5 Great Poems by Living Poets to Inspire Your High School Poetry Studies

These are the poems that my literature students couldn’t stop talking about.

Students often come into literature classes thinking they hate poetry, but what they really hate is the distance they feel between themselves and “classic poetry.” Sure, you can luck into poems like “The Raven” that feel timeless from the start, but for most people, poetry only becomes interesting when it’s personal, when you personally connect with what you’re reading. And while building your critical reading skills makes any poem fair game for this kind of connection, the process is a lot smoother — and more fun! — if you start with poetry that taps into modern life. That’s why I always try to start poetry classes with living poets. Students are surprised by allusions that they recognize from their own lives, appreciative of relaxed language and syntax, and primed to tackle poetry classics with an energy and curiosity that translates to enjoyment. These are the five poems that always seem to get the process started on the right foot.

I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party BY CHEN CHEN

It hooked them with the Home Alone references, but students really connected with the awkwardness between parents and children trying to bridge the generation gap with love. “This is exactly the kind of stuff that runs through my head when my parents hang out with my friends,” one student said. “I didn't know that was poetry.”

Self-Portrait With No Flag BY SAFIA ELHILLO

My students loved this free-wheeling take on the pledge of allegiance, which inspired them to think about things that anchor their own lives. Drawing connections to everything from the Declaration of Independence to Immanuel Kant, students for the first time actually suggested writing their own poetic pledges. How cool is that?

Playground Elegy BY CLINT SMITH

My class is passionate about social justice, and this slowly unfolding poem about all the things raised arms can mean — from freedom to death — hit them hard. One student texted me on quarantine that her friend was afraid to wear a mask in public because he might be mistaken for a criminal, and she was reminded of this poem. It’s a privilege-shaker in all the best ways.

Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why) BY NIKKI GIOVANNI 

As much as the poem itself, I think it was Giovanni’s performance of it that inspired my students — we were lucky enough to get to see her read in person last winter. But even without Giovanni’s sassy-tender reading, the poem’s self-celebrating, feminist retelling of human history is a joyful discovery.

Instructions for Not Giving Up BY ADA LIMÓN

One of the hardest things about studying U.S. history with teenagers is how disappointed they are in the United States. Many of them are seeing for the first time how the big, wonderful ideas of the Declaration and Constitution crumble away if you’re not fortunate enough to be a privileged white male. We hit a point, usually around the civil rights movement, when it just hurts too much — and that’s when I pull out this glorious celebration of hope. Limón’s view of the past as a jumping off point and not a destiny is essentially empowering, just what you need to remind you that every generation has a chance to reinvent the world for the better.

---

How We Created Our Homeschool’s Studio Ghibli Literature Class (Without a Curriculum)

We used Studio Ghibli's film adaptations of beloved children's books for a high school introduction to comparative literature. Here's how we did it — and how you can, too, no curriculum required.

Literature has always been a no-brainer in our homeschool. My daughter, who is now 15 and who has joked more than once the title of her biography should be Homeschool Experiment in Action is naturally inclined toward language arts, and I’m a well-documented English nerd. We’d never had trouble making a literature class work, and while I was ready to panic about pretty much everything about homeschooling high school, I felt fairly confident that we could handle the literature part.

We knew we’d be doing U.S. History this year, and it made sense to weave U.S. literature (along with philosophy, art, and music) into that, but we also wanted to explore comparative literature.¹ Comparative literature sounds fancy — and I guess sometimes it can be — but it’s really just looking at works from different cultures, eras, languages, etc., and considering things that are the same and different about them. Adaptations are a great place to start with comparative literature because you’re working from the same source material, which makes it easier to spot similarities and differences, and my daughter had the brilliant idea of focusing on Studio Ghibli films. Several of them are based on books we know and love — The Borrowers, When Marnie Was There, A Wizard of Earthsea, Howl’s Moving Castle — and we thought it could be fun to use these book-film combos as a jumping-off point for in-depth textual analysis.

Maybe somewhere there’s a curriculum that does this, but the great thing about comparative literature is that you don’t need a curriculum — just a willingness to really dig into the text and follow where it leads you. I’m going to break down how we pulled the class together as we went, starting with just a reading/watching list, using one book-movie combo as an example.

---

The Borrowers

By Mary Norton

The Secret World of Arrietty

This wasn’t our only literature class, and we deliberately chose familiar books for the reading list. Critical reading requires a different set of skills — you’re not just following the story, considering the characters, looking for themes and symbols. You’re pausing to consider why an author might choose a particular word instead of another one, looking behind the curtain of words for what the author doesn’t mention and what that omission might mean, considering what the story you’re reading says about the way the author understood the world. Sometimes it’s easier to do this with a book you know. I often joke with my children that I have to read every book three times because the first time I get caught up in the story, the second time I appreciate all the details I missed the first time, and the third time, I can really dig into the text. Rereading is one of the best tools a critical reader can use. So while elsewhere we’d be focusing on more challenging books, for this class, I wanted to start with the familiarity of rereading.

So we started with The Borrowers, a book we’ve both read many times together and apart. Mary Norton’s tale of tiny people who live in the nooks and crannies of old houses and “borrow” what they need from their larger neighbors is a children’s classic, playing with the idea that the everyday world we inhabit only represents a tiny fraction of what’s going on around us all the time. As we read it, pencil highlighters in hand², we found lots of things to interest us. Reading it purely for fun³, we’d never really thought about the book in terms of colonialism, but this time, we paid attention to the fact that the events of the book were happening right at the height of the British empire. It was interesting to consider how colonization might reflect the plight of the Borrowers in the book, who — as Arrietty tells the boy — have been growing fewer and fewer.

We also found ourselves talking a lot about who was telling the story and how reliable that person was. Kind of like the world of the Borrowers, the story exists within layers: First, the third-person narrator (who may be grown-up Kate) who introduces Kate and Mrs. May; then Mrs. May, as she tells Kate about her brother; and then, finally, Mrs. May becomes almost an omniscient third-person narrator, describing the thoughts and feelings of her brother, Arrietty, and (to a lesser extent) other characters. How much is Mrs. May imagining or extrapolating based on what her brother told her when he was young? How much did her brother imagine or extrapolate? Who is that first third-person narrator anyway, and why has she picked this story to tell?

With the book fresh in our minds, we were ready to dive into The Secret World of Arrietty, Studio Ghibli’s 2010 adaptation of The Borrowers. Just as with reading, turning a critical eye to cinema usually requires multiple viewings. We watched it once for fun, with popcorn and the whole family, and then again the two of us with our notebooks and pencils in hand.⁴

The movie moves the action from the Victorian English countryside to modern-day Tokyo, but it generally follows the book’s plot, with Arrietty meeting the human boy (he gets a name in the movie), forging a friendship, and ultimately having to escape with her family from the house and into the world outside when threatened by the exterminator. Taking the story out of Victorian England—basically, the land of fairy tales and whimsy — changes the story immediately, we decided. The Borrowers was written in the 1950s, long after the famously well-mannered society named for Queen Victoria had ended, and setting the story in the past immediately made it plausible: Sure, there might not be tiny people living in houses right now, but there could have been back then, right? Pulling the story into the modern world is insisting on the possibility of magic, which feels like a brave choice.

Then there’s the boy. In The Borrowers , Mrs. May’s unnamed brother is kind of — well — a brat. ⁵ The movie's Sho (Shawn in the dubbed version) is a nice kid with a serious health condition who’s anxious about an upcoming operation. Why does this change matter so much? After all, in both cases, the plot runs pretty much the same — whether the boy’s encounter with Arrietty and her family changes him or just confirms who he already is doesn’t really significantly affect what happens in the story. One clue, we decided, might lie in the ending. In the book, the story ends abruptly — “and that,” said Mrs. May, laying down her crochet hook, “is really the end.” — but Kate and Mrs. May keep the story going by imagining what the Borrowers’ life in the wild might be like. Like the layered narrators that begin the book, this ending makes The Borrowers as much about stories and how we tell them as about the actual adventures of the Clock family. The movie, on the other hand, begins and ends with the boy’s perspective — the adventure with the Borrowers is just a part of his story. (The dubbed version, especially, emphasizes this with Sho’s voice-over narration that he comes through his surgery fine and enjoys hearing stories about small things disappearing in the neighborhood.) This makes The Secret World of Arrietty a coming-of-age story—Sho’s coming-of-age story.

This, we decided, ties in well with Japanese philosophy, which has borrowed (get it?) ideas from other cultures but always emphasizes the importance of everyday experience. The Borrowers , we decided, continues the West’s long (and often problematic) division between body and mind ⁶ , so we went back to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave before diving into Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind , which works well as introductory text for considering Zen Buddhism. ⁷ We worked through these two texts side by side, considering how Plato’s dualism influenced The Borrowers versus how the mindfulness and simplicity of Zen Buddhism informed the Studio Ghibli adaptation. One great example of this we found in the two versions’ treatment of the natural world: In both the book and the film versions, Arrietty yearns for the freedom of the outside world. But while the author of The Borrowers lavishes elaborate descriptions on the minuscule, Victorian-esque home the Clocks have built beneath the floorboards, the world outside remains mysterious — only at the end is there the briefest mention of it. It is, my daughter decided, “an inside book.” The Secret World of Arrietty , however, reads as a love story to the nature world. Its dreamy depictions of elastic orbs of water, spring flowers stretching as tall and far as forests, and drifting petals as seen from Arrietty’s tiny perspective are magical. We see Arrietty through Sho’s eyes, which requires him to put himself in her (tiny) shoes, to change his own perspective.

Similarly, the Clocks are less caricatures and more grounded in Studio Ghibli’s adaptation. Homily is less shrill and panicked, Pod is less Homer Simpson, and Arrietty — who, in the book, sometimes takes risks that just seem incredibly foolish ⁸ — is brave and adventurous but not reckless. In the book, my daughter pointed out, the Clocks have almost -human names and almost -human homes, and their behaviors feel almost -human, too, often exaggerated to the point of ridiculousness. Though their tininess is even more obvious in the film, the Clocks don’t seem almost -human, like caricatures of everyday people — they just seem like people. We compared this to the Victorian obsession with Japan reflected in art — Tissot’s Young Ladies Looking at Japanese Art is complex and layered, with tons of tiny details that you can tease apart, while Japanese art from the same era is often deliberately simple, focused on capturing a single image, scene, or moment.

There were real similarities between the simple-but-ultimately-more-satisfyingly-complex characterizations in the Studio Ghibli adaptation and the sometimes overwrought-to-the- point-of-stretching-believability characterizations of the Clocks in the novel. We spent a lot of time considering the ways that being able to show Arrietty’s life through the medium of film allowed a more nuanced character development, just as the simpler art left more room for contemplative interpretation.

And that’s really how comparative literature, at its simplest, can work in a homeschool high school. You don’t have to go in with a plan, just with two good texts that you want to consider together. Your plan reveals itself as you explore together—it can point you toward philosophy, science, history, theory, art, music... well, you get the idea. It’s the kind of open-ended inquiry that allows authentic learning—and, honestly, it’s fun.

---

Nerdy Notes

¹ This is obviously a dip-your-toes-in-the-water introduction to comparative literature, not a full or comprehensive exploration.

² I know, not everyone likes writing in books. I do. But even if I didn’t, I might recommend it for new-to-critical-reading students. The great thing about reading with a highlighter is that you can mark interesting bits as you go — you don’t feel obligated to comment on what makes them interesting, which you might if you were reading with a pencil — and you don’t have to remember what you found interesting, which can be surprisingly hard. It’s easy to flip back through and literally see what sparked an idea.

³ A totally valid life choice

⁴ It’s a shame that you can’t highlight movies as you go, but we have a little workaround. I start a digital timer when the movie starts, and when we see something we want to go back to, we jot down the time so that we can easily go back and review. If someone gets really excited, we can also just hit pause. (That’s another reason to make your second viewing your academic viewing—you know what happens next, so pausing mid-movie doesn’t ruin the flow.)

⁵ Speaking of comparative literature, we kept drawing parallels between Brother May and Mary Lennox from The Secret Garden. Both are spoiled kids, reared in India and cross about being in England; both end up finding a purpose that ends up making them kinder, more likable people.

⁶ I blame Descartes.

⁷ Japanese philosophy is a gorgeous, complex hodgepodge of Eastern and Western thought, and Zen Buddhism is just a tiny, tiny piece of it. I chose to focus on Zen because I think it embraces a lot of the ideas that carry across Japanese philosophy: respect for nature, compassion, the significance of the everyday world. You could argue that Shintoism or Kokugaku or some other school of thought would have been a better place to start, and I wouldn’t get defensive. This is just where I felt comfortable starting.

⁸ My daughter insists that this is because her mom, Homily, is constantly panicking about everything so that Arrietty has lost her sense of proportion when it comes to panicking. Homily thinks everything is dangerous, but Arrietty has discovered many things aren’t dangerous, so she assumes nothing is dangerous. I’m glad her dad is the one is giving driving lessons.

---

Why can’t I get my homeschool life together?

