My wife homeschools our seven-year-old daughter, so I read with sympathy David Mills’ piece in the January issue of First Things on the suspicion he encounters when discussing publicly the homeschooling of his two children. Opting out of the public education system feels a bit like jumping off a moving train. As you tumble down the side of the embankment and struggle to gain your footing, passengers on the still-moving train crane their necks and crowd to the windows to stare at you with wide eyes and slack jaws…. Continue Reading»
We’ve been making great use of this striking coloring book, from the Hillside Education imprint. This isn’t so much a coloring book in the usual sense as simply a book of reproducible coloring pages, which feature intricate stained-glass-effect images of saints for every month of the . . . . Continue Reading »
As I was regaling you all with our booklists the other week, it occurred to me to ask some of my homeschooling friends for theirs, and then to go looking for more. While I don’t think there’s any such thing as “homeschooling culture,” as a unified entity, what I observe among . . . . Continue Reading »
We start Monday, and not a moment too soon, in my view. I’ve spent the last two days scheduling everyone’s reading and other work from now till Christmas, using the lesson-plan feature at Homeschool Reporting, the record-keeping service to which we’ve subscribed since the . . . . Continue Reading »
Forgot one item on the teenager’s reading list for this year: How to Read a Book, by Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren. When I handed her the book, she took one look at the title, laughed, and said, “Don’t you think it’s a little late for that?” . . . . Continue Reading »
Over the summer, as you may remember, I posted lists of my household’s reading here and here. Well, now the last sun of summer has set over the gables here at the House of Curiosities. In actual point of fact, the sun set, as it does every day, over the Aspen Street viaduct to the west of us, . . . . Continue Reading »
I can’t talk about the material culture of religion without, at least sometimes, talking about homeschooling. Of course, all stereotypes aside, homeschooling is not exclusively a religious phenomenon; when we began homeschooling, it was not for religious reasons, but because our oldest . . . . Continue Reading »
