Piney Woods Homeschool

Young Man's Guide to Awesomeness The Young Man's Guide to Awesomeness: How to Guard Your Heart, Get the Girl and Save the World is a book I've been looking for for years.  Barrett Johnson has written a guide for Christian teen boys outlining, in a direct and serious tone leavened with a healthy dose of humor, the challenges they face in their relationships and attempts to succeed in life and how to overcome those challenges. The three major sections of the book cover How to Guard Your Heart, How to Get the Girl, and How to Save the World.  Within each section, chapters outline different areas of focus.  In each chapter, the topic is explored within several subsections.  A pithy Big Idea gives a piece of advice.  A body part is highlighted along with an explanation of how that body part affects this topic.  Typical responses or situations are described.  Advice is given for how to respond differently than the norm.  A related lesson from the...

Latch: A Handbook for Breastfeeding with Confidence At Every Stage is a straight-forward, encouraging resource for moms who would like to breastfeed. The book is organized by the stages of the process, starting with prenatal preparation and ending with weaning. *Preparing to Breastfeed * Establishing Breastfeeding * Breastfeeding Through Changes * Weaning from Breastfeeding The tone is matter-of-fact and supportive, and the author does not make judgmental statements. Moms facing typical breastfeeding challenges will find practical advice along with suggestions for where to go for additional help if that is needed. Many testimonials from breastfeeding moms are included, giving a multitude of perspectives on the process and the types of challenges moms face. I have nursed five children, so I found much of this information familiar, but I still saw some new and helpful facts and ideas. I would have liked to see more testimonials from moms who had a smooth experience or at leas...

Whenever I find a copy of Gary Thomas' books Sacred Marriage  or Sacred Parenting  at a discount price, I buy it.  I love to give these books to other people when they are facing challenges in their marriage or their parenting.  I recently learned that he had written Sacred Search , about choosing a marriage partner, and I bought the paperback and the ebook.  I have teenagers now, and I'm always looking for excellent resources to help them transition to adulthood and the new challenges it brings. Sacred Search tries to set the focus of the dating relationship on the purpose of the marriage relationship.  Thomas hopes that Christian marriages will become support systems for lives of ministry and training grounds for new generations of Christians who will form the same types of marriages.  From the beginning and throughout the book he reminds readers that Christian lives should be focused on the kingdom of God, and this means that Christian marriage...

Why do we teach children about history (or literature or any of a number of subjects)?  What is the best way to teach these subjects?  How do we know if we have taught them successfully? In Consider This:  Charlotte Mason and the Classical Tradition , Karen Glass explains the choices facing all of us who have the responsibility of teaching children.  When we choose to present or not present certain topics, even more so when we choose to present topics in particular ways, we are making philosophical choices whether we know it or not.  These choices have a profound effect on the way each child views the world. Karen explains that today's preferred methods of teaching resemble the old story of the blind men and the elephant, as we present children with disconnected bits of information without ever showing them the whole.  Without that view of the whole, children do not come to care about the subjects of their studies or to care about the process of learni...

Just today I finished, with my ds who is just barely 6 years old, the lessons for Robert Louis Stevenson's poem "Rain", which are the first full-fledged reading lessons in the Delightful Reading package. Prior to this, for about 3 months now, we had done simple word-building work, using the word families suggested in the teacher guide. My ds appears to be a natural reader, along the lines of my oldest dd who in Year 1 was using the Declaration of Independence for her reading lessons because we needed something that challenging in order for her to have at least one new word in each lesson. I provide this information so you'll have context for my comments below. The teacher guide supplies you with the text of CM's Volume 1 that applies to teaching reading, along with some helpful notes. It supplies you with suggestions for alphabet and word building activities to use before beginning reading lessons. It supplies you with reading lessons using primarily po...

I just finshed reading Hints on Child Training by Clay Trumbull, the great-grandfather of Elisabeth Elliot.  I wanted to evaluate how closely his recommendations meshed with those of Charlotte Mason.  In many respects, the two authors come from the same perspective.  Both encourage us to respect the personhood of the child, to train rather than break the will, and to value the role of imagination in the child’s life, just to mention a few places where the two are in agreement. However, there are significant areas of disagreement as well.  Trumbull mentions habit formation but never focuses on this key Mason element.  Trumbull also assumes a level of parental control that differs from Mason–he suggests that playmates need to be carefully screened for suitability, where Mason recommends gently training the child to choose suitable playmates for himself so as not to push him toward unsuitable ones merely by forbidding them.  Similarly, Trumbu...

Tim Kimmel’s Grace Based Parenting details an approach to parenting that meshes nicely with Charlotte Mason’s philosophy.  Kimmel’s approach, like CM’s, holds out high expectations for children but expects parents to help children meet those expectations with graceful guidance rather than brute force.  I see no indication that Mr. Kimmel has ever read CM’s works, but their thinking follows along the same lines.  Kimmel outlines the primary needs children have, then shows how parents can meet those needs by showing children the same grace that God has already shown us.  He recommends that parents examine their children’s strengths and weaknesses, looking for ways to hone the strengths and help the child overcome the weaknesses, in the same way that Charlotte Mason encourages us to use habit training not only to avoid the child’s natural flaws but also to avoid the pitfalls in their virtues.  He suggests that parents follow the child’s natural ben...

Chess for Juniors , by Robert M. Snyder, covers basic and intermediate chess concepts for young people.  We are using the book with our 6yo dd, who started learning chess when she was 4 or 5.  She’s been reading kids chess books since she learned to read over a year ago, and she’s been playing chess against the computer for over a year as well.  However, I am not qualified to teach her anything more than just how the pieces move, and without instruction she becomes discouraged as the computer repeatedly wins their games because she is not using strategy.  So we bought this book to work through together so that she would have a better foundation in chess.  I am working through it with her, about one chapter or half of a chapter each week.  We get the chess board out so that we can set it up to match the illustrations in the book.  So far (we are just on chapter 6), I have found the presentation very clear and easy to follow, and the topi...

Parenting with Love and Logic , by Jim Fay and Foster Cline, presents many of the same parenting concepts recommended by Charlotte Mason 100 years ago.  The first half of the book covers the philosophy while the second half provides specific examples of the philosophy in action.  The relatively simple philosophy centers on natural consequences, allowing children to learn from their own mistakes.  The book clearly lays out principles to follow and provides guidelines for knowing how to use natural consequences (or logical consequences if natural consequences are not appropriate).  I found a great deal of resonance between this book and Charlotte Mason’s principles for child training.  If you have read Charlotte Mason but need to see her principles in action or if you needed more explanation of her principles from a modern perspective, this book can help.  The book does not really deal with habit training, which is a key component of Charlotte...

I’ll Tell You a Story, I’ll Sing You a Song by Christine Allison should be a great help to any parent wishing to incorporate story-telling and singing. For Charlotte Mason homeschoolers, telling stories in the early years is a must, since Charlotte Mason herself emphasized its importance: Every father and mother should have a repertoire of stories––a dozen will do, beautiful stories beautifully told . . . .   Away with books, and "reading to"––for the first five or six years of life. The endless succession of story-books, scenes, shifting like a panorama before the child’s vision, is a mental and moral dissipation; he gets nothing to grow upon, or is allowed no leisure to digest what he gets. It is contrary to nature, too. . . . And here is another advantage of the story told over the story read. Lightly come, lightly go, is the rule for the latter. But if you have to make a study of your story, if you mean to appropriate it as bread of life for you...