Around the Spinney

Homeschool

  • Help with Narration

    What is Narration and Why do it? When I first started to homeschool with the Charlotte Mason method, I was a bit confused about one thing: narration. While aspects of my own education involved narration, it wasn’t primary, and I would not have known I was narrating because it wasn’t used in our classroom language.…

  • Why We Focus On Nature Study and Natural History

    When I started homeschooling my son, he was only 4 years old. We were living in a place where kids started preschool at this age, or earlier, and it made sense for us to do this. I also wanted to wet my feet a little bit before I felt intimidated by the subjects he would…

  • Burgess Animal Coloring Pages

    After a few weeks of hard work, I’m happy to announce that the first round of Burgess Animal Coloring Pages are in the shop. They include 19 animals that Burgess writes about in the first 12 chapters of the book. I have to tell you that it is very difficult to draw a North American…

  • When a Poem Touches the Heart

    I remember being young, sitting with a pen and my journal, and greatly desiring to be able to write a poem. I sat on my bed in my room trying to do this, and while I probably actually was successful at times, I usually ripped it out of my journal and threw it away because…

  • Why We Use A Gentle Feast

    As a part of the #whyweloveAGF challenge this month, I wanted to let you know why I chose this particular homeschool curriculum. As a part of my introduction last week, I mentioned that I started out homeschooling thinking that resources and workbooks were the important part of getting ready each year. Those things are important,…

  • Marmots, Pika, and Sewellel, Oh MY!

    The next installment of the Burgess Animal Book for Children coloring pages are in the shop featuring Marmots, along with the cutest relative of rabbits- the Pika, and the great “Mountain Beaver” or Sewellel. The hardest animal to draw this time was the Sewellel and my favorite to draw was the Pika because it’s just…

  • Why We Love A Gentle Feast

    This month there is a #whyweloveAGF challenge! So here is the introduction to who we are and why we love A Gentle Feast Curriculum: This is us- I am from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan originally and moved down to Texas to spend most of my life in the Dallas area. I studied Therapeutic Recreation…

  • Squirrels and Critters

    In our modern world we consider most animals, especially rodents, to be pests. They get in the way of what we are trying to do with what we like to think of as our piece of earth. We find them nestled in our Christmas decorations when we get them out once a year. They make…

  • How we Settled on a Charlotte Mason Education for our kids

    Whenever I first started homeschooling my children, I thought buying enough of the best resources was the most important thing. I got what they call “a big box curriculum”, the ELITE one at that, in order to give my children what I thought would be the best education. At that point, we had two children,…

  • The Burgess Animal Book for Children

    This book by Thornton W. Burgess is one of our favorite resources from our year in A Gentle Feast Cycle 1, Form 1. My kids have all loved the stories because we all love animals! Burgess writes about the animals by making them into characters, who are fun to listen to, imitate, and learn from.…

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