Kindergarten Sight Words

My daughter asked me if we could get new flash cards for her homework. I agreed we could but I was quickly very frustrated at the fact that there is no easy way to make "sight words" or "popcorn words" flash cards for my Kindergarten student. There is no website out there with a flash card generator for these word lists.

I agree with my daughter and our annoyance is that we get bored looking at the same flash cards all the time. Our current flash cards are black and white and have mittens on them. That was great when her teacher sent them home. Now we have been using them for months and are just plain tired of them. So I wrote a little Sight Words App where I could generate the Flash Cards much more easily.

I preloaded it with a bunch of graphics all in full color, and included sight words for Kindergarten through 3rd grade from the Dolch Word List. This will make it so that we can change regularly between flash card sets and progress as her reading list expands.

Anyone with young students who would like to use this resource is more than welcome to it.

School Of The Rock

I have chosen a theme and title for our 2007 VBS at church. It will be "School of the Rock" and we will be changing our format some from previous years. I am planning on shortening the opening and closing session and replacing it with a 4th "class period"

So we will gather in "Home Room" for the opening and closing sessions then our 4 class periods will be "art" - "science" - "lunch & recess" - "history". My idea for this format came from Dr. Sweet's EPIC ministry model. Creating 2 participatory sessions with art and science both being represented.

Any readers from CD I will be recruiting Section Leaders here very soon and so please give me a call if you are willing to take on one these challenges. I will post a basic classroom plan soon.

Gospel According To Starbucks - A Review

Lenoard Sweet in his newest offering "The Gospel Accoring to Starbucks" challenges the church to rethink it's "brand image" in light of a post modern culture. His book indicts not nly the IC bust also the Emergents for their failure to practice what he calls the EPIC life.

E - Experiential
P- Participatory
I- Image Rich
C- Connective

I found his work to be brilliant. The work came off as a heart felt conversation with a pastor rather than a preachy dissertation by a scholar. Though he showed no embarrassment to flex his scholarly credentials this was always done in such a way to accent his shepherding nudge. I was blessed by the ideas he presented and the medium he chose to communicate the ideas through.

A Little Bit More Difficult One

So I wanted to see if there was a more difficult one over on that quiz site. This is the only of the 7-8 tests that I did not get a 100% on. People ask some pretty simple questions to call these "challenges"

You are 89% of the way to being a Bible Scholar

 

Well done. You are awesome! It looks like you have some good knowledge. It never hurt to keep at it though.

Bible Challenge
Quizzes for MySpace

Baby It's Cold Outside

This is the TERRIBLY horrible news on my Weather widget as I booted my computer to this morning. We have been around zero for days now, but this was the first time I had noticed an ACTUAL 0 for the temp.

Hope things look better from a weather perspective to the rest of you.

A Simple Bible Quiz

Hoping to not be beaten by Gerbmom's 100% I did manage to tie it!!!

You know the Bible 100%!

 

Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses - you know it all! You are fantastic!

Ultimate Bible Quiz
Create MySpace Quizzes

An Unbelievably Proud Dad

We never know if the messages that we are trying to convey to our children are getting through. I want my children to value the rewards of divesture. I am not great at this myself, and yet I try to convey the attitude as much as possible. However, last night after homework my five year old showed me that at least some element of this teaching has seeped in. So sit back and hear my story.

It was about 8:45 last night and my daughter and I were on the brink of a war. We needed to learn to recognize 6 words. The issue was she was NOT even trying, and I was ready to SCREAMMMMMMMM! So I offered here $1 when she could answer all 6 words. Amazingly, all 6 words were recognized and identified within 5 minutes.

So with all words identified I gave her the dollar and we got ready for her to go to bed. After I had her in bed and the bible read, prayers said, stuffed animal cuddled, I brought the dollar into her bedroom that she had left in the living room and asked her what she wanted me to do with it. She said, “Put it in the orphan’s can.”

I was overwhelmed with pride. $1 and she wanted to give it to the orphans at Schultz-Lewis. I was tearing up as I placed the dollar in the can!

Frozen Pipes and Ceiling Holes

My Plans For Sunday February, 4th:
1. Get Up at 8:00
2. Go To Church
3. Get Ready For Party
4. Host Party

My Actual February 4th:
1. Be awakend at 6:45 with Frozen pipes
2. Crawl around My basement looking for water pipes
3. Climb into my attic and find water pipes
4. Spend 2 Hours trying to warm pipes with blow dryer
5. Spend 20 minutes actually doing something productive with blow torch
6. Decide to take a shower and go on to church after recovering pipes with insulation
7. Lose balance and put left leg through ceiling
8. Deal with 2 years olds "freak out" over previous item
9. Clean up insulation from living room
10. Patch large hole in ceiling
11. Get Ready For Party
12. Host Party

Not the day I had imagined...

