Show & Tell: Fun Finds For October

LINKS ON WOMANHOOD:

• The Best Thing Out There on Singleness
• Trusting God With Dating Relationships: This article addresses some of what we talked about in a recent Advice & Answers here on Making Home
  
• What Wasn't Said: How Christians miss a major opportunity to encourage and strengthen new marriages in intimacy; one woman's view of a bridal shower.
• The Feminine "Itch": How a desire for children often creeps into the heart of women without warning.
• THE TOP TEN MYTHS OF DIVORCE

LINKS ON PARENTING:

• Trucks, trucks, trucks!: One of the funny things of parenting opposite-sex children
• Just For the Record... : Mandi's vent about people who ask, "so are you going to try for a boy?" (just a few weeks after her third girl was born!)
• Renee had two great posts last week that go together about adoption... TODDLER ADOPTION and ATTACHMENT IN ADOPTION
• Christine had a "siderant" on one of her posts that I thought was worth cutting and pasting for you to read. Here it is... and it's one of the reasons I love the homeschooling curriculum we use:

  The reason why children hearing books read aloud to them by a parent or listening to an audio book format is good rather than forcing them to only read or be exposed to books that they read to themselves is mainly because children, if allowed to move or do what they want while listening, are willing to listen and can understand content far above their independent reading level. A child's vocabulary and ability to understand and enjoy stories and non-fiction information is superior to their reading skills for a number of years. It starts nearly at birth or at least at about age one, when the language they can understand is above what they can speak. I don't know when it ends, perhaps only when a child or teenager's reading ability progresses beyond a certain 'grade level in reading ability' such as grade 12, I don't know.
  
  An easy example is that a child of age six who is just learning to read will listen to long passages about insects with rich vocabulary and understand it. If you were to give that child a book on spiders written at their independent reading level it would read something like this:
  
  "Spiders make webs. Spiders eat insects. The web is to catch the insects. Spiders live outside. Some spiders live indoors."
  
  You probably would not speak to a child of six in that way as it would be considered (at least in our family) as being patronizing and condescending. A child of six years old is not an idiot and should not be talked to like they are one.
  
  Giving a child of six over-simplified information like that which is below their mental capacities is one way that I feel that adults actually, unintentionally, 'make a child stupid'. All children should be exposed to content which they want to learn about that is interesting and understandable to them. Depriving children of information or to better stories dumbs a child down and hinders their intellectual development.

LINKS ON BLOGGING:

• Incrediblog's Hilarious Rules for Posting on His Blog (this totally cracked me up!)
• Christine writes about When Blogging Hinders Friendship (I've definitely encountered some of what she writes about)

LINKS ON SPIRITUAL MATTERS:

• Rebekah has been studying Spiritual Gifts and examines this issue through the lens of a John Piper sermon (you guys know by now he's my favorite)
• HERE's an interesting way to look at the spread of religion on earth in JUST 90 SECONDS! (Go check it out- it's very quick but informative!)
• Kelly has asked an interesting question about when church takes priority or authority over family and individual autonomy as a believer.

ODDS AND ENDS:

• The Love of Money: HelpMeet writes a thought-provoking article about materialism
• Huckabee's Boomlet: The NY Post offers a great summary of Huckabee's recent growth in polls, finances, and popularity.
• Slate Interview with Huckabee: Mike Huckabee explains why he's surging
• Free Rice: I can't remember where I heard about this, but it's a vocabulary game where for each word you get correctly, rice is donated through the UN to end world hunger. It's FREE! And it's RICE! IT'S FREE RICE! (Last night I played for 5 or 10 minutes and got up to around 400 grains of rice donated.)

Didn't have anything particularly side-splitting funny today, so we'll end this Show & Tell with Free RICE. :) HAPPY READING!!!