Our lesson on Ezra...

We had Bible lesson the other day and the topic was Ezra. I've never really paid much attention to Ezra. Perhaps it had never come to life for me. But it did this time.
Ezra was an Israelite of the captivity from Babylon. The temple had already been rebuilt 60 years previously and 80 years had passed since their slow return to Jerusalem.The reigns of  Nebuchanezzar, Cyrus, Darius, Ahasuerus, and now Artaxerxes had come to pass. We have now read about Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, Esther, and now Ezra. He was to go to Jerusalem to teach the people. Getting permission to go, he finally gets there and there is so much joy at seeing his people and his land. The punishment for sin had brought them into slavery and now they could begin anew. But then the princes come to Ezra with distressing news. The people had married foreign men and women.

Wasn't it the foreign women who deceived Solomon's heart and drew him away? This may not seem so distressing, I mean Israel was led captive and not many were left. Most left had gone to Egypt. But it was. They disobeyed God's command. Took in what seemed harmless with a twist of deceit to the heart. What harm would a goodly woman or man be though they be foreign?

The New Testament warns us about such things.  II Corinthians 6:11-18 tells us about such separation. A separation much more than mere physical.

"....Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers; for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? And what communion hath light with darkness? ....v.17..Wherefore, come out from among them, and be separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you,....."

At the evening sacrifice, Ezra fell on his knees raised his hands up to the Lord. They had sinned and Ezra thought all was well. That they were off to a good start. His heart could make no excuses but only plead for mercy. All he could do was beseech the Lord for the people in humility. 

This is the heart God is looking for. The godly sorrow that it takes to reach God's heart. Our churches are full of goodly piety. Some even preach against sin.But they have or are in the process of joining themselves to foreign wives and husbands- the world. They have accepted the world and what is seen as normal. Deceived themselves into thinking they could espouse a little of what is foreign to God and that God would overlook it. That a little compromise with the world isn't so bad. Bigger churches are pleasing to God, so they think, because living out the blessings of God with no Uriah spirit is showing how good God has been instead avoiding the very appearance of evil. All a form but no heart in the matter. Or a little heart with a little form but not a complete surrender.

Oh, how Ezra must have felt! He cried ,"We are before you in our sins. We cannot stand before you because of this."  


Let us remember Ezra and reach God's heart. God is not mocked even when we allow ourselves to accept sin, harmless as it seems. He sees within us and our affections. He knows whether we are following others or following God. These are sober thoughts but we are not playing games. Heaven is not make believe and hell is real separation from a loving God. "Depart from Me, for I never knew you..." are real words that I don't want to hear said to me or my loved ones. So Ezra must be taught and will be taught from here on out. Maybe we won't forget his cries and will avoid the sin of marrying the world.

A Few Thoughts on Being Set Free

I've been thinking about the song He Set Free.  One of the stanzas goes something like this-

                 Once like a bird in prison I dwelt
                 No Freedom from my Sorrows I Felt
                 But Jesus came and listened to me
                 Glory to God, He Set Me Free....

There was a thought I heard that has been profound to me. I can't quote it word by word but it has gone through my mind over and over with its message. Since I came to Jesus and made Him Lord of my heart, I can't tell you how many times I've heard this song. And I would in my heart and mind sing the praises of being set free from the sin that had me bound. Yet in  the last decade or so I've seen a freedom that comes in Christ manifest itself overtime. It falls in line with the thought that manifested its truth to me.  Here it is:


Free to serve the Saviour because I want to.
Free to do right not because I have to.
Free to choose Jesus and all of His loves.
Free to go to Him with no fear or qualm
Free from the task master, the Law.
Who led me to the Saviour to serve Him with Love.
Free to Obey His Spirit who is writing His ways in my heart.
Free......

               

Reading....for the love of learning

I've taught 3 children to read already. When I first started homeschooling it was a daunting task for me. Why I couldn't even remember how I learned to read. Did they teach me phonics or whole language? My first language is Spanish, but I had to learn English sometime around 8 yrs.. old. Most children in 3rd grade have already learned to read by then, so I'm not sure how they taught me since I was placed in a 3rd grade class as soon as school began the year we arrived to America.

