October 2009

take five minutes and try this

October 23, 2009

I gave my Nurturing Young Writers workshop to a small group of homeschoolers the other night. Part of the workshop is a quick exercise, which, judging from the reaction it gets, is effective. The following is a snippet from a book chapter I’m working on, explaining what I ask them to do.       Participants [...]

23 comments Read the full post →

the homeschooling habit

October 14, 2009

For years I’ve struggled with the term unschooling. It’s such a great word, implying a complete departure from school. To me, it conveys a sense of kids leading their own educations, which is something we value around here. But it’s also come to imply, it seems, a certain lack of structure, and that’s the part [...]

30 comments Read the full post →

september: notes on m.f.k. fisher

October 9, 2009

random notes: This has been a tough month for my essayist project. I’ve told you how I got distracted reading Spunk & Bite. I also have a seventeen-year-old applying to college this fall, so I’m suddenly busy with that, and reading books with ridiculous titles like How to Get Into the Top Colleges.  I seemed to [...]

8 comments Read the full post →

i am a master of spunkiness

October 1, 2009

Last week Molly and I were talking blog posts. She asked if I ever worried, when writing my essayists posts, that the writers might visit my blog and read what I’d written. She said she’d once written about a craft book, and the author had shown up and commented on it. (Luckily, what she’d written [...]

11 comments Read the full post →