This is not to pick on you (if Sunday school is meant for learning, then already knowing what is taught does rather make it pointless), but it reminded me of something I'd read recently, that comes from an alternate perspective. In the Large Catechism, Martin Luther talks about people who read through the catechism texts once or twice and think they know it so they have no further need of them. (Here he's talking about the core texts of the catechism - the Lord's Prayer, the Apostles' Creed, the Ten Commandments, and key verses on Holy Baptism and the Sacrament of the Altar - and not his or others' explanations of those texts.) He disdains this view - that we can master the fundamentals of the faith and then move on to "more interesting" things - but rather sees the need to continually grow and be formed by the core of the faith. For one, no one can ever fully master it, no matter how much they study it, but also that living in this sinful world, we are in constant need of re-learning and re-seeing and being re-formed. The core fundamentals of the faith are indeed *core* - there is no growing *past* them, but a continual journey of growing *in* them. Which is what I told my kids when dd8 complained that she "knew this already" as we read a well-known Bible story ;). There is so much more to growing in the faith than "knowing stuff".

Totally agree with you re: there being no formula that comes with guarantees. And that what happens the remaining hours of the week matters a ton. But I do think that "the point of church is grow in faith by learning more about God" combined with "church is boring/hard" - especially with the dominant cultural belief that "learning should be fun" - can be a fairly significant contribution to young adults deciding that there are better ways than going to church to learn more about God. And I do think that divorcing oneself from a local church body makes keeping your faith so much more difficult, as the local church is the normative place for gathering with believers and receiving God's gifts through the means of grace. (I do realize that going to church to receive the means of grace is only a meaningful reason if you do indeed see Word and Sacrament *as* means of grace; I do believe that God works through them even in people who don't believe in the means of grace, though.) But I agree that all those other hours in the week are very important wrt helping kids learn to understand and appreciate the Divine service. I do make an effort to teach my kids hymns and the liturgy and what they mean, as well as connect our daily devotions to what we do in church. ETA: I do think part of the formative effects of attending church is gathering *together* around the means of grace - that not only are we being formed by participating in the liturgy, we are formed by participating *together*.

This is what I was thinking. I also wonder if some of this is wrt churches that have Sunday school at the same time as the service - where the point of the service is primarily to *learn*, and the central focus of the service is the sermon. So the kids learn at "their level" in Sunday school or children's church while the adults learn at "their level" in the service - same basic goal, to grow in the faith by *learning* more about it. Whereas in sacramental churches, the point of the Divine service is to receive God's grace, and the central focus is Holy Communion. We grow in the faith through God working in us through the Word and Sacraments, and *everyone*, of all ages, benefits from that. In the Lutheran church, Sunday school is the primary time for learning more about the faith, for everyone, as the sermon in the Divine service is primarily about proclaiming the Gospel, a means of grace. (In my rough understanding, our Sunday school goal is equivalent to the church service goal of non-sacramental churches.) In my non-scientific experience, it seems to me that sacramental churches tend to be naturally "family-integrated", and I think it's due to the differences in theology of worship. If we grow in faith primarily by learning more, then common sense says that kids are at a different level than adults, and separating them is the easiest way to accommodate that. But if we grow in faith through receiving God's grace through Word and Sacrament, then we'd *want* everyone to be in the Divine service, to receive God's gifts. And the effects of incorporating the whole "learning should fun and effortless" part of our culture into Sunday school would be lessened in sacramental churches, because the kids would still be part of the Divine service with everyone, part of the life of the church, and would still be formed through the means of grace. (Although it still has pernicious effects.)

Between 6 and 6.5 for dd8. Nowhere near for dd5.5. (Both failed the Barton pre-screening - they have problems distinguishing sounds and other phonemic awareness issues.)

Interesting. I'd never heard of these before - my dh (a Lutheran pastor) has a small communion case that holds a small container of wine and wafers and some small cups, and that's pretty standard in our denomination. (They are unconsecrated - he consecrates them when he gives communion.)

:lol: to "communion lunchables". It doesn't take as long as you might think for everyone to go to the front for communion, though. My childhood church had 500-1000 or more people per service. They put some thought into logistics and we could have an unrushed-feeling go-to-the-front-and-kneel-at-the-rail communion that was faster with 1,000 people than another church with 100-150 people. I'll grant you it does still take 10 min or so (which is normal to me), but there's a lot you can do to eliminate dead time without taking away from the reverence.

Broken: 7 "Christian" Rules That Every Christian Ought to Break as Often as Possible, by Jonathan Fisk - one of the things I liked about this book was that he spent equal time presenting the Gospel as discussing the seven wrong answers that masquerade as the truth. So often books spend 90% of the time discussing the wrong views and the right view, the Gospel, is practically an afterthought. The Hammer of God, by Bo Giertz - it seems like everyone I respected was recommending this book. Finally I read it, and it was indeed awesome and completely worth reading :thumbup:.

