classical-education

Reluctant Artists and a Printable Nature Journal

Whether you’re an avid Charlotte Mason homeschooler, a die-hard Classical mom, or a free-spirited unschooler… we all want our children to spend more time outside, soaking in God’s nature, and of course the holy grail would be if they actually drew/painted and wrote down what they observed.

If you’re reading this and are thinking, yeah? What’s the big deal? My kids already do that. Then this blog post is not for you. But if you’re down here in the valleys fighting the monsters of “I’m hot and this is boring,” and “can we be done yet?” or the dreaded siren call of electronics, then know you’re not alone.

So if you have kids with ADHD, or who dislike writing/drawing, or who act like they’re allergic to being outside, here are some things that may help (or at least maybe baby steps in the right direction).

1) Set clear expectations. “We’re going outside for 30 min” is better than the abstract, full Sound of Music, “The hills are alive with the sound of music” vibe where you picture you and your children picturesquely traipsing through meadows with butterflies, sketchbooks in hand, and pencils ready to go.

2) If you have a perfectionistic artist, switch to a pen and tell them it’s a magic pen where mistakes are not only allowed, but encouraged. They don’t need to draw and erase five thousand times with a pencil while they get more and more frustrated.

3) If you have a child with dysgraphia, have them treat the outdoors like a rough draft. The messy handwriting, random keywords, and stick figures are great! Let them come in and trace and type later when they’re ready. If they saw a bird they thought was cool, have them trace a simple generic bird outline from the internet, and then fill in the details and colors on their own.

4) If you have boys or kids who like competition, turn it into a game. “Can you find a leaf you’ve never seen before?”, “Person who finds the craziest bug wins”, “Silent game and see who can hear the most bird calls”.

5) And last but not least, give them the freedom to research and sketch something crazy. Yes, you want them to be inside, but sometimes kids just want to research man-eating crocodiles in Australia, or a cute, nearly extinct red panda bear, and that’s ok too. I think sometimes we forget that the goal is to fan the flame of intellectual curiosity, observation, and research, and that doesn’t always fit into our idyllic homeschooling ideals.

And if you’re one of those folks with a good printer and a speaking relationship with it, here’s a printable Nature Sketch Journal you can download for free:
1) Nature Journal w/Butterfly Cover
2) Nature Journal w/Grasshopper cover

It has space for both drawing and writing, and it’s formatted so your child can read their writing/notes, while their listeners can see their drawing.

If you need any other reluctant middle-school or Challenge A help (if you’re in Classical Conversations), you can find an ADHD friendly Latin workbook here. Or a traceable cartography workbook with drawing tutorials here. Or an anatomy workbook for kids who are strongly in the dialectic phase and like to argue and be opinionated here.

Meanwhile, I’m off to shoo my crew outside and pretend like we’re super chill about poison ivy and ticks! Ahem.

Anatomy Curriculum & Giving the “Birds and the Bees” Talk (Science Freebie)

I should have done this a long time ago. I wrote a whole Anatomy Workbook/Curriculum! Between four kids who love science, a mom who is a nurse and loves human anatomy, and my years as a Challenge A Director, I’ve spent the last several months compiling all of my favorite experiments, dialectic questions, simpler drawings, and all the crazy memory hacks my mom used when I was little to help us memorize everything. It was one of those projects where I felt like I could have kept writing it forever, adding new interesting research and information I dug up, but I also wanted to make it doable. An independent, open-and-go curriculum with an easy answer key that wasn’t online and was screen-free. I also tried to tap into middle schoolers’ natural desire to form opinions and argue with everyone around them. Ahem.

You can find the printable digital version here.
Or…
You can find the printed and mailed-to-you version here.

And now, on to the thing that sparked this whole adventure. I think THE TALK is a universally dreaded conversation to have with your kids, and it always seems to be in capital letters in one’s head. And the worst part (at least in our family) is that when you finally muster up the courage to have the conversation, you forget that your kid has an auditory processing problem, and you make it so low-key and chill that they promptly forget the whole thing, leaving you to experience Groundhog Day. Good times. The internet is chock-full of all kinds of books, instructional material, and helpful advice, but it can be daunting and overwhelming, and thus we disassociate until another day and hope we don’t wait too long, or heaven forbid, give it too soon (where are my pearls to clutch).

