Celebrate Random Acts of Kindness Day in Your Homeschool
Want to raise kind kids? Celebrate kindness in your homeschool!
Even your youngest homeschool students can celebrate Random Acts of Kindness Day by making the world a kinder, happier place. Here are some ideas to get you started.
Write a thank-you note. A sincere thank-you — to your neighbor who always shares her extra zucchini or the ballet teacher who inspired your dancer son — is pretty much guaranteed to make its recipient’s day.
Make a donation. Collect outgrown clothing or canned goods, and make a donation to an organization that helps other people.
Put together care packs for unhoused people. Include essentials like toothbrushes and toothpaste, deodorant, soap, and shampoo. Add bottled water and shelf-stable snacks, like granola bars, and a lightweight blanket, hat, and gloves, and distribute the packs to people who need them.
Clean up your neighborhood. You can volunteer to pick up litter at your favorite park or just collect the rubbish on your street, but caring for your environment is a great way to show kindness.
Compliment a kid to his parents. If you can genuinely praise a kid’s work or behavior, he and his parents will bask in your appreciation.
Hold the door for someone. Kids may need help with heavy doors, but most people appreciate the friendly gesture.
Leave a happy note. Jot down a message — such as “Have a beautiful day” or “You look fabulous today” — on a sticky note and leave it on a public bathroom mirror for the next person to find.
New Books on Our Homeschool Reading List in February 2023
These are the books we’re excited to add to our homeschool reading list in February 2023.
So many books, so little time! But these are the titles on our library holds list.
The Pearl Hunter by Miya T. Beck
Honestly, this one had me at middle grades novel about pre-shogunate Japan. Pearl diver Kai makes a deal with the gods to bring back her twin sister’s soul: She’ll steal a legendary pearl from the Fox Queen, and the gods will give her sister back to her. The buzz on this one is a little iffy, but I’m always going to check out historical middle grades fiction from the Asian world, so this one’s still on my list.
It’s Boba Time for Pearl Li by Nicole Chen
How charming is this? To save her beloved neighborhood boba shop, Pearl Li decides to start selling her handmade amigurumi dolls — but of course it’s a much more complicated project than Pearl Li anticipated! I love boba, yarn crafting, and family stories so this one is right up my alley. I really love books about people who make things with their hands, and I happen to have a school full of crafty homeschoolers looking for book recommendations, so I have high hopes for this one.
The House Swap by Yvette Clark
If a middle grades book is being billed as a mash-up of The Parent Trap and The Holiday, I think we can all feel confident it will find a spot on my reading list. I did have a chance to read an advance copy of this one, and I am happy to report it is as warm and cozy and delightful as that description implies — with an emotional depth that feels all its own. Los Angeles native Sage and English village-dwelling Ally swap stories while their families swap houses for summer vacation.
The Universe in You by Jason Chin
Chin’s dazzling picture book illuminates the microscopic building blocks of life. Definitely read this as a picture book, with your middle grade science classes, and even with your high school biology curriculum. Just read it!
The Bright Side by Chad Otis
Something I am always trying to do with my kids is to normalize life experiences that don’t look like ours. I wish this picture book had been around when they were younger because Otis does a brilliant job showing what life is like for a kid who lives in an old school bus instead of a house. We don’t know why his family lives on the bus — it might be a lifestyle choice or an unhoused situation — but that’s a great reminder that we don’t, in fact, know other people’s backstories and shouldn’t make assumptions about them.
Winston Chu vs. the Whimsies by Stacey Lee
I read an advance copy of this, and I definitely recommend it for middle grades readers. Like all the books in Rick Riordan’s imprint, Winston Chu vs. the Whimsies plays with traditional mythology showing up in the modern world. This time, it’s Chinese folklore — and a magical shop where mysterious things happen. When this imprint is at its best, the modern world stories are as important and complex as the mythologies they spotlight, and that is definitely the case here: Winston’s family is still recovering from his military father’s death in action, and he is a little envious of his wealthy friend who has all the cool stuff and never has to worry about money. There is a lot happening in this book, including a big cast of characters, so it feels a little chaotic at times, but the payoff was definitely worth it for me.
The Davenports by Krystal Marquis
In 1910 Chicago, the four Davenport daughters are among the wealthiest Black families in the United States. If you know me at all, you know that my passion for history comes from Sunfire’s YA historical romance novels, so I was pretty much first in line for this one! It’s definitely lighter on the history than the romance (even though it’s based on the real-life Patterson family, who are totally rabbit trail-worthy, if you are so inclined), but it’s still really cool what it was like to be part of the Black one-percent during the early 20th century. And yay for historical fiction about Black joy and Black success, which I always personally love to see.
No Accident by Laura Bates
Don’t tell my students, but I’m apparently very into stories about teenagers in peril these days. Here’s a dark and twisty YA take on the genre: A chartered plane goes down with a high school basketball team and its cheerleaders on board. Seven teens survive and make it to an island, where they have to figure out how to find water, rig a shelter, and generally survive in the wild. But that’s not all: Something happened at a party the night before the plane went down, and someone wants revenge. I think this is a book that raises a lot of compelling questions. It doesn’t answer them all, but maybe that’s part of the point?
The Swifts: A Dictionary of Scoundrels by Beth Lincoln
In this rambunctiously funny middle grades mystery, Shenanigan Swift puts her detective skills to work solving the murder of her Aunt Schadenfreude at a family reunion. I’m always on the search for a mystery that captures the spirit of my beloved The Westing Game, and while this one didn’t quite get there for me, it was still a madcap mystery adventure that I thoroughly enjoyed. Sometimes reviews comparing new books to much-loved books do the new books no favors, so I will resist the urge to compare this to other middle grades books I have known and love and recommend you go into it with no preconceptions.
