My husband and I have always remarked that raising up smart kids is easier than training them to be kids with Godly character. Our second quarter saw Part 2 of disciplining our student in the area of diligence on a daily basis; Part 1 was during the 1st quarter. I was agonized by the fact that the area of diligence has been our major problem for years now; student taking forever to finish book pages assigned to her per day. Thus, more work pile up on the next day.
Now that she's 9yrs old, and we're running on our 6th yr schooling at home, I'm expecting more from my daughter to be more diligent in finishing the daily tasks assigned to her.
I was about to call it "burnout" until one day my student surprised me about how she shared the love of Jesus to a neighborhood friend, a girl her age who just lost her father months ago.
Euy and her friend became very close since that incident. I once heard Euy encouraged her friend that everything will be fine because God loves her. That's evangelism at work! She also invited this friend along with her older sister to join us on our feeding program where they met the poor kids that we feed at church.
For about two months now, Euy has been actively participating at our church's feeding program where she is able to encourage other kids to trust the Lord despite their condition in life. It gives us so much joy and humility to see poor kids from our community swarm around our children whenever we arrive at church. Our pastor, Euy's uncle, even said that because she had been memorizing Tagalog Bible verses with them, eating lunch with them, and cleaning the church with them, these kids felt that they were really important in the eyes of God.
When asked why she loved joining the poor kids at our feeding program, Euy said that she feels happy to see these kids know more about Jesus and how despite being poor, some being orphans or abused by their parents, are fun to be with.
Euy has been diligent in writing on her Sunday journal, a notebook where she jots down the sermon every week and where she also writes a brief reflection of what she learned.
Looking back this past second quarter, we learned that it's critical not to cause our children to abhor homeschooling by STRESSING OURSELVES TOO MUCH in accomplishing our portfolios or curriculum according to our target dates and set goals.
We may just have to improve on setting goals that are both realizable and enjoyable to us but not compromising the lessons that had to be covered per quarter.
And for this, lapbooking had always come to the rescue. Our discovery of making lapbooks last year had been a major breakthrough to putting life and "fun" into our discussions. My daughter finds it easier to be asked orally and then write down her answers in pre-cut minibooks from memory.
Euy reads her Botany book on her own and orally recounts to me the new discoveries she learned for the day. This is her strong point, remembering details from what she read. I noticed that she retains information as I allow her to do all the talking without my interruption.
Civics, Wika, and even Reading (TLP, Total Language Plus) and Grammar (SRW, Speak, Read, and Write) involved plenty of written activites from the textbooks. And this is where her weak point surfaces.
Although Euy loved reading and discovering new things, it's the question-(written)answer part that she finds uninteresting. We hope to be more patient in handling these subjects in the future.
At the end of the day, as parents, we learned that homeschooling may have given us the opportunity to be in control of what to teach our kids, but there is still a part of their lives which we don't and can't have control of; that's the time when we as parents can trust the Lord for His grace knowing that our Heavenly Father picks up from where we stop. Rest assured that our Father can handle the areas we can't see for our kids or we may have overlooked teaching them.