Akiane

I was stunned when I stumbled upon a child prodigy named Akiane. I read about her in an excerpt from a book titled, Heaven is for Real. Akiane started sketching her "visions" when she was 4 and began painting in color at age 6. She did this remarkable painting of Jesus called "Prince of Peace" at the tender age of 8. What is also amazing is that she was homeschooled by an atheist mother and her father was a non-practicing Catholic. Then, at age four, she began to talk about "meeting Jesus" in her dreams and seeing "visions" of God, angels and heaven and having conversations with God.  This, of course, got her parents' attention.  At some point later, they became Christians. Many of Akiane's paintings recreate her visions. Take a look at her website gallery and you'll understand why I am fascinated. Here it is: http://www.artakiane.com/gallery

Critical Thinking Activities

While I am working with one child on science, I have my other child do a critical thinking activity. Here are some critical thinking activities we use. Please feel free to post your ideas, too.

• Logic Links
• Deducibles (sequence puzzles)
• Noodlers (spatial reasoning puzzles)
• jigsaw puzzles
• Extreme Mazes book
• Extreme Dot-to-Dot book
• Critical Thinking Activities books (patterns, imagery, logic)
• Color Sudoku cards with Unifex Cubes
• Blik-Blok
• 4-D Animal Puzzles
• Q-bitz
• Tangrams and Patterns
• Multiplication Mosaics
• Squzzle Puzzles
• Banana Grams or Scrabble (make as many words as you can)
• construction materials
• Legos
• Q-Ba-Maze
• Lincoln Logs
• Tinker Toys
• Marble Run
• Magna Tiles
• Magnetix

Here are some things on my wish list for our Critical Thinking time:

• Lab Mice Puzzles
• Grid Perplexors
• Code Breakers
• Analogy Croswords
• Math Path Puzzles