Our next section in our inductive study for kids through the Gospel of John is our biggest section yet! I feel like we are actually making progress…finally! The first section of the book of John is so foundational; not only to the book itself, but to the gospel message. No amount of review is too much in the foundational things if we want our children to know who Jesus is and why He matters. Thus, we have expended a LOT of energy on the first 18 verses of the book. We should be able to move a little quicker for the forseeable future.
We have been having so much fun with our Inductive Study of the Gospel of John. All the kids want to gather round our chalkboard table to participate lately! It makes this Mama’s heart happy to see my kids developing a love for the Scriptures.
This week we moved on in chapter 1 to verses, 14-18. These are truly difficult verses to unpack with little ones. We did our best to work through the verses together using the Inductive method.
I am a relatively organized person. And I would have thought that would extend into my homeschooling experience. But in the midst of starting homeschool for my girls I had two little ones underfoot. Add to that the fact that homeschooling can be a complete upheaval of all homemaking routines. I spent the first 2 and a half years of homeschooling floundering without a sure foundation to ground us. Every once in a while, we would settle into a homeschool routine. And then life would shift and I would no longer have my feet underneath me.
It was, in short, a struggle. Some things would get done regularly. Other things would get put off for another day (Ahem…1st grade math…ahem). And my kids knew that if they worked me hard enough, the whole day could be put off. Often I felt like a homeschool mom failure.
As if the internal struggle wasn’t real enough, I also had two students who put up a MAJOR fight on most days just to get through the little bit we were getting done. I understood that the early years of elementary learning are supposed to be loose, but this was not exactly what I pictured. I needed a solution – on some days I thought I needed magic. Continue Reading
We have finally gotten back to our study of the book of John. We went off track for quite some time to study the book of Genesis. I am hoping to get through quite a bit of the book in the next few months. Hope springs eternal.
If you have followed along with us on our study of John thus far, you will remember my thoughts on presenting this material to children is incredibly simple and it is inductive/classical in approach. I do not try to make it more than it is and get to the deepest meanings. I am just wanting to present the basics of the Bible to my kids. We spend much of our time in the Observation (attending) stage of our study.
If you are new to this series and would like to catch up, you can find the rest of the posts in the series at the top of this post. And if you have any questions, I am always happy to hear from you in the comments!
Our regular readers will likely remember we are quite the book-loving family around here. Back before we had kids, my husband and I actually started a book blog. We had a fun time talking about the words of others using words of our own. Then we became parents and reading for ourselves is a bit more sporadic. I still crave the joy of a book so well-written it demands I stay awake turning pages (old-fashioned or digital) until the wee hours of the morning. Those joys are just fewer and more distant between them than they used to be.
In the meantime, we have discovered the joy of short, sweetly penned books that resonate with us because of contagious rhyming structures or delightful interactions. We have become picture book loving people. And thankfully, through these simple books we have somehow turned our little ones into lovers of books, too.
The entire time I have been doing homeschool, a morning time routine seemed a natural way to work through our day, getting devotion, prayer, memory work, and the like into the mix. Something informal for the little ones to be able to naturally start to join in as they were ready. I found myself sitting in the same place every morning (the hearth in our living room) and telling the kids, “Gather ’round.” Not all of them would come, but I had the quorum I needed…usually. The little ones would wander in and out throughout our Gathering. They would hear a song they wanted to enjoy with us and come running. They would wander back to their toys when the music died down, toddling back in for their turn to sit on Mama’s lap for reading. It was really loose. And inconsistent.
We started settling into a routine of morning time a while back. It was a natural outcome of the rhythms of our day. But getting a routine right took some adjusting. And sticking to it became even harder as seasons in our lives changed. Thankfully, I feel like we have really found our homeschool groove in the past 6 months. Scheduling seems to be easier. Getting through the day without major tantrums is a blessing in itself. And staying the course when diaper changes or nap times interrupt our day has become de rigueur. Continue Reading
