Knitting As Rome Burns

We made fossils today! BYL Prehistory unit. A photo posted by Annie Pizana (@annie_zp) on May 30, 2015 at 7:18am PDT We are doing the Build Your Library Pre-History unit over our short summer break to introduce us to what next school year will be like. We are not completing every single activity, just trying to have fun learning and dip our toes in a new kind of daily rhythm. We had fun with the fossil activity, and those are still sitting on the window sill, getting checked daily. One of the things I am enjoying is the freedom we have to take what we find useful and leave what we don't. G and C are upper elementary, so we created Books of Centuries in the Charlotte Mason style, and added the prehistory timeline pages to the front of those. But that activity on top of the field guide activity was a little too much, so we decided as a group that the field guide was not serving us and just stopped doing it. Such a little thing, but a powerful symbol of how we ar...

John Oliver on Standardized Testing He makes some good points. Absolutely nsfw, but that is one of the reasons I love his show.

I've always wanted to homeschool, since before J started kindergarten, but it was too expensive and I was not sure we could handle it. K12 has been a real eye opener of what I can handle and how they learn best, but we are all unhappy with their system and do not want to use the public schools where we live now. So I kept looking and found the most wonderful sources. At the end of this year we will switch to a blend of Build Your Library and Ambleside Online. Thinking back I am heartsick at lost time when this beautiful free resource was available and I had no idea. It is hard to let go. Ableside Online is based on the methods of Charlotte Mason, so I started reading her books which has made me a little sad about my own childhood. Not only the beautiful classic books I missed out on, but the lessons she considered crucial. One habit she instructs parents to focus on is redirecting negative thoughts so that children learn to control them. I think I would be a completely diffe...