Contacting me or Brave Writer: Please do!

I sometimes forget that we get new people interested in Brave Writer all the time. One of the distinctives about this company is that my primary objective is to offer you as much support as you need to keep you and your kids writing. You don’t simply purchase a book from Brave Writer and slink off to a homeschooling island to use it. Brave Writer provides you with opportunities for feedback and follow-up support because, frankly, writing is a community project. No one successfully writes in isolation. Even more, fledgling editors (you) need the eagle-eyed help of more experienced editors. That’s why we have a staff to handle classes and to answer your writing/language arts questions.

So use us! We aren’t at all put off by your questions, but are energized by them. Post your thoughts to this blog, to the forums, to email. Join classes and get support from a BW coach. Above all-find other Brave Writer mothers in your community and support each other. The more you take writing off the kitchen table and into a supportive community, the better for all of you.

Here’s where to find us and how you can contribute to making this a supportive community:

Marcy asked (and others like her have also asked) how to send me teatime photos for our weekly Tuesday Teatime post.

Email me your experience and photos: julie [AT] bravewriter [DOT] com

Attach your photos or put them right in the email. We’ll upload them and share them here. Always include a bit about your experiences. We’ll send you a free issue of the Arrow or Boomerang for your trouble. Tuesday Teatime photos are among the favorite blog posts so please do send them.

If you have questions related to writing, or if you have a student’s work that you’d like to share for feedback, I ask you to submit it to the public forum on the Brave Writer website called The Scratch Pad. Brave Writer mothers and I will give you feedback to help you continue on your writing way. I don’t prefer to read your students’ writing through email as my email is already bombarded and I sometimes can’t get to it right away and then inevitably it scrolls down into the oblivion that is my in-box. 🙂

If you’ve ever sent a question or writing sample for feedback and haven’t heard from me, that is invariably what’s happened. Just try again or post to the forums where your post will stay “stuck” in one place and can’t do the disappearing act on me. I do get over 100 emails a day for business and personal stuff. I read every one and try to respond to every one. If I don’t get to yours, send it again.

If you’re confused about curricula choices, classes, language arts programs or any other aspect of the Brave Writer lifestyle, you may email me, post your questions to the forums or call me. I can’t always talk when you call, but we can schedule a time to discuss whatever your question is. I won’t post my phone number here, but it is on the signature file of my emails. So email me first and if a call is needed, you may then call me.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, Contacting Me, General | 3 Comments »

What I forget to do for myself…

  • To take a shower… a long one, without interruptions, to think as well as to soap my hair.
  • To read the whole article in a magazine instead of quickly flipping from the beginning to the end hoping to grasp enough of it to get the gist.
  • To drink my tea while it’s hot (how many mugs of cold tea do I leave around the house while I’m cleaning, homeschooling, folding laundry…?).
  • To take a walk when the sun is out (instead of letting the habit of grey skies keep me in).
  • To pay attention when my husband gets home from teaching and comes up behind me to give me a hug and kiss on the neck while I’m washing dishes.
  • To put on make-up even when I’m running errands because it makes me feel like I’m present to the world, not an invisible schlub.
  • To actually twist into a few yoga stretches each day in between the weekly class.
  • To start the morning without email.
  • To appreciate my warm, colorful house; the stocked refrigerator; happy, cuddly children; a supportive, affectionate husband; and a reliable cable modem because today I have all those things and they each make my life happier and easier and more fulfilling.

What do you forget to do for yourself?

Posted in Family Notes, General | 9 Comments »

Poetry Teatime Titles

In response to a BW Mom’s question, this entry features poetry books our family has enjoyed during our teatimes.

I’ve listed some great teatime poetry book titles on the website here. The Read-Aloud Poems for Young People is our favorite and we use it every week.

There is a series of poetry books that features great poets with gorgeous illustrations that we regularly check out from the library: Poetry for Young People. This series features Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Maya Angelou, Rudyard Kipling, Langston Hughes, Lewis Carroll and other poets of equally prominent stature in single volumes. I love the illustrations and the wonderful choices of poems selected for children. I can’t recommend these highly enough. My favorite is the Rudyard Kipling edition.

You can’t go wrong with:

Jack Prelutsky

Shel Silverstein

Jamberry by Bruce Degen is a delightful romp through nonsense language.

When I go to Half Price Books, I check out the poetry section because often you can find nice anthologies of specific poets for really good prices. I picked up a collection of Emily Dickinson’s poetry that way.

Liam’s favorite poetry book is Great Short Poems, by Dover. We’ve got two copies and they are almost worn out.

My favorite poetry anthology: Americans’ Favorite Poems.

For moms who want to read poetry when they drink tea quietly (while babies nap or teens go to work), here are two female poets I especially enjoy for my own pleasure and edification:

Mary Oliver’s House of Light

Jane Kenyon’s Otherwise

I know you all have favorites too, so please list the ones your family enjoys in the comments section. Include titles and authors so we can easily look them up!

UPDATE: You’ll also find more suggestions on our Poetry Teatime Pinterest board.

Posted in General, Poetry, Poetry Teatime | 14 Comments »

Johannah


She called today.

Me: How was the first day of spring classes?