We’ve been homeschooling for two years, and I still feel like I haven’t figured out how to balance everything. When homeschooling is going great, I’m dragging at my part-time job and the house is a mess. When the house is running like a well-oiled machine, homeschooling seems to fall through the cracks. I know there’s a way to balance it all because other people seem to do it. So what’s their secret, and how can I do it, too?

Well, I hate to disappoint you, but I think you’re operating from faulty premises. We all want to believe that there’s some magical balance out there, but the truth is what you’ve probably always suspected on some level: There’s no such thing as perfect balance. There’s just finding an un-balance that works for you.

“I don’t know who came up with the myth of a balanced life, but it’s become a real problem for a lot of people,” says life coach Adrienne Harlick, who specializes in helping busy moms find ways to navigate the different parts of their lives. “You’re never going to find some magical equation that lets you manage everything perfectly all the time. What you can find is a way to set priorities and manage your time so that at the end of the day, you feel good about what you’ve accomplished.”

Harlick says that moms often react to this with disbelief and disappointment — they genuinely want to find a way to do everything and are dismayed when Harlick tells them they just plain can’t — but once they accept the initial premise that perfect balance doesn’t exist, most of them feel strangely liberated.

Georgia Parker, a homeschool mom with a full-time job, came to Harlick in the same situation you’re in now: She felt like she should be able to do everything in a way that made her feel less stressed and more competent. She felt like she was constantly dropping balls because every time she focused her full attention on one area of her life, another area suffered. “I kept thinking I was just doing it wrong, but Adrienne helped me understand that what I wanted was impossible,” Georgia says.

There is no perfect balance, so you’re wasting time and energy trying to find one. Instead, Harlick says, you need to focus on figuring out how to deal with the unbalanced life you have. You have to accept that you only have so much time, so much energy, so many resources — which means everything can’t be the most important. In order to find a way to balance your life amid perpetual imbalance, you’ve got to figure out what your priorities are.

This can be challenging because it often means letting go of some ideal of a “good mom” or a “good partner” you have stuck in your head. A good mom could keep the house spotless, shine at work, cook healthy, kid-pleasing meals three times a day, and homeschool kids in a way that’s both rigorously academic and relaxed and child-led. You are never going to be that imaginary mom. Setting priorities lets you imagine the kind of good mom you actually want to be and gives you the space to build a life that plays to your strengths. Yes, you will probably still have days where everything falls apart, but once you start prioritizing what matters to you, you will have a lot more days that end with you feeling good about what you’re doing.

• Make sure you’re setting goals that line up with your priorities. You’ll never feel balanced unless you can feel like you are making progress, and you can’t feel like you’re making progress if you’re stuck in an endless to-do cycle. Once you know what your priorities are, you can start setting goals that will move you toward reaching them. Setting goals helps you pinpoint what’s really important to you and gives you permission to sidetrack the things that aren’t. “You will feel much less guilty about not doing that co-op class if it’s because you are working on your dissertation, or much better about ordering takeout if you didn’t start dinner because you spent the day helping your kid work on a big project,” says Harlick.

• Recognize that you have a choice. When you’re feeling unbalanced, it’s often because you feel like you have to do everything, but you have more choices than you might initially think at any given moment. When you feel overwhelmed, Harlick advises pushing yourself to figure out what is the least important thing on your list — can you pause that? Outsource it? Let it go completely? What about the second-least important thing? The third? “People tend to fall into the trap of thinking that because everything they do is important, everything they do is essential, but that’s almost never the case,” Harlick says. “What if you didn’t make lunch for your 10-year-old? He’d probably feed himself when he got hungry.”

• Give overlapping a try. So you want to start a garden, but you have no time to do it. Or you’d love to write that curriculum, but to do it, you’d need an actual moment of quiet. Try including your kids. There’s not reason your kids can’t help you get that garden going or test-drive a NaNoWriMo project while you’re writing, too. This doesn’t always work out, but it’s always worth a try because the times when it does work out are magical.

• Take the big picture view. Your goal shouldn’t be to find balance in one-day increments but over the long term, says psychologist Nigel Marsh. “Your days are always going to feel lopsided and uneven — because they are probably going to be lopsided and uneven,” he says. “But if you look at a six-month chunk of time or the course of a year, you can see more clearly where your time and energy are going.” If that view makes you happy, you’ve got as much balance as it’s humanly possible to have. If it doesn’t — well, you’ve got a much better perspective of what you want to change.

• Throw money at the problem. This isn’t always an option, but if your budget has some flexibility, consider outsourcing some of the things on your to-do list that don’t match up with your priority list. Georgia Parker hired a cleaner to come in twice a week to do the heavy cleaning so that she just has to keep a handle on everyday clutter and clean-up. If you need more time for your own work, an online class or hybrid homeschool might free up some of the hours you’re putting into homeschooling. A mom in our homeschool group raves about her dinner box subscription, which takes away all the time and energy she used to spend on figuring out and shopping for dinners every week. If you can afford to let someone else handle a problem area, you’re giving yourself more space to focus on what you care about.

• Stop putting off self-care until you have time. “You will never have time, so do it now anyway,” Harlick says. Harlick says ones of the symptoms of the balance myth is that women tend to put themselves last on the assumption that they’ll eventually figure out a way to fit their own self-care into the routine. The truth is, taking care of yourself will only end up in your routine if you actively put it there, so schedule your meals, your bedtimes, your free and fun time, just as you schedule park days and standardized tests. “Once you accept that you’re never going to magically get everything balanced, you can also accept that your own needs shouldn’t wait indefinitely,” Harlick says.

• Know what makes your good day highlights reel. What makes you feel really good about your day? A run in the morning? A book in the bath? Nature time with the kids? Identify the little get-to moments that make your have-to list a little easier to work through, and get them on your schedule at least a few times a week.

• Plan when you’re going to leave, not just when you’re going to get there. This applies to everything from social activities like park days to dance lessons to the office. “If you know when you’re leaving, you can start preparing to go 20 minutes in advance — you won’t have that and-one-more-thing stretching out activities, which can make you feel like you’re always scrambling,” says Harlick. Setting your exit in advance of your arrival reduces a lot of stress and hassle.

• Don’t be afraid to multitask when it helps. We’re always trying to be in the moment more, and that’s a worthy goal — but it’s not one we can meet every minute of the day. Sometimes a quick email check while the kids are working on their math means you can squeeze in a little work time, or it might make sense to practice your poetry verses while you tend the garden.

---

The Art of Knowing When to Push

How do you know when your child wants you to nudge them forward and when they want you to respect their “no?”

One of my guiding principles for homeschooling comes by way of unschooler Sandra Dodd: she says that when kids feel truly free to say, “More, please!” when something interests them and free to say, “No, thanks” when something doesn’t interest them, those kids can’t help but learn, and learn with joy and empowerment.

But what about when my kids say “No” not because they’re not interested, but because they’re afraid? What then?

I recently faced that thorny question while my two kids and I were on a trip to the Florida Keys.

My 11-year-old daughter has long loved the ocean and its creatures. For years, she’s dreamed of snorkeling near coral reefs and seeing colorful tropical fish up close. While we were in Florida, we reserved spots on a snorkeling tour at John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park near Key Largo, the first undersea park in the United States. 

A motorized catamaran carried us and about fifty other passengers of all ages to Grecian Rocks Reef, a smooth 30-minute ride southeast of the park visitor center. Our guides were a pair of enthusiastic young women named Brittany and Caitlyn, who proudly informed us they were the park’s only all-female crew.

I was a little nervous as our boat skimmed toward our snorkeling destination, though for my daughter’s sake, I did my best to keep my fears to myself. What would it be like to swim with tropical fish? Would they brush up against me? Would I scratch myself on sharp coral or damage a reef? 

When we stopped and anchored near the Grecian Rocks, the other passengers started spraying defogger on their masks, gathering up their fins and snorkels, and heading for the ladders on either side of the boat without any visible trace of nervousness. I asked if my daughter wanted to go in first. She shook her head and said I could go ahead of her. 

The water was shockingly cold at first, and I felt awkward in my fins, mask, and snorkel. I also felt vulnerable. I’m used to swimming in pools with sides I can grab on to and shallow ends where I can easily touch the bottom. Now I was treading water in one of the world’s biggest oceans with no land in sight. I felt keenly that I was a land-based creature, an alien here.

I hung on to the bottom of the ladder to wait for my girl to join me. She made it halfway down the ladder and balked.

“I can’t do it!” she whimpered, her eyes wide with terror. “I don’t want to do it!”

My aspiration as a parent is to listen to my kids’ feelings and refrain from trying to talk them out of their emotions, no matter how inconvenient or unwelcome those emotions might be. If they say they’re not ready to try something, I figure they know better than I do what’s right for them in a given moment. 

But this time, my intuition told me that my daughter would regret it if she didn’t get in that water. I wasn’t ready to let her off the hook without trying for at least a little while to talk her through her fear.

“It does feel scary at first,” I said, hanging on at the foot of the ladder, still feeling clumsy and a bit scared myself. “But once you get used to it, I’ll bet you’ll really like it.”

I kept trying to pep-talk her, telling her that when we try something that scares us, we become bigger people. We’ve got one less thing to be afraid of and one more memory of tackling a challenge that we can call on for strength later on.

No dice. She was not budging off that ladder. 

My son had been less than enthused about this whole snorkeling business to begin with, but there’s nothing like having a younger sibling afraid to try something to motivate an older sibling to dive in and show ‘em how it’s done. He climbed down into the water and flopped in beside me, clearly feeling just as awkward as I did.

Brittany and Caitlyn encouraged my son and me to go ahead and swim around and check things out. They assured me they’d be happy to sit with my daughter while we explored. My daughter said that was all right with her, so my son and I kicked away from the boat. 

Only a few yards away from where we were anchored stood clumps of large, boulder-shaped corals swaying with sea fans and covered with forests of staghorn coral, brain coral, and elkhorn coral. Blue tangs, porcupine fish, and stoplight parrotfish nosed peacefully among the corals, oblivious to us humans hovering a few yards above them. 

Gradually, I started to relax. The fish were close enough for me to see them well, but not close enough to brush against me. We were at a comfortable distance from the coral, in no danger of touching or damaging it. 

Swimming through the silence of the calm, clear water, immersed in a world I’d previously seen only in books and movies, I focused less on how alien I felt and more on how utterly amazing this place was. I bobbed my head above the surface and lifted my mask to see if I could spot my daughter back on the boat. She was sitting in the bow wrapped in a towel, dangling her legs over the side, squinting toward me in the bright sun. 

 “Let’s go see if she’s ready now,” I told my son, and we headed toward the catamaran.

By the time we’d gotten to the boat, my daughter was standing by the ladder with her wetsuit, snorkel, and mask on, her fins in her hand. 

 It still wasn’t easy talking her down that ladder. Tears fogged up her mask as she hit the water. Her body was stiff with fear. 

With my son on one side of her and me on the other, she took the risk of putting her face in the water. We swam side by side, my son holding her right hand and me holding her left.

Within seconds, I heard her gasping with wonder as she spotted her first fish. Gradually, she grew brave enough to briefly let go of my hand to point at especially big or colorful fish that caught her eye. 

By the end of our hour or so of snorkeling, she wasn’t holding my hand at all and was confidently swimming ahead of me. She’d conquered a fear. Her possibilities were just a little bit bigger than they’d been an hour earlier, and she’d fulfilled a dream she’s had since she was tiny.

So how do you answer that question of when to push a child who’s scared to try something? I think for me, the answer comes down to being clear about why I’m pushing. Is it because of some abstract idea about not wanting my child to be a scaredy-cat or a quitter? Or is it because I know deep down, based on my relationship with my child, that they’re more ready than they realize and just need a little encouragement, a gentle little nudge? Do I want my kid to overcome their fear to please me, or because I think overcoming that fear will please them? My answer to those questions makes all the difference.

Riding back to shore with my daughter huddled beside me in a damp beach towel, our minds brimming with the wonders we’d just seen below the waves, I felt confident that at least this time, I’d been right not to take “no” for an answer.

---

The Hero’s Journey: A Book and Movie List

Joseph Campbell’s take on the Hero’s Journey is maybe a little sexist (skip to the end for a different version), but it is reflected in centuries of great storytelling. The hero’s journey is so prevalent in film and books that it makes a great jumping off point for a comparative literature study, and these texts are a great place to begin.

You don’t have to be familiar with the hero’s journey to appreciate epics like the Odyssey and Beowulf, but the hero’s journey does provide a surprisingly useful framework for exploring classic Western literature. (Even Bluey uses it!) Sometimes, it can be just as interesting to look at the ways a text DOESN’T line up with the traditional hero’s journey — there’s a lot of conversation in the counterargument.

Buy on Amazon

MOBY DICK

Ishmael signs on for a three-year journey on the whaling ship Pequod, entering Campbell’s belly of the whale as he cuts himself off from the known world to pursue a literal white whale through the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans.

