Guest Post – Michelle Wright

Michelle blogs at Blogging From the Boonies and specializes in encouraging Compassion sponsors to write letters to their children regularly.

Our involvement with Compassion International has been a family affair since the moment we clicked "Submit" and started sponsoring our first child, Precious from Ghana. I am thankful that my girls all had an interest in learning more about that sweet face looking back at them on the computer screen. As our Compassion family has grown from one to nine, that interest in learning about the lives, cultures and countries of our Compassion children has not diminished at all.

As a homeschooling family, the addition of a new family member from a foreign country inspires us to start a small unit study to learn more. I scour the online library catalog for children's books that feature that specific country.

We head to the internet to look up videos.

Then, I print off some worksheets and notebooking pages so that we can take down some facts. Jolanthe of Homeschool Creations has a whole slew of wonderful geography resources (hyperlink:http://homeschoolcreations.com/Geography.html ) for many of the countries served by Compassion International.

Letters to our sponsored children are a crucial part of the Compassion ministry and my daughters love to be involved in writing and creating things to send to our children around the world. Even my four year old reminds me when it has been a while since she's written to her special friend, Madina in Uganda.

We also love sending photos!

Even the old Autumn stand-by craft of making leaf rubbings can become a special item to send to a sponsored child when paired with a Bible verse!

Once a month, I head up a class for our homeschool co-op and the children share information about their Compassion International children and share any letters they have received. We also join together in prayer and I love hearing the heart-felt ways our children pray for their little friends that live oceans away.

Being involved with Compassion International has been an amazing way for my daughters to learn more about our world. Being connected with these sweet children has inspired an interest in geography and culture study. It has also given my children perspective about the reality of how people live all around the world. My daughters never fail to remind me to pray for all nine of our Compassion children, if I happen to forget.

Sponsoring through Compassion has been one of the very best things our family has done and I am so thankful that it is something that we all enjoy together!