A Winter's Homeschool

Hello! I follow a number of substacks now and often forget why I follow people here until I’m halfway through their note. So just to recap…this is a substack primarily about homeschooling. We use of a mix of curriculum, Classical Conversations, and relaxation. Our family of seven lives in Vermont in the United States.

We continue to burrow into winter’s snowy depths here with inside-projects occupying most of our attention. Because I know summer will come, I feel I can focus on the mundane organization of daily life without agonizing over the time spent, say, reorganizing a drawer too much.

Actually I’m feeling really optimistic about homeschooling right now. That’s a bit unusual for this season, typically the late winter-spring is when you hit the doldrums. I’m feeling really enlivened by how there is always more to learn, and there’s time to do it. There’s time to catch up, there’s time to pull ahead, there’s time to circle back and try again. There are great books, and beautiful languages, and fascinating facts about the geography of our world.

Part of my refreshed optimism comes from focusing with renewed interest on doing school with my 1st grader. The 4th and 7th grader work mostly independently now. While I floundered for a bit, wondering how to still include everyone, I realized that focused attention on my 7yr old was exactly what she needed. My brain has finally settled into this and I think that’s bringing some delight to the process.

As an example, RightStart math, known for using an abacus, is a very popular curriculum at my co-op. I just decided to order it for her, my fourth child! Not my first, as would have been very economical of me, but for my fourth. Oh well! It just arrived last week and we are already enjoying it.

These wintery feelings of time and contentment coincide with the arrival of seed season. Seed packets in the mail, small jotted notes about what we might want to grow again this year scattering my desk, faint memories of last year’s garden swirling around, and of course, watching anything Erin at Floret posts. In the same way that after five pregnancies I was still absolutely dazzled by the fact that one human body could quietly build another human body, as a continuing gardener, I am still dazzled that tiny seeds, supplied with the right care, can grow into glorious green plants.

On the theme of wonderful things you can do indoors: here’s a project lifted directly from the teens in my house. Lux found this modern english to old english translator, and the girls were inspired to translate their letters to friends. They drafted the letters and put them into the translator. Cue delight over the phrases that resulted, “She doth instruct me in the art of crochet, a craft of no great difficulty once the stitch is mastered. Yet to fashion ought but a scarf is a task of greater import.”

They decided to dye their letter paper with tea-water and wrote in cursive with inky pens. The result was absolutely wonderful mail that went out into the world!

To circle back to my opening remarks about the thrill of learning—how fun to use the delight of letter writing, the learning of cursive, peppered with a bit of Old English appreciation, in a new project.

My girls are very into this song Baker by Aimee Carty (spotify link). It makes me wistful about childhood and that stage of watching them believe in the deep purpose of their creativity, as they paint, sculpt play dough or dance in front of the mirror. May all of us reclaim that!

Once upon a time, I was a baker
And everybody was impressed
But I didn't need approval because I already knew I was the best
Everything I made was a masterpiece
It all tasted like heaven
But then unfortunately, I turned seven

It is winter so of course a little wanderlust is afoot. Winter is always when I find myself checking travel books out from the library. Luckily I have a goal to plan around already: we are planning to visit Rome this summer. The last time we went our kids were 7, 5 and 2.5! Little did I know that just two years later we would start studying Latin together using the wonderful Schole Academy, and now three kids have studied Latin, with me in the background, learning alongside a little bit more every time.

Last time we went, we contented ourselves with long walks around beautiful buildings and a lot of takeout cheese & salami dinners on our Airbnb patio. This time we’ll still be using our Airbnb patio to the max, but I’d like to schedule a few formal tours of places like say, the Colosseum and maybe the Sistine Chapel and Pompeii.

I thrifted Elizabeth Minchilli’s Eating Rome book, leading me to daydream about pizza and espresso constantly; and I am loving this unexpectedly vibrant story of one Roman woman from history, Clodia of Rome. The author has filled my imagination to the brim with detailed images of life in the Roman Republic. Isn’t it wild we can still read letters composed then? And who knew Cicero was such a villain!?

Beyond the dreamy reading, planning family travel usually looks like creating price alerts on google flights and Kayak to watch flights for a few weeks before I book them. It means finding an airbnb with a late cancellation date, just in case. Poking through forums and reddit posts for recommendations on city guides. Making notes on my calendar to remember to buy tickets for sights that sell out like the Borghese Galleries. Searching my photo roll for years of screenshots from other people’s travel recommendations (surprisingly easy, just search for s word that was in the original post, like “Rome” and your photos will pull it up). And my absolutely favorite: tagging places on google maps so that I can easily see how to route our special destinations together.

I have started putting rom-coms into our family movie night jar. It was actually Joe’s idea, and I was like—well, sure! The first one that was pulled out was You’ve Got Mail. Oh my goodness. Such a classic. Watching it is like eating a chocolate chip cookie with a glass of milk. Or sipping a very cold, perfectly prepared martini. You get what I’m saying—one of life’s great things. When Meg Ryan as bookstore owner is hosting the children’s story time and she’s reading from Roald Dahl’s Boy. I mean…just such a classy choice. The rush of the checkout counter with the wrapping paper and ribbons. The neighborhood block fair. Tom Hanks mixing perfect martinis on his sailboat (although, a big eye roll to the conversation happening during that scene—his dad recounting which babysitters he dated has not aged well.)

But, wow, I couldn’t believe how many things had changed! I thought we were just going to be describing to the kids what e-mail was like in late 90s—that you would open your inbox and be surprised to have an email. That no one, not one business would ask you to share your email address with them. But it felt like everything was different. Of course that’s what I love about family movie night; the chance to watch something hard to define, and share that experience together.

Federal Education Tax Credit: Has your state opted in? Vermont has not…yet although my advocacy emails have hit their inboxes.

Selfish Reasons to Send Your Kid to Public School: I enjoyed reading this article. I often suggest to families debating homeschooling that they might consider attending their local school for one year in order to make those life-long community connections.

Using Memory Palaces with Kids: in Classical Conversations, kids as young as 4 memorize the US Presidents in order, using a song. This article is a deeper dive into building a memory palace that would allow for memorizing presidents, vice presidents, and remembering them in order—meaning you could ask which one was #15 and they could remember without counting them out. I would love to learn more about memory palaces and this is a great primer! Tiny aside, the author of this post is the same writer that wrote the anonymous review of Alpha Schools for Astral Codex, linked to in newsletter #45.

by Rev. Sarah Speed

If God lived next door,

I’d drop off a loaf of bread.

I’d use my mom’s best recipe.

I’d wrap it in parchment and ribbon

and place it on the front stoop.

If God lived next door,

I’d leave a note with my phone number.

Call anytime you need anything!

I’m always happy to help!

If God lived next door,

I’d keep sugar on the shelf,

just in case she needed a cup.

I’d put a picnic table in the front yard

and begin taking my coffee there.

Whenever God passed by with their gaggle of rescue dogs,

I could say, Want to sit for a moment? Want to rest your legs?

I’d keep a jar of dog treats and water by the mailbox

and change my doormat to one that says:

All are welcome here.

I’d invite God over for dinner.

She’d bring bread and juice.

I’d host a block party,

so that everyone could meet her.

I’d start a community garden

so that the kids could run between rows of squash and tomatoes

while we adults put our hands in the dirt.

We’d share stories while we weeded,

and eat harvest meals at the end of the season.

If God lived next door,

I’d want to build something beautiful.

Then again,

who says she doesn’t?

Written by Sarah A Speed, from the resources on Sanctified Art