Little Helper

My son very proudly brought me his shoes just as I asked him to.

"My shoes had sand all over them, Mom!"

"Oh."

"But I got it off."

"So now it's all over the bedroom floor?"

"Yep!" (Big smile.)

The Shepherd King - as contrasted with the tyrant king

Almost every night, we pray and sing hymns before the kids go to bed. When in it's full version, each child gets to choose a hymn. Out of the blue the other evening, my daughter said, "What was that "king one," Mom?" 

"King one? Have we sung it before bed before?"
"Yeah, awhile ago."
"We Three Kings?"
"Yeah! I used to know all the words!"

I know that many will think this is just awful, but I'm okay with breaking out the Christmas carols on October 29. I think I've usually waited until November 1, but what's a few days? :)

The irony of it all is that I just studied Matthew 2 last week. I had no thoughts of Christmas when I began studying Matthew, but the timing was beautiful.

Here Herod the King is noticeably concerned over some tidings from some eastern visitors. Their claim that a Jewish king had been born has him summoning all of the chief priests and scribes to learn more about this.

Do you know what strikes me? The wise men said a king was born. Herod asked about where the Christ was to be born. He was immediately concerned that the Messiah had come. He immediately began plans to destroy this baby. How often do you think Herod sat in fear of his kingdom being ripped from him? 

My thoughts immediately go to "The Sword of Damocles." Damocles was a Greek who was given the opportunity to be king for a day, but before allowing him the privilege, the tyrannical king Dionysius had a sword hung from the ceiling by a horse hair. Damocles was enjoying himself immensely until he looked up. To Dionysius, being king meant a life of constant fear that others would want his power. 

And how do rulers act when they're living in fear? They're tyrants. The tyrant knows that if everyone else wants his power half as much as he does, he's in real danger. He thinks that if he can somehow get everyone else lower than him... if he can keep everyone else afraid enough of him... then he will stop being afraid and start feeling secure.

Fear is a terrible thing to base authority on.

Contrast that with Jesus.

"for from you shall come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel."

What's the opposite of a tyrant? What's the opposite of someone who spends every effort to crush everyone around him? Perhaps we might think of someone who spends every effort to take care of every last one under his care. Perhaps we might think of a shepherd.

What does a shepherd do?

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
    He makes me lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside still waters.
    He restores my soul.
He leads me in paths of righteousness
    for his name's sake.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
    I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;
    your rod and your staff,
    they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me
    in the presence of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil;
    my cup overflows.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
    all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord
    forever. (Psalm 23)

What did Herod do? He killed all of the boys 2 years old and younger. Having two of those sleeping in their bedrooms as you read that makes it hit a little closer to home.

But what does the shepherd do?

He will tend his flock like a shepherd;
    he will gather the lambs in his arms;
he will carry them in his bosom,
    and gently lead those that are with young. (Isaiah 40:11)

That verse the scribes quoted came from Micah 5. When I read the rest of that passage, I was just so amazed at the contrast to the storyline in Matthew 2.

And he shall stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord,
    in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God.
And they shall dwell secure, for now he shall be great
    to the ends of the earth.
 And he shall be their peace. (Micah 5:4-5)

Here’s hope for the tyrant. Here’s hope for the mama who just lost her babies. Where is peace and security to be found?

“He shall be their peace.”

Jesus came as the shepherd king - not the tyrant king. He came humbly - as a child under the protection of his earthly father. But earthly kings still had no dominion over him. Herod stood no chance to destroy him. Jesus is who deserves all of our worship and praise - all of our elaborate, impractical worship.

The Most Important Recognition of Every Educator

As I write this, I'm actually just trying to figure out how to motivate the whole world to go read this one chapter that Charlotte Mason wrote. Here Charlotte Mason points us to one of the most amazing metaphors education and how God works through the minds of men. She then takes that metaphor and applies it directly to our hearts as parents and educators. Honestly, it won't take you long. I read it out loud to my husband while he stood in the kitchen. He was just as awed as I was.