---

Buy on Amazon

JANE EYRE

When she leaves her beloved Mr. Rochester and Thornfield Hall, Jane enters the English countryside equivalent of the Underworld: penniless, friendless, and fraught with trials and temptations.

---

Buy on Amazon

THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN

Jim — with his combination of river knowledge and complex commitment to superstition — serves the role of Huck’s wise companion on their journey down the Mississippi River.

---

Buy on Amazon

DUNE

Frank Herbert takes a subversive approach to the hero’s journey, following its patterns but raising questions about the nature and value of heroes. “The bottom line of the Dune trilogy is: beware of heroes. Much better to rely on your own judgment, and your own mistakes,” said Herbert.

---

Buy on Amazon

THE MATRIX

Morpheus stands in for the father in Neo’s journey into the real world, and Neo can’t achieve full consciousness to fulfill his destiny until he understands his father’s teachings.

---

Buy on Amazon

THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ

A tornado sweeps Dorothy across the threshold and into the land of Oz, where she must follow a literal Road of Trials (paved in yellow brick) to complete her hero’s journey.

---

Buy on Amazon

O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU?

Like Odysseus, on whom he’s based, Ulysses Everett McGill can only end his journey when he’s reunited with his family and his home is restored.

---

Buy on Amazon

LABYRINTH

This fantasy twists traditional gender roles as a teenage girl takes up the hero mantle and is tempted by a Goblin King — played by David Bowie, which makes it easy to sympathize with how hard he is for our heroine to resist.

---

Buy on Amazon

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

Who knew a picture book could be so epic? But you can trace Max’s journey from the call to adventure to the freedom to live (and eat supper).

---

Buy on Amazon

THE GOONIES

A group of kids follow the hero’s journey in this film, which ties its happy ending into the literal treasure the children bring back from their Underworld adventure.

---

Buy on Amazon

STAR WARS

George Lucas sets the hero’s journey in space, but Luke Skywalker’s journey from farm boy to savior of the galaxy echoes the classic journeys of Gilgamesh, Beowulf, and other epic heroes.

---

Buy on Amazon

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

Scout may be just a kid, but she heeds the call to adventure aided by the guidance of her wise mentor father.

---

Buy on Amazon

And finally: For a feminist exploration of the hero’s journey, pick up From Girl to Goddess: The Heroine's Journey through Myth and Legend, which explores multicultural myths and folktales with female protagonists.

---

How do I raise kids who value diversity in a not-very-diverse homeschool community?

I want my kids to be the kind of people who value diversity, but our homeschool community is pretty homogenous. How do I raise open-minded global citizens when our opportunities to experience other cultures are limited?

This is something I worry about, too. Our homeschool community is vibrant, engaging, and full of creative, curious kids with diverse interests and talents — but it’s a very white, middle class community. And I worry: How will my kids be responsible citizens in an increasingly global and diverse world if they don’t have opportunities to spend time with a diverse group of people?

Here’s the good news: It turns out that just by talking about issues of race and difference with our kids, we’re improving their diversity IQ. This goes contrary to what a lot of parents think: By talking about differences and racism to our children, aren’t we really just teaching them to notice differences that they’d be oblivious to otherwise? In fact, no: Kids as young as three years old start to form ideas about race and act on them — not because children are natural-born racists but because they experience the world through cataloging and comparing the people and things around them. “Don’t you want to suggest to them — early on, before they do form these preconceptions — something positive [about differences between people] rather than let them pick up something negative?” asks Kristina Olson, a psychologist who studies racial bias and social cognitive development.

So talking about race and difference is important, and if your community doesn’t lend itself to natural segues into those conversations, you can turn to books and television to bring up the topic. Ask your librarian to help you find books that have been nominated for the Coretta Scott King Book Award (for books by an African-American author and illustrator), the Schneider Family Book Award (for excellence in writing about the disability experience), the Pura Belpré Award (awarded to a Latino illustrator), the Stonewall Award (for excellence in children’s and young adult LGBTQ literature), the American Indian Youth Literature Awards, and the Asian Pacific Awards, all of which seek out works by authors and illustrators that highlight diversity. But don’t stop there: Also talk to your kids about where you don’t find multiculturalism in books and television. Why aren’t there any black Santa Clauses? Why do people assume a character like Rue in The Hunger Games or Hermione in the the Harry Potter series is white — and get so upset when it turns out that she may not be? You can use these conversations as a starting point to talk about diversity in your real-life community: Why do you think we seem to see people who look the same everywhere we go?

It’s possible that in the course of your conversations, your kids will say some insensitive things. That’s great because it gives you the opportunity to talk about the thinking behind the insensitivity, says Howard Stevenson, professor of education and Africana studies and author of Promoting Racial Literacy in Schools: Differences That Make a Difference. Don’t admonish your child for saying something that’s off-base — instead, respect your child’s curiosity and help him explore the ideas that led him into narrower-minded thinking.

One of the most effective ways to do this is to teach children that diversity is a value. Your children probably aren’t going to be blind to the fact that other people look different, talk differently, and have different abilities — so instead of teaching them to ignore differences, encourage them to embrace them as good things and to look for commonalities with people who seem superficially difference. Reading a book about a first-generation Chinese boy, look for what you might have in common with the protagonist — an obsession with baseball or a bossy mother — as well as differences. The more similarities young kids see between themselves and children of other races, the more they may embrace them, says Stevenson.

Of course, there’s no substitute for first-hand experience with diverse people, so look for opportunities to explore different cultures. This can be as simple as loading up the car to check out festivals, restaurants, and cultural events near you, or as involved as planning immersion getaways to places that are totally different from your hometown or sponsoring a foreign exchange student. Ideally, you’ll guide your kids by being excited to explore and discover diversity, whatever your community, and following your lead, they’ll grow up to value and seek out diversity, too.

---

When is it OK to let kids quit?

When is quitting a smart way to cut your losses on a project that didn't work, and when is it failing to keep a commitment?

I signed my sons up for a class at our nature center because I thought they’d love it — but three weeks in, they’re asking if they have to go every week. I’ve probed and probed, but it doesn’t seem like the class is bad or the instructor is mean — a friend’s daughter took the class with the same instructor last year and loved it — they just don’t want to go. Should I let them quit? And if I do, am I raising them to be quitters?

It sounds like you signed your sons up for this class without really getting their opinion on whether they wanted to take it — which is fine. How will kids learn what they love if they don’t try lots of different things? Part of our job as homeschool parents is to plant seeds that might bloom into interests. But not every seed blooms. Trying lots of things means that you’ll also discover things you don’t like — and that often involves quitting something that just isn’t a good fit.

We’ve stigmatized quitting, pitting it against virtuous qualities like persistence and follow-through, but quitting isn’t necessarily a bad thing, says Shimi K. Kang, author of the book The Dolphin Way: A Parent's Guide to Raising Healthy, Happy, and Motivated Kids-Without Turning into a Tiger. It’s a normal part of pre-adolescent development, as kids experiment, explore, and find their passions through trial and error. The problem, says Kang, is often that we sometimes leap right into a three-month class commitment instead of giving our kids free space to explore their interests on their own. Just like you, we think, “Oh, Marshall loves going to the nature center — I bet he’d love this nature class,” when we might be better served looking for one-day programs (check nature centers, community centers, state parks, and libraries in your neck of the woods) that let kids sample an activity without commitment. And don’t underestimate the power of free play for letting kids test out different interests — the modern-day prescription to any childhood interest tends to be a structured class, but that isn’t always the best way for kids to test the waters. Kids who have a pattern of wanting to quit activities may just need fewer activities and more free time. This may be the case with your sons — they like nature study, they just don’t want to get up and do it every week in a structured way.

Now, if your sons were the ones who pushed to take this class, I’d feel differently. Yes, trial and error are an important part of finding your interests, but time and money aren’t unlimited for most of us. If a child is interested in a class or activity, it’s smart to talk about expectations up front. For team sports, choirs, theater troupes, and other activities where other players are depending on your child’s participation, your child should plan to see the season through before he signs up — part of signing on to that kind of activity is becoming part of that community. If you’re paying for a class or activity, agree together on what a “reasonable effort” before giving up entails. A full semester? A month? The length of the class? Then hold your child to her commitment. (Of course, if kids want to quit because they are being hurt, physically or emotionally, they should always be able to quit.)

Bottom line: Quitting isn’t all bad, and you should address it on a case-by-case basis before the activity even starts.

---

Great Short Stories for Your High School Literature Class

Suzanne has the definitive guide to the best short stories for your middle school or high school homeschool (or for your own personal reading list). Bonus: You can read most of them online for free.

As Library Chicken readers may already know, the past year or so of my bookish life has been all about falling in love again with short stories. I was an avid short story reader growing up: I read ghost stories, detective stories, classic stories, and all the science fiction and fantasy I could get my hands on, including everything published in the Big Three magazines (Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine). At some point, however, I lost interest in short stories, preferring the complexity (and longer emotional commitment) of novels, even getting to the point where I actively avoided story collections.

Once I decided to focus on short stories in our homeschool-hybrid junior high literature course, though, I had to start reading and rereading for the syllabus, which led to a binge-read that hasn’t yet tapered off, even as we’re about to wrap up the class. (NOTE: For any interested parties, the list of stories we read during the past semester is included at the end of the post.) For my own sake, I wish I’d rediscovered short stories a while back, but I’m really kicking myself that I didn’t use short stories more while homeschooling my own children.

Short stories are WONDERFUL for homeschool. By their very nature, they’re less intimidating than novels for slower and more reluctant readers (and they don’t interfere as much with the stack of recreational reading that avid readers will already have piled by their bedside), and it’s easier for busy parents to work them in as read-alouds or read-alongs. All of the basic concepts of literary analysis and criticism (setting, protagonist, plot, conflict, etc.) can be practiced with short stories, and it’s easy to read a bunch and build up a ‘mental library’ for the purposes of comparison and contrast. It’s a great way to introduce homeschoolers to classic authors and new genres — and if readers hate them, then the suffering doesn’t last very long! If you haven’t already, I highly recommend trying out some short stories in your homeschool curriculum, and if you’re looking for summer reading ideas now that the school year is winding down, short story collections are a great place to start.

So I’m happy to present for your reading enjoyment: Library Chicken’s Top-Ten(ish) Short Story Collections (So Far). (Please note that while I’d have no problem handing any of these to teenage or young adult readers — and many of them to upper elementary and middle school readers — some stories are definitely more adult-oriented and may contain sexual situations, violence, and/or racial or ethnic slurs. If you are considering short stories for your homeschool curriculum, please read them first so you can make the best choices for your own family.)

Buy on Amazon

• The Oxford Book of American Short Stories edited by Joyce Carol Oates

• The Best American Short Stories of the Century edited by John Updike

• 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories edited by Lorrie Moore

These three hefty anthologies are great places to start if you’re looking to catch up on American short stories past and present. Many of the best-known and most-anthologized stories (and authors) in our literary tradition can be found here. Don’t be intimidated by massive size of these books — you should feel free to dip in and out and skip around.

---

Buy on Amazon

The Serial Garden: The Complete Armitage Family Stories by Joan Aiken

ALL AGES. Sadly, I have not done as much reading (and rereading) of short stories for younger readers as I would like, but this collection is a standout. If I had discovered it a few years ago, it would have gone straight into our read-aloud pile; as it was, I immediately bought a copy for our home library. Every Monday (and occasionally on Tuesday) amazing and fantastical things happen to the Armitage family, and you owe it to yourself (and any children you may have wandering about) to get to know them better.

---

Buy on Amazon

Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to be American edited by Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan

Amy Tan, Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros, E. L. Doctorow, Louise Erdrich — do I really need to say anything more? (This would be a fabulous text for a homeschool high school literature course.)

---

Buy on Amazon

• American Gothic Tales edited by Joyce Carol Oates

• The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

Short stories are traditionally the home of ghosts and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night, and these two anthologies have some of my favorite and most bizarre examples. They range from deliciously creepy to full-on horror, so read at your own risk!

---

Buy on Amazon

• Tenth of December by George Saunders

• Get in Trouble by Kelly Link

• What is Not Yours is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi

If you prefer your weirdness to come with a more literary bent, these three acclaimed authors can take care of that for you. (Also see any short story collections by Neil Gaiman or China Mieville.) If you have a middle/high schooler who claims to be bored with reading, definitely consider putting some of the stories collected here on your summer reading list.

---

 ...Which brings us to the end of our official Top Ten, but I can’t leave without recommending the following classics to all readers and especially homeschoolers:

• pretty much anything and everything by Edgar Allan Poe

• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

• The World of Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

• The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft by H.P. Lovecraft

• The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson

• The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

...and a personal favorite that I DID make all of my children read (because I’m a science fiction nerd):

• I, Robot by Isaac Asimov

BONUS: Below is the list of stories that we read in our junior high literature class this past session. We typically read and discussed two stories a week. If you are considering coming up with your own list for summer (or whenever) reading, you could go with one story a week and still get a lot of great reading done. Also, when making up your own list, my advice is to start where I started: with the short stories that you love from your own reading AND with the ones (whether you loved or hated them) that still stick in your head from your own school days. If they made a big enough impression that you still remember them (ahem: see “To Build a Fire” below), there’s probably something there worth revisiting.

