Education Blog Posts

Helping Kids To Thrive During Coronavirus School Closures
Help Your Kids to Thrive During Coronavirus School Closures Coronavirus has caused many disruptions to our normal schedules, including kids staying home from school. While

Stress Free Homeschooling for the Holidays
Stress free homeschooling is possible, even during the holidays. In this post I wanted to give you some simple ways to incorporate Christmas into your

Introducing Children to Art and Art History
Art and art history have been a part of our school life from the time my boys were toddlers, both producing art and enjoying works

Hate History?
Do you hate History? Did you watch the clock tick off each minute as your teacher droned on? Did you suffer through dry readings,

Get Your Museum On…
Summer, beaches, baseball, museums…yes, museums. It is a great time to take the family to the museum. We have made two museum trips so far

Why We Need to Rethink Rewards
Do you have some sort of reward system in place for chores? Do you reward yourself when you lose a certain amount of weight or

Curriculum for Elementary School Recommendations
These are many wonderful curriculums out there, so this list just shows the tip of the iceberg. While the variety of choices is great, it

The Conversation That Is Art: An Introduction to the Study of Art History
The study of art history starts with examining tools. Every discipline has its tools. Writer’s craft with words to stimulate the senses, rouse the emotions,

Video – The Conversation That Is Art
Check out the video below “Conversations in Art” and the full article here on the Blog: The Conversation That Is Art: An Introduction to the

The Habit of Thought Determines Your Child’s Future
The habit of thought is not an option in education. Whether parents with kids in school or homeschoolers, this area of the thought life of

Another No Prep Writing Exercise
Here is another no prep, easy writing exercise to keep up your children’s skills during this time we are ‘sheltering in place.’ For some basic

Schooling At Home Facebook Lives
Hi all, I’m going to be adding the video’s of my FB lives here. I’ll apologize here for the quality of the videos. FB live

Fun Writing Exercises
Fun writing exercises, that resemble games, are a great way to pass the time while we are ‘sheltering in place’ during this pandemic. While children

My Greatest Fear
My greatest fear when we began this homeschooling journey was not that the boys wouldn’t get into college, or even that I would miss some

Let a Child Lead You
Color in art is…complicated. While working on writing a clear, somewhat comprehensive article on the subject for my curriculum, I’ve struggled far more than seems

Color Crash Course – Part 1
Quick color crash course. Color is one of the foundations of art, and so we need a basic understanding of color theory. For thousands of

Entering The Conversation That Is Art
Every discipline has it’s tools. Writer’s craft with words to stimulate the senses, rouse the emotions, and spark our ideas. Construction workers use tools to

Get Organized And Ditch The Overwhelm
People who know me might be laughing right now. I am a go with the flow type mom, and messes are part of the flow.

10 Fabulous, Off the Radar Christmas Books
This year I was on a mission to discover some new and unusual Children’s Christmas Books. We have recently moved and I’ve been visiting

Molly’s Pilgrim
True confession, when I read this book out loud to students I cry. I cover it well, but every time it gets to me. Part

Make This a Summer to Remember
Summer is here!!!! Except it’s not. I was at the library with my 18 month old granddaughter this morning and overheard some conversations between

Reduce Stress In Your Homeschool Day
Homeschooling is stressful. There are time constraints, financial burdens, and parent burnout. However, the big source of stress is fear that we are not doing

Are parents really qualified to teach their children?
I understand if you have your doubts. We have been taught to think that we need a special credential to teach our children and that

Shakespeare Resources
In a previous article I made the case for teaching Shakespeare to your students. If you haven’t read that article you can find it

Shakespeare’s England
The ability to place Shakespeare, the man, into his historical context can enrich our reading and understanding of his plays. While dealing with universal themes

Why Shakespeare?
I admit, I’m one of the nerds who loves Shakespeare. I was introduced to the Bard in Jr. High in a drama class, and was

Why Geography?
We live in a crazy and exciting time, the world is changing… daily. When I wrote up my Philosophy of Education, and looked to the

Busting The Myth Of The Perfect Homeschool
This post is dedicated to all those homeschooling moms who fear that they are not doing all that they should to assure their kids get

Making the shift to homeschooling, not doing school at home.
One of the easiest mistakes to make when beginning the homeschooling journey is to model our homeschool after our local public schools. Each of us

Solving at least one common homeschool frustration
On a typical homeschool morning it was a major accomplishment to have all the kids up, dressed, fed, and chores done. Then we need

Steps to Becoming a Confident Homeschooler
As many of you know, over the summer I’ve been working on getting my website up. Part of doing that has been listening to a

Reading for your child is often the best tool to teach them to read. Especially if they struggle.
In our last post we discussed the importance of allowing children to read books that are too easy for them. If you missed it, you

Easy Books Are Key To Kid’s Loving Reading
Easy books, lots of easy books, are a key element in raising kids who love to read. We all want our children to be good

Curriculum is not the key to your homeschooling success
One of the biggest mistakes parents and teachers make is teaching a curriculum. Let’s take math. Our child needs to learn mathematical concepts, so we

Advice for getting the most from those Junior High Years
So Just what do your kids need to do in Junior High? In elementary school our children are learning the basic building blocks

New Homeschool Year Checklist
I LOVE September. Forget the whole ‘January is a new year’ business, it’s the start of a new school year I love. So here is

Homeschool Vs. Charter School
This has been a difficult article for me to write and one I have put off repeatedly. I was asked again today about Charter Schools