The Ancient Israelites, and the Jewish Religion

We learned about the Ancient Israelites over hundreds of years of history. I loved seeing how the history of the Bible fits in with world history, and getting a better idea of the world of the Old Testament! We are studying the Old Testament for Home Church this year, so we are reading many stories from the King James Bible, but I also checked out a bunch of Bible storybooks from the library. Our favorites were The Lion Bible for Children (here) and the DK Children's Bible Stories (here)—that one had some cool photos of ancient artifacts and maps along with the stories. 

One of our favorite activities, found in the fun book Old Testament Days, was making Israelite costumes and having a nomad's picnic. We just made tunics out of king-sized pillow cases (with neck- and armholes cut into them). We made a big drawstring bag which we used as our "table." And we ate flatbread and homemade yogurt and goat cheese (and hard-boiled eggs, which maybe wasn't authentic…did nomads have chicken? Maybe they ate quail eggs?). It was quite delicious.

It was also really interesting to learn about the Jewish religion and some of their holidays, both ancient and modern. These are holidays I've always heard of, but other than Hanukkah, I knew very little about the history of any of them! The girls had heard of lots of these holidays reading the All-of-a-Kind Family books, so they were excited to try out some of these fun traditions.

We cast our breadcrumbs on the water for Rosh Hashanah, and ate apples and honey. Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year. 

We also made shofars to blow! (Er…sort of. Posterboard with a balloon is pretty much like ram's horns, right?)

We made cheese blintzes for Shavuot (dairy products remind the Jews of "the Land of Milk and Honey"!) Shavuot celebrates the giving of the Ten Commandments to Moses. To make blintzes, you make crepes, fill them with a cream-cheese filling, fry them again in butter, and bake them in a casserole dish! It's a lot of work, but they are really good, and quite different from just plain crepes! We ate them with berry jam and powdered sugar. Yum.

We learned to make challah. We especially liked doing a four-strand braid with the dough!

We usually try to have a sort of Passover Dinner on the Thursday before Easter—not a real Seder meal, but kind of a modified Seder where we talk about some of the Passover symbols. I usually make a Seder plate and we try to eat some kind of lamb! This year we got take-out from an Indian restaurant we like; Lamb Coconut Kurma. It was so good, maybe we'll do that every year! :) I made tzatziki to go with it.

We built a little sukkah, open to the stars, for Sukkot or the Feast of Tabernacles. This is a fall harvest festival, and the Jews eat and sleep in their little huts! That sounds so fun! We just ate in ours.

We also got to go on a really fun field trip where we saw a model of the Ancient Old Testament tabernacle. It was put on at a stake center, and they had a little video connecting the ancient temple to modern-day temples, and showing some symbols that are common to both. It was really interesting! Then we got to walk around the life-size model of the tabernacle, from the outer courts all the way into the Holy Place and the Holy of Holies, where we could see the Ark of the Covenant. It was really cool to get a sense of how big everything was and how it was set up and put together. The picture above is taken by the altar of sacrifice in the inner courtyard.

Here is the Holy Place (the skies were really beautiful while we were there!)

The big menorah in the Holy Place. The shewbread was in the part too.

And this is inside the Holy of Holies, during a sudden downpour—it was so snug and cozy in there with the rain pounding down! The ark of the covenant had the tablets that held the Ten Commandments, some manna, and the Rod of Aaron inside.

The 1800's and the Restoration of the Gospel Homeschool Unit

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In October 2019, the President of our Church, Russell M. Nelson, announced that 2020 would be a year to celebrate the Restoration of the Church of Jesus Christ on the earth, which commenced with Joseph Smith's vision 200 years ago in 1820. He asked every member and family to

prepare for a unique conference that will commemorate the very foundations of the restored gospel. 

You may wish to begin your preparation by reading afresh Joseph Smith’s account of the First Vision as recorded in the Pearl of Great Price. Our course of study for next year in Come, Follow Me is the Book of Mormon. You may wish to ponder important questions such as, “How would my life be different if my knowledge gained from the Book of Mormon were suddenly taken away?” or “How have the events that followed the First Vision made a difference for me and my loved ones?” Also, with the Book of Mormon videos now becoming available, you may wish to incorporate them in your individual and family study. 

