I love the early snow around my faith garden. The snow makes new shapes that are already in the garden. New shapes are formed and sometimes it’s a real mystery what is under the snow. Ice always comes in November, makes for more interesting visuals in the snow. Each layer brings a new shape to November. And God is the artist.

The shape of home school starts to change a little in November, too. With the holidays, home school can take basic subjects and build on them with the holiday decorating, art appreciation, historical facts and family times.

Let’s talk about the turkey. Home school can study the natural science of turkey growth while smelling a turkey roasting. Turkey soup can be a cooking lesson. That is served before Thanksgiving. Make your own turkey broth by boiling just the turkey leg. The bone structure of a turkey leg is a good lesson when you are taking the meat off the turkey leg for soup. Add lessons of hospitality by serving soup to a neighbor. Social justice studies around turkey production would be interesting to study. Layer and layer of new study add to home school curriculum.

Change the shape of learning in November and see where God leads you.

Each year, I fill the flowerpots on my front porch with natural items. A long time ago, I learned that the cost of greens was not equal to what I could do with twigs, branches, grasses and seedpods. I wet the dirt and when it freezes in a few weeks the natural items will freeze into a winter arrangement that will last. These natural items go together in a natural combination. It’s a minute of creativity for me to find and place things together.

In your home school there are also natural combinations. When a teachable moment comes, it is natural that you stop work and help kids learn in a new way. Consider this.

The kids are doing Math at the table. A 1st grader is working on one thing and a 4th grader is working on something else. You are washing dishes while supervising. The 1st grader says, “This is hard.” The 4th grader says, “That’s the idea, butt head.” If you don’t drop a dish, I’m proud of you. No one wants one child calling another names. The natural combination here is to stop Math and deal with name-calling. Creative teaching during the moment becomes necessary.

That can only happen in home school. In larger groups kids are great at name calling under their breath and half of it goes unheard by adults. But in home school the immediate apology teaches lessons of forgiving and forgiveness.

Your ability to combine teachable moments and home school is a gift from God. After they kids do Math, try a walk to collect natural items for your very own, front step pot to celebrate winter.

When I teach prayer with kids, I always tell them a life of faith is more about being prayer than doing prayer. We look for all the times, places and experiences in our day where we could pray. Eventually, we hope that kids will weave prayer into their entire life.

Clematis’ are one of the most varied and beautiful vines. They climb fences, trellises and any place you want. The blooms on mine last about a week and I just have to go out and look at them several times a day. I always miss the blooms when they make these interesting seedpods and then disappear. One day I noticed the cool weaving vines that is the base for the blooms. The vines are really strong and make beautiful patterns.

Prayer is like clematis. The blooms of each prayer are beautiful, but the patterns that give strength are the true base for our lives. In your home school, look for ways to weave a strong base of prayer. Yes, pray at meals, bedtime or for special days. But help kids understand that we can pray continually to God for strength, patience, help, thanks and a million other ways. Try these activities.
1. Touch the door frame of each door as you go through it both inside and outside. Pray for safety, learning or good experiences as you touch the door. (How were doors important to the Exodus story?)
2. Hum familiar tunes to faith songs like “Silent Night”. Talk about chanting being a way to pray that has been present for centuries in religion.

Often the pictures on this blog are full of happy sunshine and beautifully colored blooms. Daily growth celebrates beauty. Lots of actions happen before the beautiful bloom. The decomposition, the cold that is necessary for some seeds, the shorter days and the moisture through rain and snow. We need gray days as well as blue bird skies. We need black manure and white mold. Daily growth in nature needs all the colors. Look at all the colors in just this goldenrod plant.

There are many colors of faith, too. There are relationships that make us feel yellow, blue, red, green and purple. There are experiences that seem black, grey and white. Faith is not one color or one dimension.

In your home school environment, do the following activity with children of all ages.

Materials needed: Large paper, water color paints, brushes, water, classical music to listen to as children paint.

In these words or your own words.
“Today we are going to paint the colors of your faith. Think about how you feel today about God. Is there a color you can associate with that feeling? Was your faith stronger earlier in the day? How did that change the color? How do you hope your faith will show in colors tomorrow? We are looking for just color, not specifics objects. Let’s paint the colors of your faith.

Share the paintings with one another.

Talk about how the color changes are subtle or bold. Answer the question together, “How is our faith subtle or bold?”

Does faith mean we feel different? Have you ever looked around and felt like your faith makes you different? Every one around you might feel cheery (or cherry tomato!) and you are just hanging out. You don’t see things from the same perspective and you feel as if you don’t fit into the norm.

I wonder what God thinks about being different. We need to remember that we are created in God’s image. All of us are created in God’s image. WE may be different than one another, but we are not different than God. If our faith makes us feel different than others, perhaps we need to take a good look at our gifts. Be the pumpkin! Diversity is God’s plan.

Fall is a time when perennial root structures do their most growing. These are the roots of the grasses in our fishpond. They grow so much in the late summer and fall that they become a mat of roots. And they are hard to split up. We actually had to cut these out because the roots were keeping the water from coming down the waterfall. We put them in another place in the pond to re-root next year.

One of the things I appreciate most about home schooling is that families are allowed to step back and evaluate growth more often. It isn’t about tests that everyone takes at the same time or preparing for conferences. You are able to re-root goals for each learner. You step back and see each child.

Try using these three open-ended questions to evaluate faith and your child. Use them whenever you have a moment to just stop, look and listen. This will help you to see where God is leading your home school lessons next.

I wonder how my child’s faith is connecting in the world.
I wonder how my child’s faith is connecting to God.
I wonder how my child’s faith is connecting in the family.

These questions will help you evaluate what you might need to emphasize more in the faith formation of each child. Do you need to have a child do more service to others? Does your child need more time with God through holy texts or prayer? Does your child need practice acting out faith with siblings?

Evaluate and re-root your faith formation for the kids. And look out for growth that is blessed by God. Amen.