athelas

I have been trying to think through my blogging plans for this year and since this is my spot for thinking things through, I decided to give it a try. Daniel Siegel says in the book The Developing Mind that the left brain is responsible for making sense out of things — making experience flow [...]

Recently I have been feeling guilty about continually inflicting my boring journalling on the homeschooljournal community. On the other hand, the nice thing about blogs is that no one HAS to read it. I have been trying to decide whether to change my mode of record-keeping for the summer. There is this article on Unschooling [...]

Aidan was so focused at speech therapy today. He did a categorization game with magnets — food, animals, transportation, clothes, and home. The SLP phased really gracefully from giving him choices between two categories — is the apple a food or an animal? — towards letting him pick them out himself as he got to [...]

When I feel logistically disoriented, I make an organizing book. It really seems to help get me back on the ground. Around Christmas-time, I read a lot about Visual Spatial learners and learned a lot about the way I think. One thing that helped was realizing that I don’t move well through time sequence. I [...]

I think I will start a tradition of saving Fridays for an assessment of the past week.   Today was pretty much like all the other days in our week.   Usually we have Homeschool Stations of the Cross but this month it hasn’t happened because of illnesses and weather.  Once again that was true of this [...]

Have you read Cushla and her Books? It is about a disabled child who was read to by her parents and overcame some significant limitations through her relationship with books. The author’s depiction of Cushla’s response to different books at different developmental levels is perceptive and thought-provoking. (I think it was her grandmother, a reading [...]

Last night we got snow!  So that was the first-priority experience of the day — all of them wanted to be out in it.   For some reason, perhaps the colder weather which makes the house feel cozy and closed-in, I have been in an organizational mood.   So I organized part of my curriculum [...]

I am trying to be a bit more structured about keeping records, while hopefully keeping the balance of freedom and opportunity.    (By the way I really like JoVE’s post on Don’t Do It All, Just Good Enough and am saving it as a reminder along with Morgan‘s post about The Paradox of Choice) . [...]

Quick list of some of the record-keeping forms I like — I am drawn to these like a moth to a flame.   They don’t work for me that well if I overdo it, but indulging in my addiction every once in a while helps me jumpstart my organization.  So here’s a group of my [...]

Sean – near the end of book 5 Key to Algebra – started reading Story of the Church –read chapter 4 of Our Life in the Church – continues Latin vocabulary. – rereading Lord of the Ring trilogy, Outlaws of Ravenhurst and Father Finn books. Kieron – on chapter 8 in Saxon 65 – also [...]