This week I finished reading Rethinking Positive Thinking by Gabriele Oettingen (referral link). I relate to the premise so much. I love to imagine achieving big goals, whether it is related to homeschooling, my website, a health and fitness related challenge. In my mind, I can feel the sense of accomplishment and my sense of…
April was a turn-around month. We quickly wrapped up our winter term, took a fleeting week off from lessons, celebrated a birthday, and jumped right into our summer term. Here’s how the month went. For reference, I have three boys and we are using AmblesideOnline. At the end of the month I now have: Age…
I have a bit of a fascination with Charlotte Mason’s Twenty Principles (see here). It seems like such a good idea: twenty short-ish statements, the perfect introduction to a philosophy of education. Grasp these ideas and off you go! You can educate the Charlotte Mason way! Except that reading the twenty principles often leave you…
I’ve had a lot of posts coming up in my RSS feed about social media, most of them offering different takes on how bad it is. I have lots of Thoughts about social media, and I agree in general that it doesn’t do us a whole lot of good. I won’t digress, but here are…
I’m a guest on How We Homeschool today. It’s a Substack run by Catherine Oliver, a British, home educating mum who shares what her days with her children look like. She also shares many guest posts like mine, where other people share their homeschool days, so you never get the impression that there is only…
This week I am a guest on the Homeschool Conversations podcast with Amy Sloan (from Humility and Doxology). I always love going on podcasts, and I was particularly excited to chat with Amy, who in addition to being delightful herself, has also had some of my very favorite people in the CM world on Homeschool…
“What’s your takeaway from the workshop?” “I really need to work on my art anxiety.” I spent last week in the Lake District, with three days at the Charlotte Mason Centenary Conference in Ambleside, put on by the Charlotte Mason Institute and University of Cumbria, the institution that incorporated the Charlotte Mason College (formerly the…
What does it mean that children are born persons? This is Charlotte Mason’s first principle and one of the most important. If we don’t grasp her meaning, we will struggle to make sense of the rest of her ideas and apply them well in our homes. It is deceptively simple. We all have an intuitive…
We are inching closer to the end of our term and I’m attempting to put on tunnel vision to stick with our plans and keep us on track to finish strong. Slightly easier said than done (we are a tiny bit behind on Robinson Crusoe), but all in all, we’re doing pretty well. I’m more…
Happy St. Patrick’s Day! The holiday doesn’t mean all that much to me, but I will still be enjoying our family tradition of eating Irish fare for dinner tonight. In reading this week, I’ve happened to read several articles with criticisms of social media and the way it behaves. I also happened to spend a…