Coming out of his sister's shadow--yea, Joel!

I discovered in the last two weeks that I have been mistaken when it came to Joel's academic abilities. I took his unwillingness to try and lack of motivation as inability when really he was just frustrated by Kari's more advanced skills (she's had two more years to learn these things, you know). Since Kari's been at school in the mornings, I started working more intentionally with him on his letters and helping him learn the memory verse for the week, and I was shocked (although I probably shouldn't have been) to see that he knew way more than I thought he knew, and that he's just as good at memorization as she is, just not quite as driven. I've been trying to make it fun for him, and it's working. He learned the first verse (which was a pretty long one) within two days, and then he did it again this last week with the memory verse from the Sunday school lesson on Noah and the ark. Here's the evidence:


Genesis 6:9 "This is the account of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with God."

(Don't you think the toy ark in the background is a nice touch? It was not intentional. The ark lives there on that shelf these days, and Joel just happened to be in the right spot when he was willing to be videoed. Kind of funny, though.)