Select your own questions. Design your own plan. Immerse yourself in the glorious light of the Restoration. As you do, general conference next April will be not only memorable; it will be unforgettable.

I spent a few months worrying about how on earth we were going to "immerse ourselves in the glorious light of the restoration." I knew I could study the priesthood and Joseph Smith History on my own, but how to get the family involved too? After talking to Sam about it, I finally decided we'd take some time in Spring of 2020 to do a Homeschool Unit on the 1800's in general, and the events of the Restoration in particular. Sam said he was always much more able to understand and appreciate church events when he had a good picture of what else was going on in the world at the same time, so I thought that would be a good place to start.

I also realized that we'd studied the American Revolution, and we'd studied the Civil War, but we'd never really studied the time period in between the two, so this unit would be a good chance to fill that gap.

Some of the main historical events and issues we talked about from the 1800's:

• Colonialism

• the French and Indian War/Seven Years' War
• the War of 1812
• the Napoleonic Wars

• the Louisiana Purchase

• the Lewis and Clark Expedition

• the Gold Rush

• the Erie Canal

• the Missouri Compromise

• the French Revolution

• the Napoleonic Code

We also discussed contemporary figures:

• Napoleon Bonaparte

• Charles Dickens

• Ludwig van Beethoven, and the Classical and Romantic Eras in music

• Abraham Lincoln

• Louisa May Alcott

• Ralph Waldo Emerson

One thing I hadn't realized was how closely contemporary, and really quite similar in many ways, Joseph Smith and Abraham Lincoln were. They may even have met once! I read these two books and thought they were both great:

Men of Destiny, by Lu Ann Brobst Staheli

The Lincoln Hypothesis, by Timothy Ballard

I shared parts of them with the children, and I wanted my older boys to read especially the Timothy Ballard one, but they didn't ever get around to it. Too bad.

I had planned this unit to take place in the six weeks or so leading up to General Conference, and so as things turned out it also corresponded with the cancelling of everything due to the Coronavirus Pandemic. Luckily, we already had our library books, and though I had a few field trips planned up to Temple Square to watch the Joseph Smith movie and do some other things, we were able to figure out substitute activities at home. And luckily, all the church movies are also online. There are worse ways to spend quarantine than studying the early days of the Restoration! I found it calming and comforting to have that be our focus, and I was really grateful to feel that we had truly prepared ourselves to experience the historic April 2020 Conference!

Here are some links to resources we watched or studied:

Organization of the church:
•  https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/inspiration/latter-day-saints-channel/watch/collection/childrens-bible-videos/jesus-organizes-the-church?lang=eng
•  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJnN2FkgD-g#action=share

Pictures of painting or house restoration (in connection with discussion on Restoration):
• https://www.belfor.com/en/ca/galerie-de-photos
• https://www.gearygallery.com/accent-restoration/oil-painting-restoration/

Matching Game about the Restoration:
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/bc/content/shared/content/images/magazines/friend/2018/04/april-2018-friend-magazine-mormon_2060580.pdf matching game

The First Vision:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hv8Mu-KLGgc&feature=youtu.be first vision

Book of Mormon Translation: 

• https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/media-library/video/2018-09-1080-how-did-joseph-smith-translate-the-book-of-mormon?lang=eng
• https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/inspiration/latter-day-saints-channel/watch/series/now-you-know/where-did-the-book-of-mormon-come-from-now-you-know?lang=eng
• Article: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/2006/10/plain-and-precious-truths-restored?lang=eng
• “Days of Harmony” video: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/media-library/video/2018-03-1000-days-of-harmony?lang=eng

• “A day for the eternities” video: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/media-library/video/2018-03-2000-a-day-for-the-eternities?lang=eng

Emma Smith:
• https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1992/08/my-great-great-grandmother-emma-hale-smith?lang=eng
• https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/emma-hale-smith?lang=eng

A Mary Whitmer story:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP_EMknPE10

I found so many great ideas and links (many of these above) at my friend Montserrat's blog, A Gospel Centered Home. She has simple Family Home Evening lesson ideas and tons of activities for kids. 

