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I did not find anything interesting or valuable in watching them, knowing their names, or even noticing their existence. A year or two ago a friend was telling me about reading and studying at her desk by the window where she could see her bird feeders. I suddenly realized how fulfilling and beautiful it would be to enjoy one of God’s beautiful creations in this deliberate way. That’s all it took, just a simple idea planted in my head by this friend that has changed so much in my heart, and that’s what education truly is.

Twaddle – – the highly debated, variously defined, fascinating word used to describe material that talks down to a child and/or does not feed their intellectual appetite or imagination. She very often likes the twaddle of goody-goody story books, he likes condiments, highly-spiced tales of adventure. We are all capable of liking mental food of a poor quality and a titillating nature; and possibly such food is good for us when our minds are in need of an elbow-chair; but our spiritual life is sustained on other stuff, whether we be boys or girls, men or women. * My kids each have to read a few books ( the number depends on the child and which books they choose) from our library, mostly non- and historical fiction from the time period we’re studying, and then they can read a book of their choice.

Paper clutter drives me crazy, which is probably why I eventually settled on a homeschooling philosophy that doesn’t require a lot of paper. We use worksheets and pre-fabricated lesson material as little as possible, but for those few subjects, a spiral binding machine is my best best friend. For my Year 2 student, I used the Zaner Bloser handwriting page generator to print out large font selections from his school books with a blank lined page on the opposite side. During his 10 minutes of copywork each day he starts where he left off the day before and is able to write for 10 minutes without having to search for paper or a book or figure out where he is.

At the beginning of the year we each picked a book (my husband and I and our three oldest boys) and assigned them to a day of the week. For a few weeks we successfully read each book once a week and it went really well. Instead of missing a chapter of our one read aloud every Tuesday, he misses the entire book which actually works out much better. Since then we have realized that reading 5 nights a week is a little ambitious…we usually only get it in about three nights a week so we dropped down to three books and we rotate through them based on the children’s interest.