time of the Exodus, but she doesn't claim to be the foremost expert.  I like her humility, even though you can tell she has done her homework when you read her books.

It is very interesting to take events that we read in the Bible and see them through the eyes of people that could have existed and experienced things at that time.  It definitely makes it more memorable and personal.  In fact, I loved using historical fiction with Hope and Sam through many eras of history - and I so look forward to reading these books (and more) with Rosie! So fun!  So helpful!  (Check out Living History Library and Beautiful Feet website.)   It is a Christian worldview company and has many wonderful book recommendations!  (We have also enjoyed G.A. Henty books.  The Cat of Bubastes is wonderful!  It is also set in Ancient Egypt.  So are Golden Goblet and Mara, daughter of the Nile, both by McGraw.) 

I can't stand it!  There are so many great books and so little time! 

Until next time!
Blessings!
Heidi

A Review of Fall 2017

SO - a lot has happened! 

Hope successfully turned her rejection to Praxis into energy and raised over $20,000 for Operation Underground Railroad!  It is such a worthy cause to support....saving children from being sold as sexual playthings.  (It is so horrible that a person can barely think about it.  Check out their website if you want to learn more about how to help.  O.U.R. website)  She was in the musical Narnia with the Youth Performance Company as the character Mr. Tumnus.  It was a lot of work and time, but she thoroughly enjoyed it!  She also sought out a way to make income, which resulted in a nanny job.  She is "on call", but can refuse any assignments.  It has worked out well.  If she has time, she goes - if not, she doesn't.  She also started an internship with Terry's company, New Vision Engineering, in the marketing department.  She is learning a lot and we hear a lot of good things about her from the owner.  She continues to listen to educational self-improvement and business-minded audios and read books from the Life System.   And - on top of it all, she reapplied to Praxis and was overwhelmingly accepted!  She is already learning a lot, but the official start date is January 3rd.  She even has her own web page set up already at hopeszymanski.com ! 

To be true to the title of this blog, I am thankful we home schooled Hope because she has learned to be a very self-directed learner.  She isn't afraid to be adventurous, set high goals, and go in a different direction than most people would.  At the same time, she is very aware of how she affects others and is continuing to strive to learn more and more about how to serve others.  And - above all, she cares about God's people, especially the little innocent ones that Operation Underground Railroad saves and rehabilitates.  See the article Life Blog posted here .

Sam had a challenging semester.  He had 12 credits of college classes and I would have to say that the biggest lessons he learned were not the actual skills and details of the classes, even though his writing did improve quite a bit. :-)  (Mary Mueller would be proud!)   He learned about time management and about effort, which will be so valuable to him going forward.  There is definitely some regret for not trying a little harder in a couple of classes because he was very close to the next letter grade in both.  I don't think much more needed to be said.  On one hand, he has regrets, but on the other hand he learned that if he tries a little harder he can do very well. 

I am thankful we have been home schooling Sam because we would not have done PSEO otherwise and the experience was very helpful.  He will be much more ready for the fall of 2019 when he steps into some college classes as a freshman.   (He is also very excited that History of Western Civ is out of the way! LOL!!)

Rose had an interesting semester.  She broke her arm in mid-September, which led to a few days off from expected school activities.  I realized part way through the semester that she was either bored with math or was not getting the addition of sums as quickly as I'd like.  (I am referring to not counting on her fingers, but by seeing the numbers and mentally rearranging parts of numbers to add quickly.  I found that Hope and Sam did much better in math after having mastered this.)  So - we moved away from the normal math curriculum and played games instead.  Cribbage, math dice, and Adding War became more of our normal routine than going through the book.  I also make her figure things out on her own when she asks questions about things like how much money she would have left if she bought a pirate costume, for example.  Purely hypothetical, for sure. ;-)   NOT!

I am thankful we are home schooling Rosie for many reasons.  When her arm was broken, the doctors and nurses kept explaining about when she could go back to school and what her restrictions would be.  (It was a pretty bad break which required surgery, pins, and a cast.)  Being at home allowed us to do what she could when she could - (and we didn't need to take her out of school for her follow-up appointments.)  And her ears still worked, so I could still read to her, which is most of what we do anyway.  Recently she has been exploring her interest in theater, so besides being in a couple of plays, she actually wrote a play!  It is too cute, and actually pretty good.  Mom did the typing, but the rest of it is her original work....and she is working on gathering friends to be in her play so she can direct it.  (She even studied her director and watched how she put her shows together.) 

Rose met a little girl much like herself in one of her plays this semester.  They are both very strong-willed, outgoing, adventurous, creative, funny, and precocious - which, for Rosie, sometimes leads to problems.  This other little girl's mother told me they were having trouble with her at school, but more of in a way that makes them think she just needs a different environment, so they pulled her out.  I am thankful that Rose is at home where we can help her develop in a way that will hopefully keep her amazing qualities intact and let them flourish, while still teaching her how to play nice with others, including us. :-) 

Well - I committed to Sam that I would blog every day for 90 days and that I want him to do the same.  Praxis founder, Isaac Morehouse, recommends it and has the Praxis participants do it as well.  It develops a person.  It makes them more creative.  It holds a person accountable to something and builds a positive habit, which leads to believing you can build other positive habits.  I can't promise every one will be this long.  In fact, I promise they won't!  I may have to stray from the original concept once in a while, but will try to tie it in somehow. :-)

Until next time! 
Heidi