I hope you are enjoying my telling of what we do each day. So far I've shared our singing of hymns and prayer time; how and what we memorize. It might interest you to know that this just completes our first half hour of the morning, and now it's time to open our Bibles!
Bible is the foundation for everything we do. With the advent of Charlotte coming to stay, we've gone through a learning process that has taken us from complicated, to simple. I've written about our Principle Approach to studying much over the years, and I'm really seeing how it has prepared us for this (Charlotte Mason) progression in our learning. While we learned so much with our Judah Bible Curriculum, our emphasis was changing and we are now finding it a true pleasure to just read the Word of God!
Concentrating our efforts on reading scripture has given us a fresh passion for God's story. We chose to read through the gospels first and are using Penny Gardner's lists that you can find here and here. Son and I take turns reading and it really is a great chance for me to hear him read aloud. We are enjoying the fact that the short lessons that Charlotte prescribed, suit us well at this time. They allow us time to discuss what we've read, and lend themselves nicely to have five year old daughter join us. She is learning to narrate and son is loving sharing his own bits of learning with her.
I have to mention that a side benefit of reading the Bible has been our children's increased vocabulary. Well, any reading of real books will do this, but it's amazing to me how a spelling quiz will show no trouble with words like "righteousness", "blessed", or "trial", while "exception" or even "dilemma" bug the tar out of my boy!
One conundrum that I've faced with the decision to go this direction, is what to do with other Bible resources we have and love. For instance our "Child's Story Bible", by Catherine Vos. I love this book! We used it and our Bible for awhile, but there was so much repetition that it got monotonous. Charlotte does not hold to repeating readings, and preferred the actual text, to watered down versions. So while Vos's book is the best of the story Bibles, the Bible is the Bible!
This brings me to another bit that I haven't mentioned for awhile: Translations and simplified texts. We have chosen to use the English Standard Version for our own personal reasons, but with that decision came the effort that we would all use it together. We also chose to put son in a "full", and not "children's" version as soon as he was solidly reading. This was around age 7. It helped that they came out with a Children's ESV that was full text but included pictures! With memorizing, studying meanings of the words God used, etc., we just didn't see it making much sense to use a kiddie version.
Recently we began attending a new church and 5yo daughter's first handout in Sunday School was the Lord's Prayer--in baby talk. No kidding! She has been in the process of learning the true Lord's Prayer and I found it frustrating that they would use baby talk in place of the beautiful words of Jesus! Is it any easier, or hold any value, to teach a child a watered down prayer that's not in the Bible, than to teach what Jesus truly taught? I think not! Enough said.
Lastly, I'll add that "just" reading the Bible is what we feel the Lord wants for us at this time. We've set aside the notebooking and the excessive planning and are concentrating on listening to God and seeing what He has to reveal to us. This was not an easy step for me (the Planner!), but we have been really blessed by it! AND. Bible is solidly the Word of God and not a "subject" that requires a programmed response.
Read about the other things we do:
Part 1: Hymn Study
Part 2: Prayer
Part 3: Memorization
Thursday, February 19, 2009
What We Do, Part 4: Bible
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5 comments:
Totally agreeing with you!! We dumped the Children's Bible story books and replaced them with plain Scripture. We are ALL loving it. We follow along in our own Bible and take turns reading aloud. The children remember so much more and have such thoughtful questions and insights. We use the NKJV but only because I actually have 4 copies of it. LOL.
I personally love my new ESV Study Bible.
BTW, you post on prayer really convicted me that I'm not teaching my children how to pray by example. I've always prayed by myself & really realized that my kiddos need to hear more than grace at dinner. Thank you so much.
I'm tracking with you. How do you keep things so short though? We continually end up with an extended worship time. I can definitely think of worse things to extend though. ;)
We had a Children's NIV and I never liked it. Finally found Bug a NKJV that has missionary stories and facts about the world. Pictures would be nice, but I like the inspirational stories and focus on what we can do to advance the kingdom of God now. Great stuff! Maybe I should get one for myself...Hadn't thought of that. :)
Thank you for sharing all this, it has been very helpful.
We're doing the "just reading the Bible" thing too, which means that I, too, must not hyper-plan what I want to bring out of the reading...then it becomes what they want to talk about! PTL.
I like your insights about children's Bible study. That's always my daughter's criticism on the few opportunities she does have to go to any kind of class setting. She complains, "Why do we always study Noah's ark, Creation, and Daniel in the lion's den? Aren't there other stories?" It makes her crazy. :-) She quickly picks up on the sense that kids can't grasp the "tougher" concepts and stories in the Bible. And it insults her.
We use Doorposts Polished Cornerstones to guide our B study.
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