Pray Daily for Your Children - A 31 Day Prayer Calendar

I've been wanting to pray more regularly and purposefully for my children.  Recently I came across a list of "31 Ways to Pray for Your Children" by Bob Hostetler. I'm going to use the list to pray for my children every day.

Here are the first five days' entries:

1. salvation "Lord, let salvation spring up within my children, that they may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory" (Isaiah 45:8, 2 Timothy 2:10).
2. growth in grace "I pray that they may 'grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ'" (2 Peter 3:18).
3. love "Grant, Lord, that my children may learn to 'live a life of love,' through the Spirit who dwells in them" (Ephesians 5:2, Galatians 5:22).
4. honesty and integrity "May integrity and honesty be their virtue and their protection" (Psalm 25:21, NLT).
5. self-control "Father, help my children not to be like many others around them, but let them be 'alert and self-controlled' in all they do" (1 Thessalonians 5:6)

Mr. Hostetler said to feel free to duplicate or improve on his prayer list. I can't improve on it, but I did duplicate it as a calendar in the iCal format. You can view it in your browser with this link. You can add this calendar to any calendar software that supports the iCal format (most do) with this link. I'm having my calendar send me an email every day with that day's pray topic so I remember to pray for my children.

And here is a daily agenda view. It should refresh automatically.



Please let me know in the comments if you find this helpful or if you need help getting the data in a format you can use.

Looking for a Bible reading plan? Here is how I am reading God's word this year.

Math Help Online

The web is full of great resources for supplementing our children's regular math curriculum. For example, one of my kids was struggling a bit with place value. Japanese is different from English in that there are words for ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, AND ten-thousands. Then it goes to ten ten-thousands (10,0000), a hundred ten-thousands (100,0000), a thousand ten-thousands (1000,0000), then another word for a hundred million (1,0000,0000), and so on. Add to that the fact that yen are two orders of magnitude different from dollars in value, and you've got guaranteed place value confusion for kids growing up bilingual (and their parents)!

All that to say why we needed extra math help, and how we found some wonderful math resources online. Sal Khan has hundreds of excellent, concise math video lessons, all for free at the Khan Academy. He begins with 1+1=2 and goes right through linear algebra. He has even branched out and done some videos on science, history, finance, and test prep. Here is his first place value video and links to his others. (Click the video to start it. Click it again to see it in a larger size on youtube.)

• Place value 2
• Place value 3
• Decimal place value
• Decimal place value 2

I'm all for teaching math through fun games like UNO, but sometimes you've just got to crank through a worksheet or two to solidify mastery. Softschools.com has help for several subjects including free math worksheets to cover subjects from pre-K through middle school. I like that you can set the minimum and maximum number of digits. Here are the ones I used for place value.

• Place value worksheet
• Numeral to number word worksheet

These are just two of the many, many resources out there. Please share your favorites in the comments.

Jewish Feasts and Crafts

In our first nine weeks of homeschooling this year, the kids learned about ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations. They also studied the Pentateuch (first five books of the Bible) and learned about creation, the calling of the Patriarchs and the Exodus. They learned about the Israelites' wanderings in the wilderness and the institution of the Law through Moses (including fun and meaning-filled feasts). Here are some pictures from the unit.

R's cereal-box ziggurat (the corn meal was meant to be mixed into the paint to add texture. She forgot, then sprinkled it over the top like snow).

A shelter for the Feast of Booths.

A shofar for the Feast of Trumpets.

The kids made a display about Rosh Hoshanah and Yom Kippur.

Breaking unleavened bread (made by T and R) at our Passover feast.

Broken bread at Passover.

T made challah, a bread that is eaten at Sabbath and feasts other than Passover.

Nerima Ward Agricultural Festival

Last month, we went to Hikarigaoka, our favorite park, and the agricultural festival for Nerima Ward was going on. It's kind of like a county fair in the US, but without the carnival aspect. Enjoy this slice of Japan.

Fall in beautiful Hikarigaoka Park.

Prize vegetables on display

Perfect box of onions

Tokyo's Nerima Ward is known for dried daikon radishes.

Boat made from vegetables

Detail of vegetable boat

Fishing for fruit

 The idea of this game was for people to see how much CO2 was prevented from being released by buying locally grown produce.

Holding a chick at the petting zoo

Marmot at the petting zoo

No agricultural festival would be complete without an Ampanman show!