1. “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe

2. “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” by Arthur Conan Doyle

3. “Big Two-Hearted River” by Ernest Hemingway

4. “The Monkey’s Paw” by W.W. Jacobs

5. “The Luck of Roaring Camp” by Bret Harte

6. “The Courting of Sister Wisby” by Sarah Orne Jewett

7. “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe

8. “To Build a Fire” by Jack London

9. “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Gilman

10. “A Worn Path” by Eudora Welty

11. “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” by Rudyard Kipling

12. “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury

13. “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell

14. “Quietus” by Charlie Russell

15. “It’s a Good Life” by Jerome Bixby

16. “Jeeves Takes Charge” by P.G. Wodehouse

17. “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” by James Thurber

18. “Good Country People” by Flannery O’Connor

19. “The Gift of the Magi” by O. Henry

20. “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce

21. “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut

22. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula Le Guin

23. “The Lady or the TIger?” by Frank Stockton

24. “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson

(I didn’t read them in time for this session, but next time around I’d love to add “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker and “A Jury of Her Peers” by Susan Glaspell.)

---

How do you plan a move when you’re homeschooling?

We’re trying to sell our house, which means no piles of books or stinky science projects for a while. Any tips for homeschooling while your house is staged? 

I am neither an expert on home staging nor on housekeeping while homeschooling, so I asked a friend in real estate for her recommendations. She says the biggest challenge most homeschool families face is returning their home to “normal.” For instance, lots of us use the dining room or formal living room as homeschool central, which can be off-putting to some buyers. If you’re so serious about selling that you’re actually staging your home, this may mean drastically changing your space to make it more neutral. Consider setting up your rooms with a traditional flow — a table and chairs in the dining room, an office or sitting area in the formal living room, etc. You probably know this, but decluttering and packing non-essentials will go a long way toward making your house buyer-ready. (As soon as you pack up a box of books, you’ll discover that the one title you really want is in the box — accept that this will happen, and just plan to hit the library when it does.)

Keeping things tidy is vital. If you have clutter-prone areas — our dining room table is our worst offender — make clearing them off a priority. If you aren’t naturally neat, keep a few big laundry bins under your table for emergency get-that-cleaned-up-now sessions — throw a nice tablecloth over the table, and no one will be the wiser. Move homeschool materials to free-standing dressers and armoires so that they don’t clutter closets — buyers will check out your closets, but they’d have to be pretty nosy to rifle through the furniture that’s not part of the house. 

As for academics, the selling-your-house period is an ideal time to dive into unit studies or intensive projects like NaNoWriMo (most people do it in November, but you can write your book any time of year). Focusing on one topic at a time makes it easier to quickly shift gears if you need to—and gives you the freedom to take spontaneous field trips during house showings. 

---

How to Be More in the Moment in Your Homeschool

Get out of your head and into the joy of your everyday homeschool experiences. Here’s why embracing the magic of the moment can change your homeschool for the better — and how you can do it, one moment at a time.

Chances are, you’re thinking about something else right now.

It’s kind of hard not to. Homeschooling is one of those projects that depends on multitasking. You may be measuring the pH level of red cabbage or tracing a map of a medieval village, but you’re probably also listening out for the clothes dryer or waiting for an email or trying to figure out how to turn the odds and ends currently in your fridge into dinner so you don’t have to squeeze in a grocery store run. Most of us, most of the time, are probably thinking about something other than what we’re doing at any given moment.

People talk a lot about enjoying the moment, but it turns out that being in the moment is a skill we have to acquire — not something that comes naturally for most of us. It seems like it should be easy to get lost in what we’re doing at a given moment, but our brains aren’t really wired that way.

One of the distinguishing features of human consciousness is our ability to do one thing while thinking about something else. Being able to anticipate the future — whether we’re doing it consciously or unconsciously — is a benefit of our big brains, and often, this ability really is a benefit. When we’re making plans or looking forward to something we’re excited about, we may actually feel happier and less stressed than when we’re engaged in routine activities. And remembering is a plus, too: Catching a glimpse of a family vacation photo or hearing a song that reminds us of a great road trip can make us instantly connected to past happiness. That’s the upside. Any homeschool mom who has ever been up at 3 a.m. replaying something another mom said at park day or worrying about her son’s math skills never developing can tell you the downside: Our ability to look beyond the present moment can also equal worry and rumination. It can also keep us from really connecting to everyday moments. If we’re worrying about what’s next and fretting over what has been, how can we reorient ourselves to be present in what actually is?

“Everyone agrees it’s important to live in the moment but the problem is how — when people are not in the moment, they’re not there to know they aren’t there,” says Ellen Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author of Mindfulness.

Being in the moment — also called mindfulness — is, at its most basic is just being present in what’s happening around you. It has two essential parts: Being there requires you to focus on the actual experience you’re having, without being distracted about what you’ll do next or what might be going on somewhere else, and it also necessitates open, nonjudgmental acceptance of whatever is happening. In other words, mindfulness is being there and being okay with being there — which, for parents, means ignoring those critical thoughts about your parenting choices (Maybe this whole homeschool project is really a big mistake) or frustration at your child’s choices (Why is he standing right in that mud puddle in his brand- new sneakers?).

This is easier said than done, especially for homeschool parents who are usually juggling a never-ending to-do list of projects and worries. You may be enjoying exploding that baking soda volcano in the backyard, but if you’re like most of us, you’re also mentally organizing the post-eruption clean-up, trying to remember what you’ve got on hand for lunch, and wondering if that co-op teacher responded to your email about the age requirement for her medieval history class. Maybe you’re also worrying because your sixth grader sulked and grumbled his way through math practice this morning, even though he’s already way behind where his public school peers are in math and really needs the practice. If you were in the moment, you think — pulling yourself even further out of the moment — you’d be enjoying all the volcanic fun, but instead, you’re only part there. The rest of you is somewhere else.

“We live in a world that contributes in a major way to mental fragmentation, disintegration, distraction, and decoherence,” says B. Allan Wallace, a Buddhist scholar. Buddhists call this permanently scattered mental state that so many people tend to live in “monkey mind,” referencing its ability to swing from thought to thought without settling in any single spot. Being in the moment asks you to change this and be where you are — which means accepting all the less-than-great things about where you are without letting yourself get caught up in them. This doesn’t mean you have to like everything that’s happening: You can be a perfectly mindful person and still not love it that your middle schooler is refusing to do math. You can be a mindfulness adherent and still be bored playing your 2,000-th game of Stack the States or listening to your child explain his Minecraft project in micro details over a 45-minute traffic jam. People often think mindfulness means being happy in every single moment, and while that might be a lovely dream, there are plenty of unlovely moments in everyday life.

“Taking care of children all day can be emotionally, cognitively, and psychologically exhausting, and it’s really problematic that parents aren’t more honest about that,” says Claire Lister, a New York City-based psychologist. “Sometimes, you’re going to zone out. Sometimes, you’re going to think about the other things you need to do next. Sometimes, you’re going to be in the moment and be bored out of your mind. It’s great to be present, and I think you’re usually happier when you are, but expecting yourself to be fully present and totally delighted every single minute of parenting is likely to be a recipe for failure.”

What keeps you in the moment in those situations where you’re not basking in the glow of a moment’s perfect joy is recognizing and accepting what’s actually happening instead of immediately jumping into anger, blaming yourself, or trying to problem-solve for the future. Being in the moment is an active, open, intentional process — and it’s one that comes with a host of benefits for you.

“When people are in the mindful, they are more likely to experience themselves as a part of humanity, as part of a greater universe,” says Michael Kernis, a psychologist at the University of Georgia. “The line between self and other gets blurred in a way that’s conducive to growing strong, healthy relationships and self confidence.”

Blurring this line is surprisingly positive in all kinds of unexpected ways. For starters, it makes you more empathetic, which can be a big plus during those middle school math stand-offs. It may make it easier for you to see your child’s perspective and to feel more connected to her needs and interests. Even better, it helps you take your ego out of potentially emotional situations so that you’re less likely to link your self-esteem to events — like your kid’s academic success or how well she enjoys homeschooling on a given Thursday — and more likely to take things at face value. Ultimately, this kind of perspective can make you less aggressive, defensive, and reactive and more understanding and accepting — of yourself and of other people, says Kernis.

Learning how to be more in the moment can also help alleviate one of the plagues of homeschool life: that constant second-guessing we always seem to be doing about everything from whether homeschooling is the best choice for your child to whether you should have spent that $500 on science supplies. “Being present minded takes away some of that self evaluation and getting lost in your own mind—and in your mind is where you make the evaluations that beat yourself up,” says Stephen Schueller, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Learning how to be in the moment can reduce the overthinking that drives us to doubt our confidence and be our own worst critics. When you’re able to focus your attention on the moment, you’re better able to stop problematic catastrophizing (worrying about the future) and rumination (worrying about the past) — in the moment, definitely, but also later, when you’re back in everyday multitasking mode.

Mindfulness also seems to have physiological benefits, though it’s an area that hasn’t historically been the focus of rigorous scientific research. Still, the existing studies suggest that people who practice being in the moment, even with minimal practices like five minutes of daily meditation, report reduced stress, better immune system functioning, lower blood pressure, and even reductions in chronic pain. These small benefits may lead to bigger ones — reduced risk for high blood pressure and other chronic health problems, as well as sometimes significantly reduced depression and anxiety symptoms.

These benefits aren’t just for you either. Parents who practice mindfulness are more likely to have kids who can enjoy being in the moment, which can do a lot to mitigate some of the bigger emotional challenges of childhood and adolescence. If it feels selfish to focus on your own well- being, remember that your wellbeing when it comes to mindfulness has a direct, positive benefit for the rest of your family, too.

* * *

Mindfulness isn’t really complicated, though we often try to make it that way. “People set the goal of being mindful for the next 20 minutes or the next two weeks, and they end up thinking mindfulness is difficult because they are using the wrong yardstick,” says Jay Winner, author of the book Take the Stress Out of Your Life. The only way to measure mindfulness, Winner says, is one moment at a time, which means every moment is an opportunity to practice mindfulness. There’s no magical way to learn to be in the moment, but these tips can help you start incorporating mindfulness into your regular routine.

Practice in happy sensory moments. Ultimately, you want mindfulness to be a part of your whole life, but if you are struggling with getting started, happy sensory moments — eating your favorite dessert, taking a bath, stepping out into the sunshine — make for good mindfulness practice.

“The easiest way to start being in the moment is with a physical sensation that makes you happy,” says Sonja Lyubomirsky, author of The How of Happiness and a psychologist at the University of California at Riverside. Concentrate on one specific sensation—revel in it, and savor it — and you’ll find that being in the moment feels easier than you might have thought.

Let yourself relax about messes — at least sometimes. That baking soda volcano may cause a clean-up emergency in your yard, but homeschooling in general can be a messy project. Even if you’re not making oobleck or glittering up your homework, being a hands-on homeschooler will often mean that your dining room table is buried under books, your breakfast dishes are still stacked in the sink at lunchtime, and your family room is full of the clutter of everyone’s projects and activities.

To be mindful, you have to let go of thinking about clean-up while things are happening. You’ll still have to dust-bust the piles of glitter or load the dishwasher later, whether you’re thinking about it now or not, so give yourself permission to deal with the mess when it’s actually time to deal with the mess instead of proactively planning your tidying. Obviously you may not be able to do this every time there’s a mess in the making — that’s okay. But letting go of that kind of forward-thinking future planning even sometimes can really help you be more in the moment.

Cultivate a mindfulness habit. If mindfulness doesn’t come naturally to you, finding ways to encourage it can help you integrate more moments into your routine. One strategy that works well for some people is keeping a memorable moments journal and making a point to write in it for a few minutes every evening. (You don’t want to write in it — or even think about writing it — during the rest of the day since that can pull you right out of the moment.) Knowing that you’ll be looking for information to write about at night can subtly encourage you to pay more attention to moments as they are happening. This doesn’t work for everyone, but if you’re struggling with everyday mindfulness, this is a trick worth trying.

Press the pause button before acting. Homeschool parents can develop a tendency to jump right in when kids are struggling with an assignment, unsure at the playground, or otherwise experiencing a moment of uncertainty. But being in hover mode can make mindfulness impossible — that state of perpetual readiness it requires is the opposite of the nonjudgmental attention to the present moment. Practice giving your children space to explore and problem-solve on their own.

As a bonus, reducing parental steering has mindful benefits for both you and your child — solving problems on your own boosts mindfulness, decision-making, problem- solving, and self control.

Let go of the myth of “quality time.” Parents have a tendency to value special, focused time — a trip to the nature center, a family picnic — over everyday life moments, like trying to find a parking space at the karate center or folding the clean laundry. But all time has the potential to be quality time.

