“[O]rganized games are not play… Boys and girls must have time to invent episodes, carry on adventures, live heroic lives, lay sieges, and carry forts, even if the fortress be an old armchair; and in these affairs, the elders must neither meddle nor make.” —Charlotte Mason

A gentle reminder that free play is essential for children. It’s not a “break” or “recess” or a reward for finishing schoolwork or chores.

Play is THE ESSENTIAL teaching tool the child has at their own disposal.

Let playing children play!

Loosen the schedule so enough time exists for play to begin, continue, and wane without interruption.

Need more support?

• [Podcast] Teaching Through Play
• [Podcast] The Right to Play: An Interview with Eloise Rickman
• [Webinar] Parallel Play!
• [Post] Learning Through Play
• [Podcast] Party Schooling with Lise McGuinness
• [Webinar] Party School!
• [Post] Make a Mess!

A mom once told me that she used our Dart program to share read alouds with her 10-year-old son. They had the best conversations she’s ever had with him about books.

Her son was so jazzed that he started reading chapter books on his own and pointed out punctuation and literary devices in them. He has now read 800 pages on his own!!

The mom told me that she didn’t realize how easy it was to teach through discussion. Yeah: we forget how much we learn through simply talking with real people.

That can be true for you too!

The video linked below is a brief example of how you might converse with your child using a passage from Charlotte‘s Web.

Watch the Video

If you’d like to ditch the workbooks, Brave Writer has a level that is right for your family and we’d love to help you change the way your kids learn so that it sticks.

They say writing as a job will be eliminated by AI. Weirdly, I agree.

The kind of writing being replaced by AI is the kind of writing most writing curricula teach.

And that’s the problem.

When schools and homeschool programs teach writing by format, they admit that writing can be reproduced by a machine easily.

You know what kind of writing AI can never reproduce? Your:

• original thinking,
• ideas,
• insights,
• and beliefs.

Humanity First

Kids need help finding those words and thoughts that live inside them first! Their writing starts with their humanity, not structure.

AI is great at the machinery of writing.

But we humans will always be better at being our original selves.

We teach WRITERS, not writing. We would for love you to try the Brave Writer difference! Growing Brave Writers is our best program to grow a writer.