HomeSchooling
That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not alone and isolated from anyone. You belong. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Visual Latin: A Review
Teaching a foreign language to my children is simply not going to happen from my skill set. We’ve played around a little with a program called DuoLingo that helps to teach Spanish, plus a handful of other languages you might prefer. The kids like it – it’s a free online program. It’s just an introduction sort of situation, not a thorough education, but they enjoy acquiring a few words and I think it’s mildly helpful. Although I’ve heard other parents sing the praises of having their children learn Latin, somehow it has never been on my radar. But this year, after hearing positive reviews from several homeschooling friends, I decided…
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Five Finds Friday (quelf the game, oatmeal in the Instant Pot, kind words)
We’re back to school this week. It’s been good to be back to routine but it’s been painfully difficult to get out of bed on these cold mornings. It was also a four day school week and that has me thinking that ALL weeks should be four day school weeks. Can I start a utopian society where people only work for four days a week for about five hours each day? I think we’d all be more productive and just embrace working harder for a short time, knowing you had lots of free time coming. Who wants in on my future society? Happy Friday y’all. funny …
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reading and literary journals and your suggestions
There’s a lot of details I’ll get wrong in education. (Same was true when I was employed in mainstream education too.) Ideas shift. Trends in education rise and fill. Diagramming sentences matters in one decade, not so much in the next. I started farming out math to tutors and computer “textbooks” at about the third grade. Science isn’t my jam. At home we don’t raise our hands and sometimes we do history class in our pajamas. We travel as much as we’re able for the best sort of learning and no one calls roll each morning. The one long standing, enduring, hasn’t changed detail that I do manage to…
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you pick the story from our day: a beautiful & terrible world.
Which story should I tell you about my day? The one where the kids and I sat on a gigantic rock outcropping behind poet Carl Sandburg’s house in Flat Rock, NC and read his poems to one another while the mountains and the trees listened in? Or the one where my kids acted so ridiculous at the dinner table that one of them spewed lemonade all over his sweet potato? Should I tell you about how we visited a new to us apple orchard and loved the dwarf trees and the views and the staff there? Or should I tell you how my…
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An Ode to Autumn
A simple part of our Nature Study for the past several years has been to simply pick a spot outside (each of us in a different location) each week and for just a short time to sit still and observe. While you are observing you may lie still with your eyes closed or you may draw what you see or record what you hear or let nature inspire you to draw or create in some other manner. Recently, this is what I heard and what I saw and what I wrote after one of our observation times. _____________________ When a bird makes a noise that distinct I…
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it’s easy to love homeschool on a day like this.
One of the more challenging aspects of homeschooling five students at once in five different grades is that their needs and desires and skill sets, both educationally and otherwise, are so varied. When they were all younger, this seemed less dramatic. There seemed to be less of a division. Now London, in high school, can be rather tethered to giant books or a computer for her math program. Her science can take nearly an hour to wade through each day. Labor intensive. Much more so than elementary school. So the dreamy Little House on the Prairie days are fading and it’s certainly plausible that I am holding more tightly…
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Dr. Bonyfide, Science Books: A Timberdoodle Review
This was the year that I knew our science would take a giant shift in the Wildwood Halls of Ivy. London started high school which means the rules all change and there is a particular order and type of science that she has to cover. She’s taking Biology this year but I didn’t want to have all of the kids take high school biology because, of course, my elementary students couldn’t keep up with that. We’re still doing a weekly Nature Study together because it’s important to me, but this year I decided to have London take biology and Bergen and Mosely (7th and 8th graders) are trying a…
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Five Finds Friday (Puck perches, a leftover success and a breakfast solution)
Sometimes I feel this need to apologize to you all for not writing every day. Like I’ve got some quota to fill and I’m letting someone down if I don’t post daily. Sometimes I feel as if the person I am letting down is me. But goodness, y’all. This pace is hard to maintain. The website for TR, homeschool, driving kids to events and activities and soccer practices and appointments and theatre camp, the prepping and planning of meals for half a dozen people like three times every day. This sounds like a rant, a whine. It feels a little like it too. Anyway – thanks for continuing to…
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Beautiful Coloring: A Timberdoodle Review
School is back in session and I haven’t even snapped one single legitimate back-to-school photo for some reason. Maybe because not every kid is always dressed in photo worthy attire at the same moment. Or because our first days have been sort of anti-climatic. (This morning I started the day out by artfully dropping a glass bowl full of hummus – shattering the glass across the entire kitchen floor. Despite our careful clean up both Bergen and I have received glass splinters in our feet already today. It was even hummus that I used real tahini in so it tasted top-notch. I don’t know which made me more sad…
Keep Reading . . .
Mand Labs Lit: A Timberdoodle Review
leaving colorado.
Lake Jocassee with the Boys
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Day One School Thoughts
School started back for us today. Hello Wildwood Halls of Ivy. I have a high school daughter again. And two middle schoolers. My “baby” is in third grade. He feels super unexcited to be required to do school again. Today it was difficult to stay on track for all of us, but I think over all we did alright. High school curriculum is not cheap, let me tell you. Our Latin curriculum has yet to arrive but I like the first couple of days to be a slow start anyway so we don’t hit all the subjects all the days. Latin is new for us…
Keep Reading . . .
back of a book, on the porch
soundtrack of my mind
Colorku: A Timberdoodle Review
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Coming Soon to a Stage Near You
A goose. A maid’s daughter. A Persian man. A Hebrew woman. And soon an ant and a family living in communist Russia. These are the roles that my children have had in their years of stage experience with the Logos Theatre in Taylors. Our family first heard about The Academy of Arts and their theatre quite a few years ago when we saw an advertisement for auditions for their production of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Finn auditioned back then and we went through months of rehearsals and held our breath and wondered what the final result would actually look like. It looked like magic.…
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Local Beowulf Class: My Girls Loved It, Maybe Yours Will Too
Even though my official piece of paper declares that I have a degree in English and Theatre and Communications (it was so hard to choose), I am always looking for opportunities for my children to participate in the arts in memorable and challenging ways. I know that, even though the deepest core of my home education philosophy is reading and living books and art, I need other teachers and educators and perspectives and experiences feeding into my children’s hearts and minds. I believe they need to sit in the audience at theatre performances and I believe they need to step on stage sometimes too. I believe they need group discussions…
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A Simple Map Study: A Charlotte Mason Geography
Sometimes in home school (in life) we make things so complicated. Well, sometimes I make things so complicated. My family moved from the coast of Virginia to the mountains of Virginia the year I was leaving the sixth grade. In my old school on the coast, geography was taught more exclusively in seventh grade. In my new school in the mountains, geography had been taught in the sixth grade. I missed the window. Therefore, I have nursed a deficiency in geography for most of my life. I am good with directions and carry a pretty decent mental map around in my head of my own hometown and my own area…
