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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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,…
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….
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….
What I desire to set before the reader is a method of education based upon natural law. Charlotte Mason, Home Education There is something about Charlotte Mason’s ideas that is extremely intuitive. I don’t think it’s just me, either. Plenty of people find that her principles speak to something that they’ve known, but couldn’t articulate….
I’m thrilled to be on Mere Orthodoxy this week with an article on Charlotte Mason and her educational philosophy (which will surprise exactly no one). I very much believe that we all need a Christian understanding of what it means to be a person. I think there is even a general, growing consensus that this…