J: Good. I’m looking forward to today’s sociology class.

Me: What will you study?

J: The Salem Witch trials, child molestation, pornography and Satanists. So I’m really excited about it.

—

Well, who wouldn’t be?

Ahhhh. My little anthropological sociologist.

Posted in Family Notes, General | 4 Comments »

Keeping Up with the Joneses in School

Keeping up with the Joneses in School

One of the challenges of homeschooling is that most of us never were. We grew up in schools. We have the voices of a dozen administrators and teachers whispering in our heads as we teach our children. They ask us if our kids are doing enough “school work,” if they are “grade appropriate,” if they could survive if they were ever put in school.

Sometimes even our spouses or parents add volume to these voices with specific questions:

“Did you do anything today?”

“Why doesn’t Katie know her times tables like her cousin?”

I know that for me, these voices get loudest when I’ve been distracted and not attentive to my kids. If a week goes by where I’ve had two dental appointments, a trip to the vet, lots of business and a flooded basement, the routine of activities that reassures me that my kids are getting a better education (or at least, a different one) than their schooled peers is sidelined. When that happens, I doubt my effectiveness as a home educator and all those whispers become shouts.

A personal philosophy of home education
is critical to resisting the voices.

I’ve noticed that today’s new homeschoolers often start right out with curricula and skip what I consider the most important step in the homeschooling journey: developing a philosophy of education. Brave Writer, for instance, isn’t a system or schedule or curricula as much as it is a philosophy of language arts and writing that then gets executed very differently from what is done in school. The process and results don’t match well with 3rd grade language arts or 5th grade creative writing. The only way to embrace the difference is to believe in and be reassured by the philosophy (and documented evidence of its effectiveness) when you wander down this very different path to your children’s education.

So what should be done to develop that philosophy of education and what good is it at the end of the year when your kids have to take standardized tests (as they do in some states)?

Let’s look at each piece:

The Philosophy

Home education is deliberately not “school.” The home education movement removes children from buildings, teachers and curricula to bring them home to spend the day with parents. Parents’ reasons for this non-traditional educational path have ranged from religious conviction to special needs support to accelerated learning to real life learning (as opposed to learning from a canned curricula). Each one of us must spend time identifying our reasons for homeschooling. It helps to read books, to join email lists, to chat online in homeschool discussion groups, to meet monthly with a local support group. These are the places where you cultivate your convictions about why home education is the right choice for your family.

Remember: there is no perfect educational model that will yield better results in every category, in every condition. You can’t expect kids educated at home who aren’t being drilled to death for standardized tests to do as well as kids whose teachers spend half the year preparing their kids to take those same tests. That some of our kids do better than the kids in school without all that preparation is even more remarkable! If you are a home educator, standardized testing is one good reason to keep your kids out of the system so that all they have to do is take the tests, not be enslaved to them for half a school year. Additionally, no one is going to make your child “go to school” for a low score. Find out what the minimum score is that your state requires to show advancement and then shoot for that. You are educating a whole person, not a test taker.

The Practice

When you’ve determined your philosophy of home education and have developed it to include why you see it as a better choice than the alternative, it’s time to think about how to carry out your philosophy. Here’s the trick, though. The practice is nothing like what you remember from school. That means (pay attention here) the results will look different than what you get in school. Some of what you accomplish will be light years better in an obvious way (snuggling on the couch, great discussions about a book you are reading aloud, trips to the zoo, kitchen science experiments that are bubbly and dramatic, nature walks that lead to blackberry bushes, learning to read at one’s own pace, math facts learned without ever studying them). Other results will seem inferior (not as advanced in math or spelling or writing as age mates in school, timidity in your child, no cool projects to hang on the wall, standardized test scores not as high as you imagined).

Even some schooled kids have low test scores, don’t learn their times tables well, are poor writers and readers, and find it difficult to sustain friendships in the school setting.

Read that last sentence again. For some reason, when we compare our kids to schooled kids, we tend to compare our normal kids to the top of the class in school. We just assume that the norm in school is higher than what our kids are producing, but that is patently false. Think back to your own school career and the friends you had. Some of you excelled at everything, but many of you are painfully aware of your own gaps as an adult. You remember friends who fell through the cracks, or who had to repeat a grade.

Home education is not about scores, proving oneself in the arena of “A” students or even meeting the demands of school scopes and sequences. Home education is about nurturing your children’s love of learning so that as they encounter new and interesting aspects of the world around them (the sciences, history, literature, art, music, poetry, theater, nature, astronomy, movies, writing, crafts, gardening, cooking, cleaning up after one’s self, driving a car, making a friend, redecorating a bedroom…), they feel inspired and competent to learn all they need to about the subject at hand.

We are attempting to create a rich educational environment
that is not out of a box or canned curricula,
but that invites participation!

We homeschool because we want to catalyze a love of learning. We homeschool because we value each child’s unique pace in acquiring what he or she needs for a successful, satisfying, meaningful place in the adult world.

So standardized tests? Don’t stress about them. Evaluate your home education by your philosophy and practice, not by how school measures it.

Beware the Ghost of Public School Past

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, BW and public school | 6 Comments »