One of the most frequent questions I get is regarding how and when to start homeschooling a young child. Everyone is a little apprehensive the first time out of the gate, and we all want to get it right from the beginning. We don’t want to “mess our kids up.” We’ve been conditioned to think… Continue Reading
This year in our homeschool we will be studying the period of Christendom–the Middle Ages beginning with Constantine and the Edict of Milan in AD 313, going through the Reformation, and ending with Elizabeth I of England’s ascension to the throne in 1558. First semester will be devoted to the history and literature of the… Continue Reading
In honor of national poetry month, here is a list of my favorite poetry anthologies to use with children. A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson (My favorite illustrated versions are by Tasha Tudor and Jessie Willcox Smith.) A Child’s Book of Poems by Gyo Fujikawa A Child’s Treasury of Poems by Mark… Continue Reading
June was baby month around here (Christopher arrived on June 20th). In addition to getting everything ready for his arrival and resting up for the big day, I managed to get in a decent amount of summer reading as well. I love the extra time I generally have in the summer for reading. Here’s what… Continue Reading
So, I started this series awhile ago, and it’s not that I’m not enthusiastic about the topic, but life got in the way…namely in the form of pregnancy morning sickness and sleeping when I would’ve otherwise been blogging. I’m also slowly in the process of turning this series into a book, which is sucking away my blogging… Continue Reading
For the first several years that I homeschooled, I would spend the spring and summer searching for curriculum sales on the things I wanted for the upcoming year. As time has moved on, I have drastically simplified to the point that I don’t really buy that much prepared “curricula,” and, therefore, don’t have to work… Continue Reading
So, I feel like I’ve been in a huge reading (and blogging) slump. I’m blaming it on the pregnancy. When I would normally be reading or writing I’ve been…sleeping (or working on projects for the baby). But I did read a few things over the last several months, and I’m determined to do better once… Continue Reading
Every semester it seems I’m able to simplify even more as I read and learn and find new resources. This makes me happy. Our homeschool averages about 3 hours each morning, 4 days per week, and this semester consists of Morning Time (read about specifically what we do here; this includes Worship elements, Literature, Shakespeare,… Continue Reading
First of all, if you follow this series, you know I didn’t post the books I read in October through December. The truth is, I can’t remember all of them! I’m usually very good at keeping track on Goodreads, but we did a lot of traveling, which meant a lot of library downloads to my… Continue Reading
The word “classical” gets thrown around a lot, from descriptions of classical music to classical education to classical culture. But what does it really mean? As with most words, people could use the term, of course, for a whole host of different ideas and connotations. But here is what I think is at the heart… Continue Reading
In this series, I am discussing the four different ways that evangelicals are doing classical Christian education (CCE) in 2015. In my first post, I asserted that CCE has come a long way in the 30-plus years since Doug Wilson wrote Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning. I would argue that CCE has grown beyond… Continue Reading
These are some recent reader questions that reflect questions I get fairly often regarding history curriculum and history dating of ancient times from a young earth perspective. Since these seem to be common questions with a similar theme, I decided to combine them into a post and include my answers in case they would be… Continue Reading
As I plan for our upcoming school year, what am I buying? I still love much/most of what we’ve been using. We had a few things that didn’t work for us this past year, so I’ll note those changes and why they didn’t work. Also, we’re transitioning into our second history cycle, so that necessitated… Continue Reading
I’m guessing that a lot of homeschool parents, like me, encountered classical Christian education (CCE) through either Doug Wilson’s excellent book Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning or through Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise’s very helpful The Well-Trained Mind. Wilson first convinced me of CCE, and Bauer and Wise made me think that I… Continue Reading