Salt, light and school!

Ahh.. right now my children are involved in what we like to call the great library book roundup. They have a central location to keep their books BUT that rarely happens... so one day I announce Library day..which consequently falls every Thursday and there is a mad dash for books. You see if you have all your books in you book bag then you get to check out a video or dvd from the library. If not..well then you don't. Today I have three that will get this privilege it looks like. Hmm... one day maybe they all will!

Anyways, so the other day I was wondering about teaching your children to be salt and light to the world while still sheltering and protecting them. Dh and I participate in a group that goes to a homeless shelter once a month. It is a Christian shelter and we have a time of praise and worship with the people and then one of our men brings a sermon. Then we serve the men dinner. Now we leave our two year old little boy with my mom because we would spend more time watching him then serving and we leave our just turned four year old little girl at home because she is very touchy, feely and this is not appropriate for the men's homeless shelter. We take our five year old girl and almost five year old boy and our eight year old girl with strict rules that they stay right by our side. The children absolutely love it. As a matter of fact after we did it the first time they played, "feeding the homeless" almost everyday. My five year old prays every night that God would take care of the homeless people. They are definitely learning something.
Now as an aside I have to tell you a funny (to me) story. We have someone that we know that when they found out we would be homeschooling and some other convictions we have on raising children admonished us to not shelter them. They needed life experience. This same person when they found out we were taking our older children to the homeless shelter with us had a coniption fit. They literally lectured me for half an hour on why we should protect our children from such influences. ?!?!?!? is all I have to say to that!
Other ways we are going to teach our children to minister is through our neighbors. I am planning starting in the new year to take some food/baked goods to one new neighbor a month. We also want to open our home to our neighbors and really just try to witness to them through friendship and fellowship and relationship. After all Jesus was all the time eating dinner with the sinners! :) We also have some other things we are cooking up. One thing we are sure of though is that our children will be really sheltered. There is no reason we should send our children out to fight battles that we as adults cant quiet handle yet. God has entrusted them to us for a reason. All to quickly they will be grown and gone. We have to take time now to really train them and saturate them in God's word.
Now onto my newest school dilemma..as they come fast and furious around here! So..we decided that we would probably leave our kindergarten in school to finish out the year. She seemed to be doing well and we saw no issues that had arisen. Fast forward to the last few weeks. She brings home a report card that said she needed help at home in everything, she needs reinforcement at home with her school work, she doesn't know her letters or her numbers and her writing needs help. I just stared at this thing. Up until now we had no idea there was a problem. I talk to her teacher every day in the carpool lane. Every paper she has ever brought home says, "Good work!" at the top. I help her with her homework every night. We read together all the time. She is writing as well as I could expect any five year old to write. Were they supposed to just know how to write? She knows her numbers just fine at home. She still gets confused with some letters but she has only been working on them for a year! I was not happy at all that it took the teacher 9 weeks and then on a report card to tell me there was a problem! Then my sweet angel girl comes home from school the other day and tells me they were playing vampire on the playground and one of her classmates stole her soul! These are five year olds! Now my second grader bought home a report card that was semi-bad. She got one D in...language which I assume is grammar. My problem here is all of her grammar papers she has brought home have been between 75-95%. I thought she was doing..ok. Her spelling was a C- once again all of her spelling tests except maybe two or three have been 90% or above. Her math which she has only brought home a couple of good math papers was a solid C and her reading which her teacher always complains to me about was a B. Forgive me for being confused!
This week beat all though. Let me first explain the "color" system that schools are using now. You start the day on a "good" color, which for both of my girls is yellow. If you misbehave you go to the next color which for us is green. After that you go to blue. KA has seen blue twice I think. I don't know the colors after that because my girls know they better never hit those colors. :) The teachers have consequences for the colors, but I don't know completely what they are. In our house green once or twice a week is a uh-oh I messed up with a talk on how we can do better. More than twice you loose a privilege. Blue is well...blue is homework, dinner, and bed with no free time. After blue daddy takes over because all mommy sees is red. LOL just kidding. Like I said we don't know what happens after blue..yet. Anyways KA comes home from school one day last week on green. When I asked her why she told me she was not reading with the class. Apparently they have this "game" called Fluency. The teacher reads part of a text and then snaps her fingers and the class reads on as fast as they can. No offense but this sounds like the second dumbest thing I have ever heard of. Second only to when your adding and subtracting you bonk yourself in the forehead to "put" the big number in your head. YES this is something my second grader is TAUGHT in school. *Sigh*. Anyways when the teacher snapped her fingers and 20 second graders took off babbling incoherently my second grader lost her place and sat back quietly to listen to the chaos around her. The teacher noticed she was not reading and instead of trying to figure out why yells across the room for her to flip her card since she is not reading. Oh, flip your card means put it on green. As the smoke poured out of my ears all I heard was, "Hey stupid! Since you cant keep up with the rest of the class you are now punished." Are these the words she said? No, but they could have been. Now for those who know me you KNOW I am NOT a parent who believes my children do no wrong. Come on I am with them 24/7 I KNOW they misbehave..BUT this is not a behavioral problem. This is an academic "I cant keep up with the babbling incoherently around me" problem.
I have had enough. I NEVER thought school would be this emotionally draining for me. I knew it would be rough and I would pray a lot but I never knew I would cry over the innocence my children are loosing at such a young age. I never thought I would physically want to ring a teachers neck. Not this early in the game! Our adoption does not seem to be progressing at all we have not heard from anyone in... well in forever! I just want my babies home where I can love, nurture, guide, and teach them. I dont want them on the playground where a little girl steals there soul or they play witches and warlocks. I don't want them getting in trouble because they don't understand something or making a simple kindergarten mistake and writing a d instead of a b and the teacher start looking for learning disabilities. Im so frustrated. Im quickly loosing my sense of humor and once that is gone...well it wont be pretty. Im so glad that hubby has agreed no more school agers for us at this point. This is one area of life Im not ready to deal with yet. Right now Im just asking God for the strength to get me through to the adoption.
Ok well this is long enough. Thanks for letting me vent some!