The Themes for This Month: Passover (4/19-4/27) Easter (4/21/19) Everything about birds! Passover: Read the story of Moses in Egypt from a Children's Bible Teens:  Read the book of Exodus from the Bible Easter: Read the story of Christ's passion, death and resurrection from a Children's Bible Teens:  Pre-read the readings for Holy Week or read pertinent parts from one or more Gospel. Movies: Joseph and the Amazing Technicolored Dream Coat (a tiny bit risque when Potiphar's wife gets the hots for Joseph, but other than that, lots of fun.  Kids learn how the Israelites got to Egypt in the first place.) The Prince of Egypt - I love this reverent retelling of the story of Moses.  The music is amazing. NB:  The study of Passover overlaps nicely with learning about Egypt. He Is Risen - I think this is the animated movie we had which told the story of Easter for kids.  The movie is long gone from our house, but for many years we watched...

This list sort of goes in order of listening comprehension, from youngest to teen. The Beginner's Bible - I'm pretty sure this is a Protestant version.  I don't remember how we acquired this one.  And yes, the bad cartoon drawings made me cringe a little.  BUT my kids loved this bible.  We took it with us on vacations (so many stories in just one volume!).  We read from it frequently when they were little.  Through frequent reads with five little ones, it got rather threadbare.  It served as a good introduction to well known Bible stories. The Weight of the Mass - We came to this book in mid-homeschool career.  But it didn't matter.  It is so beautifully illustrated and such a powerful folktale that even adults (and teens) are affected by it. St. Jerome and the Lion - We would read this every feast of St. Jerome.  Lovely book. The Holy Twins - A great story about brother and sister saints. Catholic Tales fo...

This resource is probably something that every Catholic homeschooler already knows about. Vision books have been around for a long time.  I actually remember reading Vision books when I was young.  I clearly remember reading the one about Father Isaac as a child in hard cover.  I just looked it up and it was first printed in 1956.  I remember being completed captivated by the idea of the Canadian wilderness and trying to teach the Indians about Christ.  And how frightening the idea of torture was to me and how holy and willing to give himself up for Christ and his Native American children Father Isaac was.   While I read many of these out loud over the years, we didn't get to all of them.  The only one that I recall that fell flat was the one on Edmund Campion.  For some reason we just couldn't get through that one.  We loved the ones about St. Therese and St. Elizabeth of the Three Crowns, St. John Vianney, known as the Cure of Ars, ...

We only watched a couple of videos from this guy in our homeschool.  That's because, alas, as the kids got older it was harder to have a particular time to meet for breakfast.  My son started attending classes at the community college and my daughter got really ill and has been struggling for the last two years of high school.  So basically we stopped meeting at breakfast.  I miss it some, but frankly, kids need to move on and create their own schedules anyway at some point.  It's tricky as a parent who is used to calling the shots having to relinquish a lot of the daily details. But I did use this resource for a class I was teaching on Modern European history.  Tom Richey is a high school history teacher from South Carolina.  He's a hoot!  He is a southern conservative, so keep that in mind.  He might not be everyone's cup of tea.  But he's a great teacher and on his youtube channel he's made lots of great videos that actually prepar...

If you want to learn about the periodic table in the most charming way possible, you've got to watch Sir Martyn Poliakoff's wacky scientist videos from the University of Nottingham.  These were breakfast videos par excellence!  We thoroughly enjoyed these short, informative, engaging, humorous videos and we learned tons about chemistry and the periodic table.  These will make your kids fall in love with science, or if not, at least they will love the lovable professor and find the science entertaining. We spent a year watching all these videos together.  A few a week at the breakfast table. A fun resource to go along with watching these videos is the activity book Fizz, Bubble & Flash.   We enjoyed reading this book aloud and we did a few of the experiments out of it.