“My son is in college now, but his favorite memory of homeschooling is cleaning up before school started in the morning — we’d turn up the music and do a one-song clean-up session as fast as we could,” says Naomi Vincent, who homeschooled her son from 4th to 8th grade. “I planned a lot of field trips and special activities, so I was surprised that silly ritual, which was really just about trying to keep the dining room from becoming a disaster area, was his happiest homeschool memory.”

Don’t schedule away your down time. It’s tempting to do a grocery run during ballet lessons or to answer email while you’re waiting in the co-op parking lot, but this perpetual busy-ness doesn’t leave much space for mindfulness. Sometimes you may really need that gallon of milk, but when you don’t, bring a book and settle in under a shady tree or find a cozy spot to knit a few rows. This kind of slowing down won’t come naturally at first if you’re not used to it, but you’ll find it makes a big difference.

Similarly, don’t always save time just because you can. If it takes you an extra 15 minutes to walk to soccer practice instead of driving, take the walk occasionally. Bring a deck of cards to the library and play a quiet hand of spades before you leave. Stop and have your coffee at the shop instead of zipping through the drive-through. Leave more openings in your schedule for experiences.

Accept that there will be bad moments. Homeschooling is full of great moments, but homeschooling — and parenting and pretty much all of life — has its share of not-so-wonderful moments, too. Mindfulness is not going to magically make those moments go away, but mindfulness can help you through the rough moments just as it can enhance your enjoyment of the good ones.

Ideally, being in the moment lets you approach challenging moments with your kids with more empathy and understanding — you see that your third grader refuses to read because he needs to move around in a way that’s not conducive to long reading sessions or that your first grader’s tantrum is a way of testing his limits. But it’s also great if the effect of mindfulness is simply that you can accept when a bad moment is happening and not take it personally or feel like it’s your problem to solve immediately.

Make mindfulness part of your routine with these tips from other homeschool families who have discovered ways to be more in the moment.

Shake Up the Routine

Homeschools run on routine, and most of us would be lost without our everyday rhythm. That’s why the very occasional disruption of that routine can be one of the most effective ways to get you out of your head and into the moment.

Throw a surprise shake-up. A few times a year, let the gang get about ten minutes into your regular morning routine — then announce that it’s ice cream — or swimming pool or ice skating — time. The unexpected momentum shift will kick your homeschool energy into higher gear. (A version of this can also be fun for bedtime.)

Make time for mystery trips. Whether it’s a weekend in the mountains or an afternoon at the zoo, the fun of a mystery getaway is not knowing where you’re going. Help your kids dress appropriately and let them know if they need to pack a bag, but don’t tell them anything else — the anticipation is what makes a mystery trip so fun.

Shake up someone else’s day. The only thing more inspiring than giving your own routine a little jump is inspiring someone else’s day. Bake cookies to leave surprises for your neighbors, bring flowers to your favorite supermarket clerk, or stop by a senior center for a singalong. Doing something nice for other people will help you enjoy the moment yourself.

Put Adventure on Your To-Do List

It’s easy to slip into a rut, so build your own momentum by keeping fun on your radar.

Update your calendar every season with the activities you don’t want to miss: planting a veggie garden or taking a waterfall hike in the spring, visiting a pumpkin farm or navigating a corn maze in the fall, or finding a new swimming hole or painting a new fence mural in the summer. Scheduling spontaneous fun may seem weird at first, but getting the fun on your calendar is the first step to actually having it.

Keep a choose-your-own-fun box, and fill it with cards describing possible activities. Have one color card for free or cheap activities (like a picnic in the park or a hike on a nearby trail), another color for activities that require a little more cash (museum visits or favorite eateries), and a third color for splurges, like a trip to an amusement park or a camping weekend. When you have free time to spare, choose a card that suits your time and budget and head out on an adventure.

Celebrate the Little Things

Don’t save all your celebrations for a couple of annual events. Make moments all year long by scheduling low-pressure celebrations.

Look for silly excuses to celebrate, like Star Wars Day (May 4), Lost Sock Memorial Day (May 9), or National Doughnut Day (June 1). There’s no hype or stress surrounding these low-key holidays, and you can invent your own ways to celebrate them, from all-out party time, complete with costumes and props, to laid-back movie nights.

Schedule fun studies periodically. In our house, we call them DEAPs — Drop Everything and Play — and we pull them out when we feel like learning has become a bit of a grind and we want something new. A DEAP might be a new art curriculum or a complicated Lego kit; it might be a board game, a unit study, or a creative writing project. The idea is to have a built-in burst of fun to get you through the inevitable times when homeschooling starts to drag.

Have a birthday party for your favorite writer. ReadWriteThink maintains a great list of beloved kid’s lit authors’ birthdays, and you can set aside a day to read your favorite book, bake a cake, and sing an enthusiastic happy birthday to an author whose work you love.

Make a ritual of one everyday meal. Maybe it’s setting the table and lighting the candles for dinner or opening the window and pouring juice for breakfast — whatever meal you choose, establish a pattern that you follow every single day.

Have a Plan to Deal with Stress

Being in the moment can be the hardest when you’ve got big worries to deal with — when you’re confronted with a major life stress, like changing jobs, moving, unemployment, health problems, or relationship problems. Getting stuck in worry is totally normal — you’d be superhuman to get through a really big life upheaval without stress, but you can still find moments of peace by focusing.

Start with your breathing. People always say this — if you slow down and just focus on your breathing, clearing your mind of everything else, you’ll feel more centered and in the moment — but they always say it because it’s actually true. Take five minutes, and just breathe.

Single-task the little things. Resist the urge to listen to a podcast while you do the dishes or to respond to email when you’re eating lunch. Instead, use these pockets of time to be fully in the moment, focusing on the sights, smells, sounds, and sensations of the single thing you’re doing.

Make the Most of “Wasted Time”

Most homeschoolers spend plenty of time between the good stuff, whether you’re driving to and from lessons or squeezing in a load of laundry. Obviously every single one of these moments can’t be a profound experience, but there’s no reason some of them can’t.

Park farther away. Sure, a close spot is convenient, but parking farther from your destination gives you space to shake off the drive, connect with your kids, and refocus on what you’re about to do.

Do it together. Probably things like making dinner, sorting clothes for the laundry, or staking the tomato plants will take a little longer if you get your kids involved, but involving someone else in the process will automatically make you slow down and focus more on what you’re doing.

Let Housework Be Your Inspiration, Not Your Nemesis

You’re always going to have housework to do. Some people can find mindfulness in rituals like folding laundry or scrubbing toilets, but if housework just feels like, well, work, try adding a dash of fun to your chores.

Make it a party. Whether it’s a laundry-sorting mock-snowball fight, where you pile all the dirty laundry on your beds and sort it by throwing it into the correct hamper, or a sweeping and mopping dance party, making your everyday chores an excuse to play together can pull you all right into the moment.

Start a friendly competition. If there’s an everyday job you hate, turn it into a competition. Time how long it takes everyone to work together to wash the dishes or fold the laundry, and make a point of trying to beat your best time. (Make it clear that smashed plates and crumpled-up T-shirts don’t count as finishing the job!) Keep your family’s best time posted prominently, and you may find that racing the clock makes that dreaded chore zip by.

Employ a little logic. When you’re tackling a big mess — cleaning up the playroom or a big day of lawn work — up the ante by putting together a mystery for your family to solve: Borrow or concoct a logic puzzle, and break it into pieces that you hide in ziplock bags around your work site. As kids clean, they find clues to help them put together the answer. Not a logic puzzle fan? Try a scavenger hunt instead.

---

Homeschool Unit Study: The Sacco-Vanzetti Case

How impartial is the U.S. justice system really? A deep dive into this notorious 20th century court case gives historical context for that big question.

The Sacco-Vanzetti case, which began in April 1920, remains one of the most controversial and debated cases in U.S. history. Did Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti commit the murder for which they were executed? The answer to that question remains less important than the other questions about immigrants, political opinions, and justice that it continues to raise. This is just one case, but digging into with your high schooler reveals a lot about the United States in the 1920s, anti-immigrant sentiment, and the Red Scare.

The Case:

On April 15, 1920, robbers killed a paymaster and a guard at a shoe factory in South Braintree, Massachusetts before escaping. Suspicion fell on two naturalized Italian immigrants: Nicola Sacco, a shoemaker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a fish peddler. Sacco and Vanzetti were ideal villains — as atheists, draft avoiders, and anarchists, they represented a triple-threat to American ideas about the importance of religion, country, and property. 

The problem was that they might not actually have been villains. Caught up in a maelstrom of prejudice and fear, their case moved rapidly to court and execution, in the end resembling a slow-moving lynch mob as much as an organized pursuit of justice. Neither man had a criminal record, and there was no evidence against them. Another known criminal actually confessed to the crime while the trial was happening. Despite numerous appeals and evidence of the innocence, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed August 23, 1927.

• Listen to this: The Past Present: History For Public Radio’s episode on Sacco and Vanzetti includes historical audio of the defendants and other people involved in the case, Woody Guthrie ballads, Italian anarchist songs, and readings from the letters Sacco and Vanzetti wrote from prison. (Scroll to the bottom to download the full program.)

• Talking point: Why were anarchists targets for suspicion in the 1920s United States?

• Read this: How did people feel about the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti? The New York Times gave them the day’s main headline, and for the first time in modern history, the city of Boston shut down Boston Common in fear that activists would congregate there. The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, one of many artists who tried to have the verdict overturned, wrote, “[the] men were castaways upon our shore, and we, an ignorant savage tribe, have put them to death because their speech and their manners were different from our own, and because to the untutored mind that which is strange is in its infancy ludicrous, but in its prime evil, dangerous, and to be done away with.’ And the Atlantic Monthly published a long essay by future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter highlighting some of the major problems with the case.

• Talking point: How did anti-immigrant sentiment contribute to the sentence in this case? (You may want to look up the immigration quotas of 1924, which passed while Sacco and Vanzetti were in prison.)

• Explore this: You can visit the virtual exhibit Sacco & Vanzetti: Justice on Trial from Boston’s John Adams Courthouse online and explore the history and after math of the trial, including court transcripts like this cross-examination of Sacco: 

QUESTION: Did you love this country in the last week of May, 1917?

SACCO: That is pretty hard for me to say in one word, Mr. Katzmann

QUESTION: There are two words you can use, Mr. Sacco, yes or no. Which one is it? 

SACCO: Yes.

• Talking point: Would it have been possible for Sacco and Vanzetti to get a fair trial somewhere else?

• Watch this: Tony Shaloub and John Turturro lend their voices to Peter Miller’s 2006 documentary Sacco and Vanzetti, which recreates the trial and incorporates modern forensic evidence. 

---

30 Ideas (One for Every Day!) for Celebrating Poetry Month in Your Homeschool

Celebrate National Poetry Month this April with an inspiring activity for every day.

DAY 1: LAUGH IT UP

The National Poetry Foundation’s satiric send-up of what a world with plenty of everyday poetry might look like (Rachel Maddow hosts the MSNBC special “Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare’s Plays” and ESPN2’s best memorizer competition hits the big time) is hilarious.
 

DAY 2: LISTEN UP

Log on to the Poetry Everywhere channel, where poets like Galway Kinnell and Adrienne Rich read their favorite and original poems.
 

DAY 3: FIND YOUR OWN WORDS

Use classic poems or speeches as inspiration for your own poetic work with the Word Mover tool. For kids who have trouble getting those first words down on paper, this is a great place to start; for kids who love putting words on paper, it’s a great way to play with classic texts.
 

DAY 4: FIND A NEW FAVORITE POEM

A few we love: “Macavity the Mystery Cat” (T.S. Eliot), “April Rain Song” (Langston Hughes), “Sick” (Shel Silverstein), “About the Teeth of Sharks” (John Ciardi), “Rabbit” (Mary Ann Hoberman), “The Adventures of Isabel” (Ogden Nash), “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening” (Robert Frost), “What Is Pink?” (Christina Rossetti)
 

DAY 5: ORGANIZE AN EXHIBITION

Put together a homeschool Poetry Out Loud competition in your town. Whether you decide to choose a winner or not, this recitation exhibition brings poetry to vivid life.
 

DAY 6: BE INSPIRED

Listen to three teens from the Santa Fe Indian School practice their recitations for the National Youth Poetry Slam Festival in Washington D.C.
 

DAY 7: MAKE A BLACKOUT POEM

All you need is  a newspaper and a Sharpie to make poetry. Scribble out words and sentences on a newspaper page, leaving uncovered carefully chosen words to make a poem. (Tip: Arts pages often have better words to choose from than a newspaper’s front page.)
 

DAY 8: HAVE A POETRY TEA

Make a Tuesday date around the table to share your favorite poems over a traditional afternoon tea.
 

DAY 9: SAY HI TO HAIKU

Read classic haiku and master the skills you need to write your own seventeen-syllable poems (in lines of five, seven, five) with this worskshop from the University of Colorado at Boulder's Center for Asian Studies.
 

DAY 10: GET NERDY WITH IT

Write a Fib, a six-line poem that uses the Fibonacci sequence to dictate the number of syllables in each line.
 

