A Month of Grace

Not Works

Grace, triumphant in the throne,
Scorns a rival, reigns alone;
Come and bow beneath her sway;
Cast your idol works away!
Works of man, when made his plea,
Never shall accepted be;
Fruits of pride (vainglorious worm!)
Are the best he can perform.

Self, the god his soul adores,
Influences all his powers;
Jesus is a slighted name,
Self-advancement all his aim:
But when God the Judge shall come,
To pronounce the final doom,
Then for rocks and hills to hide
All his works and all his pride!

Still the boasting heart replies,
What the worthy and the wise,
Friends to temperance and peace,
Have not these a righteousness?
Banish every vain pretence
Built on human excellence;
Perish everything in man,
But the grace that never can.

by William Cowper

A Month of Grace

Laughter is the closes thing to the grace of God.
Karl Barth


The unthankful heart ... discovers no mercies; but let the thankful heart weep through the day and, as the magnet finds the iron, so it will find, in every hour, some heavenly blessings!
Henry Ward Beecher

A Month of Grace

For I am sure that no man asketh mercy and grace with sincerity, without mercy and grace being given to him first.
Julian of Norwich

A Month of Grace

Grace is available for each of us every day -- our spiritual daily bread -- but we've got to remember to ask for it with a grateful heart and not worry about whether there will be enough for tomorrow.
Sarah Ban Breathnach

The most perfect instrument of tyranny...

I found this excellent quote in the otherwise middling 7 Men Who Rule the World from the Grave:

"A public-school system, if it means the providing of free education for those who desire it, is a noteworthy and beneficial achievement of modern times; but when once it becomes monopolistic it is the most perfect instrument of tyranny which has yet been devised. Freedom of thought in the Middle Ages was combatted by the Inquisition, but the modern method is far more effective. Place the lives of children in their formative years, despite the convictions of their parents, under the ultimate control of experts appointed by the State, force them to attend schools where the higher aspirations of humanity are crushed out, and where the mind is filled with the materialism of the day, and it is difficult to see how even the remnants of liberty can subsist."

Christianity and Liberalism (1924) by J. Gresham Machen

A Month of Grace

Grace is free sovereign favor to the ill-deserving.
Benjamin B. Warfield


If any man ascribes anything of salvation, even the very least thing, to the free will of man, he knows nothing of grace, and he has not learned Jesus Christ rightly.
Martin Luther

Composition Notebooks and Narration

Using our new composition notebooks has been educational, not just for the kids, but for me, too. I've been a bit frustrated at our exams because the kids don't remember details from their reading, but I haven't known what to do about it, unless I start giving them lists of names, dates and places to memorize. J and L haven't been writing much for school at all. L is ten and just getting to the point where he'd be doing written narrations, so I had started having him do one a week at the beginning of this term six weeks ago. I hadn't been requiring any more than one a week from J because he's still learning to spell and I didn't want to ask too much of him.

So I made them each a composition notebook, a handy size they could fill in a term, and asked them to write a brief summary of everything they read for school. They still narrate orally - longer oral narrations, but concise snippets for their books. That was my thought. So far it's been going well. The biggest surprise is J (Year 7). He doesn't want to write concise summary snippets. He says he'll remember better if he writes more, and he says he loves to write. Who knew? He requested that he do written narrations instead of oral, so we'll try that and see how it goes.

This morning I wrote down some names on a sheet of paper before we read 1 Sam 26 - Saul, Abner, David and Abishai. I told them I wanted them to use those names in their written narrations, and I left the paper out for them to spell the names correctly. Charlotte Mason did that - writing certain things on the chalkboard that she wanted her students to look for in their reading. I don't know if she left them up for her students to copy the spelling. She probably had them memorize the spelling by closing their eyes and visualizing the word, and then erased the board. But we're taking this one step at a time.

L was having a tough time with his Plutarch narration, so I let him dictate it to me - he knew what he wanted to say, but he was having trouble getting it on to the page. I wrote it out on a scrap sheet of paper as he dictated, and he copied that into his booklet in his own handwriting. I noticed that he revised and consolidated as he copied, which is probably a beneficial exercise in itself. I think we're going to do his Plutarch narrations this way from now on.

I don't know what kind of a difference all this is going to make educationally - I won't find out until exam time. But I think it will help.

Here's a peek at their notebooks to show how they're set up and how we're utilizing the space on the pages. This is pretty much how the notebooks I saw from some PNEU students were done - with more than one entry on each page, and each entry dated.

L's book, age ten, Ambleside Online Year 4


J's book, age 13, Ambleside Online Year 7


T's book, age 16, Ambleside Online Year 11; his book is not only a bit bigger, but it has more pages - 48. He'll fill his because he writes more - written narrations are nothing new to him.


Miss M, age 3, Ambleside Online Year 0, has her own book - I gave her the one that I accidentally put the pages in upside down so the top margin is at the bottom. She likes to do whatever her brothers are doing!

Do Parents Have the Right Not to Education Their Children?

"If you're a homeschooler you have heard that question or some variation on it from somebody advocating greater restrictions on homeschoolers. Often it will be accompanied with a sort of backhanded compliment something like this, 'I know you'll educate your children, but what about the parents who won't?'"

The Headmistress at The Common Room wrote an excellent response to this kind of question in which she considers that, with the public schools graduating 25 percent of their students still illiterate, why are we assuming that it's the homeschoolers (who have a 90 percent success rate) who need policing? "...indoctrination is really what it's all about. One reason public schools fail to teach so many children to read is because they are most interested in teaching them something else altogether."

Read the whole post here.

A Month of Grace

Dependence

To keep the lamp alive,
With oil we fill the bowl;
'Tis water makes the willow thrive,
And grace that feeds the soul.

The Lord's unsparing hand
Supplies the living stream;
It is not at our own command,
But still derived from Him.

Beware of Peter's word,
Nor confidently say,
"I never will deny Thee, Lord," --
But, -- "Grant I never may."

Man's wisdom is to seek
His strength in God alone;
And e'en an angel would be weak,
Who trusted in his own.

Retreat beneath his wings,
And in His gace confide!
This more exalts the King of kings
Than all your works beside.

In Jesus is our store,
Grace issues from His throne;
Whoever says, "I want no more,"
Confesses he has done.

by William Cowper

Stacks Winter Reading Challenge

Krakovianka posted about this reading challenge:
"If you are anything like me your stack of purchased to-be-read books is teetering over. So for this challenge we would be reading 5 books that we have already purchased, have been meaning to get to, have been sitting on the nightstand and haven't read before." They're hoping to get people signed up by Nov 15.

Krakovianka is going to read War and Peace, a Polish book and something by Jane Austen that I've never heard of. My list won't be quite so serious. We recently sorted and reshelved all of our books, and I came across some children's books that I'd been meaning to read. And here's my opportunity!

My five selections:

Roller Skates by Ruth Sawyer
Linnets and Valerians by Elizabeth Goudge
The Iliad for Boys and Girls by Alfred Church
All of a Kind Family by Sydney Taylor
Just David by Eleanor Porter
The Mouse and his Child by Russell Hoban

Okay, so that's six. But I've been wanting to read all of these. And, with my schedule, children's books are probably all I'll be able to manage.