Back to School Prayers

With the start of the school year upon us in my community as well as many others, here are great items to pray about regarding your local schools. Even if you no longer have children in school, our schools and everyone who is connected with them need our prayers.  

Pray for School Boards: 

• Give thanks for the individuals who serve our community in this way. 
• Pray for wisdom and discernment as they make decisions that impact our community. 
• Pray they may honor God with their speech and actions. 
• Pray for positive interactions with administrators, teachers, staff, students, and families.
•  Pray for good working relationships between board members. 

 Pray for staff: 

• Pray for administrators to be good leaders. 
• Pray for teachers to connect with their students and families. 
• Pray for teachers who are new to their district or have changed positions. 
• Pray they will adjust well to the schools. 
• Pray for secretaries, bus drivers, and custodians. These important roles are often the first connection a student makes with a school. Pray these individuals will be caring and empathetic to students and families. 
• Pray that Christian staff members will have opportunities to live out their faith on a daily basis. May they be faithful to their beliefs as Christians and their calling as teachers. Pray for appropriate opportunities to share their faith. 
• Pray that all school staff will get along and support each other. 
• Pray by name for teachers that you know personally or for teachers your children/grandchildren will have.

 Pray for students: 

• Pray for students who are new to our community or who are attending a new school that they are able to make friends and to feel welcome. 
• Pray for students who are just starting school for the first time this year.
•  Pray for them as they adjust to new routines, new teachers, and new friends. 
• Pray for all students to be kind and welcoming to others. 
• Pray for students who have difficult home situations or lack food, supplies, and other resources. Pray that school may be a safe place and they will have adults they can trust. Pray that school personnel can help connect them to appropriate resources. 
• Pray for students while they are on the playground and/or athletic fields. Pray that they will honor God in their speech and actions. Pray that these will be places where students will be lifted up and encouraged rather than torn down. 
• Pray for safety while traveling to school whether that be by bus, driving, walking, etc. Especially pray for safety for high school students who may be newer drivers. 
• Pray for the physical and mental health of everyone who is connected with our schools. Pray for students who may be considering suicide that they will seek help and that friends and others will reach out to them. 
• Pray specifically for students you know by name.

Newest from Richard Louv

If you have previously read Richard Louv's books The Last Child in the Woods or The Nature Principle, his newest work Vitamin N: The Essential Guide to a Nature Rich Life needs to be added to your to-purchase pile. Unlike his previous works which focus more on the theoretical side of why spending time in nature is important, Vitamin N is a guide-book for parents and anyone else who works with children which gives ideas on how to easily provide opportunities for children to experience nature. As such it is not a book to read straight through and then put on your shelf. It is a book to leave where you can access frequently and dip into on a regular basis so that the ideas shared can be put into practice.

My review copy was an ebook but this book really needs to be purchased as a print copy in order to make the most of it. If you are a parent of pre-schoolers or early elementary aged children, you need to run to the nearest bookstore and purchase a copy of this book. If you are a home-school family, this book will be a great asset to nature study and other educational endeavors. While targeted to parents, there are ideas that can be implemented by adults as well. Libraries, schools, YMCAs, and other organizations that provide services to children and families will also benefit from having access to this book.

I was provided a copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

How Are You Smart?

Dr. Kathy Koch explores the variety of ways someone can be smart in the new edition of her book How Am I Smart?: A Parent's Guide to Multiple Intelligences. This book does a great job of bringing Dr. Howard Gardner's concepts of Multiple Intelligence to a level understandable and applicable to all. Dr. Koch spends several chapters introducing the concept of various smarts and then delves into each of the 8 smarts individually. Throughout the book she gives many examples of how student lives have been changed by realizing they are smart in various areas as well as how this information has changed adults as well.

