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Registration for Charlotte Mason Boot Camp is now open! We’re limiting the summer session to 60 slots, so don’t procrastinate. Registration closes Wednesday, June 12, 2019 at midnight whether we’re full or not because I’m heading to GHC Ontario. ♥
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Speaking of Great Homeschool Conventions, the Ontario Schedule is live now. Please note: one of my sessions was accidentally not color coded. If you want to come — or send your friends — to my Start Here talk (which is similar to the talk I’ve been giving for years, but I reworked it this year so it’s also a bit new), make sure you notice that it’s Thursday, June 13th at 4pm.
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We began three new read alouds this week!
A-Age-Fourteen chose The Man Who Was Thursday by GK Chesterton for our whole-family read aloud time. She was very insistent that her dad would like it and so if here little brother didn’t, he’d survive. Which he has, so far. We’re only a few chapters in, but it’s Chesterton, so the writing is fabulous.
It was my turn to choose for our lunch read aloud, and I chose Straw into Gold by Gary Schmidt. I’d never read it before, but I can’t resist a good fairy tale retelling, and someone I trust declared this one good. Before we began, of course, by reading the tale of Rumplestiltskin out of our Grimm’s collection.
For one of our summer morning Circle Time selections, I chose Talk to Me by Dean Nelson. Every time I have a child enter the teen years, I get questions about how to have a conversation. I decided to head my younger two off at the pass (and benefit all four children) with a book that will help them ask better questions — which should mean it helps them become better conversationalists.
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It’s time to help one of our own. I don’t usually ask people to donate to things because I know that most of you already have a lot of places where you give — your churches, your missionaries, etc. But if you have anything extra to give, today I ask you to give to my friend Phyllis Hunsucker.
Phyllis is one of my fellow Auxiliary Board members at AmblesideOnline, and she was our (Q-Age-Twelve and me) roommate at AO Camp this year. If you’ve ever read a PR article for free on the AO site, it’s probably because of Phyllis; she’s been organizing the typing project there for years.
Phyllis has always quietly given to the Charlotte Mason community, and now she needs *us* to give to her. You see, when she returned home from Camp, she was unexpectedly diagnosed with metastatic melanoma. Phyllis is a missionary living in Ukraine with her family. There is a good treatment option for her in Kiev, which is a 9-hour train ride away from home, but it’s very expensive. Without it, her prognosis is not good.
Will you please donate? There are two options. One is using this Go Fund Me fundraiser. The other is to send a check to:
Grace Bible Church,
8820 Idlewild Rd,
Charlotte, NC 28227
(Just please add a note that the check is for Will & Phyllis Hunsucker. Contributions through GBC are tax deductible and are deposited directly to their bank account.)
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Yes, we finished the Flourish Charlotte Mason Homeschool Annual Review this week. But also yes, it’s still for sale. Flourish will be available until the end of June, at which time it’s going away for a while. It’s not disappearing permanently, but we won’t be selling it all the time. It’ll be back in late October for folks who end their school years that time of year.
This means if you want to benefit from Flourish this summer, you need to grab it while you still can!
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This week’s links collection:
- Mueller probe witness George Nader charged with trafficking child pornography from Fox News
- Please tell me how so many pedophiles end up in positions of power! Ugh.
- And apparently this isn’t his first time offense: “Nader pleaded guilty to a federal child-pornography charge in Virginia in 1991.”
- The World Beyond Your Head review – philosophical inquiry that demands your attention from The Guardian
- Someone recommended this book to me last week, and then I read this review. Looks promising! (It’s on my wish list.)
- Love Is Not a Feeling from First Things
- The author of this article is preaching at my church on Sunday morning! I’m pretty stoked about that…
- Here is the most important point in this article: “…it becomes clear that the LGBTQ moment is not merely a revolution in what sex means; it is a revolution in what it means to be human.”
9 Comments
What did you think of Talk to Me? I have a teen who feels like one of the roots of her social anxiety is that she never knows what to talk about when she’s with people, and I’m wondering if this book could be helpful.
I feel like I can’t say quite yet. We’re reading through it really slowly, one small section per day, so we’re only about halfway through. Today we began a chapter that says that good interviewers have to be good conversationalists, so I assume he’s going to give some conversation coaching, but haven’t read it yet.
I also have on my stack The Social Skills Guidebeook. We haven’t started yet but it *might* be more of what you are looking for? Not sure.
Actually, that guidebook looks like just what she’s been asking for. I’ll have to check it out.
I know you’ve explained it before, but could you direct me to the post in which you explain your varied read aloud times? (Whole-family, lunch, etc.) I am going to need to alter a few things next year and a re-read would be helpful…
I can’t seem to find one … I wonder if that was from Instagram? I know I wrote something somewhere!
The basic principle I used is to have a book going with each group of people. So, for example, on youth group nights I have a book going with the kids too young to go. That sort of thing. A subsidiary principle that I sometimes use is to have read aloud assigned to certain times. I use this especially in the summers. So we have a breakfast book and a lunch book, etc.
Thank you so much for linking to dear Phyllis’s fundraiser. Some of your readers have donated. ❤️ #helpthehunsuckers
Now we need to keep the momentum going!
Mathew Crawford’s other book looks interesting, too:
Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. But I’m behind in my book stack, so I’ll put it on my wishlist and wait.
I am looking forward to watching/listening to the replay of session 2 of Flourish this afternoon. I’ve had to put it off due to other commitments, but I’m getting to it. I need help after the rather negative interview with my son. :::sigh::: but maybe its negative b/c he’s 8? And he was heading off to camp for a week the next day? I might need to re-interview later in the summer.
I’m so envious that you have Carl Trueman preaching at your church on Sunday! (or whatever the non-sinful version of envy is. 😀 )
I’m thrilled! He’s speaking at Reformation Bakersfield this weekend, so E-Age-Seventeen gets to hear him tonight, and then tomorrow my husband will, too. But I have to stay home and prep for GHC, so I’m so happy we have Sunday as well.