Reading, Writing & Pondering

A Bird, A Girl, and a Rescue by J A Myhre kept me on the edge of my seat throughout the book. . .and I think it will you too. A Bird, A Girl and a Rescue is the story of eleven year old Kiisa and her adventures during her first year of boarding school in Africa. Kiisa is young and misses her family but her father sends her a special bird to keep her company, Njili. Njili keeps Kiisa updated with news from home and guides her as she learns to make decisions on her own. Kiisa faces some exciting adventures as she deals with African rebels and sets out on her own rescue mission. Myrhe writes an exciting story that is the second in her Rwendigo Tales series. The first book is about a boy, entitled, A Chameleon, A Boy, and a Quest . I just learned about this series so we have not read that book but I plan to purchase it and use both books for our homeschooling. I like that these books teach about life in Africa in a way that is interesting and will draw my child in to learn....

The Homeschool Mom's Bible is a regular Bible with 365 meditations with prayers interspersed throughout the text. The devotionals were written by Janet Tatman who is a homeschooling mom with over 25 years of homeschooling experience. There is also a forward written by Vickie Farris, who is the wife of Michael Farris, founder of the Homeschool Legal Defense Association. As a homeschool mom with very little experience, I couldn't wait to get this Bible. I figured I could use all the encouragement I can get! My edition of this Bible is NIV but it also comes in the King James Version for those who prefer it. There are enough readings for every day of the year and each one is listed to start with January 1 at the beginning of the Bible. Since I just got this Bible, I decided to start at the August readings and then work my way through chronologically from there. I think you could skip around or do whatever works for you. In any case, the readings seemed to offer real-life enco...

The Brinkman Family adventure CDs are based on the adventures of real missionaries who share some of their humorous escapades through the Brinkman Family tales. The stories are dramatized with various voices for the different characters, along the lines of the Adventure in Odyssey stories. My son is 11 and he enjoyed them. The jacket says that children under the age of 10 may find the stories to be intense so they encourage parents to listen along with them. They seemed to be the right amount of adventure for my son's age as he didn't get too worried and just seemed to enjoy the stories. These CDs would be great to have for long car rides. They would be good to help kids see the excitement in being a missionary.You can purchase these CDs for yourself at: http://brinkmanadventures.com/   You can even listen to a sample at: http://brinkmanadventures.com/listen . They operate on a donation basis and they can download the episodes on the site or order physical CD's.  If...

For our homeschool art class we recently completed an art project with Master Artist Pat Knepley called Poppy Collage. . .with the intent to make a flower collage in the style of artist Georgia O'Keeffe. This is a DVD in the series from See The Light: http://www.seethelightshine.com/art-projects/ There are 4 complete step-by-step lessons on the DVD, with each lesson lasting around 20 minutes per session. At the end of the DVD, we had a completed project and we knew about the artist whose style we used as an example for our project. In our case, Georgia O'Keeffe. In each lesson we learned some of the history of how Georgia started painting, where she studies, what her paintings were like and more. The lessons were interesting and Pat is an enthusiastic teacher. As a Christian, it was great to see her tie in a bit of Scripture with each lesson. The recommended age is over 10. . .My 11-year old son enjoyed the project and learning about the artist. It seemed to be rig...