Homeschooling is a wonderful journey. Take it on as a great adventure, knowing that you’ll never figure it all out, that you’ll probably always adapt as you go. If you follow the lead of your kids, it will all work out.

Actually, we ended up getting a fire-bellied toad cluster from friends. We now have twenty small fire-bellied toads (actually, they’re frogs). I have to give some away–I can’t keep up with all the crickets they need to eat!

I’d love to hear about your writing project.

I used to collect eggs and tadpoles off the swimming pool cover — I guess frogs laid them in the collected pools of rain water — the weekend we started cleaning up for the season when I was a lifeguard. I figured they were going to die anyway, so I didn’t need to feel guilt if they didn’t all make it.

Surely that wouldn’t be against the rules!

And I agree: it definitely forges personal connections. I think it’s so meaningful to the kids that their words matter to you.

The fact that you use your recess time to write with kids shows what a wonderful, dedicated teacher you must be!

Homeschooling takes so many approaches, so it’s hard to say how it might look to different families in the summer. But one mom blogger whose kids go to school is trying out her take on unschooling over the summer, and she’s blogging about it with others here: http://vintagechica.typepad.com/summerunschool/

“When you separate the task of writing from the task of just oral story telling students create incredible things…. By typing out what they say and then going back and reading it together, students learn all kinds of things about their style and voice.”

Yep, yep, yep. This is precisely what I’m giving a homeschooling workshop on in a few weeks, and what I hope to focus on in my book draft. When it comes to young kids, people think of “writing” as the kids putting pencil to paper. But it takes years for kids to develop fluency in writing, and I think it’s important to allow kids to develop their writing voices when they’re young–and the best way to do that is to take dictation for them. I think it’s harder to accomplish that in a classroom setting, due to the adult to child ratio. Kudos to you, Jack, for making it happen! But for homeschoolers, it’s easy. If parents would make a regular habit of writing down their kids’ words–fiction or nonfiction–those kids would develop such fantastic voices as writers. And if you have a strong writing voice, all the other parts of writing fall into place pretty easily.

I’ve never seen him in a toga!