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.)
It's that time again! We've rounded up some great ways to celebrate your first day of the new homeschool year, whether you want to keep it simple at home or take a big adventure together.
If you want to make your homeschool a place that values creativity and creating, you can’t sit on the sidelines and wait for it to happen — you’ve got to get messy with them.
It’s been a while since we’ve done a Stuff We Like post, but here are some things that are inspiring our homeschool life right now.
Break out the board games to beat the mid-winter blahs in your homeschool.
Edgar Allan Poe’s Raven turns 176 years old this January, but there are still things to discover about this most mysterious of birds.
Here’s some of the stuff making my homeschool life a little happier lately.
Evil-fighting babysitters, middle school testing, Japanese storytelling, magical houses, and more in this week’s roundup of Stuff We Like.
The surprising fun of just asking why, the challenges of choosing a reading list, reading poetry, and more stuff we liked this week.
Being patient in pursuit of a routine, un-magic people at magic schools, teaching poetry to kids, and more stuff we liked this week.
Knitting for chilly classrooms, remembering why poetry books are so fun to read, watching His Dark Materials, new highlighters, and more stuff we liked this week.
Memes as the new formalism, how predictive text works, reading trends of the 2010s, and more stuff we liked this week.
The myth of morning routines, the downside of immortality, the problem with online reviews, and more stuff we liked this week.
Apprenticeships are the new college, what we lose when we lose local news, how we lost our sense of time, Hanukkah churros, and more stuff we like.
Decolonizing the canon, what to buy your favorite Nancy Drew fan, emphasizing the significance of the domestic arts in history, and more stuff we liked this week.
Leftover pie, the language of the apocalypse, the myth of limited rights, be as nice to yourself as you would be to a stranger, and more stuff we liked this week.
Games for storytelling, the problem with history curricula, eating alone, and more stuff we liked this week.
Why we love annotated bibliographies, Scooby Doo as Gothic lit, my new retirement ambition, why you should probably hang on to your notebooks in the computer age, and more stuff we liked this week.
Reading before bed makes you smarter, happier, and healthier (ahem), the emotional labor of feeding your family, Rebecca paper dolls, spooky witch houses, and more stuff we liked this week.
The cultural relevance of fairy tales, Hamilton bathroom breaks, new words as old as you are, and more stuff we liked this week.
Rapping The Iliad, historical costumes and racism, the yellowing of school buses, the problem with constant production, and more in this week’s roundup of Stuff We Like.
What were people searching for on HSL in September?
Lilith Fair flashbacks make me happy, British citizenship tests are stuck on the Tudors, the problem with “spiritual consumerism,” when books could kill you, and more stuff we liked this week.
Rediscovered Langston Hughes, the Algonquin Round Table turns 100, feminist utopias, and more stuff we like.
Preschool politics, battles on the YA shelves, Stone Age engineering projects, the subtleties of translation, and more stuff we like.
Burnout is not a professional goal, the myth of the frontier in U.S. history, what do we mean when we talk about “electability,” what we always suspected about cats is true, and more stuff we like.
Highs and lows of Facebook groups, Teddy Roosevelt and the Iron Throne, my new favorite interview with a vampire, and more stuff we like.
Our weekly roundup of links, books, and other homeschool inspiration.
Our weekly roundup of great links, books, and other stuff that’s inspiring our homeschool life.
The slow, important uncovering of history, snow plow parents, transcript-writing for people who aren’t transcript writers, cats in medieval manuscripts, and more stuff I like.
Problems with children’s literature, thirty years of “Closer to Fine,” saying goodbye to Dylan McKay, weird ancient Greek obsessions, and more stuff we like.
Amy Sharony is the founder and editor-in-chief of home | school | life magazine. She's a pretty nice person until someone starts pluralizing things with apostrophes, but then all bets are off.
AMY SHARONY is the founder and editor-in-chief of home | school | life magazine. She's a pretty nice person until someone starts pluralizing things with apostrophes, but then all bets are off.