Next week, we’re leaving on a grand adventure: a driving trip across the United States. In one month, we plan to see Yellowstone Park; South Dakota’s Black Hills; Chicago; Niagara Falls; Boston with MIT; New York City; Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; Washington, DC; Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Atlanta, Georgia; Disney World; New Orleans; Austin, Texas; Roswell, New [...]
I really want to like our neighborhood school, where Kelly is currently going. I know she loves it, because every day after school, she can’t even wait to walk home before showing me the work she’s done. She’s putting more effort into reading independently than she did when she was with me, she asks me [...]
We moved on to studying ancient Greece, and one of my first activities for Neil was learning Greek roots. On the first day, Neil asked me if “acro-” was the prefix for high, what was the prefix for low? I had no idea, and the list I had (in a simple kids’ activity book on [...]
Since the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum is in San Jose, we happen to visit it just about every year. But this was the first year we went there after a course of study on ancient Egypt. Needless to say, we noticed and absorbed more than we had on other visits. For one thing, after taking the [...]
On Saturday morning, Peter took us all to see the Tapestry of Arts festival which had appeared overnight on the streets of downtown San Jose. The last time we went to see it was 11 years ago when I was pregnant with Neil, and I remember it being big, but also awfully hot. In short, [...]
Kelly had her kindergarten orientation this morning, while the older classes had their first day of school, and Peter and I are still ambivalent about sending her off. There was a lot to look forward to with being at a neighborhood school instead of at the science magnet where Neil went. The school is only [...]
When I started hanging out with homeschoolers last summer, I wondered openly why so many of them took their family vacations during the summer time, when everyone else in the universe does. Travelling in the summer means having to pay top dollar, face crowded attractions, and compete for lodging: so if you’re not bound to [...]
Peter and I briefly toyed with describing the next few years of Neil’s education as “a classical education at home” or “going to a very exclusive private school.” We just wanted to separate ourselves from the unfortunate conception of homeschooling as forcing our child to be cloistered away from all society with only a Bible [...]
There’s a lot to be said about San Jose’s relatively new library downtown, but I’ll focus this on one of the best, and the very worst. Just as context, the 8-story library located on the border between downtown San Jose and San Jose State, is a collaboration that combines both a city library and a [...]
I love having children who love to learn, and that Neil is particularly eager to encourage Kelly towards that end. A few months ago, he used his own hard-earned money to buy an arcade game featuring her favorite character, Snoopy. Neil told Kelly he’d give it to her when she could count to 20 all [...]