So don’t take this as advice or a strong opinion, but if you’re looking for a plain, factual lesson, I’ve got you covered. For those who have visual learner kids, but don’t want something super graphic and are looking for a more science-friendly approach, here’s the Reproductive System Lesson from the workbook. A freebie science printable, as they say. You can hand it over, or do it alongside them, or edit it, or use it as a starting point to build with more information as they get older and more mature (or perhaps less mature in the case of middle schoolers). Enjoy!

Or you know, you can always go the super expensive route and buy a homestead and have animals, and then the reproductive education (mostly) takes care of itself!

Teaching kids to be thinkers: Fallacy Flipbook

The world right now feels a bit like a flamingo trying to put on pantyhose in the dark. Lots of staggering involved. Maybe it’s because I have one kid going through the Fallacy Detective right now, or maybe we’re just in a new season of family dinners where varying opinions, debates, and conversations are flying on a more “oh hey look my kids are actually mini adults now” level and not the old days of “Please put your underwear back on, and no you cannot stick beans up your nose.”

So all that to say, we’re on a logical fallacy kick around here. We find them in movies and ads, we catch each other doing them and we find them in spades on the internet and news. Whether your kids are homeschooled, private schooled, public schooled, or meet under a waterfall in some Waldorf-inspired space, I think it’s safe to say raising discerning thinkers is a high priority for all of us. Equipping them with the tools to think, discern, and pursue truth is like a broken record on the to-do list.

Not that I have anything remotely close to the answer, since persuasive rhetoric is supercharged these days, and we’re just as susceptible as the next person. So this is not a promise for “life-changing” results, but we’ve been enjoying these cards and matching game which you can download here. It’s led to lots of great conversations and I like that the youngest is catching up quicker than his older siblings did.

Or if you feel like supporting a small business, (mine!) you can download the full flipbook for a few dollars here. I made them to be neuro friendly and brain “sticky” in all the ADHD/Dyslexia ways. Even my older kids are picking it up and reading through them….which….let’s just say I’ll take that as a win!

The Secret Hack To Getting Your Kids Through Their Schoolwork

I’m loathed and embarrassed to even use such a clickbaity title, but I stumbled upon this method quite by accident and either it’s an anomaly for my kids/friends kids/students or it really is magical.

In all my spare time, I (try to) read books on neuroscience and listen to podcasts on all the latest cognitive strategies (hello Huberman), but there’s a difference between absorbing parasympathetic systems and dopamine receptors, and the real strategies for down-in-the-trenches help. So if I were to analyze this method dispassionately, I would say it’s the adrenaline and dopamine receptors that are kept guessing, that make this strategy so effective, but enough of the navel-gazing…. what is this?

A printable board game and a few dice. I’m not joking. I can literally get my kids and my cottage school kids to do anything with this game. Math? done. Latin? done. Spelling? done. If you only have one kid, you’ll have to play with them as you need at least two players. Sometimes I do their work alongside them to show that even moms have to do school too, and sometimes I have them assign me my own “school work” like switching the laundry or starting lunch. After all, fair is fair, and if I’m asking them to do half a math worksheet, then they can assign me peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (little do they know, that I need the ADHD motivation hack too).

I named it “Via Triumphalis” which means “The Road of Triumph” in Latin. But don’t worry, you don’t need to understand Latin to play this game beyond knowing that “Proelium” means battle, and “Porta” means gate. You also need dice, and dry-erase markers (or a penny or something to move across the board…we use dry-erase markers). I have two versions, a simple one for younger kids, and a more complex one with character cards if your older kids get bored of the simpler version.

Word of caution though, don’t use it too much….act reluctant…only pull it out every two or three times they ask for it, otherwise (like with all things) the novelty wears off.

Here is the simple one, and here is the more complex one with character cards. Enjoy! Hopefully it’s not one of those things that only works magically for me.

