When Joy and Learning Fuse Together
Through the years of our involvement with our local church, Ray and I have admired the servant heart of our sister Judy, especially through her work making quilts and her service to children involved in our Wednesday night children’s outreach. We have also appreciated the professional job that Judy’s attorney granddaughter did for us when we settled my mother’s estate.
On Saturday Ray and I enjoyed a fall day out with our daughter and her family at Cantrell Farms, our county’s brand new corn maze.
At the farm, we got to meet one of the proprietors who is both Judy’s son and our attorney’s dad. It was a joy to meet a member of the generation in between. We met him after he and his tractor pulled a trailer full of parents, grandparents, and children around the corn maze and pumpkin patch.
Yesterday I looked at the farm’s website and was grateful for what I read there. It said:
Cantrell Farms is all about family. From our family to yours, we want to make a place where your loved ones can make memories together all the time. We want to be a place your family can call home.
While we enjoyed hot dogs, hamburgers, and barbecue in the pumpkin shed, our daughter and I talked about how wonderful it was that all those parents had brought their children to the farm. We loved seeing them enjoying being together.
We had wagon loads of fun on Saturday. When I thought back on our day, I realized that our grandchildren were learning along with their fun. They were practicing one problem solving skill after another, including when they got so hot that they crawled inside a giant pipe to eat their free bags of popcorn. That’s one good way to escape the heat—one that certainly didn’t come to my mind.
They figured out how to feed the goats without spilling the feed,
How to pump water fast enough to move rubber duckies down the trough in the rubber duckie races,
How to rope a steer with a Hula Hoop,
How to cover their Little with corn, and
How to find their (and our) meandering way through the corn maze.
Learning wasn’t the reason we went to Cantrell Farms on Saturday. We went to have fun. The best homeschooling moments are when learning and joy are fused together.
I will instruct you and teach you in the way which you should go;
I will advise you with My eye upon you.
Do not be like the horse or like the mule, which have no understanding,
Whose trappings include bit and bridle to hold them in check,
Otherwise they will not come near to you.
The sorrows of the wicked are many,
But the one who trusts in the Lord, goodness will surround him.
Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, you righteous ones;
And shout for joy, all you who are upright in heart.
Psalm 32:8-11
