I remember having a discussion, in my homeschooling days, about what should be included under the umbrella of "Language Arts." Someone proposed that it include speaking and listening, and I thought it was a brilliant idea.

Good to hear! (And I only saw the pun after typing that. 😉) Just this morning I was running water over a mason jar that had been in the freezer. The sound that the water, drumming on thin metal, was like the whoosh of a brewing storm. I had my husband take a listen and he agreed. This led us to becoming nostalgic about old time radio dramas and the clever ways they created accompanying sound effects. Both of us had the distinct impression that young kids today may just be ready to bring something like this back to life. The constant flashing of images all day long is exhausting, and it cuts short opportunities to imagine for oneself. Many positives to this revival. ❤️

Public speaking project in 4H was one of the best and toughest things we did as homeschoolers. One year I paired all that with lightning lit’s speech unit and we did poster talks and PowerPoints good and bad tools. Made sure those high schoolers were ready for college speech class!!

Aloud is allowing. Confessing aloud makes it so. Words are power, knowledge is power, conversation as a power exchange. Words are spells, spelling is creating. This is why the pen is mightier than the s-word. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, God created by the power of His Word. Our names are powerful spells, that brainwash us, we answer when we are called by our parents, and then eventually the meaning of our names, if we cooperate, and partner with our parents and God, is God’s calling on our lives. And we too need to understand the Power we have of speech, words. The animals used to be able to talk in the Garden, but it was taken away when it was used to deceive us. And now they are only allowed to talk on rare occasions. (Balam’s donkey.) When people learn online, they don’t realize they are being silenced from speaking, and if we are not allowed to speak, we are not being allowed to think for ourselves!! God takes it very personally and so should we when our intellect is insulted, “don’t think, just do.” Since when did mirroring become ok? “Repeat after me?” And we are paying for the privilege to be told we don’t know how to THINK.🙏🙏. We are agreeing with people who are talking down to us, but that is to keep us small, indoctrinate us, because they are middlemen that need to be needed. We are being brainwashed and must conform to the material. That happens when someone does all the talking in a conversation too. Also, lying is witchcraft, that weakens us. Which is why we have to be super guarded and read and hear everything like a legal document. So that we absorb and believe as few lies as possible. Someone that would lie, sets themselves up as the authority, then we are gullible and think they have our best at heart and they may but what if they too have been misled, the blind leading the blind? They might have 95% truth, but an airplane just needs to be 1% off for a while to not land on their target. Spells are used manipulate and of course those that do, do so while saying “it’s just words.” Online and typing, it’s called a “cursor,” we are concocting, the tree dots that appear when someone is typing? They are “bubbling” a brew! If we are not building we are being destructive and tearing down and talking down, power-grabbing. That is why we have to go-spell “the good news.” God literally tells us that life and death is in the power of our tongues. He does not exaggerate because that would be a form of lying. That’s why it’s so important to “go-spell” truth, encourage, rightly dividing, articulating, versus allowing blanket statements, vagueness, and the bad spells of nihilism, of no hope, because there is, in fact HOPE. 🙏. And we can believe Him. He’s telling the Truth. The more our word means something to us, the more careful we are with our words and the more careful we realize that God is too. He says what He means and He means what He says and He is not sloppy and He does not conflate. That is why His Word is so powerful, because He cannot lie. So His Word super potent, compared to ours, it’s super concentrated. It has Powerful Potential to divide bone from marrow. Anything else is watered down, literally diluted. God cannot lie and He never has but we have been weakened by our lies and others’. That makes Him All Powerful. Each lie and inconsistency weakens us. The more truth we have, the more truth we say, confess, out loud, the more powerful we get to be, rather than being weakened by lies. It really is Truth to Power, but not like that.

Charlotte Mason for the win!

I have been a pediatric speech-language pathologist for 45 years. The number of language delayed children on my caseload, not counting children with autism, has increased by 36% since COVID. To add to that...I was at a conference several years before COVID. The speaker was a famous speech therapist. She described walking behind a family who had 2 children in a stroller. They were walking through a large, packed carnival with lights, sounds, smells, etc. She was behind the family for 30 minutes. Despite all of the stimulation and all of the opportunities for conversation, the children were looking at their iPads the entire time. I'm sure everyone reading this can easily imagine the scenario.

Connie Braun 🙂

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