Children are all different. My first son took off after the Teach Your Child to Read in 100 easy lessons. We briefly went over the Hooked on Phonics stuff and moved right into spelling rules because he has been reading  and progressing on ever since. He reads at the speed of light and keeps me hopping as I try to keep up with the young adult section of the library.  My second son was a different story. He couldn't take all the sounds that TYCTR offered. We had to go straight to Hooked on Phonics and slowly learn the short sounds, then the long sounds, then the diagraphs, dipthongs...etc I still monitor his oral reading to check to see where his vocabulary is going and how much he is retaining when he reads. My third child was average, not to slow and not to fast. She was right where she was suppose to be and moving on at the expected pace. But the fourth, well let's just say she is a combination of the second and her very own.

So what have I learned about teaching children to read?
1. They need to be exposed to a lot of phonetic awareness activities, like listening to rhymes and then having them fill in the end of the well reviewed rhyme. Ex.
Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great ____

This is the first step in their brain making a connection with sounds.

2. Reading is not a race that we should start as soon as we our child is 3 or 4. Some children are not ready at 4 or 5, but how long do we wait till we teach them to read? The question lies in the child and his abilities.  In homeschooling there is a great advantage to waiting but also to starting. YOU must spoon feed the child history, science, etc until he can proficiently read for himself. Why? Because if not they will be delayed in everything else. I say this because I am not a believer in letting children choose when it is time to learn to read. Reading takes a bit of work for some children. Their abilities may well be able to start reading but not their will to work at it. The advantage to delay is that the child may need a little more time to mature, to develop motor skills, to grow mentally. This is not an option in public school, where children get left behind because they didn't grasp something as quickly as others. So you must observe the child and his phonetic awareness, his ability to recognize letters, and whether he can retain information well or not.

3. Once we teach them to read, we must listen to them read orally for the next couple years. Listening to them read orally is important because you can catch reading problems this way. You can tell whether a child is having trouble pronouncing words and which sounds specifically he is having trouble with. You can tell whether they know how to divide syllables this way. You can tell if they are smart enough to retrieve the information from what they are able to read by context clues  and or because they substituted words they could not sound out. And you can help them by making them face the word. By having them read each syllable and reminding them why it makes that certain sound. They will learn when to pause, when to stress words, etc...

There's probably more that I could say but everyone is waiting for me so we can go to the library at this very moment.

2011-2012 school year under way (long and windy)Be warned!

    Well, next week we start our 6th week of school. We have done one week on and one week off since the end of July to make up time for when the baby gets here. Overall, we had a good summer but my little breaks are over. We are doing 7th, 5th, 3rd, and Kindergarten. (plus a little Preschool with Noah, which I have yet to decide whether to do everyday or every other day).

    Our school this year has a new addition since Chloe started Kindergarten . The boys and Annabelle still get up at 6:30am and Jesse gets math(Saxon 87) done while Grant and Annie do Bible with me. This year we're covering from Saul's reign thru the minor prophets with Rod and Staff's Bible reading program.(most of it is oral because we are using it mostly for our Bible)


      At about 7:30 am Annie and I do math(R & S 3rd grade math) while Grant does his Saxon 65.
During this time, Jesse works on finishing math, doing Spelling or Bible. (also Rod and Staff) and we break for breakfast. After breakfast,  everyone gets dressed, beds made, teeth brushed, etc.

      Around 9:30 Jesse practices piano. This year we are using Bastien(the older edition). He has two hymn books, the classics book, his lesson book, a technique book and his theory book. This is different from our previous years where he has focused on the Suzuki method and used the Hal Leonard books for lessons. But I'm pretty pleased with it so far, and so is he. He really likes the Bastien books. This year I've taken Annie and Grant under my wing sort of speak and I've been teaching them lessons with the Bastien books also. I can probably do this until they get to book 2 or so and then we will have to try to get them in with a teacher.

   Soon after our morning chores, I do English (R & S) with Annie, send her on her way to get it done, along with Spelling and Handwriting, and begin school with Chloe. This was the first year I have ever attended a homeschool conference, and there I decided to purchase Christian Light's new Kindergarten curriculum. We do about 3 worksheets a day that entail learning letters and their sounds, numbers, prereading skills, handwriting etc. Except on Friday, which I save for some kind of Educational game and an extra project or so. I've also started using Teach Your Child How to Read in 100 in Easy Lessons with her because she is definitely not ready for Hooked on Phonics yet. We're also going to start using Happy Phonics next week. For her other subjects, we are using Learning at Home with Ann Ward Pre./K. and this leads us to storytime. We have a great library and depending on the subject that she is learning about, I tailor her storybooks to go along with that. We check out non-fiction, fiction, craftbooks, etc around the subject she is learning about.

