My husband surprised me with tickets to a Tenth Avenue North concert last night. It was awesome!! I really like their authenticity and genuine spirit. They truly make their concerts into a time of worship and put all the spotlight on God rather than themselves.
Their tour is called "The Light Meets the Dark" and is used to highlight the heinous issue of modern slavery. I have heard many times about this problem and it has always been a heavy weight in my heart. But two things were said last night that really hit hard. They have partnered up with Compassion International, which is a child sponsorship organization. A Compassion video was shown where 3 adults from other countries spoke about their lives before Compassion intervened and they were sponsored by someone. One man said that he remembers his mother holding his 10 month old sister as she died of starvation. I have an almost 10 month old. Wow. I don't even want to imagine what it is like to hold your baby as they die of something so simple, yet something you can't provide. Not only that, but the days and weeks prior to that when they cry out in hunger.
Then the lead singer of Tenth Avenue North began to talk about slavery and he said he'd always wondered how it actually happens, how a child becomes a slave. And he began to paint a picture of a common scenario. A man is working in a field for many hours. Perhaps a coffee bean field, plucking the beans by hand. At the end of the day, he brings the pile of beans to his boss and receives $1 for his day of work. He feels the stress of not being able to provide enough for his family to eat. Then a stranger comes along and says something like "I have work for your child. If you let her come with me, I'll pay her $300 a month." And the man, out of desperation, gives his daughter to the stranger, maybe not having the slightest idea what she will be doing or what will be done to her. Now, I know that thousands of other children are kidnapped or get into the sex slave industry by more forceful means, but as I sat there and thought about my two babies sleeping peacefully at home, I tried to put myself in that mother or father's shoes and felt heart-wrenching pain.
The singer went on to say that when you sponsor a child through Compassion International, you actually stop that cycle right where it starts. You literally pluck a child out of a desperate situation in poverty and give them a new start in life. Instead of a stranger coming to that family's house to offer "work" for a child, a Compassion worker comes and brings wonderful news in the form of food, education, clothing, and most importantly, the Gospel for the child. What amazing news that must be to a family who wonders how their dollar will feed and clothe their children, let alone give them any education!
He went on to give the typical speech about how it's about the cost of 3 or so lattes a week, but not being a huge coffee drinker (thought I love it, opportunity and cost deter me), that kind of talk never resonates much with me. What does is realizing that I have and most of the world has not. It doesn't matter that most of our clothes are second-hand and our TV is old and I have to watch almost every penny I spend. I have clothes and a TV and pennies to spend. I spent this morning folding clothes and thanking God that I have clothes to put on, a washing machine to clean them in, a clean floor to fold them on, a warm bed to sleep in, food to eat for breakfast, and many other things.
But even more than God taking care of me on a daily basis with my physical needs, He has taken care of a deep spiritual need that all of us have. He sent His son Jesus to die on that old rugged cross to take our place. He literally plucked me out when I was drowning in sin and saved me. And I thank Him all the time for what He did for me. He can pluck you out, too, if you just trust Him. Believe that He died for your sins. Tell Him that you need Him. And don't forget to thank Him :)
Our sponsored child is Joan and he lives in Peru. He's 15 now, which is hard to believe. He was only 8 or 9 when we began sponsoring him. It's like watching your own child grow up too fast :)
http://www.compassion.com/
We had lots of "F"un during F week!
- Flowers - we didn't do this particular activity, but I found a neat craft in Family Fun magazine (instructions posted below). What we did do was take a flower sponge and used paint to stamp some flowers across a piece of paper. Then I had Asher practice drawing lines by drawing the stems with a marker. Then we completed the picture with some bug stamps and other flower stamps!
- Fingerprints and Footprints! You can do so many things with this. I had plans to do the following activity with our play group, but we ran out of time and didn't get to do it. Read Dr. Seuss' "The Foot Book", then roll out a long sheet of easel paper on the ground and have the kids step on a paper plate with paint and walk down the sheet of paper to make lots of fun footprints! Left foot, left foot, right foot, right! For fingerprints, use a stamp pad, paint, or just color marker on the fingers and make them into bugs, caterpillars, letters, etc.
- Frogs - the day we did this was a rainy day, so it was perfect for an indoor activity. Take several paper plates and color them green. Then cut a wedge in each plate to make a lily pad. I will insert here that it would be a wonderful and easy opportunity to help your child learn to use scissors with these wedges. I didn't even think about it until Asher said "I do it!" I helped him get his fingers in the holes and held the plate. Once he got started with each new cut, he actually did pretty well! And your preschool teacher will thank you a million times over if you've worked with your child on this skill beforehand!! Anyway, we pretended to be frogs and jumped on the lily pads. We have a small toy frog that Asher liked to make jump around on the lily pads too.
- Make a small and simple family tree with photographs and help your child understand some easy concepts about family (like his grandma is actually your mommy).
- Four - do everything in fours! And practice that counting!
Our activities for the letter E week:
- Ears and eyes - listen to different sounds (you can get into high and low sounds, loud and soft sounds, play 2 sounds and ask your child if they were the same or different, etc.), look at things and talk about how we see with our eyes, use a blindfold to put on and see how hard it is to walk around in the dark, etc. Just be creative with this one!
- Put googly eyes on a picture (one that has eyes, of course, or it might look silly :)
- Put silly glasses on your eyes!
- Eggs - go somewhere where you can get messy and bring a few eggs and a bowl. Let your child play with the eggs and see how hard they have to push for them to crack. Let them feel the inside of the egg and see the different parts. Then cook some eggs (not the ones you played with!) and eat!
- Save the eggshells to make some crushed eggshell art. Be sure to peel out that thin lining so that all you have is the hard shell part. When the shell is dry, let your kid have fun crushing the eggshells on a piece of paper. Put some glue on a piece of paper and sprinkle the pieces on. When it's dry, you can paint them with watercolors.
- Watch a youtube video of some eggs hatching.
- Make this elephant craft: http://www.first-school.ws/activities/shapes/animals/elephantshapes.htm - you can discuss the shapes and have your child glue (we used tape) the pieces on a piece of paper to make an elephant. But really, if you just search for elephant crafts on google, you find a ton more to do! We just used this one because it was really easy. (picture above)
- Exercise!!
It's been busy in the Regier household and we haven't had much time to do our letter activities lately, but we are getting back into the groove this week! I also haven't had much time to update the blog, so although we are farther down the alphabet than the letter D, I'm just getting to writing about our fun activities. We didn't do a whole lot for our D week, but here are the activities:
- Dance to music!
- Make drums out of butter tubs, canisters, pots, etc. and make some noise!
- Read a book about dinosaurs
- Hide a toy dinosaur around the house and have your child search for it
- Hide a toy that starts with D (dinosaur, duck, dog - we used the duck and dog) in the dirt and have them dig to find it! This was Asher's favorite activity - he wanted to do it everyday for the next week!
- Make a day/dark picture (I know the opposites are day and night, but to make them both start with D I had to get a little creative). We divided a large paper in half and I drew a sun on the day side and a moon and stars on the dark side. Then I had Asher paint blue all over the dark side and color the rest of the picture with markers once the paint dried.
- Watch Dumbo - this movie has been played about a thousand times in our house, so it was a no-brainer to include it in our D week!
- Let the dogs out to run around
- Draw pictures!
- We gave a jar of "delicious" salsa to our friend Dana!