DAY 11: GO EPIC

What makes a poem epic? Dig into the details of the history and characteristics of this distinctive poetic form.
 

DAY 12: STAGE A RECITATION

Memorize a poem and perform it for an audience, just like the “Friday concerts” in one-room schoolhouses. 
 

DAY 13: START A COMMONPLACE BOOK

Make your own perfect-for-you poetry collection by copying your favorite poems into a notebook. 
 

DAY 14: PLAN A BIRTHDAY PARTY FOR A POET

There are lots to choose from in April: Maya Angelou was born on April 4, William Wordsworth on the 7th, Charles-Pierre Baudelaire on the 10th, Seamus Heaney on the 13th, Shakespeare on the 23rd, Robert Penn Warren on the 24th, and John Crowe Ransom on the 30th.  
 

DAY 15: TANKA YOU

When is a syllable not a syllable? When it’s an on, a Japanese sound unit used to set the strict metric tone for the Japanese tanka.
 

DAY 16: Make Poetry move

Students of all ages can be inspired by creating choreography for their favorite poems: Think of it as an interpretive dance that moves with words instead of music.
 

DAY 17: MAKE A CONNECTION

The Academy of American Poets invites students to write their own poetry in response to poems written by Academy members — what a great reminder that poetry is an ongoing conversation, not just a monologue.
 

DAY 18: NOMINATE A POET FOR A STAMP

You can nominate any American poet who has been dead for at least ten years to be featured on a U.S. stamp. Send suggestions to: Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee, c/o Stamp Development, U.S. Postal Service. 475 L’Enfant Plaza, SW, Room 5670, Washington, D.C. 20260-2437    
 

DAY 19: LAUGH AT LIMERICKS

Make poetic sense of nonsense with an in-depth look at Edward Lear’s work and the limerick’s form and function.
 

DAY 20: READ ALOUD

Former poet laureate Billy Collins gives his best poetry reading tips — and suggestions for 180 poems to practice with — on the Poetry 180 website.
 

DAY 21: MAKE A POETRY COLLAGE 

Choose a favorite poem — your own or another writer’s — and illustrate it with a collage. Magazine pictures, flower petals, scrapbook letters, colorful paper, and yarn all make handy collage supplies.  
 

DAY 22: GET PUBLISHED

Mail an original poem to the Poetry Wall at the Cathedral Church of St John the Divine in New York City. All submissions, from poets known and unknown, are hung in the Cathedral’s ambulatory.
 

DAY 23: DISCOVER NEW POETRY

Former poet laureate Ted Kooser introduces hundreds of hand-picked poems as part of his American Life in Poetry project.
 

DAY 24: TELL A STORY IN POETRY

Learn about narrative poetry and poetic persona using Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening”and other works as your starting point.
 

DAY 25: MAKE EVERY DAY A POETRY DAY

Subscribe to the (free) Poem-a-Day newsletter from the Academy of American Poets, and you’ll get a poem in your inbox every morning. The selections are a nice mix of classic and modern.
 

DAY 26: GET DESCRIPTIVE WITH KARLA KUSKIN

Take an online workshop with poet Karla Kuskin to learn how to use strong, descriptive imagery and language in your poems.
 

DAY 27: CELEBRATE POEM IN YOUR POCKET DAY

Our second-favorite holiday (right after Read in the Bathtub Day), Poem in Your Pocket Day encourages you to carry a scribbled version of your favorite poem in your pocket to share with other poetry lovers throughout the day.   
 

DAY 28: PLAY EXQUISITE CORPSE

In this surrealist take on MadLibs, players choose a syntax pattern (adjective, noun, verb, adverb, adjective, noun, perhaps) and take turns filling in the blanks to create a poem.
 

DAY 29: FALL IN LOVE

Read the poems of poets whose romantic relationships influenced their work, such as Elizabeth Barrett􏰁and Robert Browning, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, or Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell.   
 

DAY 30: PLAY WITH SHEL SILVERSTEIN

Head straight for where the sidewalk ends on this fun-filled site. You’ll make your own rhymes, solve cryptograms, test your knowledge of Silverstein’s work, and more.

---

Channeling the Healing Power of Art in Your Homeschool

When life gets tough, an art day can be just what the doctor ordered, and when the world seems dark, a community art project can help us find a little light.

On a Saturday morning about a month after [the 2016] election, I brought my two boys to a local community center, where my younger son’s middle school art honor society was helping to paint murals. There were some kids from the middle school with their parents (and an older sibling, in our case), some volunteer artists, including my son’s art teacher, and kids and adults from the community center, which is part of a public housing complex. Together, we were going to paint in four murals that had been sketched out by the volunteer artists. Later, they’d be hung within the community center.

It was a busy, hectic morning. My older son and I quickly discovered that our best role was in the background, making sure paintbrushes were clean, changing out rinsing water, and helping anyone who needed it with getting paint. Many, many hands added color to the pictures. As the morning went on, I realized that for the first time in a month, I didn’t feel overwhelmed with dread. My hands were busy, my mind was occupied, and I was in a room full of people of all ages, equally busy creating colorful, community art. It was exactly where I needed to be.

In times of uncertainty — which is one of the subtlest words I can choose to describe the current climate in the United States — it’s almost instinct to gather together. Doing so in order to add beauty and inspiration to the world feels even better. And gathering as a community — including members of the community you may not know yet — seems vital. Art-making can be used as the common ground around which to gather.

The event my kids and I attended was coordinated by Creating Communities, a nonprofit organization in Annapolis, Maryland, that provides arts-based mentoring programs; all we did was show up. If a similar opportunity doesn’t exist in your community, try to create one. Obviously, if murals are your objective, it will help to have some experienced artists to sketch them out. But plenty of community-based art experiences can be had without needing superior artistic skills! As with any other event, figure out who and where, then tailor the what to the space.

Who: What parts of your community do you want to bring together? Do you envision a program open to everyone (and thus in a public space), or something more specific, as the mural painting was to the community center? Make sure your organizing is done with the relevant community members and not presented as a final plan. Partnering should occur early in the process, not at the end.

Where: This may be dictated by who is involved. Do you want a public event at a library or a park? Perhaps your co-op space is hosted by or shared with another group and you’d like to partner with them (and simultaneously get to know them better) to beautify your shared space. Or you can partner with a community or recreation center. Think creatively; where do you see a need for some art-making?

What: Community art-making doesn’t need to be elaborate and permanent, like murals. It can be one or the other or neither. A bunch of colored chalk in the hands of kids and adults can become something fun and simple or beautiful and complex; either way, it’s temporary. Prayer or Hope Flags are simple to make and become a powerful art installation when complete. Unless you’re planning a drop-in, public event, make sure to include representatives from the community you’re working with during the brainstorming process.

Remember to value the process overall. Community art-making is first and foremost about coming together, and that should be a relaxed, happy experience. Because our group was painting murals, some areas were touched up at the end by the volunteer adult artists, but during the group painting, nobody was criticized or bossed around for color choices or their ability to stay in the lines. If your project involves a set idea on what the product should look like, make sure to figure out a way for that to happen while also honoring everybody’s contribution to and enjoyment of the process.

Most importantly, spend some time talking to people you don’t know while you make art alongside them. Create something, together.

(Additonal/optional: this is adapted from a post that first appeared at amyhoodarts.com in May 2015)

How-To: Block-Printed “Hope” Flags

This is adapted from a post that first appeared at amyhoodarts.com in May 2015.

These are inspired by Tibetan Prayer Flags, which are hung in the elements until they disintegrate, releasing the prayer or hope. Participants can depict a hope for themselves, their family, or their community and add it to the display. Prayer flags were traditionally block printed, but this uses a printmaking method accessible to all ages and skill levels, scratch-foam printmaking.

Materials: 

• 7”x9” rectangles of repurposed cotton cloth

• Styrofoam trays

• pencils

• liquid acrylic craft paint

• foam brushes

• clothesline

Preparation: 

• Cut the rectangles from repurprosed cloth if possible (solid, light-color sheets are perfect).  Using a rotary cutter with a pinking blade or pinking shears makes a zig-zag edge, which cuts down on fraying a little. Press a fold at one end to create a 7”x7” square and stitch to make a casing. Using a chain-piecing method makes this go more quickly, but backstitch at the beginning and end of each casing so they don’t come undone.

• Using a craft knife, metal ruler, and cutting mat, slice the raised edges from the Styrofoam trays (which can be purchased in packages of 25-50 online) and then cut them into quarters. If you choose to repurpose the trays, stick with vegetable trays rather than ones used to package raw meat, for hygienic reasons.

Method

1. Think about what hope, dream, or wish you’d like to share, and how you can represent it with a simple image.

2. Using a pencil, draw the image onto the smooth side of a Styrofoam rectangle. You want to indent the Styrofoam, but not make holes in it. Your image will print in reverse, so keep that in mind while drawing. Words are probably too tricky at this point unless you are very good at mirror writing.

3. Paint a thin layer of acrylic paint onto your scratch-foam drawing. If it’s too gloppy, your image will get obscured when you print.

4. Take a look at a blank hope flag. The casing (the folded over and sewn bit) is at the top, and the fold is towards the back. Lay the front of the flag over your painted foam and firmly smooth it to transfer the paint. Don’t wiggle it around or your image will smudge. Just firmly press. Then peel it off. Optional: Have permanent markers on hand so people can add words to their picture.

5. Run the string through the casing and hang the flags to dry; this also creates your display as you go.

Optional: Have paper available so participants can make a print to take home and/or send them home with their printing plate.

Liquid acrylics don’t require heat-setting to be permanent on fabric, so your display makes itself as people create flags. Hang outside or in to beautify your space and remind the community of its shared hopes.

---

Homeschool Family Camping Destination: Olympic National Park

Looking for a little homeschool camping adventure? Olympic National Park has 1,441 square miles of rainforest, glacier-fed lakes, mountains, and coastline to explore.

by ANGIE COLLINS

Headed to Olympic National Park this spring? Keep these tips in mind.

“Take advantage of informed hiking.”

Hiking is one of the best ways to explore the park. Kids can check out a Discover Backpack at any visitor center, stocked with nature identification guides, binoculars, magnifying lens, nature journal, safety whistle, and light. The included field worksheets are a fun way to add a little focused study to your family hike, whether you’re elk-spotting in the park’s southwest corner, catch-and-release fishing at Crescent Lake, hiking through old-growth forest to Marymere Falls, or soaking in the spectacular mountain views from famously windy Hurricane Ridge. Pay a visit to the Makah Museum, an archaeological and anthropological research center focusing on the Makah people of the Pacific North- west. A mudslide sometime between 300 and 500 years ago buried the summer village of Ozette, and the — well-preserved — village was rediscovered in the 1970s, offering a fascinating look into the past.

“Don’t stop with one rainforest.”

Olympic National Park is home to four separate rainforests. The most accessible is the Hoh Rainforest — the 0.8- mile Hall of Mosses trail feels like a secret road through Fairyland. This trail is like a rainbow all in shades of green: turquoise spruce, emerald ferns, olive moss in the trees, and chartreuse moss on the rocky banks of the Hoh River. The Quinault Rainforest is a bit of a drive — about three hours from Port Angeles — but it’s also home to the world’s largest Sitka spruce tree, a 1,000-year-old tree that stands 191 feet high. Let your kids see how far they can stretch their arms around the gigantic trunk. If you’re feeling adventurous, head even further afield to Bogchiel or Queets, the most remote rain forest, accessible only via 11 miles of curvy rustic roads. (If you have issues with car sickness, skip Queets with my full support.)

“Make time to play in the water together.”

Stop by a visitor center to grab an Ocean Steward booklet for your Junior Ranger, and explore the diversity and beauty of the park’s coastal ecosystem. Kaloch Beach is one of the best places to go tide- pool hunting, but make sure you pack a tide chart because the water levels can change quickly and you don’t want to be caught unawares. Thirty minutes before low tide is the best time to scout tidepools. Visit in April, and you may catch sight of gray whales on their migration to LaPush. Rialto Beach is the place to spot sea stacks, dramatic rock-like columns formed by erosion. The choppy sea is not a great place for young swimmers, but the beach dotted with enormous logs of driftwood and rocky coves is picturesque.

“Camping is the best way to experience the park’s natural beauty.”

Campsites are distributed on a first-come basis, so plan your arrival time accordingly, especially if you’re camping over a weekend or holiday. The Graves Creek campground is a magical spot nestled in the heart of the Quinault Rainforest — if you want to explore the rainforest, there’s no better home base. It’s a good alternative to the also-fabulous Hoh Rainforest campsites, which tend to fill up fast. If the beach is more your family’s thing, snag a site at the Kalaloch campsite, which overlooks the Pacific Ocean. Not a camper? Rent one of the rustic, vintage cabins at Lochaerie Resort on Lake Quinault — it’s the next-best thing to roughing it.

---

Homeschool Reading List: The Big Bang Theory

Dig into the science behind the Big Bang Theory with a book for homeschool scientists at every level.

