NOTE: Lucy is now in the 11th grade. She has been homeschooled for most of her school life. She was asked to provide a writing sample for a class she's petitioning to get into. As someone who stares at blank pages hoping and praying for inspiration to come, I totally enjoyed this. I think you will, too. (She wants to be a published author one ...
Homeschooling
The Star-Spangled Banner
Today's History Lesson for Your Edification: There was a young and deeply religious lawyer by the name of Francis Scott Key, who had a well-established law practice in Georgetown, near Washington, D.C. Although he was opposed to the War of 1812, he had a deep love for his country and served in the Georgetown Field Artillery in 1813. He ...
SmART Cuban
I have times when I feel inadequate to homeschool my kids. Not that I can't do stuff, I totally know I can. It's just that I've never been much of an academic.I'm more of the right brain, emotionally driven, wow-what-a-great-color artistic type. And I can do a lot of stuff, except maybe algebra and seriously, name five people ...
Misspellers of the World: UNTIE!
When I started the first grade here in the U.S. I had only been in this country for six months. We were still trying to get used to life in America and spoke only Spanish at home. (That rule carried on for as long as I can remember.) My English at that point was only what I had gleaned from watching Captain Kangaroo ("El Capitán ...
Capturing their imaginations
Education at home is not me filling my children's heads with facts as much as it is me "teaching" them how to learn.My educational goals for them have more to do with getting them to love learning as opposed to filling their heads with facts they can parrot back to me immediately but not retain in the long run. Today we visited the ...
Best of Both Worlds
WARNING: A little bit of a homeschool rant coming up.... I'm always a surprised that when people discover that we homeschool our children they ask two primary questions.You would think the questions would have to do with the actual mechanics of doing school at home, but they don't. (I know. It's shocking to me, too.) If you ...
How to Cha-Cha
You know those uber-dorky people who have a dictionary and an atlas sitting near the dinner table so that they can look stuff up when they start arguing during dinner about ways to pronounce words, or the capital of someplace, or what exactly a rhombus is? We are those people. By the way... In geometry a rhombus or rhomb is a quadrilateral whose ...
Learning to do advanced geometry
One of the beautiful things about home education is that I get to learn stuff alongside my kids. Seriously, I think back to when I was in high school and learning Algebra and Geometry. Well, "learning" might be a bit of an exaggeration. I showed up. I kind of did what I was told to do. I parroted answers that I had ...
Pure Imagination
This was a magical weekend for my son, Jonathan (the 13 year old). He actually became Willy Wonka. Our homeschool drama group put on the play/musical Willy Wonka Jr. No, seriously. He wore the purple coat and the trademark top hat in a remarkably comfortable manner. He wielded the glass-top cane as if he had been doing it all his young ...
The view from the cheap seats
While he's on stage rehearsing, I'm still painting and touching-up sets and helping to transform a rented hall into a "world of pure imagination." I am completely content to sit back here and do what I do to make all of them look good. To pull off this (or any) production it takes an amazing group of people. ...