P.S.
Not just for homeschooled kids, works great for getting any kid through homework.

Math Notation Flashcards

We’re on winter break, “enduring” the prettiest, gentlest snowstorm, and enjoying everything being canceled. Back last Summer when it was 100 degrees with 100% humidity I started (what I thought) was going to be the simple task of making math notation flashcards for myself and my kids. I got about halfway through when the school year officially started and we all feel like we’ve been tipped off a cliff or tossed off a high dive. Since then it feels like it’s been a thousand years with a few battles with the Balrog, but finally, I came face to face with enough time to finish those soul-sucking math notation flashcards. Definitely a labor of love. Ten out of ten do not recommend. Trying to figure out how to make logarithms and formulas on Canva is definitely not my idea of a good time. The only thing that kept me going was that I couldn’t use the normal ones. The ones CC sells are double double-sided, i.e. they put answers and questions on both sides, so both sides of the card criss-cross and contain both a question and an answer to the other side. It’s brilliant really. Nobody wants to carry around an enormous stack of flashcards and this cuts the stack in half. They’re great flashcards, well done…high quality…fit perfectly in the little flashcard boxes at Walmart/Target. You can purchase them here.

My eyeballs literally can’t handle them though. No matter how many times I tell myself this x has nothing to do with the “geometric mean”, it’s like my brain takes a picture and it’s stuck in there permanently the wrong way.

So for those who are also visual learners…have ADHD…or dysgraphia, here is a PDF of all the flashcards with just one notation and answer(s) on each card. I made them humorous and satirical with a grumpy cat and an over-enthusiastic stick figure. I also added some Latin explanations (couldn’t help myself)

Please, for the love of all the things that got neglected in my house to make these (the mud tracked in, wood shavings everywhere, cats hiding behind water heaters), use them if you need them. Hopefully, they do someone else some good too.

Now I’ll return to working on writing, spelling, and Latin curriculum, where letters mean their actual letters and not points of an angle.

It’s February, and it’s ok to feel like Frodo on the side of Mt. Doom, right? Right. (Also, can you tell what Snowday books/movies we’ve been consuming?) ahem.

If you’re looking for other neuro-helpful stuff:
Here’s a fun, electronic-free, comic-book style Latin workbook that goes along with Henle and Challenge A.
Here are some colorable Latin Flashcards that use mnemonics and puns to help them stick.
Here’s a simplified Anatomy workbook with body systems and guided research that is more accessible for dysgraphia/dyslexia.

Draw the world. Trace the world. Paint the world…Whatever your heart desires.

Don’t tell me if someone has already done this, but I finally drew an accessible world map. Straddling the GenX/Millenial line means I know how to use electronics better than a Zoomer, but not as well as a true dyed-in-the-wool GenX. Consequently, I have been struggling to find the perfect whole world map for nigh on 7 years now. You’d think it would be easy, but it needed to:

A) Be easily photocopiable and printable (you’d be shocked at how many maps have weird gray areas or water that don’t copy well).
B) Have the longitude and latitude lines go OVER the countries. This is super important to be able to draw it using the grid method.
C) Be the least garbled Mercator projection so the grids are in straight lines.
D) Have nice thick, easily traceable lines so it could be put on a window or lightbox.
E) Fit on a standard 8.5×11, but also be printable in bigger sizes.

It has been driving me crazy for years because I’m sure it exists somewhere and I didn’t need to draw one myself, but I couldn’t find one I liked. But I really didn’t want to make one myself because drawing the whole world takes time and effort…two things in short supply when you have 4 kids and a million other responsibilities and priorities taking up one’s time (like reading historical fiction till 2am…cough cough). I tried several times, but someone always spilled something on it, or I couldn’t get the perspectives and lines right. It was my own personal Sisyphean task…every time I worked on it, I somehow found myself back at the beginning.

