I recently put together a list of Bible verses about love. What amazed me as I researched for it was the overwhelming number of verses about God's love for us compared with verses about our love for God or others. It's really true that "we love because he first loved us."
Justin Hyde gives a peek into his family's intentional evenings in a blog post titled "How I Pastor My Family."
If your the type who isn't into plowing through the Bible in a year, then maybe the Daily Bible Meditation Guide (pdf) is something you would be interested in. Actually, the whole life2gether blog is really good. (via)
Flip teaching, or backwards teaching, is a classroom teaching innovation that interests me. The idea is that kids watch lectures and videos at home, and then class is for hands-on work and face-to-face interaction with teacher and peers. Check out this article in the Daily Riff and this one in the Telegraph. Like many other educational "innovations," homeschoolers have been doing it for a long time.
My ten-year-old son beat me at chess today for the first time. Not to make excuses, but the sun was in my eyes, not to mention that annoying hangnail I've been nursing. Kidding aside, I knew the time would come; I just didn't think it would be so soon!
Here is how he learned to play chess and beat me. Some things I taught him, and some he learned on his own.
I first taught him how to set up the chess board and all the ways that pieces can move and take opposing pieces.
I talked him through our first several games as we played, telling him what I was doing and why. I also asked him to explain his moves to me, and I gave him feedback on his strategy.
When we first started playing, I allowed him to turn the board around at any point in the game (as long as he wasn't in check) and for us to finish the game playing each other's original pieces.
I started playing with just half of my pieces, then increased the number of pieces I used as he improved.
I let him take back moves if I hadn't yet touched a piece.
I never lost on purpose; I handicapped myself, but always played to win. This kept things fun for both of us.
He played a chess game on my ipod touch on the way to Kyoto and back.
And today he beat me with both of us playing at full strength! I'm proud of him. Pretty soon he'll be spotting me pieces just to keep our games interesting.
Schoolchildren in Japan often make kites during the winter holidays and fly them on New Year's Day. T made one this year. He designed, built, and flew it himself. It's made of paper and bamboo sticks. The first flight ended with the kite in a tree. After patching it up, he went back and flew it well in the park, as well as could be expected on a windless day.
We're on a sudoku kick at the moment. I spent a couple hours today on a really tough one and messed it up twice. T, R, Tomomi and her parents are all in on the action. Besides being fun, addictive, and sometimes frustrating, sudoku helps development in the following areas.
logic
problem solving
working memory
concentration
perseverance
pattern recognition
creativity
confidence
dealing with frustration
by jen_maiser
Of course it's important to start children out with easy puzzles so they don't get too frustrated right away and give up. You can model solving a puzzle and talk your way through it, but once your child has the basic concept, don't help too much. A big part of what makes sudoku fun is the satisfaction of completing a puzzle "all by myself!"
Here is a link to the more typical 9x9 sudoku grids with various levels of difficulty.
If you'd rather work with words than numbers, there are lots of logic puzzles that are more like story problems. Here is a collection of 12 printable logic puzzles with grids.
I watched "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" today with my kids. What a fun and wacky movie! Like many of the other animated movies that come out these days, it touched on several important themes without being too heavy handed.
Generation and communication gap between fathers and sons. "Not every sardine was meant to swim, son."" I don't understand fishing metaphors!"
Large food portions and obesity. "Bigger is better!"
Smart girls/women who act dumb to be accepted. "It's a solid, it's a liquid, it's a viscoelastic polymer made out of polypeptide chains but you eat it! I mean, it tastes good! "
Living on past glories. "I'm Baby Brent!"
Redeeming past failures. Spray-on shoes
Unintended consequences of messing with nature.
I also loved the voice casting, especially these two guys. Know who they are? The first one is easy.
It has become a winter family tradition for us to skate at the Hirakata Park ice rink in Osaka. This year D had grown into the smallest size of rental skates so he came with us and had his first ice skating experience. He got tired of skating after about one minute ("It's fun but the ice is too slippery") and went to play in the fake snow for a while.
