Time to Talk About Time

Time has always been a kind of fuzzy concept for me that if I start thinking about too much everything around me starts to go splotchy and I start to hear humming in my head and wonder if the universe really exists or is all inside my skull.

And now I am finding, with Miss Language on the other side of the world, that time is even fuzzier. By the clock, she is teaching a class right now in China - where it is 9 something in the morning while it is 9 something at night here. That makes no sense to me. How can that be? It is easier in my head for me to just think she will be teaching a class at 9 something in the morning, or that she did teach that class this morning... and yes, I know some of you live in one of these parallel dimensions where night and day are reversed somehow and I am not sure what day it is anywhere. But that is OK.

Praying Our Geography

Teaching geography is one of those things that frustrates me in homeschool. I am not good at it. I believe in using maps to look things up and only know the barest outlines, which I consider in a constant state of flux, whether due to politics and war or earthquakes and other disasters shaking things up and making my hard-earned knowledge out-of-date.


But this year we hit on a simple system that I like. We have used the prayer calendar from Operation World at breakfast to give us the "country of the day" -- only actually, they each get three days, which is handy for weekends and days when we just don't get everything done. I am increasingly convinced of the importance of building in margin (not margarine, I use butter and olive oil, but margin). 


So, we look at the country of the day and mark it on an outline map in a little folder each Bananalet has. We also have a big world map hung in the dining room to help us out a bit. Then we read the corresponding entry in the Operation World book, summarizing where it gets a little dry. The big hit here is trying to guess what the per capita income in each country is when we get to that part in the entry. Miss Dance usually guesses low, Devastatingly Handsome just a bit high, Mr Music one dollar on one side of one of the two of them (so he often wins) and Miss Dog Lover looks over my shoulder to see if she can see it before guessing.  :-P


Then, we check these two wonderful books for entries on the country of the day or any of its people groups:


Window on the World

and


Material World

It has been a fun, relaxed approach to learning about the world, and has helped (at least me) to grow in gratitude for what God has given us here in Bananaland and to picture and pray for a wide variety of needs in other countries.