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 l...

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...

Last spring,  I went to the Great Homeschool Convention in Fort Worth, TX with a big question. For a couple of years, I had been studying the liberal arts on my own. I'd read pretty widely and thought I understood the first three arts, the trivium.  As I began to try to understand the quadrivium, I had read The Liberal Arts Tradition by Clark and Jain, as well as Beauty for Truth's Sake by Stratford Caldecott. I still didn't even begin to understand what the quadrivium was about. I went to the conference ready to ask people for their thoughts on how to teach the quadrivium. I left pretty unsatisfied. I got varying answers from "teach sol-fa for music" to "let them take a drafting class" to "teach them what home means."  I knew I would not make any progress at this point without a guide.   A few weeks later, I heard that a new class was being offered by the CiRCE Institute. It would be The Atrium with Andrew Kern on the seven liber...