I Will Shine
I love this. I will shine like a candle in the dark. All it takes to make a difference is a spark. Way to go, Shawna! You can listen to this and other original songs she has written or download sheet music here.
"By small and simple things are great things brought to pass." (Alma 37:6)
I love this. I will shine like a candle in the dark. All it takes to make a difference is a spark. Way to go, Shawna! You can listen to this and other original songs she has written or download sheet music here.
The grand breakfast experiment. I had an idea today. 💡 It’s not a new idea, but I’m hoping it’s an answer to prayer. I want my teenagers to not only eat breakfast but to eat a healthy breakfast. We don’t have a lot of time …
I was swimming laps yesterday (after doing a little ballet with Anna, which was so fun to have her lead me in a little warm-up-to-the-day exercise), thinking again how I wish I had learned to swim laps as a child.
Today, in the pool again, I decided to work on learning a flip turn. Somehow when I was young, I got afraid of doing things like cartwheels and somersaults and flips. It may have had something to do with a bad experience trying to do a back dive off the side of a pool once when I hit my head on the wall coming back in from my dive: I had forgotten to push away. It hurt so much that I didn’t go back to trying to do it again. Maybe it was just my personality of being afraid of getting hurt!
As an adult, doing a flip turn is something I want to learn to do and conquer. So today Lane patiently helped me figure out how to do the somersault in the water. After maybe 20 tries, I said a prayer for help. After the prayer I was able to do it, slowly, 10 times correctly. Then I was tired: a run and a hike and lots of water somersaults was enough for one day! I’ll have to work on the turn part of that another day.
I feel like I have such a desire to learn new things as an adult that I didn’t have the chance to learn as a child. And it makes me want to help children learn to overcome fears and have fun learning things like swimming and flip turns and somersaults and splits and whatever fun physical activities when they are young so that as they grow they have the courage and self-confidence to know that they can do hard things!
It makes me think: if I were to design elementary age curriculum, I would include much more physical education than I ever had. I would have each grade learn to walk and then run distances. Kindergarten: a half mile. First grade: 1 mile, and up on through the grades until the sixth graders, who can run a 10K when they finish!
And wouldn’t it be great to have a few minutes of yoga/stretching every day in kindergarten? And dance twice a week? And basic gymnastics once a week? And teaching children anatomy and physiology and physics and geometry and culture and geography as you move, right from the start?
Wouldn’t it be so amazing to just plant these seeds of knowledge in such natural ways–to talk about gravity when you fall or try to reach–that the children grow and acquire so much more each year, building on their knowledge?
And music fits so naturally with movement, as does second language learning. There are just so many ways that multiple subjects can be combined to make learning so much more effective and fun!
Well, there’s nothing like a little quiet lap swim or morning run or a hike with my husband to get me brainstorming about things like educational reform!
Dear Daisy, I was making dinner and watching (and then eating alone as my family all had to scatter hither and yon to their various commitments) “Don’t Miss This”–I can do that kind of thing since I no longer have children holding onto my legs …
(This was a quilt that we made as a stake Relief Society for our new library in Riverton, Utah, about 20 years ago. In the bottom left-hand corner, my mom is reading to Sarah and Nathan.) Literacy is the ability to read and write. Those …
As a follow up to our Family Night on nutrition, the next Monday at dinner I shared why eating a variety of naturally colorful foods in important: it helps us get more of the vitamins and minerals that our bodies need to funtion well! I …
Sunday I didn’t teach the Primary children. I got to sit next to Lane and be with Peter and Anna all together in the chapel as we watched the worldwide broadcast of the new Children and Youth initiative. My happy anticipation was rewarded with feeling …