The only problem with the book Raising Real Men: Surviving, Teaching and Appreciating Boys, is that I regret not having had the opportunity to read it earlier.  Just published this January, this 253 page volume (including the detailed index) not only helps us answer those frustrated mommy questions like “WHY did you do that?” when your feisty sons behave oh, so differently than your dutiful daughters.

(The event I was recollecting as I said that was when my now-17 year old son was about seven, and wondered what would happen if he squirted the light bulb in his dresser lamp with a water pistol.  The resulting minor explosion was just one of many ‘experiments’ conducted by my now-not-so-little explorer.)

We have only been blessed with one boy, but he has made quite an impact on our family.  The authors of Raising Real Men have six, so they are more than qualified to write this book; actually, they are not qualified just because they have six sons; they qualify because they understand that boys – just like little girls – are a picture of the image of God, tragically marred by sin. And that our focus must be on leading our sons into godly manhood, not just trying to manage them to make our lives convenient and more pleasant. p. 25

Hal and Melanie Young, the authors of this book, clearly speak the truth as they describe our culture’s desire to feminize men and our misguided attempts to ‘change’ our boys, rather than understand them.  The Youngs not only exhort us to celebrate the uniqueness of our boys, they give us very practical suggestions for how to train and ready them to use those special God-given characteristics to be the men God created them to be.

Listen to some of these intriguing chapter titles/subtitles from Part One – Virtues in the Rough:

• Resisting Feminization
• Boys Need Heroes
• Visual Media
• Heroes from History
• Bring on the Boldness
• When to Comfort, When to Encourage
• Standing Alone
• Responsibility, Then Freedom
• Learning to Stand
• What the bible Says about Leadership
• Developing the Next Generation’s Leaders
• The Biblical View of Competition
• The Puritan View of Games and Competition
• What the Bible Says about Manners

In Part Two – Civilization for the Tough, the Youngs discuss that raising manly men doesn’t mean raising barbarians.  Men can and should be civilized. p. 126   Part Two is concerned with preparing a young man to interact appropriately with a world that so desperately needs his godly leadership. 

How can we teach our sons the things they will need to interact in society, to lead their families, to serve God?  Step by step, suiting the way God made them, in an intentional, thoughtful way… just the way we teach them everything. p. 126

Sometimes – many times – homeschooling seems overwhelming; homeschooling boys can be, especially.  I loved the above quote because it is in accord with the old Puritan saying, “Do the next thing.”  Let’s make a plan and just take one step at a time.  This book will help you make that plan for raising your boys to be the men they were created to be.

One of my favorite chapters in Part Two is called “Your Own School for Boys.” This chapter may well be your favorite chapter, too, if you have been pulling your hair out trying to home school your boys!  Melanie Young has home schooled six boys at a time and has obviously done some reading on the subject, offering us an explanation why and how boys are different than girls in the learning arena as well as many practical suggestions to get the most out of your boys.  Chapter subtitles:

• Developmental Differences
• Developmental “Delays”
• Gender Differences in Learning
• Louder, Mom
• “I Think He Must Be Hyperactive…”
• “Why Do I Have to Learn This, Anyway?”
• What’s Your Goal, Son?
• The Benefit of Stress

This is great stuff! Additionally, chapters include endnotes with scriptural back up!

Other very useful information in this book pertains to teaching boys how to be faithful stewards of their money, why we need to teach them to have good manners, how the Bible looks at work roles and how to deal with male/female relationships.  It even aids with considerations about choosing a college, for the college bound, and describes the counselor role we move into as our children leave the nest.

Imminently readable, warm and biblical, Raising Real Men will help you learn how to train and shape your noisy, dirty, rambunctious boys into real men who can stand on their own two feet and face the world, lead their families, and fulfill the purpose for which they were created.

 

Enjoy those boys!

P.S.  If you would like to order this wonderful book for you and/or others, please click on the book cover image at the beginning of this post!

