When Kayla asks me that question almost every night, it is truly music to my ears! And even though reading aloud to my kids (or really, anyone who will listen!) is one of my favorite things to do, it hasn’t happened as much lately. It used to be a daily occurrence, but now that my… Read More “Will you PLEASE Read ‘Anne’ Tonight?”
Actually, he ran for the Senate, but I can’t resist alliteration. He did not win a seat in the Senate, though, probably because he did not make cool campaign cards or purchase doughnuts for the voters. I don’t think he was very heartbroken over the loss, but he certainly looks stately ~ don’t you think?… Read More Congressman Kory
“…ask what you can do for your country.” I was asked to use that line in a short speech I gave at my middle school Honor Society Induction Ceremony ~ oh, nearly 30 years ago now. I knew it had been spoken by John F. Kennedy in his inaugural address, and that he was the… Read More “Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You…”
Plato: Rhetoric is “the art of winning the soul by discourse.” Aristotle: Rhetoric is “the faculty of discovering in any particular case all of the available means of persuasion. Cicero: “Rhetoric is one great art comprised of five lesser arts: inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and pronunciatio.” Rhetoric is “speech designed to … Read More Rhetoric in the Rough
I know I’ve mentioned multiple times how much I love the curriculum that Classical Conversations provides for my kids. As a tutor at the Challenge level for the second year in a row, I only appreciate it more and more. As my younger two kids come up through the Foundations, Essentials and Challenge A levels,… Read More Paratroopers, Rescue Dogs, Theater Camps & the Amish
We’re studying British literature in our 10th grade Challenge II Class and already have these wonderful books under our belt so far: Beowulf, Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Paradise Lost, Pilgrim’s Progress and Gulliver’s Travels. This week we’re on to Pride and Prejudice. I’m almost ashamed to admit that I’ve never actually… Read More Comparative Character Analysis: Mr. Darcy/Kory
I was going to write “The Girl’s Got Plans,” but I’m reading BOTH Eats, Shoots & Leaves AND The Elements of Style with my Challenge II class, and those books have rendered me completely paranoid about my use of apostrophes, commas, and other punctuation marks – not to mention grammar. (What do you think about… Read More The Girl Has Got Plans
Well, we started school a few weeks back. We didn’t really have a choice, as Cooper’s Classical Conversations (CC) Challenge A class began on August 24th. I was definitely NOT ready to start school with the whole crew on August 24th though. Why does summer always seem to fly by so quickly? When I was… Read More Schoolhouse in Session
Forgot to tell you about what else we got at our farm last week besides green beans and watermelon. In the farm shop, there was a father who, along with his children, were selling Monarch butterfly chyrsalides. (I looked it up. The plural can be either chyrsalises or chrysalides.) They had them all dated and… Read More New Life Beauty ~ Migration Envy
This has been the scene in my dining room for about two weeks now. I have been writing the end-of-year reports that the local school district requires, and collecting work samples from each child to send in for approval. Supposedly, Massachusetts is one of the most highly regulated homeschool states (anyone surprised?), but I… Read More Ten Years of Homeschooling – Completed! (8 More to go…)