January 9

We began our week with chapel, and today we listened to a message by Mr. Steve Nichols, the discipleship director at DCF.  We all enjoyed hearing about one of his favorite books, the Guiness Book of World Records, and some of the strange and amazing records held by people.  Mr. Nichols reminded us that the Bible is the bestselling book of all time, and he shared with us the story of the disciples arguing about which of them was the greatest.  There are lots of ways that people are recognized as the greatest in a book like the Guiness Book of World Records, but Jesus tells us that the way to be the greatest is to be the last, to be the servant of all.  Mr. Nichols asked all of us to think about someone we can serve today and encouraged us to carry out our ideas and be the servant Christ wants us to be.  What a great reminder for all of us: being the greatest means serving others.  We'll keep working on one-anothering!

The Hiding Place is giving us the opportunity to talk about and see the use of some common literary practices.  Today we spoke about the genre of the book.  We talked about the difference between fiction and non-fiction works and saw that this story fits within the biography genre--although it doesn't tell the whole life story of Corrie ten Boom.  Biography certainly doesn't mean boring, though! There's plenty of action coming!

We also talked about characterization and discussed together what we have learned about the various characters in the story.  We created a character sheet on which we are recording the qualities and attributes of the ten Boom family members.  We created a list of Father's attributes together, and then the students worked in groups to list qualities of the other family members.  We'll continue to add new things to our sheets as we discover them.

The chapters we've read gave us a chance to see how authors use flashbacks to give us information and help us understand characters and situations.  And we got to see that the author even used foreshadowing within the flashback!

Students were assigned chapter 3 of The Hiding Place as homework, and we'll continue our work with this book on Wednesday!