At any rate, a new program in Boston is working to teach low income parents to talk with their children from a very early age and to respond to their children’s conversational cues rather than shushing them.  You may have heard of the work done by Betsy Hart and Todd Risley which found an enormous gap in language exposure between low and upper income households with 9 month to 3 year old children.  Low income parents spoke far less frequently to their children and used fewer

excellent column by Clarence Page today about Robert F. Kennedy’s speech in Indianapolis on the day that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. In his speech RFK quotes the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus: He who learns must suffer, and, even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God. My goodness. Isn’t that the truth? Another choice quote from Aeschyl

I know that my perspective is different because I do homeschool and it’s for reasons far less pressing than protecting my kids from violence or sexual abuse or something like that.  So I suppose that having taken the step of removing my kids from the school system for relatively benign reasons it is hard for me to fathom why the parents keep sending their kids back to schools where there children are exposed to violence, educational malfeasance or damage done to children by t

I wrote a post on why parents who teach their children creation science or intelligent design in a way which elevates those teachings to a fundamental of the Christian faith are putting their children’s long term spiritual well being at risk.  In the comments on that post (which were remarkably civil for this topic BTW, thank you to all who commented!), someone asked how I teach my kids to be faithful Christians while also accepting the science of evolution and geology and su

I’m still waiting to get my internet back on, so I don’t have time to blog properly about this, but I just wanted to direct everyone’s attention to an Outlook article from the Washington Post on homeschooling written by an actual homeschooling parent, no less!  (I’m sure I’m the 5 kabilionth homeschool blogger to point this article out, but hey!) Pass It On! Tweet Email More Print Share on Tumblr WhatsApp #family #homeschooling #life

Be sure to check out this fantastic column over at Slate by Emily Yoffe (aka Dear Prudie) on the disaster of normalizing single parenthood. Pass It On! Tweet Email More Print Share on Tumblr WhatsApp #culture #family #life #singleparenthood

She will regularly come up to me and say, “I’m beautiful, Mommy.” Of course you are sweetheart. It’s so funny, I’m quite certain those words never came out of my mouth when I was a little girl. But she is completely confident that she is beautiful. I hope she’s always that certain. 🙂 Pass It On! Tweet Email More Print Share on Tumblr WhatsApp #3yearolds #pictures #life #kids #family

Crunchy Cons, Rod has a post up linking to a rather unfunny piece by Diogenes on Catholic World Daily which is meant to mock those who have or would like others to, ask for forgiveness for the sins of our ancestors. A clip from the piece: It’s back in style: the political fashion of issuing official “apologies” for wrongs committed by others — especially long-dead others — in order to cash-in on the compassion sweepstakes and dutch rub the opposition in the process. Australi

This is hilarious.  Remember those Where’s Waldo books?  This is a funny spoof of Where’s Waldo and The Bourne Identity. Warning: there is a little bit of language here, so you may not want to watch it with the kiddies watching over your shoulder. Pass It On! Tweet Email More Print Share on Tumblr WhatsApp #humor #life #whereswaldo

The Bitter Homeschooler’s Wish List By Deborah Markus, from Secular Homeschooling, Issue #1, Fall 2007 1 Please stop asking us if it’s legal. If it is — and it is — it’s insulting to imply that we’re criminals. And if we were criminals, would we admit it? 2 Learn what the words “socialize” and “socialization” mean, and use the one you really mean instead of mixing them up the way you do now. Socializing means hanging out with other people for fun. Socialization means having a

story in the Chicago Tribune about scientists who have figured out how to get a computer to “read” brain scans to figure out which picture out of several choices a person has viewed.  This is considered one of the first steps towards eventually figuring out how the brain works, which I suppose if good.  However, it could also the be the first step towards creating machines able to mind read, which I think is creepy. What I find both worrying and fascinating about these sort o

Christianity has literally tens of thousands of denominations. Which can’t be honoring to God; the unity of the body of Christ seems to be very important to God. Jesus talked about the desire for us to be one. Paul speaks repeatedly of the need for Christian believers to be unified. And yet, we keep splitting up, often acrimoniously. Of course this isn’t particularly new; the early Christian church was much more diverse than we often realize. What drives these divisions,

Over at Why Homeschool the Cates have put up this amazing quote: “Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind.” –Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) Artist, architect and engineer Cited in BITS & PIECES I must say that I never thought of

Many moons back, we had our oldest son, and for one year, our younger son enrolled in Montessori schools. When I began homeschooling, the first books I bought were the Teaching Montessori at Home books by Elizabeth Hainstock and Lee Davis. (There is one for preschool and another for grade school. I think I lent my preschool one to someone, but I have no idea who. If I lent it to you, could you let me know? Thanks 🙂 ) Anyhow, as I went through the preschool edition, I wa

And now for something completely different. . . I’m going to share my family’s secret recipe for Yankee French Bread.  Actually, I found this recipe in GQ, of all places years ago and have used it ever since.  It’s super easy and gives you a wonderful, dense, slightly sour loaf that keeps well in a grocery store plastic bag.  Mmmmmmm. . . 7 Cups Flour 1 Tablespoon of salt 1 teaspoon of quick rise yeast (I use regular active yeast most of the time and that works fine as well)

I got to do something today which I had once planned on spending much of my life doing, but never really got the chance to do after getting waylaid by children and life and my own insecurities. I got to take a kid who thinks poetry is boring and meaningless and show them the magic which is present in those short, truncated lines with the fancy words. I made my oldest son Noah copy out the poem “The Lion of Winter” from A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare into hi