Religion.

Well today was an interesting day. Oscar started the day by writing some thank you letters for his Christmas presents. Ok, so we should have done that a couple of weeks ago, I just completely forgot about it, but better late than never I guess. He has some more to do so I can see it being the end of the week before we get them all done.

After that Oscar did some sums, he really likes working with numbers but lacks confidence in what he's doing. I'm not really sure how to help him with this except give him lots of praise and make a big fuss when he does well (which is most of the time).

Oscar then read to me for a while before I read to him. The book I started with him today was The Bible. This has been a difficult decission for us. My husband and I are athiest and as much as we might not like it we accept that religion is part of our culture and the wider world and that it's something Oscar needs to learn about and understand.

We feel it's very important that Oscar knows about as many different religions and cultures as we can teach him about. But it is a huge subject area and there are some really big concepts to grasp so we decided to start small with a childrens bible.

I told Oscar I wanted to read to him from a book called The Bible, I explained that it was a book that had lots of short stories in it. I figured we might as well just start at the begining and work our way through so I read him How the World Began and Adam and Eve. When I had finished I asked him if he thought the book was fact or fiction. He said it was fiction so I asked him why he thought that and he said "because it has lots of fiction things it it like a talking snake". I then explained to him that some people believe that the stories in The Bible are fact and they believe that God is real and that these people are called Christians. He looked a little surprised and and said that he doesn't believe God is real. I explained that it's fine if he doesn't believe in God or the stories in The Bible but that it's really important he learns about it because so many things we do are because of these stories, like Eatser and Christmas. By this point he looked a bit bored so I have left it there for now but we will come back to it later in the week and probably over and over agian during the next several years. Ultimately what Oscar does or does not believe is entirely down to him we just want to make sure he is able to understand his own and others cultures.

I looked at lots of Childrens Bibles and decided this one from Usborne was best for us as it's just right for Oscar's level of understanding.

After lunch we went out to the post office then Oscar spent some time playing with his trains. Finally we sat and watched Countdown whilst doing one of the jigsaws we bought last week. A very nice way to  finish the 'school' day.