Here's my (fairly scant) Pinterest Board for this unit.

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Making Butter.

 Silhouettes are a fun 19th-century art project; you can find instructions here. Junie did one too but I guess I don't have a picture!

Pioneer Handkerchief Dolls we made

Service, Giving, Gratitude

There was SO much good stuff to learn in this unit, but the thing I wanted to teach the children most of all was how to be grateful for and generous with what they have! I'm always wanting to look for things we can do to serve others, but we get so busy and I often don't really know where to start. Sometimes we do service projects with our church, but we haven't found that many things to do as a family yet! So I was happy to have a reason and a reminder to look for some opportunities to serve in our community.

This United Way site is a great place to start looking for current volunteer opportunities. You can search by time period or age or a variety of other limitations, which was good because many of the organizations need volunteers that are older. But there were quite a few youth and family volunteer opportunities as well. We chose a couple that we could all do together, and found a day we could devote entirely to volunteering. I was really excited about doing this, and it turned out great. The children were, of course, not perfect angels and there was the usual arguing and grumbling over this and that, but on the whole they were great and we all had a lot of fun serving together. They all talked very fondly about it when the day was over, and agreed that we'd love to do it again soon, so I think they were able to feel the happiness that comes from service. 

In the morning we made breakfast (it's called "adopting a meal") for the families at the Ronald McDonald house. You have to prepare all the food there, but you get to use their awesomely huge kitchen. We looooved that, and it was something even the little ones could help with! We had had some experience preparing meals for a large group at our Family Reunion last year, so we knew we could do it. :) When I worked with the Young Women group at church, we always talked about doing this as a service project with the girls, but we never got around to it. But it would be a great one. The dinner time slots fill up several months in advance, but breakfasts and lunches are a lot harder for them to fill, I guess. And for breakfast you only have to make a meal for 35-40 people instead of the 65-70 they need served at dinnertime.

The kitchen has pretty much all the tools you'd need, though it took us a long time to find some things among all the cupboards and drawers. But having so much counter space and places for people to work was the best! It really allowed everyone to help without getting (as much) in each others' way. It made me wish this was my own kitchen! Except that then I'd probably just have three huge counters gathering piles of clutter instead of one. :)

LOVED this stove.

And the children were MOST impressed with this industrial dishwasher, which did a whole tray full of dishes in ONE MINUTE. We need one! :)

Anyway, it was so much fun, and I realize that by talking about it here we have our reward, but I'm just sharing the information because it can be so daunting to find chances to serve with little ones, and I thought this might help someone else who is looking for those chances. :)

Later that day, after we took Theodore home for his nap, we went out again to wash toys at The Children's Center. This is a good volunteer opportunity for families because there are always toys to be done, and any age can help do it! We got through about 7 huge bins of toys but there were many, many more, so I think they just rotate through washing them on an ongoing basis. And it was quite fun. We had an assembly line going with bringers and washers and soapers and dryers and put-away-ers, and everyone got VERY wet and had a very good time. We were there for about an hour and a half.

Here are a few more resources related to gratitude and giving:

Have you heard of Kiva microloans? It's a cool concept. You help fund small loans for small home-based and family businesses in third-world countries where traditional loans might be unavailable or out of reach. And it's fun because you read about what the loan will be used for, see pictures of the people applying for loans, and kind of feel like you are involved a little bit with their efforts. You can search by different categories too, like loans for women or loans for people raising pigs (my children were all really drawn to the people needing agricultural loans, for some reason) or whatever you want. We read the profiles and watched some videos and then the children helped me choose a loan to donate $25 to. They loved doing this! When our money is repaid we will choose another loan to donate to.

We also went on a field trip to Welfare Square. It's a great place to learn about some of the things the LDS church does to serve others, and the Humanitarian Center is another. Both of these places have great ideas for service and it's inspiring to see how other families and individuals are finding ways to serve! (And at Welfare Square, you get to taste the bread and honey and chocolate milk they make! :)) With the recent refugee initiative, we'd like to find more things we can do for local refugees, as well.

We read and talked about Elder Dale G. Renlund's talk on how the closer giver and receiver are to each other, the more love can be felt through service. I love this concept so much! So many applications to family life and how we can best love and serve others (and how we can feel gratitude for those who love and serve us!).

