Book Review - Laddie

This book took me way too long to read. I'm not a fast reader and this isn't the most interesting book I've read. It was fun, but had a lot of tangents that went on and on and on. It felt almost like you're reading someones journal and they are just writing things to remember what it was like not because it is interesting.

In the end, I did enjoy reading the book, but I think it would be more fun to read with kids. There were a lot of things throughout the book that would be good to discuss with kids.

I think we will definitely read this book with our family, but it isn't going to be at the top of our list.

Cupcake Maker

Kendi informed me that she wanted to be a cake and cupcake maker when she grows up. She knows that we spend time learning about things that she is interested in for home-school so she wanted to do a project.

We spent some time researching cake makers and looking at sites like The Sweet Tooth Fairy. She picked a project of making decorated cupcakes like some that she saw while we were researching.

Kendi made a journal entry

where she drew pictures of cupcakes and wrote about becoming a cupcake maker. She even put that she could work at Dairy Queen because they make lots of desserts.

Over the next few days, we spent a little time on this project everyday. Once we officially start home-school, we will probably only spend one day a week working on what she wants to be when she grows up.

Kendi wrote down the ingredient list and we went shopping. I like the way we worked a lot of home-making skills into this project. We got the kitchen ready and read over the directions. We talked about why we have to do the things the directions say like flouring the pan and measuring out ingredients. We counted out the 30 seconds to mix the batter before we beat it. We talked a lot about all the numbers and measurements we used. And for the first time Kendi learned how to load the dishwasher when she was done.

This was really, really fun and I was surprised at how much there was to learn beyond home-making skills. I always want to take Kendi's ambitions very seriously even if I think it may be a passing phase she's going through. I would love for Kendi to become a cake maker and we will definitely spend more time on this.

Book Review - Anne of Green Gables

Everyone should be familiar with Anne of Green Gables. Everyone has seen the movies and everyone should read the books. I enjoyed every minute of reading this book. It has all the excitement of a blissful childhood and all the melancholy of real life. This book will make you laugh and make you cry. I can't help but think that Anne reminds me of my own Kendi. They compare similarly in imagination.

This may be one of the first books I read together with my girls once we have officially started Home-School. It makes me anxious to get started and I can't wait to move on to the sequels.

Experiment #1

I wasn't sure I was ready for this, but Kendi has been begging everyday to do Home-School. For more than a year now (sometimes off and on) we've made it part of our daily routine do some reading and writing together. Kendi has heard me talking a lot about TJed to Jared so she knew there was something I was holding out on her. So, today I decided to try it.

I had noticed that The Grimm's Fairy Tales were on the list of classics for TJed. I had already downloaded them for free a while ago, but hadn't actually read any of them to my kids yet. The first one on the list was titled The Golden Bird and it sounded great to Kendi.

We just read it all the way through. Next time we read a story, no matter how short, I think it would be better to stop and talk about it multiple times throughout. I wasn't even sure if Kendi was following me until later when she surprisingly repeated it back to her Daddy.

At first, this story seemed bizarre to me, but I figured that I'm not used to reading classic literature, especially ones that were as old as this. The story had such a strange ending that it threw me off for a minute. I wasn't sure I even wanted to discuss it with Kendi. I couldn't even think of questions to ask her. After taking a moment to put Aydri down for a nap it occurred to me that I could just focus on the good parts of the story.

We ended up having a great discussion about being obedient even when it's hard and doesn't seem like the normal thing to do. Kendi even drew a picture and I helped her write a journal entry about what she learned from the story.

If anything, I learned today that there is something we can dig out of every story that is worth talking about. I learned that it helps to organize the questions to lead from one thing to the next. And I should probably read through stories before I decide to read them with my kids. haha. TJed suggests studying Leadership Education for a whole year before you start implementing it into your home-school. Hopefully, I will learn enough about how to do this more effectively before Kendi starts 1st grade.

Book Review - The Lonesome Gods by Louis L'Amour

This book was especially fun for me to read. Some may think it is depressing as the book starts out. The main character is a young boy and ends up in very unfortunate circumstances. The young boy triumphs over his dire situations, but as he grows he learns harder and harder lessons of life.

After having read a few classics now I feel like they hold so much more depth than modern books that are written purely for shallow entertainment. I'm glad I've discovered books that benefit me for my character and make me want to read them over and over again.

