I have been learning so much from homeschooling this year. Crazy, right? Who learns from teaching their kids 1st grade stuff? Well, so far, I've learned to tell several different tree types apart, the songs of several different birds, and that 3-year-olds can write their own name. But, the coolest thing that we've been working on, by far, is the Bible stuff we've been doing. I'm using a little workbook put together by the pastor at David's parent's church, Compass Bible Church. It's just a short introduction to each book of the Bible, with one or two memorable events from each book. The kids learn about the book, then draw a picture of what they learned (for example, a picture of Abraham for Genesis, with the idea the big-picture perspective in Genesis is that God formed a covenant with Abraham), and then we tack a little reminder picture up to the bulletin board in chronological order. I'm going to be supplementing this with a little more about some of the OT stories this semester, and the NT stories next semester. Several days ago, we put up a map of the united kingdom when we learned about Joshua conquering Canaan, and then marked off the divided kingdom when we learned about Rehoboam and Jeroboam splitting the kingdom. Very cool. Today, we put up a timeline for Biblical history that we'll keep adding to the entire year. The Bible events are in blue, and the historical events (including things like the kid's birthdays) are in red. (Note: not that Bible events aren't historical--they totally are. But I wanted to distinguish them somehow.) And, just for my non-young-earth friends, the timeline is 6,000 years, with creation being right at the beginning. Ha--take that! I'll make crazy fundamentalists out of the kids yet!
All that to say: I'm very excited about school this year.
