How cool is this? Four sisters, all homeschooled, play classical music together as street musicians in Chicago and Milwaukee in order to raise money for expensive music lessons. And, according to the article, they’re good.

My niece wrote me a letter asking some questions about homescholing. She’s hoping to homeschool her first grade son, Parker, this fall, and she has three younger children. Here are my answers to her questions; however, I expect to be asking her advice after next year. Pray for her.

I’m so sorry it has taken me so long to get back to you. We were out of town when your letter arrived, and since I’ve been back I’ve been so busy. I know it’s everybody’s excuse, but I can use it, too, especially when it’s true.

“What curriculum did you use for first grade?”
I can tell you what I used, but a lot depends on where Parker is now academically. To teach my urchins to read, I always used something called Sing, Spell, Read and Write. It’s a phonics, reading, writing, and spelling program, and I’m used to it by now. If Parker is already reading well, he just needs practice. I really like SONLIGHT curriculum; it involves lots of reading out loud and lots of reading for them. However, I wouldn’t start SONLIGHT until he can read unless you want to use their phonics program with which I am unfamiliar. I think you can find SONLIGHT at www.sonlight.com. For math, I use some workbooks called Miquon Math because they’re cheap and kid-friendly. These workbooks cover math through third grade. Oh, you also have to have Cuisenaire rods to go with them. You can purchase both the workbooks and the rods from any homeschool supplier.

“What are daily routines like?”
Daily routines around here involve lots of juggling. I’m trying to keep Zion out of trouble while helping the others with whatever problems they have. Naptime, if you have one is a good time for reading out loud to the older ones. Crock pots are invaluable. My younger children probably spend 1-3 hours total doing school. One hour a day (not necessarily all at the same time) is plenty for a kindergartener or a first grader. After he’s reading, he may want to spend more time reading by himself, and of course, all of them are learning all the time.

“How did you balance?”
Balance, what’s that? Just do the next thing, and try to to do it well. I don’t think I can answer this question. I just keep muddling through.
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I received this email today from Homeschool Legal Defense Association:

Dear HSLDA members and friends:

Please write, e-mail or call now!

Unfortunately, I had to send HSLDA a correction.
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I found this on the Christian Science Monitor blog in reference to something the author saw at a national park mentioning that Teddy Roosevelt was “homeschooled.”

People have been educating their children at home for centuries, but “home-schooling” has a contemporary political edge, and it doesn’t fit the Roosevelts.

Home-schooling is an act against “the establishment,” or at least apart from it. The Roosevelts couldn’t be against “the establishment”; they were the people who established the establishment.

So the term “homeschooled” has political connotations that “tutored” does not? Exactly what political connotations is the author, Ruth Walker, drawing? Could it be the “right-wing, fundamentalist, Republican” stereotype? And was TR himself really an establishment kind of guy? He was rather unorthodox and had a rather unorthodox childhoood as far as I remember. I think TR’s family would have fit in quite well with the homeschoolers I know–except that they (the Roosevelts) were rich and, unfortunately, most of us aren’t.

I read this srticle that appeared in yesterday’s Houston Chronicle, thanks to Daryl Cobranchi (Homeschool and Other Stuff). It leads with the graduation ceremony that I attended last Saturday and then quotes Joanne Juren and Tim Lambert, both of whom are old friends. Unfortunately, the journalist writing the article felt compelled to mention Andrea Yates, too, but overall it’s a positive piece.

I got this link from Daryl Cobranchi at Homeschool and Other Education Stuff. T.C. Pinckney and Bruce Shortt plan to introduce a resolution at the Southern Baptist Convention in Indianapolis next month calling on all Southern Baptist parents to pull their children out of the public schools and give them “a thoroughly Christian education, for the glory of God, the good of Christ’s church, and the strength of their own commitment to Jesus.”
These guys sound serious, and they say they don’t care whether the resolution passes or fails. At least, consideration of such a resolution will force Southern Baptists to think about the issues involved in sending their children to public schools where they are indoctrinated in a secular worldview. I’m going to look up the organization these men are involved with:
“Both Pinckney and Shortt are involved in a ministry called Exodus Mandate, which seeks to educate Christians about the nature of public schools and encourages them to take their children out of that environment.”

I’ve been busy today making up a list of American literature to recommend to my AP US History students next year. I’m telling them that they will probably learn a lot more if they study American Literature and American History together, but I’m just going to give them a recommended list for literature. We’ll be meeting for an hour a week fro the history class, and I’ll be making assignments, giving tests, etc. For the literature part they and their parents will be pretty much on their own. So far my American literature So far I have on the list: William Bradford, Anee Bradstreet, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Peter Cartwright, William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Longfellow, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Booker T. Washington, Stephen Crane, Edward Arlington Robinson, Theodore Dreiser, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, T.S. Eliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay, e.e. cummings, Langston Hughes, Willa Cather. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Ralph Ellison, Malcolm X, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Chaim Potok, Arthur Miller, Thornton Wilder, Harper Lee, Flannery O’Conner, and Annie Dillard. These are probably way too many authors for a high school literature class, but does anyon have any other suggestons? Anybody you think I should leave off the list? Whyy? Any specific suggestions of which stories, novels, or poems by these authors I should suggest?

Now I’m reading a book called Families Writing by Peter R. Stillman. I picked up the book at Half-Price Books when I went there today to get over a fit of total frustration with myself as a parent. I got the book hoping that it would help me with a class I’m planning for the spring in co-op. However, as I read it, I got more and more ideas for our own family. One of those ideas was to start a blog for the family and get everybody writing in it. Maybe it’ll be fun.
From the book:

“Have you ever thought about paying a youngster to write? While that may sound like the very kind of bribery you and every other right-minded parent should oppose, think again: Writrs get paid to write, don’t they? And aren’t we attempting to get family members old and young to perceive themselves as writers? . . . Toby Fulwiller, a friend and college professor well known for his contributions to the teaching of writing, and Laura, his wife, came up with notion that to induce their eleven year old daughter into the habit of regular writing they’d make her an offer she couldn’t possibly refuse: a half hour daily at the word processor, 15 minutes to be spent practicing typing and the other 15 minutes to be devoted to writing about something that happened in her day. Both parents would respond to Anna’s entries. The incentive was money–a raise in allowance from two to four dollars a week. (Had my father thought to offer me a deal like that I’d have written the Great American Novel before I was sixteen.)”

Anyone ready to write a novel?