I really loved how much history is in this book. I'm sure you couldn't learn more about the area of Los Angeles and the Mohave Desert at this particular time period than you could from any other book. It gives a good feeling of how the frontier functioned and how different the government was back then.

The main character in the book feels a connection to the desert, especially as he leaves the desert to find out if there is more for him in the city. I wonder if everyone feels a connection to nature because I have often joked about how my family possesses a hermit gene and feels the urges to leave the city behind and run to the mountains. I felt like I could relate to this book in that way.

This book was not particularly difficult to read. Most of the new words I learned were Spanish words that were often used by Anglos back then. It was fun to hear and learn the lingo that, what we now call "the old-timers," would have used.

I thoroughly loved this book and all of the mystery and adventure in it. I will definitely read it with my kids, probably while they are still young.

Why Thomas Jefferson Education

There are a lot of different curriculums out there for Home-Schooling. I don't think I'm going to stick with any one curriculum. I'd like to use a variety of things, but the major style of teaching we like is the Thomas Jefferson Education by Oliver DeMille. You can visit their website HERE.

I've been putting off this post because there is no way to put everything I'd like to say about why we want to use the Thomas Jefferson Education style into one post. This blog as a whole, I hope, explains why we chose the things we chose and the reasons for Home-Schooling.

A few of the most important reasons for following the Thomas Jefferson Education style are what I'd like to touch on in this post. I'm sure I'll get to more of them in later posts.

I love how The Thomas Jefferson Education style focuses on "Everyone is created with genius." This goes against the whole "No Child Left Behind" style that the public school uses. I can understand wanting kids to be well-rounded, but everyone is different and each child's genius is different from every other kid. It is hard for one teacher to nurture 30 different geniuses. Jared can tell you a story about what a public school art teacher told him about a student that wanted to be tutored by Jared during class-time. In the end, the teacher allowed the student to be tutored but warned Jared not to make the student too good at art because the student would not be socially excepted well at school. This situation really reaffirmed our desire to home-school our kids.

I also love how TJed focuses on teaching kids "how to think" not "what to think." The more I read about this teaching style the more I realize I'm a product of a "conveyor-belt" education. Even to this day, I struggle with some of the effects of that teaching style. For example, Kendi got some Melty Beads for her birthday. She was so excited to create something with them. She loves and insists on having someone to do things with. We got out the Melty Beads and her imagination went wild. After having read about TJed, I knew that the best thing to do was to sit back and let her be as creative as she could be. After creating a rainbow and two other pictures, she noticed that I was having a hard time thinking of something to make. After panicking for a few minutes, I just decided to copy the picture of the kitty on the side of the Melty Beads container. If you know me, kitties are not my thing. TJed allows kids to come up with their own conclusions and solve problems their own way not just memorize facts and pass test to get good grades. I feel like our brains expand when we can think all the way through a problem with reasoning and that our brains shrink when we just memorize formulas and copy answers that are already laid out for us.

Another thing that I love and that is going to be challenging for me to get used to is to teach by "inspiring, not requiring." While the kids are young the only thing TJed wants you to do is to inspire a love of learning. It would be easy to just set down a pile of books and require a certain number of pages to go through, but that is not the best way. It certainly isn't very fun either. We are currently storing my sister's piano and I thought it would be fun to see if either of the girl would want to learn. Kendi was very excited and was begging me for "piano lessons." I, myself, took piano lessons for more than ten years and cannot really call myself a pianist. Piano was difficult for me and none of my four different teachers inspired me to learn. There were a lot of requirements and even when they weren't met nothing different was done. I think I would have learned better if I had gone through the books all by myself, but that didn't seem like the "normal" way to learn. After searching online for some new or just different piano teaching methods for hours, I couldn't find any that wouldn't break my bank account. I decided to go dig out the old piano books that my generation learned to play piano from. Besides, it worked for a lot of other people. Yesterday, I opened up the old books and started to show Kendi what to do. After only a few minutes she laid her head on my lap in silent protest. I thought about "inspire, not require" and decided to teach her a simplified version of Heart and Soul. She loved that. I know that all I need to do right now is teach her to love it and technique will come later.

There are many other reasons why I love the TJed style including how they handle "teenagers." To read more about it go to their site or buy their books. They are worth it!