Cosmologist and theoretical physicist George Gamow and his fellow scientists first proposed the Big Bang Theory seventy years ago, and their ideas about how the universe began remain our best-guess understanding of the universe’s origins. It’s a fascinating theory to dive into with your homeschoolers, whether they’re young or preparing for college.

Resources for Young Scientists

These resources are appropriate for elementary and early middle school students.

• The Everything Seed: A Story of Beginnings by Carole Martignacco

  Framed as an origin myth, this joyful picture book explains the basics of the Big Bang theory and creates a creation story that’s based in actual science.

• Bang! How We Came to Be by Michael Rubino

  Focusing on the story of evolution from the singularity that sparked the universe we know to the single-cell organisms that would eventually become us, this picture book is an exuberant celebration of science.

• Older Than the Stars by Karen Fox and Nancy Davis 

  “You are older than the dinosaurs. Older than the earth.” So begins this scientific origin story of the universe, which explains how the larger cosmos and human beings within it came into existence.

• The Birth of the Earth by Jacqui Bailey and Matthew Lilly 

  Part of the Cartoon History of the Earth series, this comic book exploration of the universe’s origins is great for beginning readers. (The timeline is especially useful for making sense of cosmic time.)

Resources for Older Scientists

Use these resources when your students are ready for more sophisticated science.

• NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe website walks you through the cosmology, theory, and concepts behind the Big Bang theory in an organized (and continuously updated) series of pages. It makes a terrific orientation and an informative jumping-off point for more in-depth studies.

• The Book of the Cosmos: Imagining the Universe from Heraclitus to Hawking by Dennis Richard Danielson 

  Cosmology has fascinated scientists since the beginning of written history, and this collection of writings chronicles that fascination and its developing understanding of the universe through human history. (If you want to jump straight to the Big Bang, go directly to chapter 67.)

• Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe by Simon Singh

  Singh brilliantly humanizes the Big Bang, focusing on the (sometimes funny, often surprising) stories of the scientists who pieced together the universe’s cataclysmic beginnings from research, observation, testing, and the occasional sci-fi movie.

• The Left Hand of Creation: The Origin and Evolution of the Expanding Universe by John D. Barrow

  When you’re comfortable with the basics, dive deep into this dense, provocative exploration of particle physics that asks (and offers some possible answers for) big questions about the origin and development of the universe, the nature of time, and the connections between the origins of the universe and our own lives, right down to our genetic structure.

---

How can we do a better job homeschooling science?

Homeschooling science can get more complicated as students get older. A flexible plan, clear goals, and a great secular science curriculum can make it a little easier.

Science always seems to fall by the wayside for us. We start out strong with a different curriculum every year, but by the winter holidays, we’re months behind and barely logging any science hours. The experiments end up taking too much prep time or they’re not well organized, and the curriculum either ends up being boring or not giving enough information so that I am always having to spend way too much time tracking down resources or books. I kept thinking we’d figure it out eventually — but now we’re starting 7th grade, and science can’t keep being optional. Do you have any recommendations for finding a curriculum or a routine to make science easier?

Honestly, this is a common problem — science may be the hardest subject to pull off entirely as a homeschool class once you move past the elementary years. A good science class requires two things: information, which homeschoolers have in spades; and the ability to test that information with critical thinking. This is where things get hard: Even if a homeschool parent has a strong science background, running a science lab in your laundry room can be challenging.

The easiest way to solve this is with strategic outsourcing. If you have a homeschool coop with a science lab or — for high school students — an accessible dual enrollment program at a convenient college, in-person science with a small group is the ideal learning environment. If in-person classes aren’t available, Next Level Homeschool has solid science classes for middle and high school. For older homeschoolers, I always recommend spending your budget first on the subject your kid is most excited about and second on science classes with a lab component.

If you’re committed to finding a curriculum to use at home, I recommend focusing on one subject at a time — you probably will not find one good curriculum creator that includes great at-home biology, great at-home chemistry, and great at-home physics, so you will likely need to shop around. You might look at the options at Conceptual Academy, which are video-centric and designed by science educators but allow students to work at their own pace. They’re similar to classes you’d get in traditional schools, but you can supplement with fun readings and activities to keep things interesting. Similarly, Oak Meadow offers major middle and high school science classes in a traditional school format, with all supplies included. If you love Real Science Odyssey, Blair Lee has shared tips at SEA Homeschooler conferences for expanding these curriculum into high school-level spines.

As far as finding a routine that works goes, start with science your next academic year. In other words, start your homeschool year with just science, doing a little every day, and gradually adding the other subjects for the year around your science classes. It may not come naturally to your existing routine, but you can make it part of your homeschool rhythm.

---

Homeschool Travel: A Low-Key Family Adventure in the Berkshires

Follow the Penderwicks’ lead, and take a spring break that’s all about slowing down and taking it easy.

Buy on Amazon

THE BOOK􏰄 The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall

THE DESTINATION􏰄 The Berkshires, Mass.

When the Penderwick family’s summer plans are upset, their last-minute vacation scramble turns up a cottage in the Berkshires, which proves to be part of the grounds of a posh estate. Their impromptu adventure turns out to be a great setting for a memorable summer holiday, and you can follow their example by planning a Berkshires vacation of your own.

Nestled in the rolling mountains of western Massachusetts — about the same distance from downtown Boston as from New York City — the Berkshires is a funny mix of high culture and bucolic beauty. Follow the Penderwicks’ example, and focus your holiday on the latter: Swimming holes, berry picking, mountain trails, and reading on the back porch are the perfect way to while away the leisurely summer hours. The key to a Penderwick-style vacation is to slow down and focus on being where you are — and happily, the Berkshires is a lovely place to be.

The Penderwicks definitely have the right idea: Though there are a few family hotels and resorts, the best way to experience the area is by renting a cottage and settling in. Berkshire Rental Properties has several options, including three-bedroom Laurel Cottage with its sprawling screened porch, and Blue Hill, which has an all-white attic bedroom with two beds, just like Skye’s cottage room. Bring badminton, croquet, bocce, and your family’s favorite lawn games to play outside; if you’re following the Penderwick model, you’ll also want an archery set and a soccer ball to kick around.

Depending on the season, you can pick strawberries (in the early summer at Noble’s Tweenbrook Farm), blueberries (at Windy Hill Farm in Great Barrington when the season kicks off around July 4), or apples (in late summer at Bartlett’s Orchard in Richmond). Pick up jam jars at the local supply store to make your own vacation jam to enjoy when you’re back at home, bake a pie or two like Churchie, or just eat your pickings right out of the pail on your back porch.

If your cottage isn’t part of an old-fashioned estate house, you can still visit one. Author Edith Wharton’s beloved retreat The Mount offers a scavenger hunt to help you find your way through its maze-like gardens, which are as lovely as the Arundel gardens (and less zealously guarded against guests). Naumkeag, a quirky estate that dates back to the over-the-top elegance of the Gilded Age, is home to spectacular terraced gardens. Who knows? You may discover a secret tunnel and a new friend, too.

It’s worth planning a few day hikes while you’re in the area. Balance Rock, the star of Balance Rock State Park, is a short, easy hike with the payoff of — as the name suggests — a 165-ton boulder balanced on a small patch of bedrock. You’ll want to visit Bartholomew’s Cobble in Sheffield, a former coral reef that dates back to the time when this part of the world was covered by an inland sea. The cobble is rocky outcrop of bedrock that’s less high and more rounded than a mountain, so these quartzite and marble structures are easy to climb and explore. Strap on your butterfly wings to visit the dragonflies and red-tailed hawks in Mountain Meadow Preserve in Williamstown, or bring your water shoes to explore Bash Bish Falls State Park (near Great Barrington), home to the area’s highest single-drop waterfall.

Mostly, though, stay close to home. String up a hammock to read away the lazy afternoons, write stories in your bedroom, make cookies together in the kitchen, and amble through the sunset together, listening to the chirping of insects. Turn off your phone, leave your tablet in your tote, and teach your kids to play gin rummy and Chinese checkers, or collaborate on crossword puzzles and logic problems. Really unplug together, and see where your interests take you.

DAY TRIPPING IN THE BERKSHIRES

If you want to plan a few field trips to supplement your lazy summer, start with Tanglewood, home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and an ideal place to fall in love with classical music (just like Jeffrey). Kids will want to explore the 19th century Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, where they can watch black-smithing, house-building, and dancing demon- stration as well as learning how to milk a cow or spin wool. In Hancock, the friendly barn residents of Ioka Valley Farm — including alpacas, sheep, and goats — roam the property looking for new friends. The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge features work by one of the most U.S. artists — while you’re in town, stop by the Berkshire Botanical Garden.

---

How to Raise Self-Directed Learners

The homeschool dream is to have kids who learn because they want to — but what if your kids don’t seem to be finding their passion? Patience, persistence, and following your own joy is key.

Jen* was in love with project-based learning. She followed a gorgeously photographed blog by a homeschool mom whose elementary school son was always spending months researching and building Viking ships, or making obsessively detailed salt-dough maps of the continents, or filling up his birding journal by learning the names and songs of all the birds in the family’s community. This was what homeschooling was all about: A bright, creative kid following his interests wherever they led him, leaving a series of Instagram-perfect projects in his wake.

Jen showed her 10-year-old son Dylan pictures of Viking ship and the birding journal. “Cool,” Dylan said. But he wasn't inspired to launch into any projects of his own — or even to copy the projects other kids were doing. “The only thing he got excited about was playing video games,” said Jen. “He’d work on something if I pushed him for as long as I kept pushing, but as soon as I left it in his hands, he was done. And I kept looking at all these pictures of someone else’s apparently perfect kid and thinking what am I doing wrong?”

One of the great benefits of homeschooling is being able to give our kids the opportunity to follow where their passions lead them. But one of the things homeschoolers don’t really talk about is what happens when our kids’ passions don’t seem to be leading them anywhere in particular. How do you embrace interest-led learning when your child doesn’t seem interested in learning, well, anything? Or when your child is constantly interested in new things — but the minute she hits a roadblock, she’s happy to give up her passion for something easier? What makes some kids ready to leap into the pursuit of knowledge and others hang back on the sidelines?

First off, it’s important to know that life learners aren’t born — they’re made. “Most kids are born with plenty of curiosity, but learning how to take that curiosity and apply it to the process of learning is something that gets developed over time,” says Ian Leslie, author of the book Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It. And while some kids are born with a natural stick-to-it-ness, most of us learn follow-through by doing it over and over, much the same way you develop muscles.

And the key to developing curiosity muscles seems to lie in having the freedom to explore what you want to explore. “When we first started homeschooling, I tried to get my daughter excited about bugs, about the Civil War, about rocks,” says Anne*, who’s been homeschooling her 11-year-old daughter for three years. “I’d bring home all this stuff from the library and look up all this stuff online, and she just wasn’t interested in any of it. I’d had this vision of us cheerfully studying all these things together as homeschoolers, and I felt like I was failing.”

Then Anne happened to overhear her then-9-year-old daughter playing in her room one afternoon, reciting poetry to one of her dolls. It turned out her daughter was passionate about writing poetry, and as soon as Anne stepped back and let her daughter’s interest lead the way, independent learning bloomed in the Carver house.

“It’s hard to take that step back when your kids haven’t expressed a clear interest in something, but sometimes that’s what they need to find their passion,” Anne says.

Some kids have a clear passion from birth: My friend’s daughter’s birding adventures started before kindergarten, and now that she’s in high school, she leads birding walks in the local parks and even teaches a birding class to little kids at her homeschool co-op. Other kids find passions everywhere — one year, they’re hooked on martial arts; the next, they’re performing in community theater; then, they shift gears and become amateur astronomers. Their interests may change over time, but their passionate pursuit of them is a constant. Other kids, though, may need a little more time and space to find their passions.

That’s not a sign that your child isn’t cut out to be an independent learner, it’s just a sign that he needs space to discover what he cares about. Give it to him by making your home a space that fosters curiosity. Make a point of filling your bookshelves with a mix of interesting fiction and non-fiction books, and grab titles just because they look interesting for your library basket. Ask questions — and be genuine about it; your child will know if you’re just pretending to wonder something or if you’re asking out of genuine curiosity. Encourage your child to help you think of ideas to consider what the answer might be, then figure out how to find out together. Try to relax rules wherever you can to encourage creative exploration — fascinatingly, a 2011 study published in the Journal of Creative Behavior found that kids who were considered to be in the most creative five-percent of their class lived in homes where there was an average of fewer than one rules — such as homework time or screen time limits — while their less creative peers had an average of six such rules they had to follow. The key isn’t to push your child in a particular direction but to give her a space where she has plenty of room to discover what her passion is.

Finding that passion really is the key to self- directed learning, says Deborah Stipek, Ph.D, dean of Stanford University’s School of Education and the author of Motivated Minds: Raising Children to Love Learning. Children are motivated to learn about what interests them, so tapping into your child’s unique fascinations is the key to sparking life-long learning, Stipek says.