Have I convinced you yet?

Here's a link. 

Here are some snippets:

"In the things of science, in the things of art, in the things of practical everyday life, his God doth instruct him and doth teach him, her God doth instruct her and doth teach her. Let this be the mother's key to the whole of the education of each boy and each girl; not of her children; the Divine Spirit does not work with nouns of multitude, but with each single child...

...His God doth instruct him and doth teach him. Let the mother visualize the thought as an illuminated scroll about her newborn child, and let her never contemplate any kind of instruction for her child except under the sense of the divine co-operation....

...Suppose we are willing to make this great recognition, to engage ourselves to accept and invite the daily, hourly, incessant co-operation of the divine Spirit, in, to put it definitely and plainly, the schoolroom work of our children, how must we shape our own conduct to make this co-operation active, or even possible? We are told that the Spirit is life; therefore, that which is dead, dry as dust, mere bare bones, can have no affinity with Him, can do no other than smother and deaden his vitalising influences. A first condition of this vitalising teaching is that all the thought we offer to our children shall be living thought; no mere dry summaries of facts will do; given the vitalising idea, children will readily hang the mere facts upon a peg capable of sustaining all that is needful to retain. We begin by believing in the children as spiritual beings of unmeasured powers - intellectual, moral, spiritual - capable of receiving and constantly enjoying intuitions from the intimate converse of the Divine Spirit."

This has me thinking about so many things. First and foremost is that recognition that this training and educating of my children is really not all on me. Incidentally, I read a section from Sarah Mackenzie's book Teaching From Rest just yesterday.

"We must drop the self-inflated view that we are the be-all and end-all of whether the education we offer our children is going to work out. We are too quick to feel both the successes and the failures of our job as homeschoolers. Our kids test well on the SAT and we pat ourselves on the back. They are miserable writers and we scourge ourselves for failing them. But He never demands that we produce prodigies or achieve what the world would recognize as excellence. Rather, he asks us to live excellently - that is to, live in simple, obedient faith and trust. He asks us to faithfully commit every day to Him and then to do that day's tasks well. He's in charge of the results....

....Because whether or not he becomes an excellent writer or a proficient mathematician is not your business to worry over. Your business is that single assignment today and loving him through it."

And here Sarah hints at what is required of me. It's the same lesson God's been trying to teach me over and over again the last few years. What's my part? To be faithful.

Come to think of it it's the same lesson God's been trying to teach His people from the beginning. 

Here are some of the best words on education ever written:

"Only take care, and keep your soul diligently, lest you forget the things that your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life. Make them known to your children and your children's children - how on the day that you stood before the LORD your God at Horeb, the Lord said to me, 'Gather the people to me, that I may let them hear my words, so that they may learn to fear me all the days that they live on the earth, and that they may teach their children so." (Deuteronomy 4:9-10)

Watch yourselves carefully. Be diligent. Be faithful. The rest of he work is His.

"...that he might humble you and test you, to do you good in the end. Beware lest you say in your heart, 'My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.' You shall remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth..." (Deuteronomy 8:16-17)

I'm just here to be the gardener. I can cultivate the plants, but I can't make them grow. I can provide nutrients and healthy soil and I can water. God is the instructor. Not me. But I am responsible for providing a living, active, vitalising atmosphere of education. My children are their own persons with a God who loves them and will instruct and teach them.

Lord, please create a clean heart in me. Please do a work in my soul. Please make this home a place that breathes life, a place of peace and rest, a place of remembering. Teach us to fear You. Teach us true humility. It's all Yours.

I love you to the moon...

When putting my 2 year old to bed, I said, "I love you to the moon."

He said, "I love you to the moon and back."

I said, "I love you to the sun."

He said, "I love you to the moon and back."

I said, "Do you love me to the sun?"

He said, "No. Just to the moon and back."

What a guy.

