Summer Planning

 Summertime. ahhhhhh.

My 2 youngest are working as counselors at a local overnight Christian summer camp, so they are gone from Sunday afternoon until late Friday night, for 10 weeks. They come home on the weekend, sleep, do their laundry, run to Target to replenish their toiletries and supplies, and are off again! Since they are only 10 miles from home, I do see them a time or two during the week. My husband and I cook breakfast at camp every Tuesday morning, flipping chocolate chip pancakes and cooking sausage links, something we started doing last summer. And I usually make at least one other stop in during the week, to drop off cupcakes for the staff and whatever other miscellaneous item one of them needs - an extra blanket, a certain t-shirt for skit night, a clip-on fan for the bed, a slushie from Sonic, etc

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 Otherwise, I fill my days with my "summer projects" - organizing and decluttering my home, school planning for the coming year, reading. I sometimes can't believe that I am in this season of having NO KIDS home during the summer, and only one high schooler left to homeschool, and I do miss the days when my children were young.

No, I really, really do.

But I am trying to embrace this season as well, and have learned to enjoy the quiet. I still complain about not having enough time to get everything done. I think I have just slowed down, and spend more time reading and contemplating... I am an introvert, after all, and a lot of my activity takes place inside my head. :-) But I have big plans for J for this school year, and although I have completed my term on the Board of our support group, I am still active in leadership and still have a great desire to help new homeschoolers get a good start and to encourage as many homeschool families as I can.

I will be teaching high school English again this year, with a small group of teens in my living room, so I am choosing the literature we will study and working on a syllabus and lesson plans.  I know I want to include C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters,  Corrie Ten Boom's The Hiding Place,  and Harper Lee's  To Kill a Mockingbird, but still haven't decided which of the dozen or so others on my list to include. So many good choices!!

I have recently decided that I am also going to teach a Christian Worldview class, using several DVD series, and a Civics / US Constitution class.  I've been feeling an urgency about making sure that J and other teens have a rock-solid understanding of these things before leaving home.  Generation Joshua has a Civics curriculum that looks really good, called iCitizen: Civic Literacy for Young Americans.  I also like Constitutional Literacy from Michael Farris and Patrick Henry College, so I think I want to do the Civics class first semester, and then half of the Constitution class in the spring, finishing it next fall.  I really think the Civics part needs to come first, otherwise I would just do the Constitution class all of this year.   For worldview, I already have Focus on the Family's The Truth Project and also For the Life of the World  .  I'm also planning to use Doing the Right Thing, a series on ethics from The Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview.  And then I want to finish with a few weeks studying Darwin's theory of Evolution and alternative theories.  It is so important to me, as a Christian, that I teach these high school subjects from the perspective of a biblical worldview, since they will likely not get that perspective again in their educational pursuits.

Proverbs 9:10 says "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. "