Stuff We Like :: 8.31.18

We’re back! You may have noticed that we took a few weeks off from regular blogging — honestly, I felt like I had kind of run out of things to say and needed a recharge. We have some fabulous blog contributors who write great stuff, but a lot of the day-to-day work falls (fairly enough) on my shoulders, and every once in a while, I think I just really need a break. I lounged on the beach, read lots of books, did a little bird watching, and have been banned from playing Scrabble with the rest of my family, so I think I got a pretty good one.

What’s happening at home/school/life

I have been really enjoying getting to know all the people who are using our high school curriculum. (And I apologize to the folks who have reached out about ordering it and can’t get it — because it’s kind of a passion project, I just don’t have the bandwidth to keep the curriculum store opened during academic year. You can get Years One and Two next summer, though!)

We are hard at work on the fall issue. Can you believe October is right around the corner?

Maggie wrote a great piece about looking beyond learning styles to explore the bigger picture of multiple intelligence in your homeschool.

In a sentimental mood, I republished an early “day in the life” of our homeschool. (It was our Hogwarts year!)

From the magazine: A six-step strategy to turn the homeschool you have into the homeschool you really want

And Shelli has a timely reminder that you are probably doing this whole homeschool thing better than you give yourself credit for.

The Links I Liked

I will read a Little Women think piece every time, but this one was particularly good: “The book is not so much a novel, in the Henry James sense of the term, as a sort of wad of themes and scenes and cultural wishes. It is more like the Mahabharata or the Old Testament than it is like a novel. And that makes it an extraordinary novel.”

Relevant to my life: 5 things to do when you feel overwhelmed by your workload

I am definitely a fan of the new, radical bake sale.

Related: Perhaps one of the recipes from the recently reissued suffragette cookbook would be a bake sale hit? 

Idris Elba is signed on for the film adaptation of Ghetto Cowboy? TAKE MY MONEY.

If you have some time, this piece on how children’s picture books can disrupt existing language hierarchies is really interesting.

How to go back to a flip phone.

What I’m Reading and Watching

The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic might have been custom-created just for me (it’s about a PhD candidate in literature! Who finds herself in another world! Where she learns magic!), and there was so much I liked about it — but the end just killed it for me. Seriously, worst ending I’ve read in a long time.

I keep saying I’m going to stop reading postapocalyptic novels because I get enough of that in The New York Times these days, but I keep picking them up, and I am usually glad I did. Case in point: American War, which chronicles one girl’s life in the near future through the second American Civil War. It’s definitely dark, but if you can handle the weight of it, I think it’s a great read.

My daughter passed The Only Thing Worse Than Me Is You my way with a sticky note informing me that this retelling of Much Ado About Nothing set in the super-nerdy world of a super-academic high school was “hilarious!” She was right.

The kids have gotten us all hooked on Gravity Falls, but we’re inching our way through it because there are only two seasons and anything that plays like a mash-up between Twin Peaks and Phineas and Ferb is worth savoring.

What’s Happening in Our Homeschool

Though we homeschool year-round, our official new school year starts after Labor Day. That means I get to buy school supplies, so I am in my happy place, surrounded by fountain pen cartridges, new Moleskines, sticky notes in every size and color, my favorite highlighters, and more.

This year, I have a junior and a brand-new 11-year-old. (I’m not even trying to figure out the grade for this kid right now — he’s all over the place!) Our year is definitely more structured, partly because I’ve got to be organized about managing our time now that I work outside of the house half the week and partly because we’re in heavy college planning mode with my 11th grader. It feels different — not bad, just really different from most of our previous years — and I am interested to see how it comes together.

(We’re Amazon affiliates, so if you purchase something through an Amazon link, we may receive a small percentage of the sale. Obviously this doesn’t influence what we recommend, and we link to places other than Amazon.)

---