He came back later and gave it another go. This time he was able to keep his feet under him and skate around the rink several times (with help). He was the littlest guy on the rink and had quite the fan club of junior-high girls. "Soooo cuuute!"
R and T somehow improved a lot even though we hadn't been skating in a year. Between hauling D back and forth to and from the snow area and helping him skate, Tomomi and I even had a little time to hold hands and skate around like teenageers.
Hirakata Park is a nice place for ice skating in the Osaka area but it's a little pricey. If you go by train, you can save quite a bit of money by purchasing a combination train/park entrance/skate rink entrance ticket from any Keihan railway ticket office. This year they are calling it the HiraPa Go!Go! Ticket. If the link is broken, search google for ひらパーGo!Go!チケット.
Join Johnny and June Cash as they visit with Billy Graham and sing my favorite Christmas song, "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day." (RSS or email readers, you may need to click through to see the video.) I featured this song two years ago at Christmas, but it's worth sharing again.
The lyrics are from a poem that Longfellow wrote during the Civil War shortly after his son had been severely wounded and his wife had died in a fire. If he could proclaim the last stanza in those times, then we certainly can in these times too.
About this time every year I select a Bible reading plan for the following year. In 2010 I've used the Discipleship Journal Bible Reading Plan (pdf). It features selections from four book of the Bible each day and gets you through the whole Bible in one year. I enjoyed it thoroughly. It gives good balance between wisdom literature, other Old Testament books, gospels, and other New Testament books. Another great point about the plan is that it only offers selections for 25 days each month--great for catch-up or review.
The one quibble I have with the plan is that some books take so long to read through, that you can lose sight of the big picture. Several of the books take a month to read, the gospels even longer. That's why in 2011, I'm going with Discipleship Journal's Book-at-a-Time Bible Reading plan (pdf). Here's how they describe it.
The book-at-a-time Bible reading plan provides two readings for each day. The first reading alternates between Old and New Testament books, giving you three or four chapters a day. The Gospels are spread throughout the year.
The second reading takes you through a chapter or so of the wisdom literature and Isaiah. Combined,these readings will take you through the entire Bible in one year.
To prevent the frustration of falling behind and to provide some reflection time, each month consists of only 25 readings. You’ll have several days each month to meditate more deeply on something that was significant to you in the past week, to catch up on missed readings, or to revisit favorite passages.
Discipleship Journal also offers the 5x5x5 Bible Reading Plan (pdf), which they describe this way:
5 minutes per day, 5 days per week, 5 ways to dig deeper. Takes you through one chapter each day. Read the New Testament in one year.
All three of these reading plans, with an overview of each and links to printable versions in English and Spanish are on the Navigators' Discipleship Journal website.
If none of these plans suits your, check out this extensive collection of other reading plans. The main thing is to stick with the reading and allow God's Word to do its thing in your heart. Like the old song says, "Read your Bible, pray every day, and you'll grow, grow, grow!"
If you liked this post, you might also like my post about a 31-day prayer calendar to help you pray for your children.
T and I came to Kyoto today on the bullet train. We had a great view of snow covered Mount Fuji, but almost missed it because I was reading and T was playing chess on my iPod. It won't be long before he's beating me consistently. The changing of the guard has begun.
Back up your delicious.com bookmarks. Yahoo has announced that they are getting rid of delicious. They say they want to sell it, not shut it down, but it wouldn't hurt to make contingency plans.
Wastebook 2010. Senator Coburn has put together a list of 100 of the most wasteful projects that federal money is spent on including $1.5 million to demold buildings just before tearing them down and $600,000 to develop an online video game called Wolfquest. (Ever heard of it? Me neither.)
You can't multitask so stop trying. The Harvard Business Review reminds us that the ability to multitask is a myth. The online equivalent of closing your office door is to turn off your email and instant message clients and let the phone go to voice mail.
by Christine M. Field. It's a good book; I may write more about it later. She actually gets the test from James Dobson's pamphlet, "Fatigue and the Homemaker."
and did the exercises in it.
I watched 
today with my kids. What a fun and wacky movie! Like many of the other animated movies that come out these days, it touched on several important themes without being too heavy handed.