One day we went to see a special museum exhibit on Beatrix Potter.  I remember it was a real pain driving everyone in, parking, walking to the museum which was very crowded.  I remember I lost my 4 year old for a while and had a huge panic searching for him, before I found him in the little movie theater where they were showing a short bio of Potter.  My heart is racing just remembering that panic! We had read lots of Beatrix Potter stories for years, so everything in the exhibit was charming and familiar to the kids.  They had a little gift shop too and so I bought these blocks  for my littlest ones. The way I used this resource: This was one of the Montessori trays I would put out for my 4 and 2 year old every weekday morning. I think these blocks work a lot like the pink tower in Montessori.  My kids would spend intense periods of time taking up two blocks, comparing them for size and then stacking them in order from largest at the bottom to sm...

This post expands on some thought from the previous post. I am a terrible housekeeper.  I hate it.  I don't see the clutter until it gets to an absurd level or someone is coming over.  I'm not a hoarder but when I see those hoarder houses on TV, I think that is what I am always struggling against, that I could so easily become that person!  I always feel like I have my finger in the dike so to speak, holding back the flood of disorganization, but at any moment the wall will break!  And I hate cleaning.  I'm terrible at it too.  I never seem to do it as well as others.  I'm so slow!  I think maybe I'm allergic to dust because cleaning actually gives me a headache and I often get all woozy feeling.  I'm really clumsy and I can't tell you how many times I've banged my head or slipped and fallen or tripped over the vacuum cord, etc.  LOL.  I am so weird.  I've never heard anyone talk about this kind of reaction.  I was ...

A long time ago I got these videos on VHS out of our local library.  We got them out frequently for a while there.  Now you can find them on youtube.  But these videos really got me interested in Montessori and I eventually developed a routine in our homeschool which I called Montessori Trays.  I had two old kitchen trays and every morning I'd put one out on our coffee table and one on our kitchen table or on the little kids table that lived in our family room for a while.  The coffee table tray would have things like sensorial or early learning type activities.  The kitchen table one was usually messier or food related. I saw Montessori trays as a way of strewing.  My kids loved it.  I am a very cluttery, disorganized housekeeper, but by the grace of God, one summer I focused on getting the materials for much of these trays usually via garage sales and the like.  Or I made things at home.  There were a couple of things I actually ...

I was involved with The Jason Project back when my now 28 year old daughter was 10 or 12.  I was introduced to it by another homeschooling mom who was actually a biologist in real life.  She was a secular homeschooler, and only homeschooled for a little while.  But anyway, that's how I found out about it and was so wowed by what a great program it was.  The kids who enroll sign up to do certain experiments along with real scientists.  And then at the end of the year you all meet somewhere depending on where you were in the country.  We met at the National Geographic Society auditorium where you get to actually talk to the scientist either there in person or remotely on a screen. It is great fun and the whole program was so well laid out.  It even included literature, geography, history and of course applied math in the science experiments.  I remember reading Island of the Blue Dolphin when we studied the Channel Islands and Treasure Islan...

Gilgamesh, The Hero by Geraldine McCaughrean - a retelling of the oldest epic we've discovered, from Ancient Ur, The Epic of Gilgamesh. The Child's Bible History by Bishop Knecht - lovely, old fashioned short retellings of Bible stories.  I found that reading language like this in short bits, acclimated my kids (and me!) to reading rich, old fashioned classics. Aesop's Fables - Milo Winter - classic retelling with winsome illustrations. D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths - We loved the audio version of this as well with many actors such as Paul Newman reading the different myths. A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys and Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne- I still have fond memories of sitting out on our newly built screen porch over breakfast on summer mornings reading these stories out loud and the kids were enthralled! Oops!  This is out of chronological order!  I should have listed this after all the Greek Stuff. Alfred Churc...

A couple of times I tried to go all Charlotte Mason and make nature study a dedicated thing where everyone had to have supplies and we'd go nature walking at set times, etc.  It never lasted more than twice.  My kids just balked at it and I just didn't feel like making a disciplinary issue out of it.  In truth, they loved nature when I didn't require things.  They liked going to nature centers and learning about animals and plants.  They liked walking on trails through parks where we spotted various things.  They liked looking up things in nature guides.  What they didn't really like was being forced to sketch things when they didn't feel like sketching.  I myself kept it up for periods of time.  I did like feeling like a Victorian lady, a la Beatrix Potter, sketching birds and trees.  But, like most things, I was too overwhelmed to be consistent with it.  But I enjoyed it when I did do it. A stream where my children loved to pl...

