A few years ago I sat in a coffee shop, preparing for a homeschool conference workshop I’d be giving at the hotel next door, on writing with kids. There was a family a few tables over. They wore conference name tags so I knew they were homeschoolers. The two parents chatted while their son did a [...]

“So, what did I do with my kids? Well, I unschooled them. But like a lot of wives out there, my husband wasn’t always as supportive of unschooling. He has trust issues (and after all the years he spent in school, no wonder he did). So, every once in awhile he would have me do [...]

Evidence of my own mentorship. Enough about teaching and standards and intiatives! Feel free to go raise muck in the intriguing comments of that last post if you’re still riled up; otherwise let’s move on to the fun stuff: mentoring. As much as I want to prance into the hows of mentoring, I think we need to [...]

A random bit of Mr. T’s personal writing, discovered on the kitchen table. I’m going to start this post with a dubious act. In order to explore why mentoring might be preferable to teaching when it comes to writing, I’m going to share an article with which I fundamentally disagree. This Atlantic article came to me last [...]

When it comes to your kids and writing—particularly if you homeschool—you have a choice to make: do you want to be a writing teacher to your child, or a writing mentor? When H was twelve, he wrote a book review that he hoped to get published in Stone Soup magazine. He asked for my feedback on his [...]

Mr. T and I had an adventure last week. You may remember, back in October, that I wrote about my older son’s Kickstarter project, a film he planned to make as part of his college studies. Well, the project got funded, but a few days before the shoot was supposed to start, a little force [...]