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Educational Philosophy, Home Education
School is War: Scheduling for Peace Revisited

In the summer of 2013 I wrote a guest post for this blog in which I shared an experiment my family had undertaken the previous school year: I took Nancy Kelly’s admonition to “Keep Cutting Back Until there is Peace in Your Home” to heart and attempted to conform our school day schedule as closely as possible to those used in Charlotte Mason’s classrooms. My blog post generated a lot of questions: Right up front, let me stress that I haven’t Continue Reading…
November 23, 2015
Books & Reading, Mother's Education
Book Discussion 101

Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading!– Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge Before Oprah, even before Mortimer Adler, there were books and people who read and discussed them together. There are neighborhood book clubs, literary societies, library discussion groups and study groups — all formed for different reasons and with varied goals, and there are as many ways to lead book discussions as there are venues, groups and leaders themselves! Yet Continue Reading…
November 6, 2014
Educational Philosophy, Home Education
Myth: Charlotte Mason is child-led.

Type “child-led education” into your online search engine and what do you see? Page after page of articles, blogs, reference works all touting the benefits of allowing a child to determine the direction and intensity of their own education based on their individual interests. And at first glance, it may appear that some of the basic tenets of Charlotte Mason’s philosophy tend in this direction as well. Isn’t her very first principle “Children are born persons” and didn’t she say, Continue Reading…
October 27, 2014
Best of Afterthoughts, Educational Philosophy, Home Education
Secrets from Charlotte Mason on Scheduling for Peace

This time last year my then-10-year-old son was finishing Year 4 of AmblesideOnline’s (AO) stellar curriculum and we were both, quite frankly, fried. Our days began early. We enjoyed a morning time together in which we read from the Psalter, sang our hymn and folksong, read poetry aloud and recited Scripture. So far, so good. Our minds and hearts were full of truth, beauty and goodness. What a great way to start the day! We had breakfast, did chores, and Continue Reading…
June 19, 2014