You can eat only salty or sweet foods for a whole year. Which would you choose and why? Then describe what it might be like, 12 months later, to finally taste something other than your pick.
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Archive for February, 2020
Podcast: How Do You Balance Being a Parent and a Teacher?
How do you balance your roles as a parent and a teacher?
There’s a funny thing that happens on the road to becoming a home educator, and it happened to all of us — you were a home educator! Wait, that sentence makes no sense.
Let me help you out.
Remember when your baby was a newborn? Remember that scary feeling when you drove home alone from the hospital? Or perhaps you gave birth at home and suddenly the midwife packed up and LEFT!
That’s an unnerving moment, isn’t it? You are entrusted with that baby’s total care without any training, without certifications. Heck, you need to pass a test to drive a car, but you’re expected to grow a baby from scratch just because you’re called parents?
And so it begins. You become the educator while you are a total novice. You learn as you go and you impart all that wisdom to the baby from feedings to burpings to sleeping on her back.
The way you began is the way you continue and I talk all about it on this week’s podcast!
Listen to the Podcast
Show Notes
Cast your mind back to when you were raising small children. Whether you worked full-time, stayed at home full-time, or something in between, hours of your day were dedicated to parenting that baby. And while you were with that child, you were teaching them to do all of the things that people do: talking, eating, tying shoes, drinking out of a glass without making a mess, going to the bathroom without making a mess, and on and on.
None of these things were on a syllabus. They weren’t scheduled. Some of them weren’t even intentional! When a need arose, you met the need; you used your natural parenting, love, and kind voice to guide your child into the skills they needed to be successful.
(more…)Help Us Choose Books for Our Arrow and Boomerang Programs
I recently invited followers on Instagram to recommend book titles for our Arrow and Boomerang mechanics and literature programs.
Do you know what happened?
Our Brave Writer community recommended fantastic titles!
Some titles were new to us, and some—well, some were titles that we prize so highly we’d already created an Arrow or a Boomerang for them!
You all totally get us!
Below are recommended titles that are already in our collection of 240 single issue Arrows and Boomerangs.
Recommended Titles
- Carry On, Mr. Bowditch by Jean Lee Latham
- Esperanza Rising by Pam Munoz Ryan
- The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
- Wonder by R.J. Palacio
- Echo by Pam Munoz Ryan
- Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor
- The Crossover by Kwame Alexander
Great books, right?
We realized we needed to get the word out about the treasure trove of phenomenal single issues we have available in the shop!
Help us choose titles for our 2020-2021 book list!
When selecting books to read aloud, we (at Brave Writer) follow a key principle:
𝘿𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙞𝙛𝙮
The idea is to lay a feast of ideas (hat tip: Charlotte Mason) before your children, to create opportunities for empathy, to help your children grow in critical thinking, to expand a child’s world, and to entertain! That too.
The goal is to offer a selection of books over a year or several years that is diverse in lots of ways. Keeping this list handy will help you get out of ruts and habits too. When reading gets stale or predictable, shake things up!
Here’s how. Select from these categories:
- 𝗗𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗲 𝗮𝘂𝘁𝗵𝗼𝗿𝘀: all kinds of Englishes, all different backgrounds
- 𝗗𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗲 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀: male and female protagonists, older and younger, varieties of circumstance and worldview
- 𝗗𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗲 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲𝘀: familiar childhood, historical events, natural disasters, humanitarian crises, humor, suspense, fantasy
- 𝗗𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗲 𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗿𝗲𝘀: poetry, prose, nonfiction, graphic novels, comics, plays, short stories, fables
In that spirit, I’d like to invite you to recommend books for our Arrow and Boomerang programs! We’re putting together next year’s lists and we’d love your input.
Hop over to my Instagram post then click reply and let us know if there is a book we should consider for the 2020–2021 list.
Share Titles
We’ll announce the books that made the cut at the end of May!
Are you new to Brave Writer? Learn more about the Arrow and Boomerang writing mechanics and literature guides, and how they fit into the complete Brave Writer program, here.
