Faith Matters

We've been using our faith as a vehicle for learning this week and so far we have been progressing nicely.  Yesterday we worked from this book:

We read the above chapter and then answered the accompanying questions.  Benedict gave some very thoughtful answers and I acted as scribe:

The above posting was based on questions you might like to ask God.  I thought it interesting that, Benedict's primary question was the whole issue of Heaven and Hell, who gets in and who doesn't!  I remember thinking that same thought as a child, "Why does God send people to Hell?"  Of course as an adult I know that, this is not the case!  God wants us all to be with him, but some folks choose to ignore him completely and are masters of their ultimate destiny.  It's that whole area of free will and God who is Love without measure, loving us enough to allow us to make choices good or bad.

Today our faith trail led us on a patchwork discovery of prayers and hopefully by the end Benedict will have his own personal prayer journal as a result.  We used this book as our resource:

His first chapter was entitled "All About Me" and here are his thoughts:

A drawing of himself and his two best friends.

Something seemed to "click" this morning and the writing process came easily and naturally.  Benedict wrote with purpose and enthusiasm and was keen to display his spelling abilities!  He was justifiably pleased with his work.  We finished this morning's session with some shared reading and then it was time for lunch.

  Not to be out done Pip is making good progress with her jigsaw and shape sorting skills and  her language continues to blossom.   Her latest words are:

cot, all gone, oh dear, gee(for Jesus!) and her favourite, Amen!

Her understanding of language far exceeds her spoken abilities and she is more than capable of following a complex series of requests.  Like all children she loves praise and yet she  is also quite happy to applaud her own efforts for a job well done.

During our afternoon work time we have been concentrating on Practical Skills.  Both yesterday and today we have slowly been putting the garden to bed, no Sara to help this time!  Yesterday we cleared the leaves and branch cuttings from the tree pruning session that occurred a few weeks ago.  Today we cleared and tidied the greenhouse.  It was great to be out in the fresh air and the exercise helped enormously with blood sugar management!

Yes, he is wearing shorts!  Good job the rest of him is wrapped up warmly!

Leaves, leaves everywhere, all gathered and ready for the compost bin.

Since todays garden job was a fairly small task we also had time to complete one household chore before tea preparation.  The chosen activity was window cleaning and between us both we cleaned all the upstairs windows, six in all.

Working hard.

Benedict grabbed the camera and took this rather blurry picture of me!

Tomorrow we will hopefully be celebrating the feast of Martinmas, in theory there should be lantern making and some yummy food for tea; whether or not it transpires into practice remains to be seen!