Narration - Thoughts from Charlotte Mason

As promised, I'm here to offer a brief introduction to narration. I feel like it's such a tricky thing to talk about. Because on one hand, it's so very simple and I don't want it to sound anymore complicated than it is. But on the other hand, there is so much to be said and I know I could never adequately cover it all. 

Narration is so very simple. You read a story and then you say, "Can you tell me back what we just read?" The child then tells the story back again. It is such a simple, powerful tool. 

We started practicing narration this summer in preparation for this school year. I had heard from a few different places that Aesop's fables were a great starting point. They're short (so they're easier to remember) and they tell complete stories (so it's much easier for a child to figure out what to tell).

After we finished reading it, I asked my daughter to tell the story back to me. And let me just paint an accurate picture for you: she absolutely hated it. She fought me very hard and in no way wanted to do it. I wasn't surprised by this. I know my daughter's personality. And I'd heard of this happening from others. 

Let me just pause right here and let you in on a secret. Narration is really hard - especially if you've never done it before. Right after I started doing it with my daughter, I started doing it for myself. I've always struggled to listen to Audiobooks. I used to say it was because I wasn't an auditory learner. Now, I've had to admit that it's really that I lack that "Habit of Attention." My mind wanders and I don't take any control over it. 

So I started listening to a couple Audiobooks (You were wondering how I manage to read all those books in the sidebar and clean my house, weren't you?). In the beginning, I paused the recording after every 5 minutes and made myself tell back what I had heard. 

Guess what! It works. And now I can get my house clean and my reading done at the same time. I'm so thankful.

Why does it work? I think there are a lot of reasons, but there are 3 that come to mind for me. First of all, starting with short sections is really vital. From the beginning I could pay attention for a short time. I've had to work to discipline my mind to keep paying attention. Setting the clock for 5 minutes gave me a manageable goal. Surely I can pay attention for 5 minutes at my age!! As I've continued to work on it, I've been able to lengthen that time.

Second, knowing that I was going to have to narrate helped me force my mind to pay attention. That accountability is vital. I've noticed that every time I start a new book I still have to work a bit harder in the beginning. But once I get into the book, I don't struggle nearly as much. 

The third reason starts to get into the power of narration itself. There's a quote I remember from a student in one of Charlotte Mason's PNEU schools. She said, "We narrate and then we know." I've found that to be so true. If all I do is just listen to the reading and then go onto the next thing, most of what I heard dissipates. But if I force myself to stop and process it in some way, it stays with me. I've been listening to Northanger Abbey on Audiobook. I started the book weeks ago (forcing myself to read this novel slowly). But I can still tell you what happened in each chapter. It's taking up residence in a deeper part of my soul.

Of course the same is true whether I read the words on a page or listen to the Audiobook. We have to stop and process the information somehow. This is something humans do naturally. Stop and think about the things that excite you the most. What's something you've learned and felt a passion for? Did you keep it to yourself? No, you went and found the next soul (willing or not) to tell all about it. And what happens after you tell something a few times? You know it.

So what did I tell my daughter when she didn't understand why she had to do this whole narration thing? I told her it was practice for telling stories (because it is). A fancy term for narration is "Oral Composition." Eventually, my daughter will be writing some of her narrations down. She will get all kinds of practice with Written Composition. But she's currently 6 years old. That means that her writing skills are in no way matched with her composition skills.

And this is why I love Charlotte Mason (Okay, it's not just this). My daughter is getting an education and grappling with big ideas - because she is perfectly capable of that. She doesn't have to wait until her fine motor skills catch up or her grammar knowledge increases. 

There's so much more I could say here. In a future post, I'm going to talk about how I take my daughter's narrations and turn them into opportunities for character development and relationship building. 

In the meantime, here's some more from the experts:

• This links directly to Charlotte Mason's short chapter on narration in her first book.
• This is a very helpful and practical guide to narration.
• Six Steps to the Narration Sequence
• Karen Glass is amazing. 
• Why you should never re-read the passage (because the habit of paying attention is crucial):
• A more thorough discussion of the single reading
• This is an article from 1924 written by someone who taught in the PNEU Schools that Charlotte Mason started.