So even though it feels rather anti-climatic at this point (faint drumroll), here is a fully traceable, fully drawable, fully expandable world map that may or may not be totally accurate. (I used Google Maps for the most up-to-date borderlines, but the world isn’t exactly stable and black and white right now):

World Map 8×11Download

There’s even a matching blank grid included. I think drawing and familiarizing kids with the world is incredibly important, especially these days. Once when I was working as a server, I had a table of customers who were from Kyrgyzstan. They asked me if I even knew where their country was. Not only could I tell them where it was, I could also tell them every country that bordered it. In all fairness, they didn’t realize how many years I’d been teaching middle schoolers how to draw the world by heart. But seriously, world news and issues make so much more sense if you have a working mental picture of the world.

I’ll get off my soap box now. I figure at the very least I made an exceptionally time-intensive free art page. Heck, you could even print it super large, paint it with your color scheme, and frame it… or color all the places with missionaries you pray for…or color in a new country every day and do a unit study…or…or… I’ll stop now.

If you are inspired to have your kids learn to draw the whole world by memory, you can find the sum of all my labors here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1185775539/cartography-workbook-challenge-a-now-1st


What Scholarforge is and why I started it

This expository is to remind future me: I started Scholarforge to help kids (and mamas). 

 When God was handing out brains and personalities, he gave me the one that gets very distracted by shiny things (in this case, shiny new ideas). I would totally have gotten lost if I were Hansel and Gretel. There would have been no trail of crumbs, or “scarlet thread” going through the Labyrinth. I probably would have gone all Swiss Robinson family and built a treehouse next to the witch’s candy hut and turned the minotaur into a pet (or more realistically perished in the process, but who’s counting?). Consider this me staking a flag in the ground to remind myself why I’m doing this.

I came up with the idea for Scholarforge because I really do love teaching and firmly believe every kid is just one step away from a breakthrough. Trying to build those bridges across rocky terrain is what gets me up in the morning.  Whether it’s reading, writing, or executive function, I’m here for the front-row seat. I know it’s hard to watch kids struggle, and get frustrated…lash out in anger, and feel defeated, discouraged or dumb, but I can’t help but immediately start brainstorming ways to work through it all.  

Sure I have lots of lofty aspirations. My goal someday is to have a reading program that is as simple to use as 100 Easy Lessons, as colorful as The Good And The Beautiful, and as in-depth as Spell To Write And Read/Writing Road To Reading.  I’d love to make Latin accessible to everyone, churn out all kinds of helpful things to create solid spellers…oh and create a formal logic curriculum that treats anxiety and depression with truth tables, but I may need several lifetimes for all that. In the meantime, I still have four kids who can’t do half those things, but in umbra igitur pugnabimus (we struggle on regardless). 

BUT… Even if I don’t have all the fancy glossy books published yet, I always have a sympathetic and listening ear available. And somewhere in the depths of my Canva and Google drives I also have spelling songs, countries and capital songs, fun mnemonic ways of remembering the Ten Commandments, and a whole host of other things, so feel free to hit me up if you need something. You can find YouTube geography tutorials here and how to remember the Latin Declensions here. Andria and I wrote a Latin Curriculum you can buy here that can be used by anyone anywhere but is especially helpful for Challenge A kids. I also drew blackline maps for the whole world so kids could trace/draw and color the world in peace without struggling with curved projections and bubbly confusing graphics (you can find those here). 

I know it’s all a small drop in the bucket, and I totally understand that not everything will work for everyone.

But we all have to start somewhere right?

Devotional Graffiti

Once upon a time, we took our Classical Conversations Challenge B class to Rome and it was life-changing.

As we were sitting in church tonight for our Good Friday service, something in the sermon reminded me of the Rome Catacombs (not to be confused with the Paris Catacombs…cough cough). So I’m reposting my blog/journal entry from that epic homeschooling field trip here. (maybe mostly to remind myself that I need to take the next batch of students to Rome).

Today was the last full day in Rome and each day I’ve thought was the best… so of course today was no different. At one point I was flying down the infamous Appian Way in a taxi listening to 70’s music, discussing the resurrection message we’d just heard deep under the earth in the catacombs, and I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. 