    

D. "reading" Eric Carle's Brown BearBook

We've been on an Eric Carle kick recently. We read Eric Carle's "Bear Books" and visited the zoo to see some of the animals in the books. D. figured out the patten in the books and got really excited about  being able to "read" the books on his own. I caught him reading yesterday morning. My favorite part is about halfway through the video when he gets distracted by the numbers on his overalls. (If you get this blog post by email and or rss, you may need to click through to the blog to see the video.)

  

My recent writing

I've been writing recently on a web platform called squidoo. I write there about things that don't necessary fit here or on facebook. If you'd like to check out what I've written, here are five of my recent (or recently updated pages).

How to Teach Basic Dictionary Skills has fun activities for parents and teachers to help their kids look up words quickly and learn how to spell them.

How to Teach Math with UNO introduces ways to teach math skills with the card game that we all have lying around somewhere. From simple same-different sorting skills, to skip-counting backwards and forwards, all the way to working with multiplication and division facts.

How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk is my review of the excellent parenting book of that name. I also include information about the authors inspiration, Haim Ginott, and a video of a parent explaining how she uses one of the tips from the book.

Keith Green: Christian Music Legend is my tribute to a hero of the faith. It contains a Keith Green discography, my Keith Green memories, and links to various Keith Green resources like articles he has written and videos of his music and sermons.

Baby's First Bible contains my Bible storybook recommendations for parents, godparents, or anyone else who is looking for a good bible for babies and toddlers.

I'd love to hear your comments!

Our Homeschool Curriculum for 2010-2011

We are often asked about the curriculum we use for homeschooling. It changes every now and then but I'll share this year's lineup.

For our humanities and social studies subjects, we had been using whatever was recommended in The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home. I still recommend that book highly for those thinking of homeschooling or supplementing.

After going through one four-year cycle of that, we have now switched to Tapestry of Grace for history, literature, Bible, art, geography, and writing. From their website, they claim to provide "a plan of study that helps parents provide a Christian, classical education using a guided unit study approach, with the history of the world as the core organizational theme." We are just in our third week but love it so far. If I could sum up the curriculum in a word, it would be convergence. We study the same topic through all  of the humanities and social studies disciplines, gaining a much clearer and deeper understanding than if we tackled each discipline individually. When I say "we" I include myself in learning with the kids. I am definitely on the journey too.


For math we use Saxon Math, currently at the end of levels 3 and 5/4. Different approaches to math work for different students but we appreciate how Saxon Math's incremental approach and constant review. For 5/4, we use the DIVE instructional CD.

We use Spelling Workout for spelling. I haven't used other spelling books so I can't compare but I am satisfied with the kids' progress. The teachers' books are sometimes hard to find but you can get by without them. If you really want them, you can find them used online.

For grammar, we are using Jessie Wise's First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind, levels 2 and 4. These are great, but they require a lot of teacher time so we might switch to Daily Grams in when we are ready for new books later this year. (Any advice?)

We use Wordly Wise 3000 for vocabulary, but to be honest, the kids don't like it much. I'm trying to decide if we should try something else or just call it good with the vocabulary that the kids pick up from their reading.

The kids also study Japanese through a combination of reading library books, doing kumon worksheets, and working through the public elementary school textbooks.

I'd be happy to take any questions or ideas in the comments. (For the sake of disclosure, most of the links above have affiliate code in them. If you purchase anything through those links, I get a portion of the purchase price. The prices aren't any higher than they would ordinarily be.)

Edit: I forgot to mention our science curriculum. We use Real Science-4-Kids from Gravitas Publications. We are doing chemistry now. The lessons are simple and the experiments make use of commonly available items (except that we can't find purple cabbage in Japan to use an acid-base indicator. Grrrr). The kids look forward to our Friday "lab days."

Ancient Egypt Unit Study

This year we are using a unit-study homeschool curriculum called Tapestry of Grace. The first three weeks are about ancient Egypt. T and R are engrossed in their reading (Who knew that part of the mummification process was pulling the brain out piece by piece through the nostrils?). The activities are fun too. Below is the play dough land mass they made to learn geography terms. D contributed the island in the top right.

After dinner tonight, I shared what I know of Egyptian ambulatory customs.

There was dancing.

Ugly Animals

Mother Nature Network has photos of 13 of the world's ugliest animals. Here's an aye-aye to get you started.

Photo: Chris Corwin/Flickr

Whether you want to or not, you're probably going to click through to see the rest. 

(via challies.com)

D's First Day of Preschool

I've been wanting to get back to blogging for a while but needed something momentous to get me started again. Here it is.