(If you prefer to hear this essay rather than read it, click here to find the spoken tract version of this reflection.) I won’t read The Handmaid’s Tale. And it isn’t because I am a Christian who is afraid of being confronted by ideas that are unsettling. I graduated from Hillsdale College in the very late…
Images
Books Boys Love
Moms often ask us for book recommendations for their 8-12 year old sons. This particular gender and age reader combination can be challenging for many families. Even if the boys are reading independently, many do not just dive into novels the way that girls seem to. Keeping in mind that boys tend to love “real” things,…
Books for Bedrest
Our book club has a number of moms who are recovering from surgery, on bedrest, nursing babies, or are dealing with a heavy burden. Many of them have requested book recommendations that would be light and wholesome reading for those times when we are tired, hurting, nursing, or just in need of a little retreat….
Love Never Ends
A year ago this month we had the privilege of reviewing The Corner Room’s beautiful album, “Psalm Songs.” In that review, I commented that I think The Corner Room musicians are like modern day Davids – musicians who play to please the Lord. “Psalm Songs” is rich, textured, and melodic. When listening to that album,…
Signature: The Story of Clara Barton
Published by Grosset and Dunlap, the Signature “Story of” books are a biography series very similar to the famous Landmark and North Star children’s biography series. Like those series, the publishers at Grosset and Dunlap commissioned excellent authors to write biographies that would be appropriate for children. After having read several books in each series,…
A Muse Meant
muse: “to consider reflectively; a state of deep reflection or meditation.” (Webster’s II, 1984) I require time to muse. One thing I’ve been musing about lately is how often we a muse ourselves. The etymology of the word amuse gives me pause. From the Old French, amuser, to stupefy; from Latin, a, meaning “to” +…
Pronunciation
Part of our Spelling Series: Five days a week I spend a large portion of each morning teaching spelling. I watch children working, like ancient scribes, to represent their speech sounds with the symbols I am teaching them. I do teach standard spelling. I do not teach them to spell any way that feels right, but…
Magic in Fairyland
“Material facts are good enough for him. Until it comes to religion. And then, suddenly, the child who has been forbidden to believe in Jack the Giant Killer must believe in Goliath and David. There are no fairies, but you must believe that there are angels. The magic sword and the magic buckler are nonsense,…
Tiny Jars of Apples
It is apple season here in Wisconsin. We live in a place with very harsh winters, late springs, and cold falls. In our city, the “snow/cold day” school cancellation policy doesn’t activate until -35F° (with windchill). My respect for the pioneers and settlers who tamed this bitterly cold wilderness is boundless. My admiration for their…
CS Lewis’s Ransom (Space) Trilogy
To our shock and dismay we often see this series recommended to young readers – the 10 to 12-year-old boy niche in particular – and we could not more emphatically disagree. Our purpose with this review is to highlight some specific content issues in each of the three books so that parents can discern when to share this story with their children.
Why I Sabbath
When I was a student at Hillsdale College, one of my dearest friends was the daughter of a professor on campus. My friend’s family is Jewish and I was regularly invited to their home on Friday evenings to participate in their Sabbath dinner. Those Friday evenings were a time of profound beauty for me. Leading…
Childcraft: Which Sets To Buy
Inspired by the richness of the Childcraft sets we have loved, a few of us have been toiling to collect, compare, and curate all of the American printings of Childcraft that we can. We want to understand the history and evolution of Childcraft and then help would-be buyers in the discernment of which Childcraft books…
How Came We to Spell Thus
Part of our Spelling Series: How Came We to Spell Thus? Something to keep in mind in the midst of the “exception” frustration with English spelling is the fact that “way back when” (not to be too specific) there were no silent letters. All of the letters are there because they were pronounced at some…
A Jane Austen Education
“I was twenty-six, and about as dumb, in all human things, as any twenty-six-year-old has a right to be, when I met the woman who would change my life.” – William Deresiewicz When our book club was discerning a few books to read in 2016, my dear friend Diane suggested A Jane Austen Education. I…
The Jungle Book
23 years! That’s how long it’s been since I first read Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. That was the first year we homeschooled, and I was casting about our home library for literature I could teach from without having to buy curriculum at the last minute. My father-in-law had admired Kipling, and my husband had…