flynn011

Usually my blog posts on Boyschooling are about lessons learned from nature or other homeschooling insights, but this one is just a plain ol’ show-and-tell of our trip to see the total eclipse on the 21st of August. The best my iphone could do! If you’re anywhere between Texas and Maine in 2024, please block out a chance to get to a place of totality for yourself. Though we had to drive a total of 32 hours in three days to see it, we all feel it was wholly worth the trouble. The main reason is this: you cannot fathom what a total eclipse looks like until you see it - my pictures can’t do it justice, and certainly, when I tried to take photos of it before the sun was completely covered, there was very little indication that the sun was almost fully covered. The sun just basically looked like the same sun! You can't tell the moon has almost covered the sun in this photo. Well, just indulge me a bit as I give you more of a photo montage of our journey and exploration: I think you’ll l...

While I'm waiting for Vicki to complete the questionnaire from the viewpoint of a careers' advisor, I decided to take my 9th grader to coffee and talk about his future as Part 2 of my exploration of careers for my teens. You may recall in Part 1, my eldest who's in 11th grade was inspired by a book to decide her career with no further discussion. The last time I had a chat with "Killer", my number 2, he said he was thinking of going into animation for NASA. That was in 2015 as we hiked for 10 miles for my Moon Walk training. London Moon Walk: with Kim and Jenny I thought it was time - now that he's 14 - to re-visit the topic, and it's interesting how differently the discussion went this time around. Killer has done a lot of growing up in the past two years. He has been accepted onto the youth group's leadership training course and completed its first year of it; he volunteers weekly for the library, trains in our swim club's highest squad, and rece...

I'm cutting it really, really fine. We're less than a month before we're going to start school, and I haven't really made my plans for the year. Looking for inspiration in the stars I thought it might be fun - perhaps instructional - for other homeschoolers to watch me fumble through my plan for 2017-2018. As you may have gathered if you've followed me for any time, I have four children aged between 10 and 17, and I teach them all together using the Charlotte Mason method. aka Killer, Rocky, Phoenix, and Timmy There are shades of interpretation for the CM method, and while there are a lot of purists out there, I'm not one of them. To my mind, Charlotte Mason - genius as she was - was still a classroom teacher and planned, implemented, and managed her philosophy via the lens of being a classroom teacher. I know ... sacrilege, right? Well, I'm a former classroom teacher, too, and know for a fact that what one does in a classroom is not what one necessarily nee...

As my eldest is getting near the end of her homeschooling journey, I’m turning attention more and more toward supporting her to become who she is meant to be. As teens, they are starting to spread their wings Back in March of 2016, I wrote a blog post that sort of touched on this (see http://boyschooling.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-best-job-in-world.html ).   What I didn’t make clear is that these thoughts had started out from a place of fear - fear that cookie-cutter education was going to try to shape her into something she wasn’t created for. I’d seen glimpses of it already at nursery, where her personality was clashing with “the way things are done”, and the pressure to conform one’s behaviour to make the least possible waves was being frequently impressed upon her and the other children in her class. So, like I said in the earlier blog post, sometimes we may begin down a path because we’re running away from something, only to discover that it’s actually the better journey. In thi...