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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

A blogging mama meet-up. A while back I wrote about meeting some blogging friends in person for the first time. Well, we did it again, but this time there were seven of us. The photo above is what Mr. T came up with when I asked him to use my camera to take a picture of [...]

Mr. T and I have been playing with probability lately. The other day he made a spinner. We got the idea from Math By All Means: Probability, Grades 1-2. I really like these books by Math Solutions, particularly the Math By All Means series and the Teaching Arithmetic series. I used them back when I [...]