I took this photo when I was sitting in the audience for a weekly recital. We were waiting for the piano accompanist. I was so nervous. I wanted to walk up to my son and fuss over him. Remind him to use vibrato. Make sure his A string was in tune.
This is a guest post from Judy Sarden, a homeschooling mother of two, business advisor, writer and attorney. This is a photo of her son. After leaving my job to homeschool my children, I hit a paradox in black middle-class culture. No one is questioning my decision to homeschool. Rather, almost everyone has acknowledged the horrible state of public […]
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 […]
NPR did a segment on the book Secrets of Happy Families, by Bruce Feilier. His premise is that we should look at what happy families do and then copy that for our own families. Feilier says that happy families have shared values and spend time together expressing those values in their actions.
I am a person who prefers to take social and political action by just earning more money and donating it to people who take social and political action more directly. I’m way more comfortable just earning money. But as a homeschooler, I’m out of my comfort zone as an indirect activist every time I go […]
We are most likely to read emails that we receive on Wednesday. Monday we have too many, and we need to catch up. By Wednesday we are caught up and by Thursday we are already trying to get everything finished so we can leave early on Friday.
I read a lot about how to give praise to children because so many child prodigies grow up to be disappointed, depressed low achievers. A lot of that sadness is a result of people telling the kid over and over again how great they are. It robs the child of incentive to do the hard work […]
I took a bunch of photos waiting for the doctor to tell my son that he’s fine. (The kids are always fine until I don’t take them to the doctor and then they are deathly ill and I’m a bad mom. But that’s another post.) Melissa cropped the picture so that I look at it […]
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 […]
My oldest son has autism. So do I, which means I have very little empathy —common with autism—but I have a lot of empathy for him not wanting to be in social situations, because I don’t want to be there either.