Moms In Touch

One of the very first things I did as a mom with kids in the public school was to start a Moms In Touch group. There may be a group already started in your area. This is a place for moms with kids in the same school district to get together and pray for your kids and the school. There is something about getting together with other women and each of you praying for the other woman's child or children and then praying corporately for your school. This one step in obedience was the catapult which led to many other wonderful, godly opportunities for our family in our school district.

Go to www.momsintouch.org and look to see if there is a group in your school district and if not, what it would take to start one. You will NEVER regret having done this for your children!!

How to go to public school successfully

There is only one book, that I can find, that deals with this issue. It is a book entitled, Going Public, by David and Kelli Pritchard. This is a MUST read for anyone with kids in public school or planning on having them attend. I ran across this book as I was preparing to start this blog early last year (yes, I have not been diligent in getting it started!). It was one of the impetus' for us to pull our middle school kids out of public school, because I saw what we had NOT done as parents in training our kids, effecting how they were able to handle (or in our case, not handle) the school environment and especially peer pressure. What was that? Instant obedience. I have been reading alot about this idea within the last few years. Why didn't I think of that or hear about it before now? It makes sense. I always counted to three, but when they would respond at the count of 3, that was not obedience but delayed obedience which is really disobedience. Do you think we are to respond to God that way? Or does he want a moldable, soft, obedient heart to be sensitive to His commands? An obedient heart is a heart God can use. Because my kids were not obeying instantly, but grudgingly, at best, God could not use them in the public school environment. There is much more to the issue than just this one concept, but it was a key that I had not seen before. I am a very involved parent at school and I just couldn't figure out why my kids were not acting the way they should be acting. This book helped to shape my thinking on this very important issue. Please get this book and mark it up as you read the pages. Hopefully, you can make changes earlier in your family that we could in ours but it is never too late! I have seen significant improvements since we started implementing some of their ideas.

If I were to walk into my class as a guest...

If you were to walk into your own classroom as a guest what would you see? Would there be things that are different from other classrooms? What would your bookshelf be filled with? Would any biblical quotes (without a verse reference, of course :)) be on your walls? Do the kids know you pray for them? Do you have a prayer group of teachers and staff that get together to pray for the school? Do you get the kids involved in controversial topics by letting them talk about what they know, especially if you know the kids come from Christian homes? (ex. Creation vs Evolution)

Can I challenge you to not just look at your role as a teacher as a job but as a mission field and attack your work from that perspective?

A great place for you to start is with Christian Educators Association International at http://www.ceai.org/, their magazine Teachers of Vision (which is free on their site in pdf format!) is very good and informative and gives ideas for incorporating our faith into the classroom. You may want to consider moving your association and insurance to this organization instead of paying through a very liberal-minded organization like NEA.
If you have other resources to encourage teachers please let me know.

Why does this involve us?

Even though your children may not be in the public school, your neighbors are. I see my neighborhood as my mission field which means that I must include the schools in that calling. If you consider that most unsaved people are attending public schools, it just seems like a ready mission field. Besides praying for those schools and your neighbors,as a family, one of the most effective ways to reach into those schools is through donated books. My blog, Your Undercover Assignment, is about how to start. My blog,Can We Do That?, is on how to start a Christian after school club in your area school. This is a perfect fit for a homeschooling family because you are teaching your children to teach and learn God's Word, as well as giving them exposure to an unreached group of kids that will,typically, be younger than your own. This is also a fantastic way to sharpen public speaking skills and classroom management. Our family loves to have club! This is just a place to start, take a look at my series of blog challenges to get the full details of what I just went over.

Resources for growth

Here are some of the resources that our family has used over the years to instill biblical truths.

Wonder Devotional Books are good for elementary age kids from Child Evangelism Fellowship -http://cefpress.com/home.php?cat=7 - these books are great ways to learn about the basic attributes of God and the Trinity and learn to witness to others. As you advance through the series it becomes more dependent on the child to find the passage in the Bible.