A Warm Welcome to our Newest Subscribers!

Epi Kardia has a mailing list that goes literally around the world! Besides home schooling moms from Florida to Alaska, we also have readers from Canada, Australia, the Philippines, Germany, Nepal, China, New Zealand, Peru, Egypt and Puerto Rico!

Epi Kardia is honored and humbled by your support!  This has always been part business and part ministry, so as I said in my last post with our survey results, I want to make sure and respond to some of your direct questions and comments on the survey many of you so kindly completed.

Where is….?

I’m having trouble navigating your website./Your website is confusing.

• I’m sorry you are having trouble!  I have worked on the navigation  in order for it to flow a little better – if you are having trouble finding what you’re looking for, I suggest the following:

1. Go to the home page and REFRESH/RELOAD the page. (That applies to many pages – do it every time you come to a different page on the Epi Kardia site,  just to make sure you are not missing anything.)
2. Start with the Curriculum Overview page.  That page explains the different types of curricula and has links to more detailed descriptions with samples. Hopefully will clarify many of your questions.
3. If you have questions that you don’t see answered, please feel free to email me directly. (dana@epikardia.com)  I will always answer your questions.
   

Why don’t you have book lists on your web site?/Where are your book lists?/Why is there no kindergarten book list?

• We DO have book lists on our website.  You can find them on the left sidebar, under Books! From that first page you may navigate to book lists for our lesson plans and courses.
• We are adding the Kindergarten books as we speak.  Bear with me, those book links take a while to put up but I hope to have them all on soon.

Who is….?

Where can I find others who use your curriculum?/How about having a forum where I can talk to other Epi Kardia curriculum users?

• Good question!  We do put quotes on our website from real live people who use our curriculum, but at present we don’t have a forum of EK users.  (It is on our To Do list, but not at the top yet .)
• So would anyone like to volunteer to be a reference? If you wouldn’t mind answering an email question or two from someone who wants an opinion, please contact me at dana@epikardia.com.
• Alternatively, if you currently use Epi Kardia curriculum and you would like to answer a few online questions about it for others’ perusal, please go to a site such as www.choosyhomeschooler.com and write a quick review. I think you would have to create a user name and password on that site before you could write a review.
• We do have some home school moms who are going to be reviewing our curriculum in the next few months.  We will certainly let you know when they are published.

Please don’t wait for a survey if there is something you would like to ask, a broken link you would like to bring to my attention or just a comment you would like to make – I would love to hear from you (dana@epikardia.com).

Have a great weekend!

P.S. I just read a wonderful book about raising boys that I will reviewing next week!  Make a note to check back or join our list if you haven’t already done so!

I should have done this a long time ago!

A  from-the-bottom-of-my-heart thank you to those who took the time to take my survey!  After about a hundred responses, it is time to let you know a little about what you said you needed and wanted to read about on this blog.

But before I tell you that, it is obvious from many of your comments that a  number of you are in desperate need of a bit of  motivation and encouragement.

Let me give you some.

You are doing a very. hard. but. valuable. thing. in home schooling your children.

Home schooling is NOT easy, or painless, or without major self-sacrifice.

Please stop comparing yourself with other people who make it look easy.

You know who I’m talking about.

• The denim-jumpered ladies who grind their own wheat to make whole grain bread and make all their kids’ clothes.
• The ones you run into at Wal-Mart, wearing make-up, who have nine nicely dressed, perfectly quiet children walking in a line when yours don’t have clean underwear on because you haven’t been able to do laundry* and you have bribed them to behave with the promise of a treat later backed up by several nasty looks.
• The ones who not only have a neat colored-coded schedule for every day but who actually follow it for more than a day and a half.

*true story

And realize that the advice and coaching you get from this blog comes from what we have learned from doing things wrong as well as from doing things right.

