Thank you for writing that post. It is like watching The Making of Lord of the Rings movie. SO much work went in behind the scenes. I recently shared some resources with a friend who is planning on homeschooling and she said, "Wow, you must have spent hundreds of hours cultivating all this knowledge to be able to weed out what doesn't work from what does." It was so validating that she saw some of the behind the scenes work. And that isnt counting anything you mentioned in your blog.

Oh, that is reassuring. We are only about 20pgs into the first book.

Are you religious? If so, do you do anything like family devotions or evening prayer? If so, what we do is have the kids do most of it, so one might read from the Psalms, one from the Gospels, on leads us on the other stuff. They all have skin in the game and they recognize how important it is to be heard and understood.

Fully agree. I enjoy listening to the male speakers whom I have been referencing and have benefitted from their philosophizing. And I agree with @Patty Joanna that there is a ton of overlap between what they do and the market for homeschoolers. I just hadnt realized that homeschoolers were not their primary market. Kind of like when I found out from @square_25 that the majority of kids who do AoPS online are afterschoolers and not homeschoolers. Huh.

I know nothing about Pam Barnhill and Colleen Kessler, but I credit Sarah MacKensie with helping me see the importance of reading aloud to children (I hated being read to as a child, and reading aloud to children used to make me fall asleep). We are strongly a read-aloud family and I will be forever indebted to Mackensie for her putting a spotlight on this topic.

I agree. This reminds me a bit of mega churches that became big because of a founding pastor and now, as the pastor ages, there is a giant issue of passing the torch well. I dont think that CAP will crumble when Perrin retires (and I think he is only in his 50s), but I am curious what will happen.

Ahh, I think I was unclear. The only tie-in to GHC is that, in March, when the GHC suddenly shut down (I think you were stuck in limbo at the one in TX?), the classical ed folks like Perrin, Cothran, Kern, Pudewa, etc, put on a 3 day online classical ed conference that was being marketed towards homeschoolers and esp to crisis schoolers. My post was really inspired by the fact that, as @Amy Meyers mentioned, they are doing a one-day online conference next week with very similar topics and towards the same audience. It took me much longer than it should have to realize that all these folks except Pudewa are affiliated with a schooling movement as opposed to being homeschool-focused.

Thank you! That is actually why I started this thread, although I wish I had titled it differently. By "education movement", I meant "school", not education. Alas. I feel like there is a dog-and-pony show going on. Especially when, right after schools shut down in March, they held an online conference to make up for the fact that the Great Homeschool Conventions were not happening. I appreciate their efforts, but their whole spiel in March was supposedly geared towards homeschoolers, but their products (possibly not IEW - not very familiar with it) are geared more toward classical Christian schools. I struggled with this mismatch. Then, they are having another one-day online conference next week that is geared toward homeschoolers, and it leaves me scratching my head. Some of them like to wax poetical whereas SWB seems to get down to brass tacks. I like listening to education pedagogy as much as the next person, but it gets to be a bit much.

I think you either pray or sell your soul to Google/Apple/Microsoft. Seeing how flat-footed the schools have been with their "hope for the best" plans on school for the fall, I assume their strategy is going to be to not realize this is an issue until November, then set up computers outdoors in a circle, play Enya and Nirvana, have teachers pound the keyboards while others join in a circle dance while blowing up nitrile gloves like balloons.

If this would make any difference to your pastor, Dr Fauci's boss is Dr Francis Collins, who is head of the NIH. He is also an evangelical Christian and a very thoughtful person. He is very, very pro mask.

Re the bolded...I need a dumbfounded blinking emoji. Plus a sheepish emoji that this had not occurred to me. Thanks for your foresight!

I have always wondered why some links take me back to the thread I am in. There are so many old thread titles that look so alluring as links in other threads. I click on them, so hopeful, and get sent right back from whence I came. So were the 2008 threads linkable/searchable before the big changeover in 2018?

Well, there goes my weekend.🤣 Thanks, @Lori D. How did you get threads with working links from 2008??? You are a WTM ninja!

Close Reads podcast and The Play's The Thing are great for me, and they are not homeschooling; more just like listening in on a book club. I just listen to the podcasts though, and dont follow them on FB. My impression was that their talks on education are way more esoteric than they need to be, given their audience. It sometimes seemed like they are talking more for each other and less for the people listening, whom I am assuming are a fair amount of homeschooling moms. I mean, how many Classic ed school administrators and teachers are listening to this?

