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Reflecting Back on Middle School Home School

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Dear friends, This reflection is bittersweet for me since I officially retired from home schooling this year. I haven't posted on this blog in a few years, and I think this will be my last entry here. I do know that blog is still read, mainly via Google searches on literature studies, so I'm leaving it up as a resource. I was just reminiscing back on home schooling during the middle school years. My first child started 6th grade in 1998 and my tenth (and last) child just finished 6th grade in May.  That's a lot of years with middle school students in the house. My youngest  started public school this month for 7th grade, and is making a good transition. I'm very relieved about that since t his summer I went back to work part time (on a crisis and human services referral phone line). Next month I start seminary full time too, starting out with Church History, Christian Ethics, and Inductive Bible Study (much of which is literary analysis).   A nyway, I was just thinking ...
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Add a Little Adventure to Your Home School

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Add a Little Adventure to Your Home School Life isn't just a matter of fun and games, but a spoonful of sugar sure can help the medicine go down. We can help our children actually  enjoy  the process of doing their work rather than just tolerating it. In the process, they will learn their own lifetime techniques for making tasks interesting.  Middle school kids are naturally inquisitive. This creates big demands as Mom and Dad are barraged with “how” and “why” questions at inopportune moments. Within reason, we should not squelch curiosity, but catapult it into self-motivated learning situations.  Here are some ways to enliven academic pursuits: Hobbies:  Hobbies can provide beautiful balance to a home education program. They offer brain-enriching opportunities to plan projects, select materials, follow patterns and instructions, develop skills, care for equipment and supplies, make useful items, and nurture creativity. You could spend tons of money on this (“I ...
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"Over Utah in January" - Geography in Poetry

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"Over Utah in January"  by Virginia Knowles I am in the sky looking down on Vast speechless stretches of frozen white Curved round and round by Slicing crevices and streams And human roads abandoned though they be Foothills then soaring mountains beyond Majestic tall yet distant small From the sky where I look down                                  Clustering pines (wilderness steeples) Defer to barren ground below Shedding to it cumbering, nurturing snow Upright spires green Evergreen over branches, trunks,  Rough and woody brown Rooted deeply into ascending slope Yet as living arrows aiming high To the sky where I look down Up and over mountain towers, fly Peering through mottled fog outstretched Amid earthy upturned layers, variegated ripples Shadow clouds now upwisping  Sharply angled peaks Oh! These are of no h...
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The Sword of the Spirit: The Story of William Tyndale by Joyce McPherson (A Review)

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I'm so delighted to see a new children's biography by Joyce McPherson, published by Greenleaf Press .   Her newest title is  The Sword of the Spirit: The Story of William Tyndale .   The Reformation Era is my favorite time period to study in World History, and Tyndale's is a fascinating story about the translation of the Bible into English at great peril.   Tyndale  studied Hebrew under Martin Luther, constantly fled persecution by the English government, and was eventually betrayed by a friend, arrested, and executed as a martyr for the gospel in 1536.  His dying prayer? "Lord, open the king of England's eyes..."  Two years later, King James authorized The Great Bible, largely Tyndale's work, for use in the Church of England. I am most familiar with Tyndale through Scott O'Dell's novel The Hawk That Dare Not Hunt by Day , which I've taught as literature in our co-op a few times.    Most of our reading selections this coming school year will ...
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St. Francis of Assisi in History, Current Events, Literature, Writing, Art & Music

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Dear friends, You know by now how I love to integrate English with history!  The 5th-6th graders in our home school co-op are using the Mystery of History Volume 2 text (by Linda Hobar) on the time period of the early church up through the Middle Ages for their history class.  One of the lessons this past week was about St. Francis of Assisi.  I decided to shape my literature and writing assignments around that. In class on Monday, I read the  picture book Saint Francis of Assissi: A Life of Joy by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  There are many pictures books about St. Francis, but this is my favorite, and the author (son of Bobby Kennedy and nephew of President John F. Kennedy) has had a keen personal connection with his subject since childhood.   Charlotte Mason would say that's the best kind of author to read! Our main literature resource this year is The Book of Virtues edited by Dr. William Bennett, so I assigned "The Sermon to the Birds."  Francis is...
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