The worth of a soul...

I know now that I will always look back on this year of homeschooling with Stephen as PRICELESS ~ in our relationship, in my life, and just in both of our general outlooks on everything. I am so happy we chose to do this. We have so much fun reading the current events in the morning (we have 4 news sites we visit and discuss together) then we dive into all his different subjects. Today, we smooshed 2 days' worth of curriculum into 1, because he wants to just watch movies with me all day tomorrow - I LOVE it!  (Sonlight provides a 4-day and a 5-day/week school schedule, so we just combined today and tomorrow... I actually hinted to him that maybe we should 'play hookie' today and bake cookies for Kassie's class and surprise her, but he said - "Mom, when I was going to school, I always wanted to play hookie. But now that I'm at home doing school, I don't even want to skip!")

I think what I love most about doing all this schooling together is how we are not only learning new amazing things, but we get to talk about SO many things that wouldn't have normally come up ~ just because when they're in school all day, we have less time together. Today, we were reading "Torches of Joy" - an amazing book about the Christian missionaries John and Helen Dekker who moved to New Guinea to help the Dani people - a tribe that was discovered in the 1960's, and was still living in the Stone Age. Just an incredible story, and what fodder for conversation. We came to this section about how the men buy their brides for a certain amount of pigs, depending on what they think the woman is worth. Of course, it was a perfect opportunity to discuss our own personal worth, and how our treatment of others often helps creates their sense of worth... which - of course - led us to watch good old JOHNNY LINGO! He had never heard of it, so we had fun seeing it (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-PLyy0XM3Y&feature=relatedv) and discussing it. What an awesome little film.

Here's Kenny reading the Berenstain Bears book that Grandpa found online and emailed to us; we printed it out so now he has added it to our BB collection. All 3 kids LOVE those cute books - they teach such great values.