You might not want to bother taking your pan down to the river. You’d probably be smarter to do something more practical. The practical folks are the ones who get rich. Cook for hungry miners, say. Even if it means cooking beans over fire for eight hours in 95 degree heat. Even better, you could [...]

I give my kids lots of writing advice. Like this: * To get started on something new, sit down and write without stopping for ten minutes, and see what comes to you. Re-read what you’ve written and underline anything promising. Then freewrite on that. * Write your beginnings and endings last, because they’re the hardest parts [...]

photo of T by Mary McHenry Back in January, I wrote a rambling, terribly earnest post titled How Does a Child REALLY Learn to Write? That post generated a slew of thoughtful and heartfelt comments. It also managed to capture the attention of Wendy Priesnitz, editor of the always insightful Life Learning Magazine, who asked to reprint it. [...]

It’s been busy around here. Homeschool camping trips, birthdays, and the usual “end-of-the-school-year” culminating activities, which ironically manage to creep into the lives of homeschoolers. I haven’t found time to write here. But luckily for me, Annie of Bird and Little Bird visited a few weeks back, along with Molly of A Foothill Home Companion. [...]

There it is again. That wrinkled, hand-drawn Avengers graphic. This is the third time it’s appeared on this blog, which is certainly a record for Wonder Farm recycling. I hope you can excuse the chart for displaying itself again, though, because that funny little sheet of graph paper has generated some excitement around here lately. [...]

Do you remember writing school reports when you were, say, twelve? Do you remember your teachers harping on the evils of plagiarism? Was your response to do what I did and take lines from a book, switch out words, change their order and call them your own? I can’t blame twelve-year-old me. Despite all the [...]