Pray Kids- from Navpress-http://www.navpress.com/store/search.aspx?q=pray+kids -these are a great series to really help kids learn how to pray like Jesus prayed, how to prayerwalk, pray for the lost, intercession etc. There are over 20 different topics having to do with prayer. Their prayer cards are also fantastic. Even my teenagers like to do this series, it doesn't have be to be just for older elementary age kids.

Bible Study for All Ages worksheets- http://www.biblestudyguide.com/- Every page has a review section with either a time line or map and random questions from previous lessons to refresh and reinforce their memory on top of learning a new lesson. When you have finished with the whole series you will have read the whole bible! We are not finished with it yet, but we plug along doing 2 per week. (one side a day for homework. There are different levels of worksheets depending on the age and reading level of the child. You also HAVE to get their Song CD. The songs on there are awesome and make memorizing various items about the bible a cinch. We can riddle off the days of creation, sons of Jacob and all the judges in order!

Memorizing the Ten Commandments- I can say without a doubt that having a picture as a memory tool for the Ten commandments is fantastic. I have never been able to memorize them in order but now we all know them and it took just a few minutes to have them down!http://www.livingwaters.com/index.php?option=com_rokdownloads&view=file&Itemid=237&id=32%3Ateach-kids-the-ten-commandments&lang=en

Learn geography- we learn geography so that we know where missionaries are in the world and where there are people being persecuted for their faith. http://www.wartoft.nu/software/seterra/ is the geography game that we use, it is a downloadable so you don't have to worry about your kids being on the internet. I get the Voice of the Martyrs newsletter/updates every week and we subscribe and give money to Christian Aid and they have this wonderful prayer card that they send you every month. Being aware of the world in which we live and what is happening on the Christian front in other nations is so critical!

Book of the Bible Song- we learned the Cedarmont Kids song, but there are others available for free off the internet.

Book of Virtues- here is a free unit study by Shiver Academy for the Book of Virtues compiled by William Bennett- we just started this.http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/ShiverAcademy/ scroll down right hand side until you get to Book of Virtues information.

This should be enough to get you started :)

I'll have more for you in another post

Blessings

Weight of Responsibility

If you are a parent, it doesn't matter in what school your kids are registered nor what church you attend. It is NOT the school's nor church's responsibility to train up your child in the way they should go. We are to be the ones impressing God's principles on their hearts: to talk about it at home, when you walk along the road,when you lie down and get up. (Deuteronomy 6:6-7) Do not depend on the church or a Christian school, to do your duty. As Voddie Baucham says in his book Family Driven Faith, Ephesians 4:11-12 says that the job of the church is to equip the saints to do their jobs, not to do it for them. Parents, and especially fathers, are responsible before God, to raise their children with a biblical worldview. We need to be knowledgeable ourselves and our kids need to see it applied to our lives first. Our worldview should not just be effecting what church we go to, but our views on interacting with our neighbors, our closest friendships, how we spend our money and time, and our interactions with the world. Are we acting out our beliefs so that we are being doers of the Word or are our actions confusing our kids because they aren't matching what they may know of God? I pray that our actions will be a reinforcement of what we are teaching them and implant the seed of His righteousness deep in their hearts.

I think the most difficult part of this responsibility is finding the time to do it. I guarantee this will be something that you will want to give up on within the first week of doing it, because it has now become a spiritual battle that is being fought over your family. We had decided that in the morning was going to be the primary learning time before school (we did other spiritual activities after school and in the evening.) I cannot even tell you how many fights erupted during our time together over ridiculous things. I seriously considered giving up, in fact, there were some days that I was emotionally unable to lead because I was so upset with them. But, we pushed through, and now it is such a part of our daily routine that it really isn't even that much of an issue. I cannot imagine NOT doing it! You will be amazed at how much can be accomplished in a short amount of time. I want to encourage you that you can do it! It doesn't have to be in the morning but YOU MUST DO IT! You must be persistent and never give up, every day is a new day to try again. If there are only a few things that you are determined about, let this be it!

I feel that we need to look at our families as not just "us" but as future generations. Everything we do now, is going to effect our children and how they raise their children and how our grandchildren raise their children and pass on God's faithfulness from generation to generation....

