Do you know Uncle Rick?

That’s why the Uncle Rick line came about.  Now we have quite a collection of Uncle Rick audio products and we’re working on more, in addition to some digital things that are quite different from anything we’ve seen in the Christian family market. Uncle Rick’s main focus is character building.  To raise young people to be godly adults is, after all the Christian parent’s main job.  To do this, I provide high quality content in my audio recordings, beginning with the Bible itself.  So far, I have as Uncle Rick, recorded the Book of Proverbs, 50 of my favorite chapters of Psalms and the Gospel of Matthew, Book of James and the Book of I Peter. (click here to see these titles) And I don’t “just read” the Scriptures.  I explain the meanings of unfamiliar words and illustrate main points by telling “example stories.”  For instance, one of my children asked for an illustration of Proverbs 6 where it talks about the wicked man who winks with his eyes, signals with his feet, points with his fingers.  So I made up a story about two burglars who wanted to rob a wealthy lady’s home.

The plan was for one man to get a job doing her lawn work, find out her schedule and let the other man know when she would be away for a few hours so he could sneak in the back way and rob the place.  The “yard man” would be out working in plain sight of all the neighbors so it would appear that he couldn’t have had anything to do with it.  He couldn’t be seen talking to the other robber of course, so they agreed that the second man would just walk up and down the sidewalk in front of the house a few times a day and the guy in the yard would let him know what to do by a system of signals:  A wink meant one thing, pointing the finger something else and certain movements of the feet something else again.  Moral of the story, I told the kids:  When you see two people communicating in ways so that others can’t understand, beware of evil motives.  And that’s why Uncle Rick takes 5 hours to read the Proverbs when a straight reading only takes 2 hours.

Another main thrust of mine is to record biographies of great people in American history. This is the way history used to be taught: Combined with character instruction from the examples of admirable people and with historical events reported from their viewpoints as having lived through them. To name just a couple, I have recorded biographies of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin that were written in the 1890’s, before historical revisionism and political correctness corrupted our history education.  That’s the key; reading books that were written before the modern teaching of our history was twisted by humanism.   Uncle Rick hopes to teach your kids life-enriching character lessons while taking them deeper into American history than any textbook ever will.

I’ve also indulged my enjoyment of storytelling in CD (and downloadable) collections of  true tales from American history. We have LOTS of new sets available. Our newest is Boys of Liberty Library which is hard to stop listening to! It ‘s a fantastic way to learn about the American Revolution as you follow the Boys of Liberty, patriots through their adventure packed lives. As I follow my fascination with olden times in recording more and more stories of heroes, patriots, Indians, mountain men, saddlebag preachers, Yankees and Rebels, cowboys, outlaws and lawmen.  And of course, I’ll be recording great books about all these exciting characters and their times.

 By the way, Uncle Rick is a very informal guy.  I want your children to feel that they’re right in the room with me and being read to or told stories by their favorite “adopted” uncle.  I do my recording in my little office on a friend’s farm where I keep my horses and cattle and where the kids, grandkids and I fish in the pond.  That’s why I start all my Uncle Rick recordings with, “Hey, little buddies!  It’s Uncle Rick, coming to you from the Little House in the Pasture–where you can hear the birds sing, the cows moo, the horses neigh and Uncle Rick talk to his little buddies!”  And they really will hear all those things from time to time, along with crickets, dogs barking and tractors going by.  Why build a soundproof studio when you can make the experience so real and memorable?

So now you know, if you didn’t before, what Uncle Rick is all about.  Check out our website www.thelearningparent.com and look at my recordings.  I hope that very soon Uncle Rick will be a favorite “adopted uncle” at your house too!