Jake Meador on engaging with an anxious, easily triggered generation: …be intellectually serious. Read widely and read well. Allow yourself to be corrected by what you read. Change your mind about something. Have friends who will argue with you. Acquiring that intellectual grounding will be fun, in itself, but it will also equip you to…
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Advent: Decorating
Christmas is slowly coming into the home. We are not a get-the-tree-the-day-after-Thanksgiving family. We are also not a thou-shalt-wait-until-Christmas-Eve-and-respect-the-twelve-days-of-Christmas either. I go more off of feeling, which means that the decorations don’t really come down until after my eldest’s birthday in the first half of the month. Even then, it’s a slow process. Bring the…
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Advent: Hoar Frost
Very little to say today, except that the weather has been magical: cold and wintery and frosty. The little pond is frozen and the children have played and played. I walk about to keep warm, feeling grateful for my warm boots and my flask of hot tea, trying to mull over what I’ve read about…
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Advent: Day…I’ve completely lost track
One reason that I rarely use social media for my blog is that I don’t like how it feels to come up with posts that resonate with people. You probably know what I’m talking about: the ones designed to get you to leave a comment or to share, often through sharing some statement (or truth,…
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Advent: Days Four and Five
The temperature dropped yesterday – just enough to have a slight hint of frost on the meadow near the woods, and to make me glad for my gloves and thick coat. Reading in the woods while the children play isn’t the warmest of activities. The growing cold and the growing darkness both leave me with…
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Advent: Day Three
The weather could not have been more different yesterday, with the blue skies replaced by a thin fog that lingered all day. Fog is a funny thing. Sometimes it feels dark and gloomy, but yesterday we had the kind that makes everything feel brighter, partly from how the sunshine is refracted, partly because of how…
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Advent: Day Two
We had a beautiful blue sky this morning, and the sunshine is what I noticed most as I bundled the kids outdoors after breakfast. Before I moved to England, I knew the days would be short in the winter, but I didn’t realize how low the sun would stay in the sky. Even at eleven,…
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Advent: Day One
In a recent newsletter, I wrote: This Advent, I am recommitting to time in nature. We have finished school for the term, and my goal is to take my children for a walk in the woods to start our day – each day. We will probably miss a few days, and that will be ok….
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My Best Homeschool Scheduling Tip
It’s that time of year. We are well into autumn, and your plans and schedule are making plain that you are either: Totally on track to finish your autumn term well. Waving a complete goodbye to the idea of a ‘strong finish’ and hoping that you can limp across the finish line and somehow find…
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Charlotte Mason, Education, and Natural Law: Thoughts on Telos
The second lecture in my class on natural law is about metaphysics – one of those big words that comes up reasonably often, yet I would struggle to tell you what it really means. A simple google search tells me that it’s the study of the first principles of things – the nature of things….