I'm one to use too much tp (working on changing that, as between me and the dc it got ridiculous, although not a full roll in half a day ridiculous), and my first roommate bought good stuff instead of just using the school-supplied cheapie stuff. She brought it up to me nicely about using less or chipping in, and I started using the school stuff instead, with no hard feelings.

It's the answer to life, the universe, and everything ;) (from Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy). Also a fun domino game.

I've hit dh's car with the van while backing out twice now. Fortunately I back out slowly and there was no damage worth mentioning either time :phew. (Dh was a real sweetie about it both times :heart:.) Worse was when dh was visiting my family for the very first time after we started dating, and I took off the bumper of his car with my mom's car - after my dad warned me to watch for that very thing. Dh's car had just come out of the shop, too. Dh took it well, but my dad was furious. (They never did get mom's bumper fixed, though their insurance paid for dh's.)

Reminds me of a C.S. Lewis quote: He goes on to say that the best way to see the unity is to read widely from all the various ages of Christian thought - after you've seen several different variations, the underlying similarities are clearer. It seems to me that classical education is similar. I read a history of classical education in the Lutheran church, and it was eyeopening wrt all the various ways "classical" was done, how it was never this singular monolith, and seeing why the various educators picked the particular version of classical that they did. Yet for all the variations through the ages, there's still a core that distinguishes classical education from other approaches - there's much more similarities than not between all the different flavors of classical.

I had the same issue, and it was indeed the stress I was carrying in my neck and upper back. Getting rid of (enough of) the buried tension via doing a yoga/meditation based stress relief program solved it. Nothing else ever did. (It's actually rather nice, being able to lift my head up for those sorts of exercise without pain (or much pain - I've still got stress there, but less of it).)

I thought they had always been hidden from non-logged-in users - at least, that had been my experience before.

Firefly!

In some ways, I like it better than the algebra app, although to be fair, I have played more of elements than algebra (I've played 75-80% of elements). I think age wise is something like 9 and up, but my young 8yo is fairly successful with it, though she needs a bit of help. One downside is that it's hard to help if you haven't played it yourself (that's why I started), because you don't know how the app does things. It's quite intuitive if you start from the beginning (especially if you know basic geometry), but I couldn't jump in cold in the middle. It's very similar in approach to the algebra app - minimal instruction (although for some reason it feels like more than with algebra - it scaffolds well), learn by doing, teaches tons of implicit knowledge but nothing explicitly (although the connections are extremely clear if you know geometry - I'm glad I am playing it myself, because I can explain things in "regular" math by referring to dragonbox). It's proofs done visually - you have your initial setup, your goals, and an ever-increasing toolbox of things you can do to get from point A to point B (or point C, or D, or H - the number of steps increases as you go). It seems more open-ended wrt multiple solutions, because unlike the algebra app, it doesn't reward you for minimal steps. It's very amenable to teaching the idea of starting with what you *can* do, even if you haven't the faintest idea how that will get you to your goal, and going from there - with just diving in and trying something, and seeing where that leads you - which is helpful with my perfectionist, who takes one look at some of the complicated ones and wants to give up without trying.

I love my Ergo - I carried my 3yo around the zoo and several other places this summer without a problem. The Ergo distributes the weight really well - I never have problems with my back or shoulders hurting.

I was an early reader (age 2) and I've always *loved* to read. My dh learned in first grade, so age 6 or so (I don't know when he was fluent, but obviously not early per this poll), and he's a fairly big reader - not as much as me, but he goes through at least a couple of books every month. Dd8 became fluent between 6.5 and 7 and she loves to read as much as me, although she does have some difficulties (we don't know what yet, although I wonder about stealth dyslexia, but there's clearly *something*) - they've made spelling and writing in general very difficult for her, and learning to read was a fair bit of work, but now that things have clicked reading-wise, you can't keep her out of books :lol:.

Also, all the pointing out in daily life - that *is* repetition. And repetition that is more spread out than just during school time, in addition to modeling and teaching how to integrate the fruits of formal learning into the rest of life.

I was on google with safe search activated - probably necessary, because yeah, that description just screams p0rn.

I googled the key words from her description - "girl dancing whip cage men" - and I'm pretty sure I found the show she was talking about. (Generally google's pretty effective at that.)

That does sound like a good solution :). My experience is that whatever regrets you might have from inviting him will be forgotten long before the regrets that would result from not inviting him. In 5th grade I was the only girl in my class not invited to a birthday party. I was sad and cried at home a bit, but moved on. In 8th grade, the mother of that girl apologized to my mother for excluding me from that party, three years after the fact (apparently she'd given her daughter a hard limit on the number of guests and didn't realize until too late that it resulted in all the girls in the class but one being invited - she assured my mom she'd have invited me if she'd known). I'd already forgotten about that party, but the mother (and maybe her daughter) felt guilty about it for *three years*.