When God was instructing the Israelites in the Book of Deuteronomy about how they were to behave and act in a pagan culture, he repeatedly told them to teach their children His ways, in all areas and at all times and to keep His laws... "that it may go well with you AND your children after you and that you may live long in the land the Lord your God gives you for all time." (Deut 4:40) God warned that if they did not do that, the land would be taken from them. Do you not think this applies to us today? You must think generationally to keep the message of Christ continuing within your family or it will not go well with you or your children after you.

The very first thing we need to be doing with our kids is reading and memorizing God's Word with them. Start by just literally reading His Word with them and allowing God's Spirit to show you what His intention was for those verses, not make an interpretation of our own. Kids need to know that the stories in the Bible are true! Start with simple verses to memorize, that concentrate on salvation and sin and then move into the attributes of God.

We are blessed with an incredible amount of resources available to advance the message to our kids even further. One of the best resources is to sign up for homeschooling newsletters. They are a great wealth of information. All my kids were in public school and I received numerous homeschooling newsletters that helped me pick and choose what I wanted to spend my time teaching my kids. Here are a few to get you started:
http://www.currclick.com/ -this is a curriculum site that provides ebooks for free and at a cost-I love this site!
http://www.homeschoolfreebieoftheday.com/ -you never know what download you will be able to get for free!
http://www.homeschoolenrichment.com/homeschoolenrichment.com/- look at the advertisements!
http://www.thehomeschoolmagazine.com/- look at the advertisements and sign up for their newsletters-they will send you all sorts of resources.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/ -this resource site did more to supercharge our faith in Our Creator God than any other website.

Next time, I'll share some other incredible resources that our family has used.

Don't forget that our life is a race. Make sure we're heading our family and ourselves forward towards the rewards God has for us and not backwards towards Satan's desires for our family. There is no such thing as standing still. Every decision we make is a move in one of two directions. Press on towards the prize~think generationally.

Mission Field? I thought it was a mine field!

Is public school for every child? NO! But are we called to reach out to those around us? YES!

The public schools, in many ways, has become Satan's lair, only because Christians have allowed it to happen. Satan works best through slow, gradual, deceitful changes and "progress". So what can we do about it now?

LOTS!

It is like a walled castle with secret passages that we must manuever or a mine field that must be swept. We must be more bullheaded than our competition and as wise as serpents but as gentle as doves.

Many of the things I'm going to suggest are things that we do in our family. I'll be suggesting ideas each week that our family has done or that I have heard other people doing. If you have an idea that has worked for you, please let me know and if I think others would like to hear about it, I'll post it. I want this to be a site that we can go to for encouragement and creativity. I encourage teachers/administration to also add ideas.

I will be coming from a background of having kids in the public school and others that are homeschooled, so there is flexibility in what I am suggesting that can work with any person, no matter their age or family make up (including single, married without kids and retired individuals). This battle cannot just be fought by only one cross section of society, but must be a Christian stand against Satan exploiting our youth.

If the public schools are the largest unreached people group in America (undocumented, but just seems to make sense) then shouldn't we be approaching the situation like a missionary would?

Where does a missionary start?

With prayer. God loves the kids in the school, now we pray for God to give us a heart for them as well. How is your daily devotional time? Our faith and desire for godly things gets stronger and more focused as we obey what God tells us to do, no matter how difficult it may seem at the time. Are we placing more priority on our tv watching time, or the books that we read than tithing our time to God as well as our money?

I have been reading many biographical sketches of great Christian leaders throughout the centuries and, inevitably, the common denominator of their greatness, was their desire to sacrifice their time in prayer. Christ became a man, and spent numerous hours in prayer so that he could live the life that he lived, getting his marching orders. Shouldn't we be following his example?

Your assignment this week, is to keep a consistent prayer/bible reading time and really seek God. Here's what I want you to ask for:

-love for the kids of this generation and their parents

-specific boundaries of what school(s) he wants you involved in, any way he sees fit.

Blessings