Jamie and I started out the day with cappuccinos and chocolate croissants like we always do.  I kinda never want to see a chocolate croissant again, but the coffee I will miss.  Not that we don’t have good coffee in San Diego, but our truly good coffee has to be sought out like the holy grail, whereas it’s on every street corner in Rome. …Actually, that’s how Rome is in general. Our most glorious basilica in the United States is copied and pasted a hundred times in Rome.  In Rome, you’ll be walking around a church trying to take it all in and figure out which painting is the Raphael you’re looking for, when you find out the church’s relic is Baby Jesus’s manger. Jamie said he didn’t really picture the nativity with a manger of intricately wrought gold, silver, and jewels,…which is what it looks like… but the humble wooden manger is protected inside of it. (The jury’s out in the academic world on whether it really is the authentic manger). 

The religious lines got a little wonky for me today.  I’m a happy protestant who grew up Evangelical but appreciates the beauty of the more liturgical Presbyterian church. I used to be staunchly reformed and Calvinistic on all things (and I still am), but the older I get the more “big tent” Christian become. In some ways, I think of each type of Christian as a genus that’s entrusted with doing one thing (or a few things) well. The Roman Catholic church has the market on tradition, loyalty, and engaging all five senses. 

We went to the oldest church in Rome and I could picture the early home church that started on that spot, and I could see its transformation through the ages, and I could witness people worshipping Christ today.  Across the street from the oldest church, there are stairs where Jesus allegedly walked up to his trial (Constanine’s mother brought them from Herod’s palace in Jerusalem). The marble steps are so worn and sloped from thousands of years and millions of Catholics kneeling and praying on them, the steps have been closed for the last three hundred years. They’re open now. For a few months, you can pray on your knees up the twenty-some-odd steps. Even if they aren’t the real stairs Jesus walked on (I can’t turn off the rational part of my brain), it was a moving scene. 

I didn’t think anything could top the manger, Herod’s stairs, and the oldest church, but the catacombs were the next thing on the itinerary. I was nervous because it had proved super challenging to get tickets for our group.  The lines are long and limited everywhere (and for almost everything) in Rome. So in order to get 22 tickets for anything, we had to book them in advance. The Colosseum, Borghese, and the Vatican were all challenging in their own way, but the catacombs were most difficult on the front side due to the language barrier, specific rules, and lack of 21st-century technology in use to aid communication halfway around the world. After much angst and multiple tries (and being hung up on several times), all I had was an email that said “Your reservation is confirmed”.  No order number, no mention of what that confirmation entailed. It worked out perfectly though. A sweet old Italian gentleman had our tickets reserved for us on his handwritten list (the couple behind us were from San Diego too!).  All of the guided tours that go through catacombs (and aren’t third-party tours) are led by a priest. Ours was Father Tren. He didn’t look like a stereotypical catholic priest. He was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, was young, and had a dry sense of humor. He preached the gospel with such sincerity and passion: Though the catacombs are deep underground, dark, and filled with the dead, it is actually a place of hope. Hope in the resurrection. At the end, he prayed for us, that we would be encouraged and strengthened not to get discouraged. To remember those who came before us. To rest in the saving power of the cross. Even the atheist was moved. There are 500,000 Christians buried down there, with marble slates filled with Latin and Greek…lots of them with misspelled words and grammatical errors. The walls are filled with scratchings of messages “I miss you.” “We will see each other again.” “May God be with you”. Father Tren called it “Devotional Graffiti”. 

We finished the last day with the usual three-hour dinner from 8pm to 11pm, we’ve got lazy our last few days in Rome and have been eating at the restaurant right next door. The servers gave us hugs tonight and told us to come back…which was big of them. I could never quite tell if they had a panic attack every time we walked in with 12-18 people or if they appreciated the business we brought. Jesse wins the prize for the most adventurous eater this trip with fried sheep brain for first place, and Ben is right behind with squid for second place. Honorable mention to a parent for the consumption of tripe.  Jamie wins for most gelato consumed, and Hayley wins for most candy consumed. My favorite dish was veal and artichokes and I will miss being able to enjoy a glass of wine. It didn’t give me a migraine like it does in the States which makes me think it was all in my head in the first place (pun intended?). Maybe I should give wine another try, or maybe I’ve grown out of it. 

