This past school year, parents of 5th graders at our local elementary school — including Adam and me — were invited to a Zoom call wherein we could preview the 5th grade puberty lesson. The school nurse would be teaching the material at a later date, and parents had the […]
Over dinner this week, Adam and I were talking about the death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, may her memory be for a blessing, and the vacancy on the Supreme Court. Elizabeth asked, “Was Ruth on the School Committee?” (There was a vacancy on our local School Committee recently.) Thereupon began […]
I think there’s been a creative homeschooling mom inside me for a while, trying to get out. Jews divide the Torah into 54 portions, and 1 portion (called a parasha) is read aloud in the synagogue each week. (The Jewish calendar is lunisolar — the number of weeks in a […]
Following my 3-part post about why my children aren’t in Jewish day school (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), readers may be wondering how we manage their Jewish education. In many ways, life in our home provides an immersive, informal Jewish education — reciting Shema before going to sleep, giving […]
I have been stewing about the seeming lack of a strong evidence base supporting the Common Core writing standards (see this post). In my search for answers, I came across the work of Prof. Steve Graham at Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University. He’s an expert in […]
This week in History and Literature, we’re studying Megalithic Europe (4500-1200 BCE). Among the questions we’re asking: Who built Stonehenge? How? Why? I thought it would be fun to take a field trip to “America’s Stonehenge,” a site in Salem, NH claiming to be “the oldest man-made construction in the […]
I don’t remember having formal grammar instruction in school. I definitely never diagrammed a sentence. I guess I abstracted grammatical principles from the books I read and the educated, native English speakers who comprised my social world. That, and my parents corrected my grammar. (“Hey Dad, can I…?” “May I.” […]
In this week’s “picture study,” we studied our 3rd and final painting by Botticelli: I chose this painting because it lives a 45-minute drive from our house at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. It wasn’t until it came time to teach the painting that it occurred to me that the […]
Our homeschool curriculum tracks fairly closely with the recommendations in The Well-Trained Mind. My favorite thing about this approach is what Karen Glass would call its “synthetic” nature — presenting related ideas across curricular areas and learning with multiple modalities. Each year, the history and literature curricula focus on 1 […]
This week in History and Literature, we studied the first civilizations: Sumer and Akkad (5000-1600 BCE). After reading the appropriate page in our Kingfisher History Encyclopedia, David and Elizabeth created the timeline that they will fill in with important people, events, and civilizations over the course of the year. It’s […]