Does Reading Aloud Still Count as School? Here’s Our Honest Answer
A relative once asked, half-joking, whether I was “still doing school” since she’d seen me reading aloud to my nine-year-old […]
Why We Count Everything Out Loud (Even When It’s Annoying)
Somewhere around the hundredth “one, two, three, four” narrated from the back seat, it occurred to me that I could […]
15 Books That Turned My Reluctant Reader Into a Bookworm
My son once told me a book was “boring” without reading a single page of it, based purely on the […]
Five Kitchen Tools That Teach More Than a Workbook
If you added up every dollar I’ve spent on math workbooks over the years, it would probably buy a decent […]
What We Do Instead of a Math Curriculum Before Age 6
Before any of our kids saw a fraction written on paper, one of them worked out loud how much a […]
The Sorting Game That Taught More Math Than Any Worksheet
My youngest once spent an entire week sorting every button, bead, and bottle cap in the house by color – […]
Teaching Real Life Skills at Home, One Fully-Owned Task at a Time
My daughter couldn’t tie her own shoes at six, and I remember feeling a flash of worry about it — […]
The Pin Map: How We Actually Teach Geography at Home
We have a world map taped to the wall with a growing constellation of pins — one for every place […]
Living History: Why We Made Civil War Hardtack Instead of Reading About It
We made hardtack once — the dense, awful cracker soldiers ate during the Civil War — just to understand why […]
Open-Ended Art at Home: Why We Stopped Buying Craft Kits for Art
I used to buy the step-by-step art kits — the ones where you follow along and end up with something […]