     We are usually done with storytime at about lunch time(12-12:30) so we take a good break. (I really need it by then) Sometimes I wonder how this all can be done, but it does. Jesse is about done with everything, except English and any checkups that I may need to get with him on.(The check ups would be our discussion time for Science or History plus checking work in those areas. We usually do those once or twice a week.) Grant is also done with his Math, Spelling, Social studies, or Science( depending on the day) and Handwriting. After lunch and our break, it is about 1:30 or 2pm. (How time flies!) I then tie things off by getting English done with the boys, and science or S.S/history with Annie.

    So after telling you all this dear blog, all I have to say is that God is very good to me to allow me to keep my head straight with a good planner that helps me hang all this information and make it work!

A cry....for our souls as well as our country.

A Peaceful Confirmation

The thought recently settled in my heart.
"This baby inside me pleases God. "
You may think this is a strange thought but it brings peace to my heart. I hear so many 
"Are All those your children?"
"One, Two, Three, Four,....."
"How do you do it, with all those children?"
Blah, Blah, Blah...."I even had a man laughingly tell me he would commit suicide if he had that many children!


But the voice of God isn't saying this. There is a sweet restful peace within my heart. A reassurance of God's approval. A loving thought of this precious gift entrusted to us by God. 

A Word With Solomon....

  Having boys growing up on you is not easy. Being a parent in general is no easy task. Whoever stated the fact that parenting doesn't come with an instructions manual had it right. The only one I've found that comes close is the Bible. But even then, God gave us a lot of leg room. Sometimes it is easier to read word by word what to do about a certain situation then it is to seek for wisdom and guidance and then have the faith to follow through with God's direction. Solomon must have felt this way too and so I've been thinking about his life and ours.

 His life saddens me sometimes. To think that he may not have made it to heaven brings me to ponder on those things that weighed him down. He loved. He loved foreign women. He loved how they made him feel and how they looked.  He loved gold and all his cups were made of gold not silver because silver was not worth anything in his sight. He loved wisdom and had so much of it that he finally reasoned within himself about the futility and vanity of life without seeking God foremost. But his loves took his heart. They dimmed the vision and allowed him to deceive his heart!

   My older son and I had a conversation about being real a week or two ago. About serving God in earnest, without playing church. We spoke about the fruits of the spirit and works of the flesh. How hard it is to strive at being good in our own flesh! It is even harder to live in the Spirit ( I mean by this,doing the things which are pleasing to God) while feeding the flesh. We as humans learn very quickly how to feed the flesh, but sadly know little about dying to it. We feed it food, pleasure, satisfaction, material possessions. We love. We love the beautiful things. Desire wealth to make us blessed, and love those who love us best. But like Solomon our loves would separate us from His love. Rob us from our First Love and cause us to be just as idol worshipping as Solomon and Israel became. They mar our vision of Christ and fill our ears with so much sound that we can't or won't take the time to hear Him. All the while dulling us into the notion that all is well and Christ reigns, when the truth is that He can't abide because there is no room.

  Our conversation led me to this final point. We can't live by works because they fail us but we can't live without them either because that would not be faith. So we must live by Faith. Faith that God will save us. Knowing God will strengthen us. Looking to God who will lead us. Faith cannot be separate from our actions. Our works show our faith.They make us get up and seek God. Did not works show the faith in Solomon or any other man we are told about in the Bible? The righteous gave forth actions of obedience while the unrighteous brought forth works of disobedience. Both in faith. Some in a faith unwavering in a God that does not fail and cannot lie;others placing their faith in temporal things, the pride of life, and their merits.

   Solomon left us many words to ponder, and some of the instructions needed for parenting. Words of wisdom and truth that will last through the ages. What did hinder you Solomon? You did run well. And his words come back in wisdom and say, "Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep His commandments; for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgement, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil."  Ecclesiastes 12: 13-14