By the teen years our unschooly way of doing things morphed into more formal learning in many ways. Below is just a summary of how we wound up working this particular subject out.  Every kid was a bit different, almost every year.  From my experience, most of my kids took to writing easily, except one (there's always one!) in spite of the fact that they all were dyslexic and late bloomers when it came to reading. Things we continued to do into high school: Family Read Alouds :  Immersion in good and great books from childhood continuing through the first two or three years of high school.  By 12th grade they were too independent and the read aloud naturally fell aside.  But marinating over the many years in eloquent language of these read alouds laid an important and solid foundation.  Some read alouds I explicitedly read for my teens over the years:  The Count of Monte Cristo, Silas Marner, David Copperfield, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Henry V, Lord o...

We were on an Egypt jag.  I was reading The Golden Goblet out loud to everyone.  We listened to Jim Weiss' cd Egyptian Treasures, Mummies and Myths. We watched Joseph and the Amazing Techicolored Dreamcoat and The Prince of Egypt. We'd gotten tons of books out of the library on mummies and pyramid, hieroglyphics and the Nile river. We went to the traveling King Tut exhibit two hours away in Richmond.  (And then again years later when the younger kids were enthralled with Egypt we went to New York City and visited the Metropolitan museum up there.  We went through two distinct Egypt jags, one with the older 3 kids and one with the younger two). I attempted the famous mummified chicken activity of Susan Wise Bauer fame, but alas keeping a chicken in a dark cupboard was fatal to it's success.  Weeks later I realized I'd forgotten about it.  Boy did it stink!  Gag! But mummifying apples was something I could really do.  In fact over th...

The way the science is presented in The Magic School Bus books  is just phenomenal.  It goes deep, it's clear and it's engaging.  It always respects the young student.  It's solid yet fun.  In my opinion, if your kids spend the years between 1st and 8th grade reading and re-reading, watching and re-watching Magic School Bus, they will be absolutely prepared for high school science. We didn't own the whole set of books.  We owned a few and got lots out repeatedly from the library.  Magic School Bus was on PBS for many years during the period my kids were growing up.  I haven't kept track of how to get access to it now.  Here's a link to the DVD set.     Apparently, you can watch them on Netflix.   Pardon my ignorance, I hardly do anything with Netflix or whatever anymore.  I watch TCM if I want to watch a movie and if I want a little screen time, I watch my homesteading videos on youtube!  I haven't caught up with...

Hands down this was the best thing we ever listened to in the car as we drove hither and yon to grocery stores, co-ops, mass, playdates and doctors' appointments.  My kids learned their multiplication tables pretty painlessly this way.  While this might not have cinched the deal in terms of automatic recall as fast as split lightning, it got us about 85% of the way.  To get the rest of the way we quizzed each other.  All this takes time.  My goal was for my kids to have them down by the time pre-Algebra rolled around.  Four out of five kids were good with this.  As I mentioned in a previous post, my poor youngest daughter just tuned out with math.  It made her brain freeze up.  She developed an awful dread of it.  So she's just had to put her head down and push her way through.  Fortunately, she's talented in other ways; she's a really gifted writer and she has a gorgeous singing voice.  So in the end it's all good.  N...

I really loved the Charlotte Mason quote that "education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life."  It made me think about how to create home that provided such an atmosphere, discipline and life.  Already, though, when my kids were very young, I was providing a home atmosphere that stimulated learning without me even thinking about it.  We went to the library often and read books.  We kept books on lower shelves or in one of those plastic milk crates, so that they could look at them when they wanted.  I bought those magnetic letters to go on the fridge so they could play with them while I was busy in the kitchen.  We got a globe to put in our family room so we could refer to it when wondering about oceans and countries.  When my kids drew a picture, we'd hang up on the wall somewhere.  So quite naturally, the home's atmosphere developed one that encouraged learning. With unschooling, you can just take it to the next level intentionally by usi...