I started work this week on the reading schedule for New Testament. Wow. This is going to be SO much easier than Old Testament was! There are just 260 chapters in the new testament, so It’s pretty easy to finish the New Testament for these students. Students who read just one chapter a day, 7 days a week will finish 252 chapters in 36 weeks. So really, most kids will be reading just slightly more than 1 chapter per day to read the entire New Testament this year. Easy.
For my class I will continue on with my daily assigned reading, but this year, I was able to stick much more closely with the pacing guide in the manual. There are some annoying weeks when there are a ton of chapters to cover, but none of the daily assignments in the pacing guide exceed 7 pages, or about 28 minutes when read aloud (15-20 minutes if read silently). Easy.
So, I created my entire year’s calendar in about 3 hours Tuesday. Yeah, really. It took me about 25 hours to get that far last year, I think. I have left my “extra days” blank and will fill those in later with either assigned readings or other activities. I have decided to put a real emphasis on scripture mastery this year, and so I have also added something new to the calendar: a scripture mastery of the day. Each day we will repeat a scripture mastery passage as a class. Using my iPhone scripture mastery app, I wrote down the comparative lengths of the scripture mastery passages and made a list of them from longest to shortest. By my estimates, it would take 142 consecutive days of repetition to learn all 25 scripture masteries, which leaves 18 days left over for my schedule. Then I put the scripture mastery passages on the calendar. I tried to put them near when we’d cover them, but it didn’t always work. The leftovers filled in the spaces where there are no scripture mastery passages in a certain book. Then I stretched to fill in any other blank days, and *poof*. It’s done.
In case you’re interested, here is the list I made with the lengths of scripture mastery passage and how many days of repetition I estimated it would take us to learn the passage.
At first I was going to have us learn the longest passages first, all the way to the end of the year, but then I decided it would be easier for the kids to learn passages at the time they read it. Starting with longest to shortest has a couple of advantages. Using that method, students will learn the “hard ones” at the beginning of the year, when they’re more motivated. At the end of the year when things are starting to drag, students will be able to pass off several passages in a single week which could help sustain momentum. Also, you’ll end up with extra time at the end of the year where kids who fell behind can make up any passages they didn’t learn.
New Testament Scripture Mastery Passages from Longest to Shortest
(passage, length, estimated time to learn with 1 group repetition per day)
- Matthew 16:15–19, 20 lines, 15 days
- Ephesians 4:11–14, 17 lines, 15 days
- 2 Timothy 3:1–5, 15 lines, 12 days
- Luke 24:36–39, 13 lines, 10 days
- 2 Thessalonians 2:1–3, 12 lines, 10 days
- Revelations 20: 12-13, 12 lines, 10 days
- 1 Corinthians 15:40–42, 11 lines, 8 days
- Matthew 5: 14–16, 10 lines, 7 days
- Revelations 14:6-7, 10 lines, 7 days
- 1 Corinthians 15:20–22, 8 lines, 5 days
- James 1:5–6, 8 lines, 5 days
- Acts 7:55–56, 7 lines, 4 days
- 1 Corinthians 10:13, 7 lines, 4 days
- 2 Timothy 3:16–17, 7 lines, 4 days
- James 2: 17–19, 6 lines, 4 days
- Romans 1:16, 5 lines, 3 days
- Matthew 6:2, 5 lines, 3 days
- Matthew 25:40, 5 lines, 3 days
- John 3:5, 4 lines, 2 days
- John 10:16, 4 lines, 2 days
- 1 Corinthians 15:29, 4 lines, 2 days
- Hebrews 5:4, 3 lines, 2 days
- John 17:3, 3 lines, 2 days
- John 7:17, 3 lines, 2 days
- John 14:15, 2 lines, 1 day
Anyway, I’m feeling very good about the schedule so far. It’s surprising to me how it seems to break at good places for us, even though our school schedule is such a nightmare.
Frontier Cultural Museum
My dad was up this weekend for another meeting with the estate planning people. He has been wanting to get us excited to go down to the Frontier Cultural Museum near Staunton, Virginia, where he believes our Moore and Grubbs ancestors lived. My DS didn’t want to go (typical teenager) but DD was ready to go anywhere (she always is). It was supposed to be 100 with the heat index on the day he was free, and I think he sort of decided to let it go because of lack of enthusiasm. I had not planned to go, but when I didn’t take any orders earlier in the week, I decided to propose a quick trip down.