Character Education - My Journey (so far) in Learning to Train Children of Good Character

A little over a year ago, I realized that my parenting was undergoing a major shift. Or maybe I realized that my parenting needed to experience a major shift.

What happened last year? My oldest child turned 5. Up until then, I had millions of weaknesses as a parent, but I felt like I (mostly) knew what I was doing. As hard as it was to be consistent in training and disciplining my children, I knew what I was supposed to be doing.

And then my child turned 5. I talked to a few different people at that time. All I could say was, "Something has changed and I have no idea what it is or what to do about it." 

The issues were more complex. I began realizing that up until that point, all of my parenting was centered around establishing authority in my child's life. My young children and I have had countless conversations like this:

"Who's in charge?"

"God."

"And who did God place in authority over you?"

"Mommy and Daddy."

"Are you submitting and obeying to Mommy and Daddy's authority right now?"

and so on. (One of my children is brutally honest with their thoughts. When asked who's in charge, this child had a long season of usually offering their own name.)

Anyway, as I began slowly learning, at some point (around the age of 5 or 6), children begin to experience a larger world with more freedom and more decisions.

I re-watched Getting to the Heart of Parenting by Paul Tripp. He described my situation perfectly. As we were working to train our children's hearts, we were moving from authority to character. This explanation was so perfectly what I needed to hear.

And then he laid out a brilliant theology of what character issues truly are. They're a question of worship.

"Your children don't so much need character management as they need worship realignment. They don't first have a character problem; they have a worship problem that produces a character problem. Because of this they need more than character critique; they need to be given insight into the worship function of their hearts and how it shapes the way they react in the relationships and situations of their daily lives.... They need to grace of insight, the grace of wisdom, the grace of patient instruction, and the grace of daily forgiveness. And our ability to give this grace to our children starts by acknowledging that the list we have considered not only describes them but us as well. The worship of our hearts gets kidnapped, too, by something in the creation, and when it does, we don't respond as we should to the people and situations in our lives. Like our children, we need a patient Father who will help us to see our hearts so we can confess what is there and reach out for the change that only he can empower. Parents who are humbly willing to confess their need of parenting care don't resent those moments when they are called by their Father to give the same care to their children."  - Paul Tripp in Parenting: Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family.

This big picture vision was necessary. I walked away thankful and renewed in my parenting efforts. But as I continued in my parenting, I found myself a bit lost and confused again. I understood what I was trying to do now and that was a major relief. But I was still a little lost as to how to get there.

I had conversations with friends. We talked through different ways of memorizing scripture, pinpointing what aspects of character to work on with our children, and various programs that are out there for studying character with our children. But I still felt like I was treading water in the middle of the ocean. These thoughts were nice, but they weren't helping me see what I needed to be doing with my children in the midst of the daily grind.

Enter Andrew Kern.

This is really the ironic part of my story. Usually when people talk about listening to Andrew Kern, they say they love listening to his philosophy, but he's just not practical enough. But when I started listening to Andrew Kern, I found all of the practical advice I needed at just that moment (I'm just going to assume that was the Lord's guiding hand).

I've learned about a million things from Andrew Kern, but for the sake of this discussion, I can pretty  much boil it down to two things. He gave me a brand new vision for what education should be. And he gave me one simple tool for daily working to form character in my children.

I quoted this definition before, but here it is again (Click here and here for a more thorough fleshing out of this definition):

I just read an article by Mystie Winckler and she put it like this:

"Character building used to be called education, but now it is talked about as some subset, an add-on we use to supplement."

Mystie says many more beautiful and incredibly practical things about how that works daily in the home so if you're working this out for yourself, I'd strongly encourage you to go read the article.

Andrew Kern gave me one simple tool for how this works in the school day. It's called the "Should Question." It works like this. Read a story together. Choose a character from the story and something that character did. Ask this question: "Should ______ have done ______?" (Click here for a little more about the "should question.")