Huh. I just picked words from the list... Some of the instructions are starting to make more sense now...🤪

I definitely did not appreciate this until long after I should have figured it out. I had no idea of how much nuance there is in educational materials until lurking on here for a while and actually homeschooling for a few years. What helped me figure it out was using CAP's Argument Builder and every other exercise was for arguing for or against school uniforms. The first month or so I was super confused as to why a classical homeschool curriculum would have this example (I am usually not this slow on the uptake). I FINALLY realized that I am not even close to the target market, despite them having a booth at a homeschool convention and marketing to homeschoolers.

I have been thinking a lot about the Classical Ed Movement of late. Well, I think it is of late, but I have only been homeschooling for 5 years. I have listened to the bigger guns in the movement talk (Chris Perrin, Martin Cothran, Andrew Kern, etc) about lots of different classical ed ideas. I love nerding out on Circe podcasts. I love hearing educational philosophy. And yet. I finally realized that I dont think I am the target audience, even though it is all pitched to homeschoolers, it seems like we are a tagged-on afterthought. I cannot quite put my finger on the underlying attitude. Maybe I am just slow, but it seems like it was all written for and out of experience with Christian schools, but marketed for homeschoolers as well, with the assumption that we wont notice a difference. I have nothing against educational materials developed for schools, but I wish said marketers would be more straightforward about it. I finally realized that one of the things I like most about SWB and her products is she does not assume a school environment in her materials.

I am always hesitant to buy teacher's guides. For instance, I dont own the teacher's guide for Megawords and cannot figure out how it is worthwhile. Is it? I got halfway through WWS1 without the guide and regret that. I just bought it to use on my second kid. WTM Grammar I needed the guide. Singapore I never needed the guide, but I am mathy. Thoughts on your experiences?

Insert choking on tea🤣. I decided to forewarn him that the teacher's guide for WWSI1 was coming in the mail for his brother (I did WWS1 with him last year without the teacher's guide and that was a mistake) along with some other educational books.

A "game" I play with my kids we call "when who did what where why/how". You just take a topic, any topic, and come up with a sentence that says something about that topic in the order of those question words. For instance, "In The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins journeyed with the dwarfs to the Lonely Mountain because the dwarfs wanted to reclaim their home from Smaug." Or, "In 1453, the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople and closed down many west-east trade routes, resulting in the Age of Exploration." "Yesterday, my obnoxious little brother farted in my bed because he has no sense of decency." From there, focus on one of the question words from the main sentence and write a sentence about it. Do this for several of the parts of the main sentence. I found that if I do this excercise orally, it helps my "stuck" kids get a bit less stuck in how to think about what to write about.

I was hoping you would respond, bc I know you use IEW or have in the past. I agree with WTM Grammar being overkill:). In her talk, SWB said that many students will only get about halfway through the book. Then you do the next book and try to get a little further. Then, go back to the first book and try to do some of the harder lessons. I realized that if my kids can just know the first half of WTM Grammar, then they will know more than the vast majority of English speakers. I have been listening to the Art of Language podcast which is for IEW, and it is hazardous to my curriculum confidence! I really, really like TWTM materials (they fit my kids well), and what I would love is to have double the time, or more kids on whom to test writing curricula🤣.

This is mostly just a curiously question (remind me to never listen to podcasts for products/programs I dont use!). We have done the first half of Grammar for the Well Trained Mind purple book and will be doing the first half of the red book for this year. I like SWB's thoughts on diagramming and writing in general. We also use WWS. My question is this: is Fix It Grammar the opposite in practice and philosophy to Grammar for the WTM? Applied vs analytical? How does that play out in real life? The majority of my grammar knowledge is applied, and until I started teaching grammar with G for WTM and Killgallon, I did not understand why I did what I did in writing. I knew where commas went, but not why, I knew when to use "whom" vs "who" but didn't have the language to say why, etc. I am also curious as to the strengths and weaknesses in each approach (not necessarily in each program). Does one approach lead to better writing, retention, or understanding?

@Kareni Thanks for that list! I have a rising 7th grader and have been trying to think through something along those lines for him. I am putting your plan in my One Note to ruminate on and tweak accordingly😁

Oh man, bc this is a nerdy education board, your first paragraph reminded me so much of this quote by Martin Niemoller: First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me. I really, really do not mean to make to make light of neither the Holocaust nor the pandemic, but the parallels in style were too close not to say anything:).

My son has been patiently waiting for some books to come in the mail. A package came that felt like books and he excitedly tore it open. I watched his face change from pleasurable excitement to disappointment as he moped off. I looked in the box. It was the red series WTM grammar books. Like getting underwear for Christmas.🤣 Thanks, SWB, for providing me with a much-needed laugh today!