For the past two years, I home-schooled my four boys. Now that sentence alone should clue you in to the great difficulties I was up against: 4 BOYS, home-schooled! Add that to the fact that I don’t enjoy teaching, and it was a sort of a pressure-cooker for my heart. The stress was too much for me personally. I gave it up, and enrolled my children in a Christian school this year. It was a change I had to make […]
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Well, if you’re new here you might not realize that I’m sort of a reluctant teacher. It’s not that I don’t possess the joy of teaching. Sometimes it is fun. The thing is that I cannot enjoy having so many things to do. There’s a fourth grader to teach, a third grader to teach, and a toddler running around. I finally threw in the hat and sent Daniel to pre-school, but it’s only three days per week, so sometimes he’s […]
» Read moreWe declared last week “Field Trip Week”, and had ourselves a grand ol’ time. We visited the aquarium, a beautiful rose garden, a robotics show, and Santa Lucia Nature Preserve. The big boys practiced their lines for their upcoming end-of-year parent night, we squeezed in a few math lessons, read a few books, and welcomed Nonna and Aunt Janet to town. *************** Now for stop two on our Week of Adventures: Santa Lucia Preserve This place, located in Carmel Valley, […]
» Read moreSpring is one of those things you can’t help but notice. That’s the way it is with beauty. It is inspirational. When beauty surrounds you, you can’t help but feel better. It’s funny how on my sick days I often feel too miserable to want to do chores, but I’m rarely feeling bad enough to not want to go out for a walk in the sunshine. It’s positively healing, isn’t it? I think that when you are surrounded by small, […]
» Read moreThese are the kinds of fun things we get to do in Classical Conversations, our home school tutoring service and curriculum. Look closely at his picture to see if you can find the eel coming out of the coral. (Hint: middle-left, It’s a profile with an eye.) Classical Conversations is a rigorous way to approach home schooling, but it is also fun. It has definitely raised the educational bar for us. ******** If you felt like you were reading the […]
» Read more2015 was a happy year here, full of it’s own challenges, triumphs, and best of all, adventures. I put together this look back at my 10 most popular posts from the year. By popular, I mean that these are the posts that were read by the largest number of people. First, a few stats from our past year at Stories of Our Boys: You might have read all 156 blog posts. You are reading this from 120 different countries. JenerallyInformed.com was the […]
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Tonight I’m hosting my home school moms’ group. That means that I will be spending all day trying to clean up my house, take care of four children, and cook. I need to make sure that I don’t fall into the prideful trap of cleaning up my house to try to make myself look good. It’s not about me. Let’s not put on a show and act like my house is always this neat, if I even manage to get […]
» Read moreErrand Day I am going to attempt to take 4 children on a MEGA grocery shopping trip. If I do not return, you all now know why….. The day is actually off to a good start. A plumber installed a new faucet. It doesn’t leak into the cabinet, it doesn’t leak into the sink, it doesn’t spray water off to the side, it has no hole shooting out water from the handle. It’s all very EXCITING. We went on our […]
» Read moreI’m flipping out today. I’m a little bit stress paralyzed. I thought I would start school on August 17th, but that’s not going to work. My grade book is set up for school to start on the 10th. The entire school calendar and all of my plans are set up for the 10th as the start date. How did I get my plan so confused? I’ve got most of the learning materials ready, but I don’t have the cleaning and […]
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I feel like I will have an extremely firm grasp on my science plan by the time I finish poring over all these books! One interesting thing about the classical approach to education is that we pull the focus AWAY from good ol’ textbooks and look to real life experience and “living” books instead. (By living books, I just mean books that are not sold as textbooks.) However, I do actually have several ‘textbooks’ that we will reference this school […]
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