Our Journaling Pages for use with the Wisdom Books:

Wisdom Book Cover

WB Scripture Meditation Worksheet

WB Life Classroom Worksheet

WB Journal Page

WB Creation Page

WB Command of Christ

WB Biography Report

WB Character Quality Worksheet

CHARACTER

One of the many reasons we decided to home school our children was for ALL of them to receive a Godly education.  It is our desire as parents to see our children grow in wisdom and stature, building in them Godly character and wisdom that will both bless them now and in their future.

Raising children with different learning abilities, or special needs of sorts, doesn’t change that.  We still want the same things for them.  The path to that end sometimes looks VERY different.  Whether your child has ADHD, Autism, Down Syndrome, Dyslexia, or anything else you could add to the list–  we know first hand that YOU WANT THE VERY BEST FOR YOUR CHILD.  You want God’s best for them and their future.

It is for that reason that we chose to use the Wisdom Books for home schooling over other curriculum. It is built on Godly character.  The focus isn’t on how well you can do long division, instead the focus is on Godly character from the inside out.  Deepening your understanding of what it means to live a life of service, or virtue, or joyfulness, or….a long list of many other character qualities.  This is true “success” and can be “achieved” by any individual NO MATTER WHAT THEIR LEARNING ABILITY. Of this we are confident.  Yes, it might be a bit more challenging to get there, but it is possible!

This brings us to the reason for this blog entry.  We feel selfish keeping it to ourselves.  We have so loved our Wisdom Books and have labored over the past year “finding” a way to help ALL of our children glean the most from them.  We love their “journaling pages” contained within, but have found them hard to apply with many of our children. So……  we prayed, we brain stormed, we discussed, and prayed some more.  This is our end result.

We share it with all of you.  Please pass it on to ANYONE who you know would be blessed by it.

We should add that these would be applicable to families with young children as well- they don’t have to have a “special need”, they can just be an early learner joining in the joy of journaling what they have learned through the Wisdom Books.

We have “modified” all the journaling pages in the Wisdom Books and added a few extra as well.  This way ALL of our children could learn to journal, record what they have learned, and hopefully learn how to communicate it better to the world.

Attached you will find 8 different journaling pages.  Each has a “Modification #1” and “Modification #2”. The #1 is for the intermediate learner who is able to write at least some sentences on their own or with guidance.  The #2 is for the learner who has yet to master all their writing skills, but is still learning the concepts being taught.  Each page has a small box in the upper corner with “directions” on when and where to use it in correlation to the Wisdom Books.  We print all of ours and make them into a little book for each kid.  Please use them anyway you see fit for your children. We will link them either here or to the right. But we are working on the link and our “technology skills” 

Enjoy & pass it on! 

One More Thing…..

We must also add that a HUGE part of our family’s enjoyment of the Wisdom Books comes in promoting positive character development.  We were blessed to connect with a wonderful young woman, Esther, who shared with us some great ideas from Character First! (To learn more about it, you can contact her via email thru the link on the right hand side of our site called “The Staddon Family” or click on the link “Character First!”)  We added these hands-on ideas to our  continued practice of “The Purple Boxes”— which you can read more about in a blog entry of ours entitled “An Eruption of Joy”.

ENJOY!!!

Recently, we were blessed to have good friends of ours come stay for the week.  Sarah & Rachel Cooney have been in our lives for nearly 10  years now (as well as the rest of their wonderful family), and we couldn’t imagine not knowing them!  It has been a joy to watch them grow into beautiful, Godly women, who devote so much of their time and energy to other young women & teens. Amidst their busy lives, they came to CT (braving the possibility of seeing Mr. Black Bear) just to hang with us!!!

Hours of freeze tag, capture the flag, soccer, frisbee, dress up, coloring, games of miniature golf, ice cream, Oreos, and more!  They even gave our girls adorable hair cuts (extra bonus that they are both professional hair dressers)!!! Clearly also fashion experts—just check out those fabulous glasses they are wearing in the pictures below!

When all was said and done, at the end of a super long day of play, these great friends still weren’t done.  I had shared with them my goal of getting the ENTIRE school year planned, organized, and sorted into bins before September rolled around. So, each evening they helped me copy, print, sort, and bind up notebooks to go with each of our upcoming Wisdom Books.  There were so many papers, that we lost count night after night.  So I decided to add it all up just to see how much AMAZING hard work they did. They spiral bound 36 notebooks for our Wisdom Book Units,  as well as 18 handwriting/ABC notebooks for our younger ones to use every month of the year!  That’s a lot of spiral binding!!!  I printed out my monthly calendar plans for each, grabbed related books off the shelf, and stuffed the bins. THANK YOU RACHEL & SARAH for being such AMAZING servants and friends. Our school year is planned till the end of the year! Wow- I set the goal, but I truly didn’t think I would reach it- Thank you for helping me—what a gift!

HOME SCHOOLING FAMILIES : If you are a home schooler and currently use “lap books” or something similar—might I suggest to you checking out one of my FAVORITE sites Notebooking Pages.  It takes any unit or theme you can think of to learn about (from handwriting to presidents to ancient China) and sets it into pre-formatted pages. You could put them in a 3 ring or spiral bind them. I like binding them so they take up less space and lay FLAT on their work space.  So as your kids are learning, note taking, writing, whatever- they can learn to organize all their work.  I LOVE LOVE LOVE – did I say LOVE – these pages.  They help me teach one topic to a LARGE variety of learning styles and abilities. Their site has LOTS of free down loads so you can sample.  Of course being a lover of organized things, I bought the whole set. Check it out www.notebookingpages.com

Enjoy!