Have you ever read an early primer to your young child and been bored to tears? Have you wondered if your child felt the same way? What if children didn’t need stickers, rewards, or candy to learn? What if learning was so joyful and gentle that children couldn’t wait to get started? The Charlotte Mason
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One of the wonderful things about homeschooling is that every aspect of life is an opportunity for learning. Whether you have a tiny urban plot or a full-fledged homestead, a family vegetable garden perfectly fits the bill of learning through life. Planning The Garden The first step in preparing a vegetable garden, of course, is
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Remember when you first started homeschooling? You imagined cozy moments spent reading a story together or children happily working on a science project. In your mind, your beautiful children always came to learning with enthusiasm and never balked or argued. You probably have days when all these things actually do occur. A day goes smoothly and you smile to yourself, thinking, “I’ve really got this homeschooling thing down.” And then there are the other days—the days you don’t read about in homeschooling magazines. On these days, your kids moan about getting out of bed. They
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We’re surrounded by a society that treats education as a commodity like everything else. Knowledge is thought to be owned by experts who will dispense it to us if we submit to their curricula, and (once we’re adults) pay for their courses.  This packaged education system teaches some valuable things, but it has some inherent problems. It tends to fragment knowledge and responsibility, to promote passive acceptance of the educator’s assumptions and agenda, and to devalue skills which are best passed on outside the classroom, including the manual skills that supply the basic goods on
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I recently had an interesting conversation with one of my friends about the subject of homeschooling. She admitted that her son in first grade hates school and fights going every morning. When I asked her if she’d ever considered homeschooling, she quickly replied, “Oh no. I could never teach him what he needs to know. We’d do math by counting money at the grocery store instead of sitting down and learning.” Why, I wondered for the hundredth time, do we equate learning with sitting down? After all, many of the greatest minds resisted this educational
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Interest in gardening doesn’t just happen. Children gain interest in gardening by being out in the garden with their parents, grandparents, and/or older siblings, following them around, asking questions, and being allowed to get their hands dirty. I gained my love for the outdoors by following three special people in their gardens; these were my dad, grandmother, and great grandmother. Each had very different gardens and taught me very different lessons about growing fruit and vegetables, beautiful flowers, and prize-winning roses. Now I have my own gardens to get dirty in and to coax to
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Learning does not need to stop in the summer. Sure, the majority of local kids are sitting at home playing video games, surfing the net, watching TV, and letting their brains turn to mush, but that does not have to be your children. Just because summer has been a vacation from school for the last
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Summer vacation is an antiquated idea. When a much greater part of the population farmed and relied on that as a way of life, kids were needed to work the fields in the summer, so school went on a hiatus. Today, unless you are running a large-scale operation without workers, you probably don’t need to
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As if the idea of teaching your children English, math, history, and science is not intimidating enough, consider a foreign language. Learning a new language is a great way to become a more analytical thinker, to increase opportunities, and to develop as a well-rounded person. If you never learned another language yourself and the idea of teaching one scares you, fear not. There are many great ways to get your kids into a foreign language and culture, and it is not as difficult as you may think. Why learn a new language? The world is
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If children’s brains are referred to as sponges, able to soak up vast amounts of information at a rapid pace, what does this say about our older brains? Does that sponge really just dry up, leaving us with a useless impermeable rock in its place? If so, we’re all in really big trouble. Past research tells us that learning at an old age, while not impossible, can be a frustrating hurdle for the majority of mature brains. Our older learning processes no longer have the same capacity as they did in our younger days, and
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