The idea of setting a pile of sticks and logs on fire appeals to every kid who visits our farm. If we asked kids to walk through the forest and pick up the sticks so we can clean things up, the kids would get distracted. They would make guns and swords, they would look at caterpillars in the grass, they might even wander out of the forest completely. But if they get to light stuff on fire, they work hard. Kids love a good bonfire.
If you can afford to deal with your kids in the summer, then you can afford to homeschool. The collective vision we have for our kids in the summer is swimming and reading and exploring with sweaty faces and dirty feet. This is, of course, free. And requires only that an adult be there for a refill on lemonade or a skinned knee. Read more
This video, from HelloFlo is the most exciting, inspiring thing I’ve ever seen about getting your period. I just loved it.
I showed it to my sons because I thought: wow, this is the best sex ed class ever. I wanted to buy every girl I know a package from HelloFlo—but I think it’s probably better from a parent. Read more
The end of the school year is recital time for cello kids, which means that we can’t just go to Chicago twice a week for cello lessons because my younger son has all different kinds of recitals throughout the month; orchestra recital and chamber music recital and individual recitals and the list goes on. So we ended up spending four days in a row in a hotel. Read more
At first when you take kids out of school you get scared that you won’t be able to teach them what they need. After a while, you realize they were learning nothing that they needed in school anyway, so how can you go wrong? Read more
Once a person turns 25, the most predictive factor in how successful they’ll be at work is how well they’re able to surround themselves with mentors. Which means that people need to develop the skill of getting mentors during their school years. Unfortunately, the best ways to learn these skills for getting a mentor are completely impossible to learn in regular school. Read more
My kids each have their own laptops. And they have a desktop, because sometimes they need a Mac for what they want to do, and their laptops are PCs. They also have an iPhone.
You may think this is extreme, but this electronics bonanza is a small price to pay so I can work during the day and homeschool my kids. This means there are no fights over whose turn it is on the computer, there are no meltdowns because there’s a game that is only for a PC, and there are no car trips where I am doing a coaching call and the kids are screaming in the background; they are watching something. Anything. Read more
So many people tell me that they send their kids to school so they meet a wide range of people. The problem with that idea is that kids do not learn open-mindedness by going to school because school can’t have a ratio of thirty independent thinkers to one teacher. It would be chaos. Here’s how really to teach open mindedness to kids. Read more
I was reading through a collection of articles defending conventional school, and I was stunned by this one, in Consider Magazine. Because it says that education is not about accumulating facts but accumulating habits. I was so happy to read this because it gave me a new reason to homeschool. Read more