I started using this advice immediately. And I started having beautiful conversations with my daughter. She was 5 at the time. And I was asking some pretty big questions. I didn't intend to. It just happened. Suddenly my 5 year old daughter and I were discussing world hunger and how to help the poor (You know: Give a man a fish...). But here's the thing. I just asked some simple questions. It was my 5 year old daughter talking it through. I wasn't lecturing, preaching, or offering counsel. I became the mentor. I learned to ask follow-up questions to steer the conversation. I learned to insert small thoughts here and there. And I started learning a lot from my daughter. Five-year-olds don't have all the baggage we adults do. Their innocent perspectives are lovely to consider.

This is what my daughter and I now do every day. It is the heart and soul of our education and it brings lots of joy into our relationship. Now, when I'm pre-reading the stories she'll be reading on her own (Yes, my 6-year-old child reads well enough to read all of her school books on her own - though I still choose to read some to her), I think of questions to ask her. I don't necessarily think of a question for every reading and I rarely ever think of more than one. They're not always "Should Questions" (which can be worded more creatively as well by the way), but they're always questions which work toward building a relationship with my daughter.

All of this was really helpful, but I still hadn't gotten all the way to character education in the daily grind. This is where Charlotte Mason came into my story. As I was listening to Andrew Kern, he made some references that pointed me to go back and look at Charlotte Mason again. I then spent the rest of the spring and summer beginning to study the many things this brilliant woman had to say about educating and training children.

She said this:

"We who teach should make it clear to ourselves that our aim in education is less conduct than character."

I read most of the first of Charlotte Mason's series of books on education while on vacation with my family. This one is focused on children through age 9. Here I found the next incredibly practical advice I needed to hear. In this book, Miss Mason describes a number of scenarios (Clickhere to read it yourself.) and talks through how our role as a parent (or governess, etc.) should be to continually reinforce good habits in our children because:

"The habits of the child form the character of the man." -Charlotte Mason

Stop and think about that. It really makes sense, doesn't it? I'm pretty certain everyone on earth has lied at some point, but it's the person who has a habit of lying that we label a liar.

Anyway, I said I got helpful advice. But I didn't say it was easy advice. She describes a scene where a mother is teaching her son to shut a door when he leaves a room. What is the mom to do? Remind him every time he forgets to shut the door until the habit is trained in him. But she's not to be a nag. They should be on the same team. She is always to be there as the coach - providing helpful reminders - not angry shouts (Ahem).

"Every day, every hour, the parents are either passively or actively forming those habits in their children upon which, more than upon anything else, future character and conduct depend." - Charlotte Mason

Charlotte elaborates on this concept even more in an articlewritten for The Parent's Review (a magazine she edited):

"What common error do people make about the formation of habits?

They allow lapses; they train a child to "shut the door after him" twenty times, and allow him to leave it open the twenty-first. 

With what result?
That the work has to be done over again...

...How long may it take to cure a bad habit, and form the contrary good one?
Perhaps a month or six weeks of careful incessant treatment may be enough. 

But such treatment requires an impossible amount of care and watchfulness on the part of the educator? 
Yes, but not more than is given to the cure of any bodily disease-measles, or scarlet fever, for example. "

Do you have any idea how convicting this is and how hard it is for me to hear? Anyone who knows me at all knows that I am not the type of person who will even notice that the door has been left open (or care). If I'm training a child to shut a door, it is most likely because they're driving their dad crazy by letting hundreds of flies into our house (that may or not be a real scenario from this last summer). And comparing it to caring for my sick child was not encouraging. (Do you have any idea how much I dread caring for my sick children!?)

So I found myself contemplating all of this. How can I train my children to have good habits when I don't even have good habits? How can I be consistent with this every day? How do I train my children to have good character when this whole conversation just convicts me of all the areas my character is sadly lacking?

Four thoughts came to mind:

The first was quite simple: How can I? I can't.

