Published

Subpar Parks

“One star reviews don’t tell the whole story,” is the reminder I get when I read Amber Share’s delightfully clever book, “Subpar Parks.”  The project started as a joke about the negative reviews people put online about National Parks.  Amber took her graphic design skills and created artful hand-lettered travel-poster style images, poetically enshrining the …

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Teaching AP This Fall

I hope that my article in the Fall 2022 edition of “This Old Schoolhouse Magazine” inspires many readers to try teaching an AP class at home this year. I feel like our at-home AP instruction has been the best preparation for college and the best way to focus our high school studies. Though it may …

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Homeschool Mise en Place

The French term mise en place (pronounced meez-ahn-plahs) encompasses the idea of having all of your ingredients, tools and supplies ready to go before you start cooking.  Chefs employ this method to streamline their workstations.  The organizational system of  mise en place is so rigorous that chefs should be able to find the ingredients they …

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The Answer to HOW is YES

Influential Organizational Development leader Peter Block writes about the questions we ask as we begin a journey or pursue a dream.  Forcefully, he teaches, “How is the wrong question.”  He continues, “The rush to a How [question and] answer runs the risk of skipping the profound question: Is this worth doing? And it skirts the …

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Multipliers

Managing a Homeschool experience requires many of the same skills as managing a business.  In her book, Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter, Business management guru Liz Wiseman coined a term to describe effective managers.  She calls them “multipliers.” Simply put, multipliers multiply the intelligence of others around them, enabling people to become …

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Playtime Permutation

Playtime Permutations: A Christmastime (or Anytime!) Tradition One of the reasons I love homeschooling my children is so that they can have the time and shared experiences that will allow them to develop good friendships with each other.  But, since we are home together most days, I find that sometimes I feel like we are …

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Hold On To Your Kids

Canadian psychologist Gordon Neufeld has this to say about the mindset of socialization : “The belief is that socializing—children spending time with one another—begets socialization: the capacity for skillful and mature relating to other human beings.  There is no evidence to support such an assumption, despite its popularity.”  That sounds like the beginning of a …

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Why We Homeschool

Five Reasons Why We Homeschool Love of Learning I want to raise children that say “I love reading” and “I am good at math.”  I want my children to believe that learning happens all the time, not just in the hours at a school desk.  I never want them to ask, “Will this be on …

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