Happy Freedom of Religion Day! aka Halloween!

Freedom Day!

That’s what we celebrated today. It’s our party, we can call it what we want to! During trick or treat time in our neighborhood, we gathered in our living room and reviewed the things we’ve learned during the school year.

Sounds exciting, huh? Oh, did I forget to mention that the kids got a piece of candy for each correct answer?

They each had a bag with their name written on it. I had questions for the twins and questions for the older kids. Emma and Abby each identified a letter of the alphabet, sort of. Then they just kept grabbing candy out of the bowl.

I had about 20 questions for the twins, including flash cards of addition facts and some science questions and general information.

I had a list of 20 History questions, 20 Bible questions, and 20 Creation Science questions for the older kids. I had several questions that encouraged narration, such as, “Tell me what you know about George Washington… about John Adams… about Thomas Jefferson”, and Morgan volunteered to tell us all about Davy Crockett. He knows a lot about him since he wrote this story about him. Then he changed his mind and said he would tell us about Simon Kenton, which he proceeded to do in great detail. I enjoyed immensely hearing all that my kids had learned about History, Creation Science and the Bible and seeing how thoroughly they had learned it. I think they enjoyed it, too, and would have even without the candy. It just kind of sweetened the deal. 🙂

We answered about half of the questions, then we watched “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” and another episode about Linus running for class president and ate popcorn with some of our candy. The election episode just happened to come on right after the Great Pumpkin episode. I didn’t plan it, but as usual, the Spirit knew ahead of time how to tie things together with current events for me. Then we finished up the questions and distributed the rest of the candy.

I read our Bible reading for the day. It was some of the parables of Jesus, so it was really good.

Then we watched a movie called “The Lost and Found Family”. I didn’t know how good it would be or how family-friendly, but it was very good and very family-friendly. It had a wonderful message about helping foster children by really giving them love and support. I consider it a very good movie, because it made me cry about 10 times.

What did any of this have to do with Freedom of Religion? Well, we are allowed to homeschool because of the freedoms given to us by the Constitution, including freedom of religion, and homeschooling was a central part of our celebration. We read our Bible. That is definitely a privilege afforded us by freedom of religion. And the movie we watched had definite Christian overtones.

We really just called it that because we wanted a good name for our celebration, but I think it ended up being a pretty good match for our activities. We went a step beyond Reformation Day and celebrated Freedom of Religion Day!