* * *

Once your children have found the ideas that spark for them, your job becomes creating a space where they can explore those ideas in meaningful ways. “That’s our job as parents: Children point the way, and we help them clear the path,” says Raymond Wlodkawski, Ph.D., author of Creating Highly Motivating Classrooms for All Students. As homeschoolers, we’re tempted to turn every passion into a unit study — but while that can be a fun way to explore a topic, the whole point of self-directed learning is for kids to figure out how they can pursue a topic on their own. Helping kids clear the path to exploring their passions requires a careful combination of independence and support.

Set the right example. If you want your children to develop into life learners, you’ve got to become a life learner yourself. For some of us, this revelation is delightful — finally, a legitimate excuse to learn to knit/study astronomy/obsess over Stuart monarchs. For others, it can feel a little intimidating, especially if we’ve grown up in a world that values filling-in-the-blanks over creative exploration. Either way, the key is to think about how you’d like kids to harness their creativity and start doing that in your own life. Start your own library list, and tell them about it — “I put some books about gardening on the hold list because I’m thinking it might be fun to start a container garden.” Let them know how you’re pursuing your own projects: “I’m about to watch this YouTube video about hand-lettering that seems really cool — want to watch it with me?” or “I’ve never done this kind of weaving before, and my fingers are having trouble adjusting — how do you think it’s looking?” You’re not just modeling the tools to translate curiosity into learning — you’re also showing your kids that you value the process of self-directed learning enough to do it yourself.

Gradually shift responsibility. Most of us aren’t born knowing how to start, work through, and complete a project — we learn to do it, and kids may need a lot of guidance getting started with independent learning. You don’t have to sit back and do nothing during the early stages of project- based learning. It’s okay to set simple tasks and help your child follow through on them — “Let’s check out this video on soap carving and see if there are any tips to help with getting started” or “I saw this book on bees at the library, so I grabbed it — let’s check and see if it explains how the hive is built.” As your child learns what tools to use, you can redirect responsibility back to him: “Hmmm, good question — where do you think we could find the answer?” Eventually, your proctor role will become more and more removed from your child’s investigations, but a little hand-holding as your child develops motivation and follow-through skills can be essential.

Introduce new skills as needed. Sometimes your child’s interests will zoom ahead of the rest of her learning. For instance, your astronomy-obsessed daughter may lack the math foundation to understand astronomical orbits the way she wants to, or your son’s tennis passion keeps getting derailed because he wants to hang up his racket every time he loses a match. If you recognize that your child needs to develop a particular attitude, skill, or concept in order to succeed in his project, that’s wonderful news. When your child has the opportunity to learn something because she genuinely needs to know it to pursue an interest, the actual learning process is surprisingly easy. (I swear that my own child became a reader so that she could identify different Pokemon moves.)

Prepare for bumpy patches. Like most adults, kids can very enthusiastic about a new idea or a new subject but lose steam fast when things don’t come together as easily as they’d expected. (This can be especially true for kids who are transitioning into homeschooling from a more traditional school, where they didn’t have the freedom to explore topics independently.) Their enthusiasm wanes in direct proportion to their frustration. Some kids naturally bounce back from roadblocks, ready to seek new solutions or try new things, but others can internalize the problems — “I’m too stupid to do this” — or project frustrations onto their subject — “math is just dumb.” Sometimes frustration is a signal that it’s time to move on, and there’s nothing to gain from forcing a kid to follow her passion when she’s clearly not inspired by it at the moment. Often, though, this frustration can be overcome, and stepping in to help problem-solve can help your child over the hump. (Just keep in mind that you’re a brainstorming collaborator, not a teacher telling your child what to do next — make suggestions, but follow her lead.) The benefits to getting past a roadblock can be huge. Successfully overcoming challenges and failures to finish a project not only makes kids proud of their work, it also increases the likelihood that they’ll work to follow through on future projects. “It’s true that you’re more likely to want to do something that you think you’re good at, but overcoming challenges on your own is actually more motivating than just being naturally good at something,” says Stipek.

Look for opportunities for independence. Intellectual independence is a major component for successful self-directed learning, but kids often need other kinds of independence, too. If you gradually increase your child’s responsibility — letting him grab groceries from another aisle in the supermarket, making him responsible for getting his own lunches, allowing him to set up a movie date with a group of friends — that independence will start to bloom in his learning adventures, too.

Don’t make the mistake of needing to show off your child’s learning. It’s tempting to want to share your children’s accomplishments, but resist the urge to ask them to display their knowledge just for the sake of displaying it. (“Tell Grandma about how the Vikings discovered North America, honey.”) Instead, ask your child a meaningful question or wait for him to bring up the subjects that interest him. “It’s much better to engage your child in an active inquiry than to ask him to spit out routine knowledge,” says Lucy Calkins, Ph.D., professor of curriculum and teaching at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

* * *

And what about Jen and Dylan, the family we met at the beginning of this article? Well, Dylan, now 13, never fell in love with project-based homeschooling, but he did discover a passion for computer coding after his grandparents bought him a Kano kit. “He’s writing code to create digital flashcards for his spelling words and writing a script for a video game he wants to create,” says Jen. “His passion didn’t end up looking the way I thought it would, but he definitely found it. And I think I can take a little credit for trying to create an environment that made that possible for him.”

*last names removed for online publication

---

Homeschool Unit Study: Introduction to Shakespeare

Dive into one of literature’s great authors with a study of Shakespeare this spring.

“Shakespeare knows what the sphinx thinks, if anybody does,” wrote Thomas Quayle in 1900 — and though it’s been more than 400 years since William Shakespeare’s birth (in April 1564), the Bard of Avon remains as literarily essential and personally mysterious as he has been since his first show at the Globe Theatre. Dive into one of literature’s great authors with a study of Shakespeare this spring.

Start here:

We know surprisingly little about the historical Shakespeare’s life, but Shakespeare: His Work and his World is a cogent, kid-friendly introduction to his life.

Best Beginner’s Shakespeare

The play’s the thing — but if you’re not quite ready to tackle the plays proper, these texts make useful introductions.

• Stories from Shakespeare by Geraldine McCaughrean outlines Shakespeare’s best-known works intelligently and articulately.

• Lois Burdett’s Shakepeare Can be Fun series includes five popular plays, retelling their stories in rhyming couplets. The author, who runs a Shakespeare workshop series for kids, writes with staging in mind, so don’t be surprised if your living room becomes the stage for Romeo and Juliet.

• Mr. William Shakespeare’s Plays by Marcia Williams uses actual dialogue, comic strips, and imagined comments from the Globe theater audience to help younger readers make sense of Shakespeare’s best known plays.

Shakespeare in Fiction

Living books bring the historical Shakespeare and his time to life and can be a natural lead-in to the author’s plays.

• In King of Shadows by Susan Cooper, a modern-day American, in London to play Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, timeslips to the play’s original performance at the Globe Theatre. Shakespeare, who becomes a father figure to teenage Nat, is one of the main characters.

• The Shakespeare Stealer by Gary L. Blackwood introduces Widge, an Elizabethan orphan with a knack for shorthand and acting who gets corralled into trying to steal a draft of Shakespeare’s new play Hamlet for an unscrupulous theater manager.

• Add a little mystery to your Shakespeare studies with Simon Hawke’s Shakespeare and Smythe series, in which the Bard teams up with an intelligent ostler to solve mysteries that bear a suspicious resemblance to Shakespeare’s future plays.

Critical Readings

When you’re ready to dig deep into the Bard’s work, these dense but insightful texts will point you down delightful rabbit trails.

• Originally published in 1934, Caroline Spurgeon’s Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us, takes a focused look at Shakespeare’s imagery and what it implies, both about the writer and his relationship with his fellow Elizabethan and Jacobean writers, is utterly fascinating.

• The Genius of Shakespeare considers the ways Shakespeare’s work has inspired others, being reinvented and re-envisioned by each new generation. Scholarly, and occasionally gossipy, it’s one of the most readable studies of the Bard.

• For a lighter, lively study that focuses on known facts over speculation, Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare: the World as a Stage is thorough and engaging.

• Charles Nicholl's The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street is an unexpected delight, focused on a single 1612 lawsuit in which Shakespeare gives testimony in a dispute involving a a daughter, a dowry, and a wig-maker.

Fun Activities

Think of these projects as hands-on ways to experience the pleasures of Shakespeare.

• Play Mad Libs with a list of words coined by Shakespeare.

• PBS’s Shakespeare Uncovered series follows well-known actors as they explore the history and significance of Shakespeare’s plays; e.g., Ethan Hawke investigates Macbeth, and David Tennant goes backstage with Hamlet.

• The Shakespeare Unlimited podcast looks at Shakespeare’s influence — not just in literature and theater (though there’s plenty of that) but also in science and history.

• Even if you can’t swing a field trip to the actual Globe Theatre this year, you can take a virtual backstage tour.

• Masterpuppet Theatre includes 60 finger puppet cards of memorable Shakespearean figures and 12 backdrops.

Bonus:

If you have the time and inclination, you may enjoy these sci-fi Shakespeare adaptations.

• Shakespeare’s Loves Labors Won accidentally summons a group of a group of Eldritch Abominations in Doctor Who’s “The Shakespeare Code.” (Oops.)

• Shakespeare in Space: William Shakespeare’s Star Wars retells the Skywalker saga, Shakespeare style.

• And here's a list of our favorite Shakespearean film adaptations from the home/school/life blog.

---

Update Your Homeschool First Aid Kit for Spring Adventures

A well-stocked first aid kit ensures that you’ll be ready when adventure strikes.

Carry On

Stash your first aid essentials in a sturdy, water-resistant case, and you never have to worry about soggy bandages or crushed tweezers. Waterproof toiletry bags or small backpacks are good choices for day-tripping adventurers.

We Like: Holly Aiken Jet Pack, $169

(But if this isn’t something you want to splurge on, hit the toiletry aisle at Target —they have lots of cute bags.)

• TIP: Get a card laminated that lists the num- bers for your pediatrician, local hospital, fire, and police departments, the Poison Control hotline (800-222-1222), and two emergency contacts who could be notified in case of emergency, and keep it in your first aid bag.

Heat Index

One-use disposable thermometers are handy when you don’t have a convenient place to sterilize between uses. ‘

NexTemp Single-Use Clinical Thermometers, $17 for 100

• TIP: Kids who don’t like having their temperature taken may change their minds when you tell them these are the same thermometers NASA astronauts use on missions.

Cleaner Pastures

When you can’t wash your hands, sanitizer gel helps keep scrapes and injuries sterile.

Honest Hand Sanitizer Gel, $3

• TIP: Make sure you choose a gel that has at least 60 percent alcohol and have kids use a quarter-size dollop and scrape their nails over their palms for best results.

Insult to Injury

Sure, you can use regular bandages, but wherefore wouldst thou?

Shakespearean insult bandages, $7

• TIP: The Red Cross recommends making sure your first aid kit has at least 25 adhesive bandages (preferably in a variety of sizes) if you’re using it with a family of four.

Heal Appeal

UA hemostatic sponge can stop bleeding fast by sealing up the wound.

QuikClot Sport, Advanced Clotting Sponge 25G, $30

Happy Hydration

Use one tablet per liter of water if you need to fill your water bottle from a natural source.

Aquatabs Water Purification Tablets, $11

Whine Spritzer

Spray-on triple-antibiotic ointment won’t goop up your kit and is easy to apply one-handed. (Each tiny container holds about 140 applications.)

Neosporin Neo To Go! First Aid Antiseptic/Pain Relieving Spray, $7

Brace Yourself

Kids barely have to slow down to slip on insect-repellent bracelets, which last up to 100 hours when you keep them properly stored in your first-aid kit.

Buggy Bands Insect Repellent Bracelet, $30

• TIP: Prefer a more traditional spray? Plant-based repel lemon eucalyptus works similarly to products that contain 25-percent DEET but without the ick factor.

Guide Book

Stash a pocket-size emergency first-aid guide in your kit so that — even without cell service — you can treat a sprain, handle a wasp sting, or (gulp!) deliver a baby in the wild.

Emergency First Aid Pamphlet, $8

Tie One On

Soak it in water to help an overheated kid cool down, tie it for a makeshift sling, or use it to secure a splint. You’ll never be sorry you stashed a bandana.

Cotton Bandana, $15

FIRST AID ESSENTIALS

Here’s what the Red Cross recommends keeping stashed in your first aid kit.

• first-aid manual

• sterile gauze pads of different sizes

• adhesive tape

• adhesive bandages in several sizes

• elastic bandage

• a splint

• antiseptic wipes

• soap

• antibiotic ointment

• antiseptic solution (like hydrogen peroxide)

• hydrocortisone cream (1%) for rashes and bug bites

• acetaminophen and ibuprofen

• extra prescription medications (if needed)

• tweezers

• sharp scissors

• safety pins

• disposable instant cold packs

• calamine lotion

• alcohol wipes or ethyl alcohol

• thermometer

• tooth preservation kit

• plastic non-latex gloves (at least 2 pairs)

• flashlight and extra batteries

• a blanket

• mouthpiece for administering CPR (can be obtained from your local Red Cross)

• your list of emergency phone numbers

---