A Brave Writer's Life in Brief

Recently on Brave Learning…

Home-learning

Let’s change the name from homeschooling to home-learning.

I’m all for innovation! We’ve got micro schools, online classes, and a huge array of co-op options in the homeschool space. Homeschooling is having a moment!

In this big shift, I want to be sure we remember one of the golden purposes of home education: we’re not just moving the location of the education, we’re also changing how that education is experienced by the child. 

This morning I stumbled on an article I used as research for one of my books. It’s an academic paper studying the effects of play and joy on learning in Finland. One of the initial assertions is that “emotions in the school world have been studied surprisingly little.” Anxiety and negative emotions get some attention, but happiness? Forget about it.

Yet joy, it turns out, is tied to a child’s experience of success. Joy in learning is the subject of this paper.

My tag line, “Joy is the best teacher” is validated by the research! [Keep reading]

Subscribe to Brave Learning on Substack where we chat, discuss, problem-solve, and create together. Here’s what you can expect: weekly themed content, freewriting prompts, and a podcast for kiddos called Monday Morning Meeting (first 6 are free)! 

Recently on Brave Learning…

Plan Their Happiness

not only their academics…

So you’ve got your homeschool planner in front of you. You’re looking at the stack of materials you bought for the coming school year. You’ve got a calculator on the table so you can figure out what pace you must work through all those pages to wind up at the end of the year with completed programs.

Homeschool planning: calendar and program are merged into a sequence of allotted materials for 180 days for each child.

Is that what you envision?

Before you go to the trouble, let me ask you a question: In all your planning, have you also planned for your child’s happiness? [More]

Subscribe to Brave Learning on Substack where we chat, discuss, problem-solve, and create together. Here’s what you can expect: weekly themed content, freewriting prompts, and a podcast for kiddos called Monday Morning Meeting (first 6 are free)! 

Recently on Brave Learning…

The Power of Talking

Why talking is so important to writing.

We want words, lots of them, churned out on reassuring sheets of lined paper, with curlicue cursive ‘r’s and proper punctuation reflecting both the demands of syntax and emotion. When the words fail, we try to coax them out.

What sometimes gets missed in this process is the power of talking. Speaking leads to writing more than any other skill. Getting words formed in the head and then out through the mouth leads to better writing. It doesn’t even matter if they are organized or concise or logical. What matters is the process of dredging them up, giving them room to develop in the mind and then speaking them through the lips by way of the tongue. [More]

Subscribe to Brave Learning on Substack where we chat, discuss, problem-solve, and create together. Here’s what you can expect: weekly themed content, freewriting prompts, and a podcast for kiddos called Monday Morning Meeting (first 6 are free)!