our dozen beautiful feet

I'm a planner. I like to have a plan. I'm slightly obsessed with curriculum research. Lucky for me I'm really also obsessed with a classical education for my kids (and me), which narrows down my potential curricula to research.  The past five years, I've looked at almost everything out there to find just what will provide us with the most richly restful, and diligently delightful education.  My oldest child is officially starting high school in just four weeks. I have worked the past two years to come up with a solid plan that leaves as little room for discontent, guessing, and changes as possible.  Dr. Perrin outlines some problems with the frenetic pace of high school for a lot of students in this article and urges us to a measured approach instead.  In conference talks over the past two years, I've heard him prescribe his solution (though he's never written another article outlining it), and here it is.   He suggests that to give our high school students a f...

As we're only two weeks from our start to school year, it's time for my Spero Academy Curriculum Picks post for 2020-2021!  I really, really love planning for our studies! :)  Upper School: Luke and Kiryn are 13 and 15.  They are doing the exact same courses this year, which will count for full high school credits for Luke as a freshman, and maybe also for Kiryn. I don't know that I want her graduating a year early, but it might be an option depending on what her immediate plans are.  I've tried really hard to reach for multum, non multa: much, not many. I want us to go deep and read rich things. I want there to be time to live fully too. So for the next four years through high school credits, we are focusing on the liberal arts. So our categories of studies are:  -Mathematics -Natural Sciences -Great Books -Latin -Logic-->Rhetoric -Music So here's our picks!  -Mathematics: VideoText Complete Algebra I wrote in my reviews for last year all about the majo...

Just a few weeks ago, I posted about how I really do believe in the mentor model of education and that's convicted me to keep going through high school with home educating my kids. But we are in the midst of one of the most intense social and medical global crises of the past century.   Our whole lives are shut down and everything is turned on its head, including education. I've seen lots of posts and articles on how families are reacting to this downtime, and it's mostly been positive. Kids are behaving better. Parents are less stressed. People are eating together. There is no rushing from one activity to the next. Kids are actually less bored and more happy. I really hope all of this makes all of us take stock of how our lives had run away from us, like an out-of-control horse with us just hanging on for dear life, not sure how to stop it. I hope this experience gives us permission and confidence to say "no" in days to come so as to preserve a little bit of...

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 curri...

Every spring since 2017, I've made the trek to Fort Worth to attend the Great Homeschool Convention, pretty much solely to sit in on the classical education track and investigate curricula at the vendor booths.  It has grown me so much and being able to speak personally to people like Dr. Christopher Perrin, Carol Reynolds, Andrea Lipinski, Adam Andrews and Andrew Kern has been challenging, formative, and inspiring in many ways. These conferences keep me going! For various reasons, I had decided not to go this spring.  But, thanks to coronavirus, the entire conference moved online! The past three days, I've sat in the comfort of my own bed and had the privilege of listening to these wise people, and being challenge and inspired for the coming school year. I have a composition book that has become my "GHC Notebook." I've used it exclusively for taking notes at GHC conferences the past four years. Yesterday after the conference, I flipped back through it to see...