Dennis Prager has a good video on what he calls "the missing tile syndrome." He talks about focusing on what we DO have instead of what we DON'T have, which is something I am always trying to emphasize with my children!

This article is fascinating. It relates to the free market, but also gives a good perspective on how grateful we should be for what we have. We are so abundantly rich compared to any other people on earth before!

Debt: national, personal, and spiritual

Debt is such a relevant subject. There's a temporal and a spiritual component to it. And since it's our children who are saddled with most of the burden of the national debt, it seems only fair to teach them about it!

Here's a good video about the debt limit.

And this is a good one on the national debt and the deficit.

This video introduces the Laffer Curve and how lower taxes leads to higher revenue.

Related: social security.

Very interesting question: is consumption actually good for the economy?

I love this video about the broken window fallacy.

(I posted this on the Inflation post too.) It seems like everyone asks this question at some point or other: "why can't we just print more money?" And it's surprisingly hard (for me) to explain! This video does it pretty well.

On the more spiritual side, there's this good article on getting out of debt and its spiritual implications

Here is President Hinckley's great talk about putting our houses in order. I think everyone should read this before getting married!

I also love Joseph B. Wirthlin's talk about earthly and heavenly debts.

And here's another good video illustrating the great debt we owe to Jesus Christ.

Aviation and Aeronautics Unit Study

These spreadsheets look so tiny here. Click to enlarge.

As I said, I wasn't sure this Aviation Unit was really going to be my thing—but it's been awesome. I have learned SO much about airplanes, to the point that I now get almost as excited about seeing "my favorites" as my children do! :) We had a lot of great field trips and watched a lot of cool movies. We were all quite sorry when it came to an end!

Here's the Pinterest board for Aviation and Aeronautics

Here's a movie we got from the library that is good for little kids (preschool/kindergarten) about planes. It didn't really fit in on any of my other posts for this unit. :)

You better believe we referred to President Uchtdorf like crazy during this unit! We used his analogies during devotionals, and listened to all of his talks that referred to airplanes! We love him! Here are some of our favorite talks:
This one, where he compares gospel principles to the aeronautical principles of lift and thrust.
This one, where he talks about the one burned-out light bulb that led to a huge plane crash.
And this one, about an airplane that was off-course by just a few degrees.

"The Family: A Proclamation to the World" songs

I love The Family: A Proclamation to the World. I love the simple, inspired doctrines it teaches and the clear way it sets out eternal truth. Last year, during our morning devotional time, we decided to memorize it as a family.

When we memorized our church's Articles of Faith, we found that using the Article of Faith songs from the Children's Songbook made it easier for everyone. We like to sing together, and music has the added bonus of getting caught in your head often! :) So, I looked online and found that a few people had set the Family Proclamation to music, but none of the songs I found fit my requirements for a good "memorization aid" song. What I wanted was:

• The Proclamation divided up into shorter sections as songs that could stand alone
• Each section to flow into the next, so that the sections could be sung as one large unit if desired (the Articles of Faith songs work this way—you can sing one at a time, or all 13 together)
• The words to take priority: that is, they would be sung naturally, as you would speak them. I didn't want drawn-out syllables or awkward pauses in service of the music to obscure the important meanings of the words. And I wanted us to learn the exact words in all their density and power, unabbreviated and unconstrained.

After some thought, I decided that I would have to write these songs myself. I made each paragraph of the Proclamation into its own song. I'm no Janice Kapp Perry, but I have some background in composition (I was a music major in college and wrote a set of Art Songs to words of T.S. Eliot for my Honors Thesis) so I thought it was worth a try.

I tried to make the melodies simple enough for children to sing or hum, but since I was committed to making the song rhythms follow the rhythms of natural speech, there are a few places where I had to use unconventional or changing time signatures (the Proclamation, obviously, was NOT written with a nice ABAB form in mind. I could have wished for it to say, "The family is good/ Do what you should" or something, instead of "We declare the means by which mortal life is created to be divinely appointed." But it's better the way it is.) :) And I suppose the types of melodies that appeal to me are not always the most straightforward, tonal ones, so I can't promise that everyone will like them.