Not ready to leave, but feeling like a homing pigeon who needs to set the course back for home.  I’m not actually a very adventurous person. I don’t particularly love to travel, and I much prefer my own home and people. But my ideas get ahead of what my biological self prefers to do. Thus the conundrum of magical trips like these (but so worth it). 

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Donuts and Crystals: An Economics Lesson for Highschoolers

I am loving this school year so much. 9th graders are so much easier than 7th graders (although full confession, I feel like middle school is probably my calling in life). Middle schoolers are like the toddlers of the teenage years. They’re so cute, but kind of a lot.

However… (and that’s a big however). I don’t know if it’s post-covid, or a Gen Z thing or what, but I guarantee you your average high schooler has the ability to break any object lesson or activity that has worked for decades. There is nothing Gen X or Millenial teachers and parents can come up with that Gen Z can’t hack in a nanosecond.

Case in point: We did an “Inflation Game” today with very specific instructions. I was supposed to use beans and candy, but beans are boring and candy is for kids, so I took some floral rock-crystal-things I had and a cheap bag of hostess donuts (don’t judge). I handed out 5 crystals to each student and then offered to “sell” a donut for 10 crystals. This is supposed to be unsuccessful. According to my instructions no one is supposed to be able to buy a donut, thus proving that when money supply is low, inflation is low. You can imagine how well that went.

When I was prepping this activity a few days ago, I dryly predicted to Jim that it would take less than a second for two kids to combine their “money” and buy a donut since a half donut is better than none. I was correct. What I didn’t predict was that kids would start trading their snacks with each other for crystals, thus creating a bartering system outside of my controlled system (I feel like there’s a lesson there).

But it didn’t stop there. For the second part of the activity, I was instructed to give each student several handfuls of “money” (without counting to see who got more or less) and then start an auction for the donuts. As expected (and carefully explained in the directions), the extra money supply drove up inflation. What I didn’t expect is that monopolies quickly formed and two kids were in danger of getting absolutely every single one of the donuts before anyone else got a single one. So the rest of the class banded together and blocked them.

Strong feelings and opinions flew back and forth. At one point they discussed mobbing me and just taking the bag of donuts. I felt the weight of a thousand dictators weighing on my soul. It was dicey for a few moments.

All that to say, I think we learned more about economics in fifteen minutes than we have from any book. And if you try this…don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Cycle 3 Latin/English John 1

Putting this here to prove to my future self I’m not crazy when (if) it changes again.

You know you’ve been in Classical Conversations a long time when they’ve switched the memory work on you multiple times, and you feel gaslit by an otherwise charming and lovely curriculum. lol

It’s not CC’s fault… well it is, but it’s understandable. They occasionally update their curriculum and it’s not their fault I was in my 20s and had two kids when I started CC and I’m now in my 40s with four kids (and the kid who started CC as a 5-year old is now an adult). There were some good old days back there when I was a Foundations tutor and pregnant with my third and would have to run for the nearest trashcan while a kind mom took over my class for a minute. Now I’m just a cranky old Challenge director giving highschoolers the stink eye when they eat snacks through a heart-rending discussion about the Scarlet Letter.

All that to say, Andria and I could NOT figure out the Cycle 3 Latin this year. We wrote an entire workbook to make Latin accessible for ready-to-quit families, but couldn’t figure out the English translation for Foundations. Thankfully the Vulgate never changes, so at least we got that part right.

We printed these sheets, laminated them, and we sing them every morning of Cottage School so the kids have them down pretty good by now although the English is so different from the regular translations we’re used to, that we’re still messing that part up. I think the idea was to pick a translation that more matched the Latin, but if you’re a Challenge director, you will find yourself explaining that half the words are wrong from what they’ll be told in Challenge A, but whatcha gonna do. This is why people have dedicated their whole lives to translating Scripture.

…also we included some tracing sheets for fun.

john-11-7-englishlatin-cycle3Download