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I'm so delighted to see a new children's biography by Joyce McPherson, published by Greenleaf Press .   Her newest title is  The Sword of the Spirit: The Story of William Tyndale .   The Reformation Era is my favorite time period to study in World History, and Tyndale's is a fascinating story about the translation of the Bible into English at great peril.   Tyndale  studied Hebrew under Martin Luther, constantly fled persecution by the English government, and was eventually betrayed by a friend, arrested, and executed as a martyr for the gospel in 1536.  His dying prayer? "Lord, open the king of England's eyes..."  Two years later, King James authorized The Great Bible, largely Tyndale's work, for use in the Church of England. I am most familiar with Tyndale through Scott O'Dell's novel The Hawk That Dare Not Hunt by Day , which I've taught as literature in our co-op a few times.    Most of our reading selections this coming school year will ...

Dear friends, You know by now how I love to integrate English with history!  The 5th-6th graders in our home school co-op are using the Mystery of History Volume 2 text (by Linda Hobar) on the time period of the early church up through the Middle Ages for their history class.  One of the lessons this past week was about St. Francis of Assisi.  I decided to shape my literature and writing assignments around that. In class on Monday, I read the  picture book Saint Francis of Assissi: A Life of Joy by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  There are many pictures books about St. Francis, but this is my favorite, and the author (son of Bobby Kennedy and nephew of President John F. Kennedy) has had a keen personal connection with his subject since childhood.   Charlotte Mason would say that's the best kind of author to read! Our main literature resource this year is The Book of Virtues edited by Dr. William Bennett, so I assigned "The Sermon to the Birds."  Francis is...

Dear friends, These links and information are for the students in our home school co-op's 5th-6th grade English class. They are learning about medieval life in their history class, so I am trying to customize some of their literature selections to complement that. This week, at the start of Advent, we are learning how the Druids (pagans who practiced child sacrifice and a lot of superstition) came to accept Christianity, and how their existing winter solstice traditions were adapted to express the glad Christmas tidings of Jesus. "How St. Boniface Kept Christmas Eve"   is from the vintage book American Normal Readers, Book 5.   Print pages 212-227.  This will show up as numbers 207-222 on the book pages.   You can also find "Yuletide Customs" in the same online book.  Print pages 200-202, which will show up as 195-197 on the book pages. Questions: In what year did this story take place?  How many years ago was this? The first paragraph of the story descri...

Dear friends, My English class at our home school co-op was a bit of a mish mash today.  My assistant Dawn (who is actually now my co-teacher) presented a grammar lesson on conjunctions and interjections, and then I took over for the rest of the class.  In their history class earlier in the day, my seven students are learning medieval history, with lessons on St. Columba, St. Gregory the Great, and Japan in their assignments this coming week.  I decided to put my laptop computer to use to turn their history lessons into English lessons too.  (I love to integrate the school subjects with related literature!) For poetry, we read "The Prayer of St. Columba."  The chants and prayers of the early church were passed down from century to century, a potent form of devotional communication.  While reading this prayer, we talked about the use of repetition ("Let me...") and parallelism in the first four stanzas.  We also talked about the historical context (the ...

Last week I started a new blog series, Image & Imagination , to  explore how to stimulate our children's curiosity with pictures .  I like to integrate fine art and Biblical themes when I teach, whether it is in my own home or in our home school co-op English or history classes. Our 5th and 6th graders have been studying the early church in history class and reading through the book of Acts in English class.  In class this week, I showed them several pieces from the huge volume of  Great Bible Stories and Master Paintings by Owen S. Rachleff, which was a gift from my late father-in-law in our early home schooling years.  I wish we had more time to take a long look at them!  Maybe next week...  You can look up these paintings on-line, keeping in mind that there are variations in titles.  I have linked some of them here: “ The Pentecost” by El Greco (Spanish, 1541-1614) “ The Stoning of St. Stephen” by Fra Angelico (Italian, c. 1400-1455) “...