Mainline Emergent

So what intriguing event or idea has brought me out of a 3 month sabbatical to write and actual post rather a personal update or article link? It is an article in the St. Louis Post Dispatch that highlights the struggle between the Missouri branch of the Southern Baptist convention and a member congregation called the Journey.

To highlight a little background on the issue, if you are not going to read the article:
1. The Journey has a $200K loan from the state denominational authority
2. The Journey host a weekly "dialog" at the local Schlafly beer factory pub.
3. The Denomination has now officially "condemned" the church for this outreach.

So now you know what's going, we get to what intrigues me here. I struggle a lot with the tension this congregation is fighting with. I am a long haired, politically radical, cigar smoking, wine drinking, sex celebrating, loud, dreamer who thinks church should look more like refugee camp than a country club. I goto church with properly dressed Republicans who don't drink smoke or chew, who think rationally and have sex only to obey the command of scripture to "be fruitful and multiply." Ok, maybe that last part is an exaggeration, but we perpetuate this myth that sex is a dirty little secret hidden in our marriages and not to be discussed.

The tension in this is I love the Church, and I Love "MY" church and these people I goto church with.

Please don't get me wrong I live in a strange sense of tension in all areas of my life. Reagen, Tolstoy and Ghandi are my political heroes. I am staunchly entrenched to the idea that God condemns the practice of homosexuality, but still think it should be a civil right for any two people in a free society to marry. I think America need to use our wealth to fix health care, stop world hunger, and provide reproductive medicine to the world, yet I think NONE of this should be done through taxation. I live in tension, and that is me. My motto is that F. Scott Fitzgerald quote: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." Still this tension between being emergent in a mainline church or denomination is an issue that those of us who deal with it must look for workable bridges between our two loves.

So living in a state of tension there is a distinction that must be made over my philosophical meandering and the true grit of a problem that needs to be addressed in our mainline churches. There is a "learnin" that needs to take place from the emerging church.

Wiiliam Willimon wrote recently on his blog:

" Mainline Protestantism seems to be suffering from a failure of theological nerve. Our trumpets suffer from our uncertain sound. The bland leading the bland.

Courage to speak arises, in great part, from the conviction that God has given us something to say. I recall Leander Keck (in a debate on the most effective sermon styles) saying "When the messenger is gripped by a Message, the messenger will find the means to speak it."

My tension with the mainline church comes from this. I want people to take a stand. These poor ideas that are at issue here permeate mainline evangelicalism and they come from coddling to a world view nearly expired. Many of the people within the communities I have been a part of don't hold any views out of detailed committed study, instead they hold them because it is comfortable to exist in a world of Christianeze that has no call to be defended.

In the case of the Journey I think their ministry in a brewery looks a lot like Zacchaeus' house and to me and the convention looks like a certain pharisee named Simon.

My Wife Made A WeeMee

So after I sent my wife her WeeMee she made one of me not knowing I had already made one of me. Here is her vision of me:


So I incorporated some things I liked into my combined one which I posted on the sidebar of the blog and will update occasionally.

Additionally, one final pic. My 5 year old and I did her:

She was digging it!

More WeeMee Fun

Probably be in trouble for this one, but I did the wiff-ee also!

WeeMee Is All The Rage

Impressed by my own maturity I participated in the WeeMee craze. Goahead and do it, it's fun and just a little childish!!!

Equal Protection For Cohabitant Adults

In a great many debates I have argued that the issue of gay marriage is easily solved by granting equal protection to all cohabitant adults. This means if a Widow and her son want to live together to share the expenses that the deceased father once carried, they should have equal protection and benefits of a married couple. It is nice to see that "my idea" has finally floated up to people in power and positions.

The proponent is Bishop Joseph Tyson of Seattle and the paragraph that best explains the issue:

But don't be fooled: The Catholic Church is not about to drop its moral qualms about homosexual relationships. In a fine bit of casuistry, Tyson's proposal wouldn't force the Church to bless any particular living arrangement, and it would simultaneously advance one of the church's long-standing public policy goals: extending social benefits like health care more widely.

This seems to be a win for people on all sides of the debate.