I can tell you, though, that homeschooling has been a wonderful thing for my own spiritual growth as well as that of our children.  There is nothing like seeing yourself in your kids’ less than perfect behavior to give you a picture of what our Heavenly Father so often sees in us!  Ouch!

It has been an even more wonderful thing enjoying the fruit of God’s grace and our home schooling labors in seeing children who love the Lord and are working hard to walk in His footsteps.  Home schooling  is oh, so worth it.

I am also thankful for those of you who took the time to answer the last survey question about what you are struggling with the most. Some of you really poured your heart out, and I appreciated your candidness and your trust in me. I plan to address many of those issues in the weeks and months to follow.

Survey Results

Before I give you a peek at the results, let’s look at the basics of who replied (and I’m rounding):

• 12% of you have home schooled under a year

• 24% from one to three years

• 22%  from three to five years

• 42%  for over six years

I don’t know about you, but I am encouraged that so many of you have home schooled for that long, and I hope this blog will support your efforts and give you some practical tools to keep going!

First Things First

1.  Now the interesting and inspiring part of the survey. The single, most important thing to over half of you (51%) was to read about Christian parenting – how to disciple and mentor your children.  That is SUCH an encouragement to me, as this is what we are called to do, even before academics!  And if you have read this blog for a while you know that this is a topic close to my heart!  If you are new around here, you might be encouraged to read a few of these older posts that relate to Christian parenting:

• Six Tips to Start Second Semester begins with a personal inventory – the most important place to start before we ’start on’ our kids!
• Want to be Wise? is another post written from the perspective of getting yourself in the correct frame of mind first, beginning with prayer and listing specific scripture on my prayer list as I approached the second semester of this school year.
• Using Habits in Personal Training is listed under our Charlotte Mason posts, but it describes how children need to be taught, from the beginning (!), that they are not ‘their own,’ but live under a greater Authority – what a contrast from our current child-centered culture!
• Teaching Character through Poetry Part I and Part II are two of Beth’s posts with great ideas for  incorporating character training into poetry studies.
• Cultural Creeping warns that  we need to be constantly aware of how we and our children are bombarded by our culture’s non-Christian worldview and the need to combat it.

The Rest of the Very Important Stuff

2.  How to Teach Different Subjects (44%)

3.  Teaching High Schoolers (39%)

4.  Ideas for Lesson Plans (39%)

5. Charlotte Mason Methods (38%)

6. Teaching Middle Schoolers (33%)

What You Considered Important

1. Home Schooling Support and Encouragement (47%)

2. Description of Epi Kardia Curricula (46%)

3. Planning and organization (45%)

4. Hands on Learning (44%)

5. Ideas for Lesson Plans (39%)

Lesson Plan Ideas

Because so many of you considered lesson plan ideas important, before this post gets any longer I want to list some of our pertinent posts in one place for those of you who are newer readers:

• Writing a Book Review – Writing a book review for the purpose of encouraging someone else to read a well-loved book is a lot more interesting to write than the traditional report.
• Make a Middle Ages Dictionary! will give you detailed instructions and resources to make a book, taken from our middle school lesson plans, that can be adapted for younger or older students studying this or another time period/subject.
• Make a Lapbook! Identifies the benefits of using graphic organizers and includes photos and MANY ideas and resources for making mini-books and lapbooks.
• Picture Study – Ever wondered how to incorporate the study of great art into your homeschooling? Read about this painless way to do so!
• Picture Study for Older Students -A continuation of the post above, this article contains additional ideas appropriate for your older children.
• The Question Box – This creative, hands on idea can be used to review or to incite interest in studying all kinds of topics.  The lesson example given in on the Middle Ages and can be used with students of all ages.

OK, this is WAY longer than I intended!  But I do want to assure you that I will respond to your preferences  as I plan and write this blog.  And for those of you who asked me to answer particular questions, I will address those very soon.

Many Blessings, Sisters!

P.S.  THANK YOU for some of your very encouraging comments!