However, with all that said, these songs were a great success for us in memorizing The Family: A Proclamation to the World. We learned it one paragraph at a time until we could sing (and say) the Proclamation all the way through. Paragraph 7, which is the longest song, is also my favorite (with Paragraph 6 a close second). Over a year later, we can still remember the words we memorized, and judging by the humming I overhear from the children, the songs are often running through all of our heads. I don't know if I can adequately describe how nice it is to have "Happiness in family life is most likely to be achieved when founded upon the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ" ringing in your ears—rather than whatever other mindless lyric could be stuck in there. :)

I wrote these songs with only my little family in mind, but as I've thought it over, I've decided that maybe someone else struggling to memorize the Family Proclamation will find them useful. I've included them in three formats below: videos of my family singing each paragraph in turn (the little girls don't know it very well, but they are cute), audio files of just the accompaniment to each song, and .pdfs of the sheet music if you want to print it out for playing on the piano or following along with the audio files.

I hope these songs are helpful to someone! I can testify that studying and memorizing these words has been a great blessing to me and to my children, and I'm so happy we did it!

(I wrote more about our experience memorizing the proclamation, and some things it taught me, on my friend Montserrat's blog. You can find those posts here and here.)

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Here are the audio files of just the accompaniment (no words) to the songs.

The Family: A Proclamation to the World songs, audio files:

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And here are the .pdfs if you want to download the sheet music.

The Family: A Proclamation to the World songs, sheet music:

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Paragraph 9 sheet music

Making Mini Zen Gardens

I have always loved Japanese gardens of all kinds. I love the green, lush, mossy ones; and the restrained, dry, gravel ones; and the ones full of bridges and trees. I was inspired by mini Zen gardens I saw online—these and these—and I knew this would be a great project to do. (The Zen gardens are named for Zen Buddhism; contemplating the carefully raked gravel is supposed to assist in meditation and clarity. But not all dry landscape gardens have to be "Zen" gardens; we just called them that because that's how they're popularly known.)

There are some beautiful garden designs here that we used for inspiration. We also had several books with gorgeous pictures of all kinds of Japanese gardens. I wish we had one of these for our yard. :)

Making our mini gardens was really simple. We just poured white sand into shallow containers; any kind we could find. We used a couple pie pans and a candle tray and a ceramic baking dish and a tiny roll basket-warmer. Then we hunted for lovely and interesting rocks to include.

That reminds me of a funny story: once Sam and I were visiting a Japanese garden in Portland (or was it San Francisco? I'm not sure). One of the workers there came up and started telling us about the Japanese landscape architect who had designed the garden. He said, "The architect even had these rocks brought in specially from Japan. He said that in the United States, there were 'no rocks of sufficient age and character.'"

The guy (the tour guide, and I guess the architect too) was so proud of those ancient and venerable Japanese rocks. And they were lovely. But…afterwards, Sam and I just laughed and laughed at the "sufficient age and character" thing. As if there aren't any ancient rocks in the U.S. just because it's a relatively new country. And geologically, Japan is a much more "young" and volatile country! That architect must not have ever heard of these rocks, to name just one group that is of quite "sufficient age." Ha ha.

Anyway, we didn't worry too much about "age and character," but just tried to find rocks we liked. :) I used some from the beach in Oregon. We placed our rocks carefully (trying to pay attention to areas of rest and detail like Sam taught us) and then raked lines in the land. Some of the children added little "trees" or greenery as well.

It seemed like it would be fun to have natural-looking wooden rakes like they use in real, non-mini gardens. We saw these cute handmade wooden rakes, so we made a few of these of our own. We loved how they looked, and they made nice wide lines in the sand. For smaller, finer lines, a regular fork worked quite well too!

Daisy's was the tiniest garden. So cute!

It was really fun to experiment with different rock arrangements and raking patterns. This garden Sebby made is SO peaceful and simple. I love it.

This was raked with a fork. Then we rearranged it…

and raked with our little homemade rake.

That looked pretty, too!

We absolutely love our mini Zen gardens and we still have one on our kitchen table. It is very calming to sit and rake patterns in the sand. We can see why Japanese monks enjoy it too! :)