I am just so inspired and encouraged as I read in the comments from Monday’s post about what kind of legacy you all want to leave your children. Isn’t it so amazing to walk in community and unity in our goals? Of course how that plays out will be unique as each family dynamic is different and we are all unique people. Over and over again, you all said that you wanted to see the hearts and minds of your children turned towards Jesus! I couldn’t agree more.
I’ve heard a lot over the years about ‘reaching your children’s hearts.’ In fact, in my early years of parenting, I would start asking for particulars. What did that mean? How did one go about doing that? Most people seemed afraid to give any kind of practical guidance. But I don’t just want to be inspired with renewed vision, I want some practical help as I go about living this out in my home. And that is why I’m so excited to share with you another favorite resource in our home.
Educating the Whole Hearted Child.
This mammoth book is geared for homeschool families and is chock full of inspiration, help with honing a vision for discipling and educating your children and practical ideas to help live this out. Clay and Sally Clarkson identify the crux of what so many parents are yearning for – raising whole-hearted children who love God deeply, delight in the adventure of learning and have rich relationships with the family. While this book is certainly not prescriptive, it is full of principles that each family can take and weave into their home.
Educating the Whole-Hearted Child is not necessarily designed to be read from cover to cover, although you certainly could if you had the time and desire. I love having it as a resource on my bookshelf. I turn to it for inspiration on how to disciple my children. I turn to it for a pick-me-up on what my mission is and why I’m homeschooling! I turn to it for practical help and suggestions as I live out the beauty of creating a home where we learn instead of merely replicating school at home. We get to focus on REAL books, REAL life and REAL relationships!
Tucked inside this book, you will discover how to:
- Make your home and family the heart of your children’s education
- Train your children to become creative, self-directed learners
- Enrich life and education with living books
- Identify and work with each child’s learning style
- Help your children love to learn as naturally as they love to play
- Gain confidence to teach with practical, commonsense methods
Their goal with this book is to give us a larger vision for what God can do in our homes and provide a model of home education that gives us the freedom to follow the Holy spirit for what our children need most. Do I hear an amen?
Each time I pick it up to read a section, I walk away encouraged and equipped, because I’m setting about the monumental task of raising Daniels. I want to cultivate a home where the Spirit of God is present, invading our daily lives! I want to cultivate a home where we read – alot and learn together as a family. I want to cultivate a home where those character lessons are just as important as the academic ones. This beautiful book is seriously a gold-mine of information and inspiration that will bless anyone who reads it. 
Giveaway:
The Clarkson’s have graciously offered to give a copy of this must-have book to one of you dear friends! I’m tickled pink. You can find Sally blogging at I Take Joy. She also runs a phenomenal site called Mom Heart | Coming Home to God’s Heart for Motherhood, and last but not least, you can find all of their books and updates on their ministry at their Whole-Heart site. I encourage you to check out all three!
You can enter to win using Rafflecopter below. Leave a blog comment and press the +1 button to unlock other options for more entries. Giveaway ends right before midnight (AZ time) on Wednesday 03/20/13. The winner will be emailed and announced on the giveaway widget below. Winner will have 48 hours to respond to the email or a new winner will be selected. All entries must be documented within the Rafflecopter widget below. Giveaway is open to US residents only.
If you don’t want to wait and see if you win a copy, you can purchase it from Amazon, my usual default, or buy it on sale at Christian Book.com. Even with shipping charges, it still beats out Amazon’s price!
This giveaway is part of my ‘house-warming’ party! We’ll have a few giveaways posted each week in March as I share about things my family loves! Welcome to my new website! Check out the opportunity to win:
Hidden Art/For the Children’s Sake bundle (through 3/15)
Arizona Homeschool Convention and Curriculum Fair pass giveaway (through 3/20)
Playsilks: Unleashing the Imagination (through 3/22)
Block Play: Building Up the WHOLE Child (through 3/27)
Linked to: Hip Homeschool Mom’s Giveaway Day.
I don’t have the Whole Hearted Child book yet but I do have The Child Training Bible which I thought I saw in that second picture and I do love. We are in our second year homeschooling our youngest daughter and it has been a huge blessing.
April, We LOVE our Child Training Bible. It benefits EVERYONE in the family!