This an an updated edition of the previous 2007 publication. The major differences seem to be new examples that incorporate more social media and other technology that has become even more common place. A new companion website exists which contains a free smarts assessment available via the passcode contained in the book. This book was an easy read but gives good ideas of how to find the different ways in which children are smart and suggestions on how to encourage them. I recommend this book for parents of young children who are in pre-school through early elementary. While there is some worthwhile information for parents of older children, it is definitely aimed for parents of youngers.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from NetGalley and Moody Publishers. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Adventures

Since my last post was a month and a half a go, so much for becoming more frequent in my blog postings. I have started a twitter account though. Twitter, with its character limit, seems more conducive for the "hey this is what I'm doing" type of posts than a blog does. When I post here, I feel like I need to have something of substance to say.

Recently, I purchased the book Totally Cool Soapmaking or Kids for dd and me. So today, we went to Michael's to purchase the needed supplies. I'm really excited as this seems like a very do-able project that can be done in a short amount of time yet have a nice product at the end. We're planning on contributing our efforts to our church bazaar. Each year I have grand plans of making something that do not materialize and then I feel badly. This year, I've decided not to worry about it but the soap will be a nice addition.

Along with the above mentioned book, I have purchased a number of other fun things as well. I still have high hopes of doing a lot of educational activities in the evenings. My desire is much larger than my output. I really want to study history and science with the kids, read great literature, write stories, do math, and in short, homeschool. I also want to do Bible study, church history, missions, and worldview study. Unfortunately, doing all of those things along with any kind of crafty things is downright difficult.

Speaking of worldview study, I was really excited this evening to learn of a new worldview curriculum for elementary kids. It is the worldview only portion of another curriculum designed for Christian schools. The first of four volumes has been released with three more to be published one a year between now and 2012. The first volume has ten lessons with each lesson taking one to two weeks. Because it is worldview without the Bible survey, we can use something else for Bible without feeling like we are overlapping. Now I just need to decide when to begin using it. It might be interesting to do this study in a group as well.

I finished reading last week the most marvelous book, When Children Love to Learn: A Practical Application of Charlotte Mason's Philosophy for Today (Dewey Decimal 600s in my reading challenge) is in many ways a sequel to Susan Schaeffer Macaulay's For the Children's Sake. The latter book was my first introduction to Charlotte Mason and a great deal of it makes sense. I learned of the first title last fall and borrowed a copy from another library to read. The book is primarily authored by a professor of education at Covenant College and two administrators at private Christian schools who utilize the Charlotte Mason philosophy. This describes the type of school where I would enroll my kids in an instant if one was available. I read references to Charlotte Mason quite a bit of various homeschooling and afterschooling forums but had not seen her philosophy mentioned in regards to a traditional classroom although that was her original intent.

One of the things I really like about her philosophy is the oft-quoted (and paraphrased) statement that children should be given real or "living books" to read instead of "twaddle". In so many ways this just makes sense because if children read only twaddle they never develop a taste for the best of what is available and become loathe to try anything more difficult. In addition to twaddle-free education, Mason puts a emphasis on lots of nature study, picture study, composer study, reading Shakespeare and poetry, doing handicrafts, and letting children have opportunity to play and be kids. Her philosophy advocates academic school subjects in the morning with the afternoons devoted to nature walks, handicraft, and play or what she refers to as "masterful inactivity". Sometimes I have the brash idea that it would be fun to open a private school. At this point in time, it would be really difficult to decide between a Mason style school or a University Model School. I really think this type of school would fit a niche that currently does not exist in our area. The only private schools are a Lutheran school and a Catholic school that run through 8th grade but having looked over their websites and handbooks thoroughly, the curriculum uses the same textbooks as the public school with the main difference being the addition of Bible/religion class. Although, we're not displeased with our local elementary school, it hasn't knocked our socks off either. But until another option presents itself or I can figure out a way to fit full-fledged home schooling into our hectic life, I'm going to take the $3 grand plus that it would cost to enroll in private school and use that money to buy lots of great books and resources and take purposeful educational trips.