Half-baked Homeschool

I've fallen behind in my summaries of last school year, and we're starting school tomorrow! The only subject that I didn't really cover so far is Bible. I know the county won't ever check on that, but I want to remember what we did all the same.

We covered Bible in the morning during breakfast. This involved memorizing a weekly verse, learning one hymn each month, and reviewing the topic we discussed on Sunday evenings during our family devotion time.

For our Sunday evenings, my husband would read a lesson from a sweet little book his mother gave to me called Little Visits with God. Both the language and the illustrations give away the 1950's publishing date, but an excellent updated version is now available. Although I enjoy the sometimes quaint, sometimes corny aspects of the vintage version, we occasionally had to change the wording so that our children could understand the point more thoroughly.

Each lesson in Little Visits centers on a Bible verse, which is illustrated in a short story. Discussion questions follow and a closing prayer is provided. We found these lessons appropriate and interesting enough to hold the attention of both our 5 year-old and 8 year-old. I think they would work for children from about 3 to 11.

During breakfast that week, the boys and I memorized the Scripture verse from our lesson and also learned a hymn. I generally organized our devotions into monthly themes, thanks to the index in Little Visits, and our monthly hymn alligned with the theme of the month.

If time allowed, we would continue to discuss the week's lesson. This was particularly true once we started on themes of Christian character, which I would emphasize with readings from The Book or Virtues by William Bennett or Everyday Graces by Karen Santorum. Both books provide stories, poems, and quotes to illustrate a variety of noble character qualities.

We also used the breakfast hour for poetry memorization, with each of the boys memorizing a poem every month. The only difficulty in that was choosing a poem; Favorite Poems Old and New provided too many options. Of all our selections, Bearclaw's rendition of Psalm 8 and Shortbread's sweet and stumbly recitation of "The Quarrel" by Eleanor Farjeon were my favorites.