My husband after seeing the horrible way public schools handle kids through a police officers eyes
We decided to homeschool because I want my children to have a heart for God and I want to be able to disciple them daily. We also want them to be able to pursue their interests and desires and develop fully and beautifully into the unique person God made them!
Homeschooling was a wonderful and beautiful way for me to stay with my kids, knowing their frame of reference for their questions as we learned together. BEST decision that was ever made!!
Lack of good local schools motivated us to homeschool!
Better education for our children
We ultimately homeschool because God lead us to do so with our four (almost five) children. My husband is a pastor who has many evenings “tied up”, but his daytime hours are sometimes more flexible. When the opportunity arises for him to be with us during the day, we get to do so without leaving out the school-aged kids! I get to disciple my children!
I was homeschooled as well, and I knew that I would homeschool my kids from the time I was a teenager! This is an amazing book; thanks for the chance to win it!
We’re still contemplating fulltime HSing. Right now, we’re in a trial period.
I’ve planned on homeschooling my kids as long as I can remember. I was homeschooled and loved it! I want to be able to have that one-on-one with each child, working with them individually and encouraging them when they’re struggling. This looks like a great book, thanks for hosting this giveaway!
Even before we were married, my husband and I felt led to homeschool. Though we knew very little about it we just had in the back of our head that it is what we would do when the time came. I believe it was the Lord’s leading. After we were married we met a number of homeschool families and we were sure this was the path for our family to take. In fact, this book is the one book that a family recommended I read. She lent me her well worn copy and I read it years ago- great stuff in there. Thanks for the giveaway!
Wanting to be home with my kids.
I’ve heard about this book so many times and have not read it yet! I’ve love to win a copy!
I desire for our homeschool to have a Godly balance. Something that I a still working on…and probably will never fully arrive at 🙂 This book looks s if it will have some helpful advice!
We chose homeschooling because the elementary school our kids would have attended was one of the worse in town.
I was homeschooled until 4th grade and had a great experience. As a former public school teacher, I know what it’s like in the public schools and I’d rather keep my child at home. Also, I love teaching so it’s only natural to teach my own children.
LOVE Sally Clarkson!! We homeschool, because we feel that if we can do at least a good a job as the AZ public schools, then we’ve still come out ahead, because it’s a better environment at home.
Not a very nice reason, but there it is!
I would love to win! Love Sally!! Thank you!!
What led me to homeschool? Definitely God. We want them to see our family as a team, a unit. To be able to take those moments in the day to disciple and teach and learn.
I’m homeschooling because I want to raise Godly children. I want to equip them to thrive and I want them to have our family imprint.
Monica
http://happyandblessedhome.com
wow! just as I’m feeling, ok realizing, our days are without purpose.
We are choosing to homeschool to have the best opportunity to build close strong relationships with our children, share our values, and point them to Jesus. Plus I’m excited about the learning and re-learning I’ll get to do along side of them. An added bonus will be the way the homeschool journey will challenge and stretch me until the only choice I have is to rely on Him!
Friends who were seeing real fruit in their kiddos lives:)
I absolutely love the Clarkson family and, actually, ordered their 24 Family Ways just today!! I homeschool my sweet children because I feel intentional, loving, faith-driven education is so important for my children to stand firm as adults in whatever God leads them to do one day! I would just love this book!!
I am dyinggggggg for this book.
The Lord totally called our family to homeschool. But I would say that a huge dissatisfaction with the PS system helped influence our decision.
Thank you for the giveaway! I have heard only positive things about this book!
Another great giveaway! Thank you, Heather! This book has been on my list and isn’t available through my library so I’d love to win it.
What a wonderful giveaway!
I was homeschooled my highschool years. That partnered with the state of other options is all it took to make the decision to home school.
5 yo dd asked to be homeschooled in 1996….never dreamed we’d still be at it 17 yrs later but can’t imagine it any other way now
Being homeschooled myself and seeing the good, bad, and the ugly of it… and wanting to be able to influence my children when they are young and train them to interact and engage with the world around us.
We haven’t really begun the homeschooling yet as our little is only 10 months old (though she gets read to a lot already!) but the biggest inspiration has been the wonderful people I’ve met who were homeschooled and are homeschooling their own children and comparing that to the education I received in one of the best school districts in the state where I grew up. There simply is no comparison.
