Valuable Lesson - The Little Red Hen

I only get over here periodically anymore, but this blog remains for anyone who might happen by and could benefit from it. One popular feature from the past, during our writing contest days, is the story of "The Little Red Hen." Clicking on the story tab above will take you to our rendition.

Hope you're having a blessed day!

Lovingly,

Nanna Maxine

Try, Try, Again

This poem was one of our Speakables back when we were first offering them and what a good one to teach our children. Not only is this a lesson for them, but for us as well. How quickly we give up at times. And the best we can do for our kids is to let them see us, hanging in there, persevering when things go wrong or get tough.

Aesop Fables

Don't forget to use these fables in the life of your family. You can apply them so many ways! Today we posted one at the Facebook page, but remember there is always one here to use in your homeschool writing activities or just as a nice little exercise to link onto your family devotions. You can get into some very good discussions using many of these. Use the above Aesop tab to go to the current "Speakable" writing activity.

Nanna Maxine :)

The Lion and the Mouse

Do you know much about mice? In case you don’t, I will tell you a little bit
about them. Mice are very little animals with long, skinny tails. Some people
think they are cute; many people do not. Actually, mice are rodents. That
means they belong to a family of animals that have front teeth that are quite
strong. In fact, rodents can gnaw hard objects like wood, and their teeth
continue to grow most of their lives. So, you see, the teeth of a mouse are
very useful to him to survive in this world. A mouse is usually quite timid,
though. His teeth help him to live and eat, but he can’t really fight with them
or scare other animals with them because he is so small compared to most
animals. In fact, there are many animals that eat mice.

A lion, on the other hand, can and does scare other animals with his teeth.
You know all about lions, I am sure. You know how scary a lion is. He is even
called “King of the Jungle” because he is so feared.

There was a time, it is said, that a mouse ran across the body of a sleeping
lion by mistake. We do not need to tell you how very afraid the poor tiny
mouse was when the lion woke up and grabbed this shaking little fellow in
his paws. He had every reason to be scared since the lion was about to eat
him. “Please Mr. Lion,” pleaded the mouse, “let me go this time and I will
always remember your kindness. Maybe someday I can pay you back and
help you.”   Well, the lion thought this was so funny that he let his little
captive go.

Wouldn’t you know that It was just a couple of weeks later that the lion got
caught in a huge net which had been left by some hunters. He could not free
himself and began to roar loudly in dismay. Guess who heard him? That’s
right, the little mouse whom he had let go. His little “friend” came running at
the sound of the lion’s roars. The mouse gnawed and gnawed on the ropes
with those strong front teeth and before long the lion was set free and went
home.

~ Retold by M. Randall

(This is our latest Speakable to be posted. Please click on the "Aesop" tab above to take you to the page. So what does this particular fable teach us? Wonderful lessons for our children, as always. I see courage, gratefulness, loyalty, and mercy. You may see even more. Why not let this story teach your kids some of these things? As always with our Speakables, we have suggestions.)

WriteShop

Have you noticed, as we have, that there is an important virtue children of the past learned, which is not seen as often in today's society? That virtue, or should we say Christian grace, is thankfulness. But to see this grace in our kids we need to practice it ourselves, don't you agree?

As we embark on our fourth writing contest, we have a perfect opportunity to be an example to the children to whom we're trying to minister, by expressing our thankfulness to WriteShop for graciously donating one of the prizes to the first place winner. Though the primary purpose of our Speakables is character development, we also recognize the importance of children learning proper writing skills. The StoryBuilders e-books are certainly a great tool you can use to develop your child's ability to do that. If your son or daughter were to submit the winning story in our contest, they would have the opportunity to choose one of these e-books which would help them to learn to write even better stories in the future! What fun!

I would encourage you to visit WriteShop and see all of the many resources they have for teaching fundamental composition and editing skills to teens and younger students, at home or in the classroom. I'm sure you won't be disappointed.

Blessings,
Maxine

Okay! Contest Ready!

Our fourth writing contest is officially open and we welcome any and all third, fourth, and fifth grade students to participate. Children usually enjoy writing their entries for our contests and we like to think they are enriched by doing them. We also like to think they are brought a few steps closer to embracing precious virtues as their own without our preaching to them!

If you know any children in these grades, and of course if there are any in your household, please encourage them to participate.

Click on the Contests tab above for all the details. The Speakable we are using for this contest is at the Poem tab.

Any questions, just write us at the email address we've provided.

Get the Pencils Ready!

New Speakables are up and a details on a new contest will be up by Monday!! For a sneak preview, click on the Poem tab.

Setting Things Up

I like Blogger's new template designer, and it's just in time for this new blog! We've put together a design which we think is just right for what we're all about--hope you like it too. We're working on setting up the new pages, including six of the seven "Speakables." We've decided that our Child of Courage writing activity will now be one of the categories on this site instead of a page, so that we can pick up stories from the Voice of the Martyrs site on different occasions and they can be archived here.

You will see the tabs for Speakables at the top. One is a general explanation, the rest will be the writing activities themselves. I don't know how often they'll get changed, it depends on so many factors. We just hope they'll be useful to folks from time to time. But we HOPE to be able to have another writing contest in the not too distant future. We enjoy them as much as the children do.

The Gems for Bright Gems is at the page with the tab entitled "Gems" (of course), and I hope to follow the same schedule of changing that one bi-monthly. If you're not familiar with the Gems devotional activity, click on the tab!

Also, we have one more page that we hope you'll read or have your kids read. It's the "A Gift" tab, which you might agree is appropriate for an SG site. But the gift talked about on that page is one of greater value than anything we offer for sale as a company. Please go read it when you can.

I guess that's it for now. I'll be back to say more after we have all the pages up.

Maxine