From Gloria Furman in Treasuring Christ When Your Hands are Full (If you haven't read this book yet, then you need to stop reading, drop everything and go find a copy RIGHT NOW):

“When we acknowledge our inability to mother our children apart from the Lord’s provision and strength, we honor God. Of course we are not able to do this work of raising children and training them in the instruction of the Lord. That’s why we desperately need the Lord!

And from Paul Tripp: "Like our children, we need a patient Father who will help us to see our hearts so we can confess what is there and reach out for the change that only he can empower. Parents who are humbly willing to confess their need of parenting care don't resent those moments when they are called by their Father to give the same care to their children."

The second had to do with what Charlotte Mason said. She emphasized that we be our child's ally: "But the little fellow has really not much power to recollect, and the mother will have to adopt various little devices to remind him; but of two things she will be careful––that he never slips off without shutting the door, and that she never lets the matter be a cause of friction between herself and the child, taking the line of his friendly ally to help him against that bad memory of his."

Since, we're in this together, I need to remember to be on my child's team. (So all that yelling I've been doing....? Yeah.)

The third thing brought me back to the beginning. What am I worshiping? What are my children worshiping? We don't first have character problems. We have worship problems that produce character problems.

And the fourth was... grace. We all need it.

What are living books? - Thoughts from Charlotte Mason

In today's home school environment, anyone who has done the slightest bit of research knows that a Charlotte Mason education is an education using "living books." In fact, when some say they're following Charlotte Mason, this might be the only point they're attempting to follow her on (and I'm not over here trying to draw lines in the sand over who is qualified to call their education "Charlotte Mason").

We touched on this topic as well when studying Principle 13 (see my previous post). I absolutely love how she describes “living books.” I think I love it so much because I’ve watched many attempt to define “living books” and struggle. The internet is filled with lists of “living books.” But how can you tell if they are really living? Some seem to think they just have to be books which are narrative. Charlotte Mason is grasping at something deeper:

“I do not know how to describe the sort of books that children’s minds will consent to deal with than by saying that they must be literary in character…. Children cannot answer questions set on the wrong book.”

See? That's why everyone's struggling. At best, it's incredibly hard to define. Charlotte Mason didn't even know how!

I purchased a couple of books already which I thought would be just perfect. Their description fit every description of “living book” out there. I couldn’t borrow them from the library so I had to purchase them without reading them (thankfully for not too much). I read some lovely reviews and was really excited about how much we were going to love them. We were a few chapters into the first book when I pulled it out one day to read it. My daughter sighed and said, “Not that one.” (We unfortunately read a few chapters more before I let go.) The books had great potential, but in the end they just weren’t literary.

Now, of course if a child is sighing about reading a book, that doesn't automatically mean you should throw it out. It might be a difficult book that they need to grow into. Their growth might depend on sticking it out. But in this case, these books were not living. It’s hard to articulate what was wrong with the books. A lot of it relates to another quote of Charlotte Mason’s:

“Children recognize with incipient weariness the doctored tale as soon as it is begun to be told.”

These books were honestly just trying way too hard to make their points. They ceased to be authentic. It was wearying - that’s a good description. Ambleside Online uses Parables from Nature. The scope and purpose of Parables from Nature is actually quite similar to the books we were reading. But when I pull that book out, my daughter gets a sweet smile on her face and is excited to read it. The book deals with lessons on life, but I think Parables from Nature somehow respects us more as people capable of grappling with big thoughts. My 6 year old daughter is capable of much more than most modern books think she is.

Even in the PNEU schools, they sometimes struggled to find books which held up to the standard. They had examinations at the end of every 12-week term (as in all students in all the schools answered the same questions). They used these exams to evaluate their curriculum. If a vast number of students couldn't narrate from any of the books they had chosen, they knew those books needed to be replaced.

And this is why I love Ambleside Online. They’ve spent countless hours choosing only the best books. So I don’t have to waste our time and money figuring out which books are literary. Some wise women have gone before me. And it's been tested over and over again so if we're struggling, I can more easily determine if the book is the problem or we need to just keep working at it. All I can say is, “Thank you so very much.”