Thanks so much for giving us the opportunity to win a copy of this book:) I have homeschooled for 9 yrs and I am currently homeschooling my 10th grade son and I plan to homeschool my 4 yr old daughter as well
This was the very first homeschool book I ever read and I was hooked! I just loaned out my copy to a friend who’s contemplating homeschooling next year after two years in charter schools. I hope the right person gets this awesome resource. I liked it enough to buy it. 🙂
I have officially decided to start home schooling our 5 yr. old boy for 1st grade, after his first year of K he has come home with some very disappointing behaviors he learned from school. It really has pulled him away from everything we’ve tried to teach him. So since I’m new at this I would LOVE this chance to win =)
My sister is 12 years older than I am, and she has always homeschooled her children. She even taught me one year! 🙂 I would say that she influenced me the most.
Wow, this is great!
I am considering the switch from public school to homeschool. I would love this resource!
pure conviction from the Lord, without that I wouldn’t have ever started
What a great giveaway! Thank you!
My desire to homeschool was to protect my children from exposure to a variety of things the public school system is forced to accept and promote as normal and acceptable. I also homeshool so my children can be taught a Biblical view in any and all subjects.
Thank you for such a great giveaway! I have been homeschooling for seven years now and can feel the burn-out creeping up on me. I think we dredge our selves with too many half-too’s and forget about the heart of why we are doing what we are doing. I have heard so many wonderful things about this book, I would love a copy of my own.
Thank you for this awesome giveaway! Looking forward to reading more from your page 🙂 Thank you!
~MomMom Hill @PassionateParent.com
Being able to individualize my children’s education influenced me to want to homeschool
This is wonderful. Thank you!!
I would be super excited to win this book! In our first year of schooling at home- I’m sure it would be an encouragement! Thanks Heather!
I was influenced by so many things! Friends had been homeschooled. Moms in our church homeschooled. And then I became a high school teacher and saw first hand how students were having the curiosity sucked right out of them. I knew I wanted something different for my own children. 🙂
Ami, I experienced the same thing as I taught. It was so sad and I knew that I didn’t want my kids to experience that. Love your homeschoolshare sight, btw!
~Heather
Homeschooling – a word that was often tagged with the strange kids growing up – right? However now that I Christ has saved me, I have found that the children who were/are raised in homeschooling-Christian homes often have much stronger bonds to family than others and obviously aren’t strange at all. Having been an educator in my pre-child life, I of course want to make sure my children receive the best Godly based education. I also desire them to love their siblings and family the way God intended and pray that homeschooling is an means to that desired end for my kids. (My friends were always more important, on a day to day basis, than family.) So, when I read this post, on the book, well I thought – I have to enter the giveaway. I am about to begin homeschooling this coming Fall and am trying my best to become prepared. This is my goal for my kids, “raising whole-hearted children who love God deeply, delight in the adventure of learning and have rich relationships with the family.” Thanks for your page, Heather – I am eager to read more! 🙂
As for the homeschool influence question, I can say honestly that Heather (as well as the entire Lewis family) was the reason I ever considered homeschooling in the first place!
This book looks wonderful! The new site looks great, too!
Lots and lots of prayer led us to homeschool. And God working in my heart mixed with life circumstances… it was all Him! 🙂
~Jessica
I haven’t begun to homeschool yet….technically. At the age my kids are, everything is “homeschooling” in a way. But I hope to keep homeschooling once they reach school age for a number of reasons. I love the idea of integrating our faith in with the rest of their education. I love the idea of a different kind of socialization and my kids being able to learn from each other, from other homeschool children of all ages, and from other adults I trust and respect. I want them to learn to make healthy choices and schools today are so full of junk food. And another big reason is that my husband is a high school math teacher and he is just astonished at the students these days- their attitude toward education, their attitude about work, their lack of curiosity, their lack of responsibility. Of course there are good things too and I do believe that if you teach your kids well at home they are perfectly capable of overcoming challenges at school. But if home schooling is an option for us, I hope that I can rise to the challenge and provide my children with a wonderful environment to learn in and the tools for them to have a great education. I am doing a lot of research right now about how to get started and came across your website. Thanks so much for doing what you do and making it so easy for people like me to learn so much before I even really get started! And the book you mention is on my list of books I’d really love to read 🙂
Extended family and the Bible.
I’ve heard Sally Clarkson praised several times lately–sounds like this book is on the top of my post-baby reading list!
This is a fabulous giveaway!
Thank you for being such an inspiration, I look forward to your posts!