If our school was a delicious home-made pie, literature-based learning would be one half of that pie, one-quarter pie would be hands-on learning (labs, art, music, travel), and the remaining one-quarter pie would be workbooks, textbooks, lectures, essays, tests and quizzes. “Homeschooling is a superpower, when it comes to your child’s reading life and learning…
Category: Books
2019 Reading List & Lynne’s Top 5
Give the gift of books this holiday season! So many titles, so little time! I love the modern fiction I read this year, like Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield and Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. Both are well-written and full of literary magic. I could read them over again and each…
Saying No to the Dreaded Scroll
Phones are like air and comfort food. We need them and they make us feel good. Have a question about anything at all? The answer is at our finger-tips in seconds. Need to call home? The phone is already dialing. We are all, every one of us, connected and addicted to this new way of…
Calling all Cool 5th Graders (a reading list)
My 5th grade nephew goes to a great school in Brooklyn, NY. He called Tony and I last night (Hi Nicholas!), because he is raising money for a school camping trip via a class-wide “Read-a-Thon.” I love-love-love Read-a-Thons and any other “a-thon” that gets kids excited about reading enough to call their aunt and uncle…
Movies that Inspire MATH
Encouraging a love of math is tricky. People often say, “I’m not a math person.” Impossible. Everyone is a math person. Math is in everything! It’s like saying, “I am not a water person.” Um. Yes, you are. Movies are a great way to get around a subject, connect with it, or feel inspired. Movies can…
Why Teach Poetry?
Why teach poetry? Because poetry is the most compact form of literature. It demands the author to use the least amount of words possible to describe ideas, feelings, sounds, events and more. Putting the right words together is like solving a complex puzzle marrying intellect, intuition, emotion and vocabulary. Understanding the complexities of poetry is…
Teachers Helping Teachers
Writing is a powerful, necessary skill. Both teaching and learning to write well takes practice – like memorizing times tables. The words start to flow, only after eons of repetition. Wake up; write. Read as much as you can. Think. Write it down. In the words of Anne Lamott, “Put your butt in a chair…
Reading: Top 5 Favorites of 2018
Reading in varied genres is a lovely way to greet the world. With a good book in hand, it is impossible to be lonely. Reading inspires profound empathy and personal growth rooted in new-found knowledge of people, ideas, or other concepts previously uncharted. I love when a book surprises me, as happened several times this…
Adventure School Rocks
“Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.” – Martin Luther King Jr. We are often asked what model we use in our Travel School. There are un-schoolers, classic education home-schools, and many other hybrids. Our homeschool provides a college-prep education using a travel and literature-based approach to mastery learning….
About Socialization
SOCIALIZATION. When talking about our travel school, often someone will comment to us in a hushed tone, “But what about socialization?”… I cringe at the question, but understand the concern. Children are inherently social creatures and luckily ours make friends of every age, color, religion and nationality wherever we go. Travel-Schooling for us, involves about seven…
T I M B A L E R O 