We went fairly early in the morning to pick up our CSA share so that the vegetables wouldn’t wither in the heat, and on the way back I suggested we go down. DS was sullen and did NOT want to go. He had planned about 30 minutes before to attach himself to a 22-year old friend who was going to play tennis that afternoon. We voted, and he was outvoted. So we stopped at Walmart to pick up some snacks and ran back to the house to drop off the CSA share before leaving. Boy was that kid cranky. I thought I may have to pull him aside to call him to repentance, but it came out that Daddy wanted his notes on the family from PAF so that he could tell the kids about the people who he is researching. I was driving, and I didn’t think that Daddy could handle the software installation, etc, on a strange computer, so DS was drafted as computer expert.
DS has been grounded for nearly a week now for the usual computer violations, and he’s still got at least 1 more week left. These circumstances were extenuating, and so like I say, he was drafted into service. They got the laptop up and running with the updated GEDCOM, scrounged up power adapter for the cigarette lighter, and then we were off. DS was miraculously in a better mood. The kid is like a junkie with electronics.
The drive was over 2 hours. Daddy told the kids stories “Tell us another story!” until we got about an hour out, when he started telling them about the family. He then asked DS to read an imaginary letter he had written in the PAF notes as one of our ancestors of the time. The kids seemed very interested, to my surprise. It was after 1 PM when we arrived at the Museum, and H-O-T, hot. I had seen a couple of golf carts just past the gate and wondered if they rented those out. It turned out they did ($10 for the day) and we sprang for it. That cart was our saving grace. We were able to put the cooler and my purse and laptop on the cart so travel was much easier. The cart went fairly fast, and so we were able to get a little breeze going to cool us off between stops. I’d say that each of the first stops is about 1/8 to 1/4 mile apart. It would be a nice stroll in better weather, but with the humidity yesterday, it would have been unbearable.
The Frontier Cultural Museum was surprisingly good. It basically shows a couple of homes, some of which were brought from overseas, that people lived in before the emigrated to the (then future) USA. The second part is a group of homes like what people would have lived in once they got here. The college age staff was surprisingly upbeat despite the heat, and they seemed anxious to let us help out or interact with the exhibits. In Africa, my DD got to help throw mudballs and build up the brick wall around the structure. In England, a group of late elementary school children was dressed in period costume and they were weeding and baking bread and making jam. The kids even did the tour of the house and were able to answer all our questions. It was pretty impressive. DD was especially impressed with the kids (who were at a historical day camp sponsored by the Museum) and has been begging to go to camp herself nonstop since. The Irish exhibit was based on the linen trade, which fit in exactly with what we found in Ulster during our trip there to the Linen Museum, etc, last Christmas. It was very interesting to see how all that fit together on both sides of the ocean. Germany had impressive structures. The 1740s cabin seems to be something that they build from the ground up, tear down, and then build again. Daddy believes that is the kind of home our people would have lived in at that time. The other homes are pretty fancy by Mississippi standards. I guess Virginia has been light years ahead of Mississippi in wealth since basically forever.
On the way home we drove past the Tinkling Springs Church where Susannah was baptized, and grabbed milkshakes for the ride home. DS downloaded a few chapters of Mark Twain’s Roughing It, to listen to on the way home. DS and Daddy are reading his The Innocents Abroad. I finished it last week and have been laughing about it. Daddy had bought me a copy because of our upcoming cruise, and I found I really enjoyed it. ASL is also reading it, too. She found an old copy as part of a whole set of Twain upstairs in her bookshelf that had belonged to her mother. DS is reading the linen-bound copy daddy bought me. Anyway, I was telling them about Roughing it (which talks about Mormons — not very flatteringly, in fact), and so they listened to it as an audiobook. We got through 6-7 chapters and laughed and laughed. The bit about the bull climbing the tree was the last thing we heard.
Anyway, it was a good day. I hope that the kids had a good time. Certainly my dad has done all he can to get them interested in Family History — having given up on me, I suppose. :)
