Christianity & Homeschooling: Ideas for Devotions for Your Home-Schooling Family
By Mimi RothschildYou may have started your foray into home-schooling under the impression that there would be more time for family devotions. Or perhaps you thought that outside the sphere of influence of the public schools, home-schooling would make your kids more interested in God and devotions. Many home-schooling parents are surprised to learn that getting the most academically from home-schooling takes a significant amount of time. Furthermore, they don't want to deprive their children of sports and social activities, and then there are all the chores and little things you need to do just to keep your household running smoothly. Many parents find that in home-schooling, there is no more time for family devotions or any thing else then there was before home-schooling began.
Of course, there is a lot to be said for sitting down with the family and reading scripture and praying together. But even for home-schooling families, scheduling those times in a busy day is not always possible. There are a few things you can do to make more room for devotions in your everyday life with your busy home-school schedule. For example, you can use every day events to talk about God and God's teachings. You can use an afternoon hike to talk about how magnificent God's creation is and how creation reveals the nature of God. You can use a trip to the grocery store to talk to your home-schooled children about the blessings that God has bestowed upon your family. You can use any random car trip to play religious music and sing along or just talk about a specific bible passage.
In terms of making room for formal devotions in your busy home-schooling lives, you can turn other events into devotions. You can fit devotions into other activities you already have planned. For example, you can use movie night to watch a religious movie and then you can talk about it afterward or you have a game night featuring a religious game that will reinforce faith. Home-schooled families, like many other families, have events like these scheduled on a regular basis. They can be educational, fun, and serve as a twist on more traditional devotion time.
Home-schooled kids have many opportunities to learn from you about God and religion. By making room for some type of devotion every day, you are not only teaching your home-schooled children important lessons about God, you are showing that God and religion are important priorities in your lives. For families of faith, this is the most important part of the home-school curriculum.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mimi Rothschild is a homeschooling parent, children's rights activist, author, and Founder and C.E.O. of online education company Learning by Grace, Inc. Rothschild and her husband of twenty-eight years reside in suburban Philadelphia with their eight children.
Feeling that “our current system of education has broken its promise,” Rothschild co-founded Learning By Grace, Inc. to provide families with Internet-based multimedia education to PreK-12 children all over the world.
In addition to her twenty years of experience as a homeschool mother, Rothschild has written a number of books dealing with education published by McGraw Hill and others. Her Home Education Websites Blog consists of helpful online content and activities for Christian homeschooling families.
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