A review by Janice Campbell When I began homeschooling in the late 1980s, there weren’t many curriculum resources available. Many homeschoolers made do with discarded public school textbooks or struggled to persuade textbook publishers to sell directly to home educators...
Thursday seems a good day for an Ideas Worth Sharing (IWS) gathering post. Because I love patterns and systems, and like Hercule Poirot, order and method, these are roughly categorized by the areas of focus mentioned in Luke 10:27b – “You shall...
My business year has two primary seasons: the convention season and the contemplative season. The end of July saw the end of business travel until next February, unless something unforeseen crops up, and I have to admit I’m delighted to be...
In honor of United States of America’s Independence Day on the 4th of July, here are are two thought-provoking, classic poems, plus one of my all-time favorite marches. The first poem, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “A Nation’s Strength,” would make an excellent...
What’s in your to-be-read (TBR) pile? Mine is teetering way past the point of reason, and has overflowed onto a small bookshelf beside my chair, plus a few piles on the floor, to say nothing of those waiting in my...
If you’ve ever wondered whether Excellence in Literature needed a few multiple choice questions to make it “better,” this delightful essay by my friend and publisher Andrew Pudewa will make our position clear. Like comprehension questions, another pernicious evil, multiple-choice...
If your student is behind in a school subject and you are thinking of homeschooling through the summer break, please stop a moment. I’d like to share a few thoughts on homeschoolers doing summer school. Schooling through the summer may...
One of the biggest challenges facing entrepreneurial parents, especially homeschooling moms, is time management — balancing home, school, work, and life, and doing reasonable justice to each. It’s probably always been hard, but the challenge seems to have increased with the speed...
In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift wrote of the two moons of Mars. Of course, it was 1735, and the two moons weren’t discovered until 1877. In 1870, in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne described an electric submarine,...
The last College Alternatives post focused on the skilled trades, such as machinist, electrician, arborist, and others. Since college has been pushed as a primary option for most students, there has been a labor shortage in many of the trades,...
![By Claire Gregory (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://i0.wp.com/doingwhatmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Claire_Gregorys_Permaculture_garden.jpg?fit=520%2C390&ssl=1)
I’ve been enjoying Cindy Conner’s new book on growing a sustainable diet. She actually makes it sound doable! She begins by identifying why you might want to grow a sustainable diet, then walks through the process of garden planning with...
Deep meaning lies often in childish play. -Johann Friedrich von Schiller The outdoors used to be a place where children could run, play, build, create, and do the mildly hazardous things children love to do. I remember walking the 5′...
Learning Lifestyle In this pair of articles on the Circe Institute blog, Joshua Leland shares Why I Don’t Own a Television and Further Thoughts on Television. Since I am also television free and always have been, I found these particularly interesting and thought...
After the last two posts on financial aid, there were a few private comments about how hard it can be for a student to qualify for some types of aid. Honestly, it is easier now than it has ever been. There...
In 2013, I quit. I’ve never been a heavy consumer of news and pop culture, but for over 30 years, I faithfully read the daily newspaper and usually listened to radio news once or twice a week. I don’t watch television...
Financial aid is available in several forms to homeschoolers, as well as the traditionally schooled. The U.S. Department of Education (the courteous provider of most of this information) awards about $150 billion every year to help millions of students pay...
Do you have a teen who is filling out college applications? If so, there’s one more application to add to the list. It’s the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, informally known as the FAFSA, and if your teen wants...
Essay writing is not the only tool for studying literature. Students can benefit from the occasional opportunity to approach the great books in a fresh way, so here are a few alternatives to writing a literary analysis.
Connie Schenkelberg, my friend and colleague, stepped from this life to the next on Sunday morning (12/1/13), and I will miss her. I first met Connie at an HEAV homeschool conference in the 1990s. Her table was tucked into a...
Enjoy a poem (Gratefulnesse by George Herbert); a recipe (cranberry-orange relish), and a Thanksgiving sale, aka Homeschool Black Friday).
Some of the ideas in the last post’s video seem reminiscent of classical Christian ideas of how believers should live in the world. These Christian ideas are drawn from the whole of scripture and tradition, but the best known source...
Have you ever been inside Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater? This architectural gem offers contrasting spaces that feel spacious yet intimate. Its beauty and fame lies not in the fact that it’s an enormous, costly monstrosity that dominates its site, but...
When I started this blog, I planned to focus strictly on entrepreneurship and microbusiness because those things can make it possible to live a doing-what-matters life. The problem was, with a URL like DoingWhatMatters.com, it’s been hard not to write...
Fairy tales, parables, and other true stories I have been thinking about fairy tales this week after coming across a bowdlerized (to modify by abridging, simplifying, or distorting in style or content) version that appears on a third grade Common Core...
How to use the correct word when peeking at a peak.
There are many ways to learn – books, blogs, classes, lectures, online videos, podcasts, and more. You can even learn by jumping in and trying something, though I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the experiential method with brain surgery or alligator wrestling....
Want to know what homeschooling is really like? No matter what curriculum you use, homeschooling is a deeply personalized journey. What it looks like and how it feels will be based on each family’s unique blend of talents, interests, knowledge,...
Reading and teaching literature in context is a bit like studying a map before you set out for a walk in a strange city. Context helps you find significant intersections, decipher archaic language, and find a path through old-fashioned rhetoric. Here’s how to do it.
Here is a playlist of a dozen interesting TED talks on education, mostly reflecting on the nature of education and traditional schooling and considering how it could be done better.
Today’s Carnival shares posts on the state of education and leaving a homeschooling legacy, helpful articles on planning and organizing your school year and day, and a few extras on things such as how to whistle, whether homeschoolers can redeem BoxTops for Education, and more