Bumping this because I found the website for the book, and it has video lectures by Dr. Biermann that hit all the main parts of the book :thumbup:: http://acaseforcharacter.com/ Eta: Also, I finished the book today. It was definitely worth the reading and has given me a lot to think over. I'm going back over it to summarize it - I mostly understand his points (I think), but I am not at all sure yet how they fit with everything else in my head ;).

Do you know what your current reading speed is? And do you have any ideas on what might be slowing you down? Sub vocalizing - where you aren't just hearing the words in your head but are actually moving your lips a bit or otherwise effectively reading it "aloud", but without making noise - is a common culprit. Generally, reading with sub vocalizing tops out around 150 words/min. Hearing the words in your head is "bad", per the speed readers, as it limits your speed to what the auditory processing center of your brain can handle - supposed to top out around 500-600 words/min. Idk, I hear the words in my head and read around 500-550 words/min and that's been fast enough for me. I do unconsciously skim a bit on easy material - automatically fill in the short words and other expected words - and that boosts my speed somewhat. Speed reading doesn't have to be skimming so much as it is moving fast enough that you quit trying to use the auditory center of your brain to process the words but instead use the visual center of your brain, which is a few orders of magnitude faster. But a problem with reading that fast is that your ability to *do* something mentally with the words you read - aka comprehension and remembering it - isn't used to working that fast. So it's not just learning to take in the words fast but also learning to comprehend and think that fast - else it's the reading equivalent of in one ear and out the other. I know my reading speed varies based on the complexity of the material - not just so I can initially decode and comprehend it, but also because I am pausing to think about what I just read, connect it to other things.

I've found I like the sort of exercises that grow with you. So they are easy when you start, which is encouraging for me, yet as you get better, they get harder. So you don't have to learn a new set of exercises, but instead get to keep discovering new aspects of what you already know - get a deeper understanding and experience. I've also found I like defined programs - do this, this, and this, and you are done - and ones that allow you to do the whole thing from the beginning and you learn it more and more as you go, just by doing it with focus, instead of having an initial learning curve. I just want to *do* the thing, not have to stop and rewind and modify and generally put in a lot of study before I can get on with the exercising part. And I like to have quickish success - not necessarily with weight/inch loss, but just *something* noticeable. And programs that grow with you and you can learn as you do them have provided that for me - every day I notice something new, get better at some aspect :). I started with a stress relief program that combined gentle yoga and meditation, because I wanted to increase my body awareness. Funnily enough, though I didn't pick it for the stress relief part, three weeks into the program I discovered that I had a *ton* of buried stress :lol:. Anyway, the increasing body awareness and decreasing stress was enough to keep me going. And the increased body awareness led to my wanting to do more and more with it, to step up what I asked it to do, to do some actual strength building with it. I went with T-Tapp, which I've enjoyed so far - I get better every time I do it and become aware more and more of my body. I started with the Basic Workout, but it went too fast for me, and I ended up with Senior Fit, which has been *perfect*. Goes slow, is centered around the basic form and so has a lot of good repetition to cement learning the form while still being interesting all the way through. It's a bit long - the learning workout is 67min and the regular one is 47min - but the stress relief program got me in the habit of doing 45min a day, so it's worked out fine. T-Tapp MORE would be my pick for a shorter, but slow-moving, workout.

It's A Case for Character: Towards a Lutheran Virtue Ethics, by Joel Biermann ( http://www.amazon.com/Case-Character-Towards-Lutheran-Virtue/dp/1451477910/ ). His focus is on developing a set of Lutheran virtues (virtue defined as "specific skills, traits, and behaviors that serve to define and guide those on the journey to an agreed-upon telos"), which is so very helpful for those who want to educate for wisdom and virtue through a distinctly Lutheran classical education (I appreciate the focus he puts on the importance of having to have the same goal - "agreed-upon telos" - to even *want* to have the same virtues). And he starts by looking at the history of virtue ethics, including its recent revival in philosophy, and defining terms, which has been amazing. It's bringing so much of the talk about formative education and educating for virtue together for me. Plus it is intersecting with my current focus on sanctification. As I read Circe related articles and threads, I wasn't sure how to educate for virtue without getting into what seemed to me to be works righteousness, as most of the other participants had different ideas about sanctification than I did. Not that there isn't value in looking to the ideas of other traditions, but I realized that I didn't know enough about my *own* tradition to be able to evaluate those ideas, and so I felt unmoored. And what I did know about my tradition was skewed, which I realized when I read the Large Catechism and if it had been from anything but the Confessions I'd have been all, bam! Works righteousness, y'all. Clearly I need to, er, refine my understanding somewhat ;). I don't know if I will agree with Biermann's conclusions, but I am learning *so much* from seeing all the history and competing ideas in developing a set of Lutheran virtues - even if I don't ultimately agree with Biermann, he has opened up a new world of thought for me :). (My Amazon cart is filling up with books he references ;).)