our dozen beautiful feet

A couple of years ago, I started digging into how to teach my kids to really understand literature.  Luke was finishing sixth grade and had read a lot of great books on his own.  But we hadn't done much with literary analysis, or real literature.  He'd mostly read classics for kids or historical fiction to bring his history studies to life.  As we moved into middle school, I was trying to figure out the best way to tackle the Great Books.  I started out looking for the perfect curriculum to guide us through the Great Books, to provide us with a reading list and the right questions to think about. I downloaded samples and made book lists, compared book lists, re-arranged book lists. I thoroughly examined Veritas Press Omnibus, Tapestry of Grace, Ambleside Online, Classical Conversations, Old Western Culture, Beautiful Feet, Sonlight, Memoria Press, Excellence in Literature, Schole Academy, www.classical-homeschooling.org.   With a few exceptions, I felt like most of these wer

A little over a year ago, I posted an essay I had written for The Atrium class I was taking through the Circe Institute on the seven liberal arts.  Our fall semester was spent taking a close look at the history of education and the first three arts, known as the Trivium.  That essay is here . I've been meaning to follow that up with some thoughts on the Quadrivium.  It's been more of a challenge than I anticipated. After reading Beauty for Truth's Sake (twice), The Liberal Arts Tradition (three times) and listening to Andrew Kern wax eloquent on the quadrivium for about 16 weeks, I feel like I know just enough to know that I know nothing. Over the past 40 years, the renewal of classical education has done a lot of really great work and made some wonderful discoveries about true education.  There's been a lot of great discovery and reconstruction of ideas in a modern context specifically related to the Trivium arts.  A quick search of "classical curricul

I'm sure we've all found ourselves in situations beyond our control that are surprising, frustrating, discouraging and more.  I've been processing this for myself as I walk through an unexpected situation, and I'm trying to figure out how to navigate it. (I know you're all thinking right now this is going to be about coronavirus. It's not at all...) After spending seven significantly lonely years in India, finding tight, close-knit community was really important to us when we returned. I worked hard the first couple of years here in the US to identify other people, specifically homeschoolers, looking for that. And then I worked really hard to build a homeschool community.  We started with about six families, and a core group of six fourth graders starting out with ancient history projects, Latin for Children A and Writing & Rhetoric together.   That was five years ago.  We've been meeting for five years!  Those little fourth graders are fini