Down to two homeschool students

Three of my children have now moved on from being homeschoolers. Two are in a charter school that offers dual enrollment college classes, and one is serving a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That leaves just two sleeping in and learning at their leisure. We will pick up the pace next week when their part-time program begins, but for now, we're mostly learning about the 1600s in Europe.

The story of the King James Version of the Bible was covered yesterday. Did you know that there were many other competing non-Latin Bibles at the time? The King James Version won out.

As I look at the harm that can be done by mistranslating even one word* in a book of scripture, I'm amazed that Christianity has survived translation and recopying by scribes and scholars making errors and pushing their own agendas for 1500+ years now. (* Unfortunately, the Spanish-language Book of Mormon translates "wilderness" as "desierto" in many places. This is a questionable choice, for wildernesses can be quite green and full of plants and trees; a wilderness just has to be "wild" and uncultivated land. There are LDS people who debate where in the Americas the events of the Book of Mormon take place, and this mistranslation adds to the confusion.) 

And then there are the shifts in meanings that have occurred in the past 400 years. Many words can now mean the opposite of what they used to mean. "Literally" is a good example of that. I see one of my jobs as a home-educating mother is to teach my children that language changes and they need to know where our words came from. 

Besides history, religion, language arts, and foreign languages (Greek for one, Welsh for the other this year....sorry, Latin), we'll be learning some chemistry (I plan to focus the experiments on kitchen chemistry and cooking) and doing music lessons, exercising (video game dancing is a favorite), and art. I don't have a planned art curriculum for them. For art, I provide supplies and let them go to it. Sketching is a huge favorite. I love that so many of their peers sketch for fun these days and that they share their drawings with each other online and in person.