Archive for November, 2021

Mark Your Calendars: Cyber Monday & Holiday Shoppe 2021

Brave Writer

Cyber Monday is around the corner!

The Brave Writer elves are gearing up for the holiday season by offering a Big Discount for Cyber Monday!

30% discount on ALL Brave Writer products purchased in our store (not classes) for 24 hours. 

Sale starts on Monday November 29 at 12:00 AM (Eastern) and ends 12:00 AM (Eastern) on Tuesday November 30.

Holiday Shoppe

Tuesday, November 30 we’ll open our annual Holiday Shoppe!

Get ready for a slew of Brave Writer, Brave Learner Home, and Raising Critical Thinkers swag for the fan in your life (or maybe even you!).

The Holiday Shoppe will remain open through midnight EST Dec. 31, 2021.

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Brave Learner Home: Project Time!

Brave Writer

Curriculum too predictable?
Kids want something different?
In search of hands-on learning for an active, artistic, or engineering kid?
Need something tangible to show progress?

Here’s the secret sauce: Project Time! 

Project Time helps parents find productive space between their own agenda for homeschooling and following a child’s interests. 

Dedicated project time (and space!) creates opportunities for our children to build their self-awareness as kids explore:

  • What excites or interests me? 
  • What does meaningful work feel like to me? 
  • What are my standards for what I am creating or doing?
  • How do I manage all the parts of this project? 

Leslie Martino, homeschool coach and mother of four, joins us to share specific tips gleaned from her experience helping her kids and other families learn with projects.

Brave Learner Home

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Friday Freewrite: Argumentative Character

Friday Freewrite

Choose a fictional character from a book. Have them argue with the author about a character trait or plot point (or both!).

New to freewriting? Check out our online guide.

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Podcast: The Culture of Parenting, Marriage & the Mamasphere with Anne Helen Petersen

Podcast Anne Helen Petersen

The hardest part of being a homeschooling parent in this era is the pressure of being caught smack dab in the middle of idealism and the Mamasphere.

Anne Helen Petersen writes the substack newsletter Culture Study, which I’ve followed for quite some time. She’s a cultural commentator and journalist, and is the author of four books, most recently Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home, which comes out in December 2021.

We discuss the influence of the Mamasphere and why mothers trust the advice of other moms over experts or professionals. We also delve into the topic of divorce and the concept of Red and Blue Marriage, sharing examples from my life as well as Anne’s.

Show Notes

The Influence of the Mamasphere

Interestingly enough, Momfluencers – or mom influencers – are garnering more attention and, well, influence, than political pundits or even scientists. The idea of what good parenting looks like is constantly evolving, and so much of that is swayed by Instagram and other social media platforms. 

Part of that is due to an interesting dichotomy: Moms value the knowledge and expertise of other moms, but that knowledge is culturally devalued. That makes it hard to legitimize that information, and makes mothers more willing to trust other mothers instead of experts or professionals. We explore this phenomenon, why it exists, and what we can do about it culturally.

Red and Blue Marriage and the Disruption of the Nuclear Family

Instagram has become the PR firm for the nuclear family. The extra sheen of gloss makes the traditional family model seem far more perfect than it actually is. Many people in my generation grew up under that idea as well – that the nuclear family model was the way to raise a family. Anne wrote an article about the concept of Red and Blue Marriage, terminology coined by legal scholars June Carbone and Naomi Cahn.

What began to happen when the children of parents married or divorced in the 70s or 80s is a divide between the views of marriage. Children of divorced parents tend to wait longer and get married with intention. And this begins to diverge when you look at income rates, where the middle class is getting married later and staying married longer, while lower income families see the divorce rate go up – or they don’t get married at all.

Anne and Julie discuss the way these views impact today’s home educators, and in fact, women everywhere.

For more deep thoughts like this on parenting, marriage, education, and more, be sure to subscribe to Anne’s Substack, Culture Study.

Resources

Connect with Julie

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There’s No Endpoint to Learning

No Endpoint to Learning

Learning doesn’t have an endpoint—you know that because you are still learning almost as much as your kids are while you homeschool them!

We start homeschooling because we want our kids to love learning.

We often keep homeschooling because WE fall in love with learning.

It’s a paradox, right? Maybe you thought you hated history in school and now you can’t get enough of it. A couple decades or four under your belt, and suddenly ancient Egyptian embalming methods are riveting!

  • I never read Jane Austen in high school or college. It was a thrill to discover her charming wit in my thirties.
  • I discovered that multiplication (the word) comes from “multiple” which is precisely the reason I didn’t learn how to multiply as a kid. I somehow missed the point—that each times table described multiples of the same number, added together in a shortcut! Thank you Cuisinaire rods.
  • I became an expert at naming our backyard birds, and we had so much fun making homemade suet.
  • I can’t believe that I actually saw Saturn, the real planet with the real ring around it, through my own son’s telescope!
  • Never have I been more interested in what comes out of an animal than when we dissected owl pellets.

And since these experiences have been as meaningful to me as they were to my kids (maybe moreso, if I’m honest), then I don’t have to worry about my kids and what they are learning now. Sure, there’s the school-subject dating introduction service I provide them (making matches, hoping they swipe right). But there will be so much more left for them to learn after they leave home, on their own time table, perhaps even at the hands of my grandchildren.

Lifelong learning means your whole life, not just until eighteen. We, who homeschool, know this in our bones. We are the lucky ones.

This post is originally from Instagram and @juliebravewriter is my account there so come follow along for more conversations like this one!

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