The Human Kaboom by Adam Rubin
This middle grades book is just straight-up fun: Six stories with the same title (and all illustrated by different artists) take readers on a riotous romp. There’s a school field trip prank (in space!), a swanky hotel mystery, an ancient curse in a sleepy fishing village, and more. I love this idea of spitballing an entire collection of stories from a single title and definitely recommend stealing it for your next homeschool creative writing session.
The Minuscule Mansion of Myra Malone by Audrey Burges
I’ve always loved dollhouse stories, so I’m excited for this one: Myra Malone’s dollhouse blog has thousands of followers, but it also has mysteries that its 30-something owner can’t begin to understand: Rooms appear and disappear, and sometimes, she can swear she hears haunting music. Then one day a stranger contacts Myra to tell her that her mansion is his childhood home, where his grandmother disappeared when he was just a little boy. From here, their stories intersect with the mystery of the dollhouse, and it sounds like the kind of quietly lovely book I would have loved as a teen.
How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix
My friend Stephanie turned me on to Grady Hendrix — he is great if you love the idea of horror but need it served up with enough humor and hope to keep you from plunging into the abyss. I hope this one delivers more of the same: After their parents’ unexpected deaths, two siblings from a dysfunctional family have to get their Charleston childhood home ready to sell, but there’s something off about the house. Spooky puppets kind of off. If you’ve got a teen horror fan, Hendrix is a solid pick.
What are you excited to read in your February homeschool?
Life Skills Every Homeschooler Needs
Add these essential life skills to your secular homeschool curriculum.
Add these essential life skills to your homeschool curriculum.
Homeschoolers get a bad rap sometimes for shielding our kids from the real world, but we’re actually in a prime position to rear kids who are well-prepared for their adult lives. The key is to step back and let kids take the reins well before their eighteenth birthday, says Julie Lythcott-Haims, former dean of freshmen at Stanford University and author of How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success. Here’s what kids should know how to do before they start on the college applications:
FEED THEMSELVES
When: By high school
You don’t get to turn in your oven mitts just yet, but by high school, your kids should be preparing meals for themselves on a regular basis — making oatmeal for breakfast, slapping together a sandwich for lunch, and yes, whipping up a quick stir-fry or pot of soup for dinner.
How to help: Put cooking on the curriculum with a cookbook like Alton Brown’s (which is great for teaching kitchen science, too) or Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything (which includes straightforward, doable recipes for anything you might want to cook).
ADVOCATE FOR THEMSELVES
When: By high school
You don’t want to be one of those parents who calls her kid’s college professor to complain about her grade, right? The best way to avoid this is to gradually move the job of advocating for your kid into your child’s hands. (Obviously, when a situation calls for a parent advocate, you should jump in.)
How to help: When your child is upset about a grade or confused about an outside class assignment, help her figure out how to solve the problem herself. Practice with her, but assure her that you’re confident she can get her point across. It’s also important to prepare her for the possibility that she won’t get what she wants — “Many times they won't get the outcome they desire, and it's ‘Well, I tried.’ And they come home and they learn to cope with it, because not everything in life will go your way,” Lythcott-Haims says.
GET UP ON TIME
When: By late middle school
“By the time your kid is entering high school, you ought to have confidence they can wake themselves up and get themselves washed and dressed in clothing that's clean," Lythcott-Haims says. That may mean you miss the occasional co-op class or park day — which is preferable to missing a final exam with no make-up date or being late to work when you have an important meeting.
How to help: Homeschoolers don’t have to be clock- watchers, but you can let kids know your timetable: “We’re going to leave for the library in an hour, so it’s time to start rounding up your books.” Buy your child an alarm clock, teach him how to set it, and let him be responsible for getting up and ready on a few low-pressure occasions before easing into bigger responsibility.
WORK INDEPENDENTLY
When: By middle school
Twentysomethings in the workplace can sometimes struggle because they’re used to being told what to do, step-by-step, and patted on the back for every accomplishment, says Lythcott-Haims. They don’t know how to identify work that needs doing or to recognize when someone else could use a hand. Successful adults know how to make their own projects — something homeschoolers should be able to get very comfortable doing by high school.
How to help: By 7th or 8th grade, start giving your child looser and looser assignments and letting them set their own goals and deadlines to complete the project. At first, you can make suggestions — “Don’t forget to leave yourself enough time to edit your final draft” — but your goal should be to let your child be in charge.
PLAN AN OUTING
When: By high school
It can be scary to turn your kids loose to hang out with their friends, but that’s exactly what they’re going to be doing when they hit adulthood — and they’re likely to make smarter and safer decisions on their adventures if they’ve had a safe space to practice them. By late middle school, kids are ready to spend an hour at the mall in a pack or to see a movie at the theater where you’re watching a different film.
How to help: When your child’s peer group is old enough and interested in planning an outing — whether it’s to get pizza at a restaurant or see a movie — help walk them through a plan and enlist adult support for pick-up and drop-off, but let them handle the logistics of figuring out tickets, snacks, tips, etc. “This is how kids spread their wings,”saysLythcott-Haims.
Great Movie Adaptations of Books for Your Homeschool Comparative Lit Classes
Great movie adaptations of books make an instant comparative literature literature class for your secular homeschool. Here are some of our favorite homeschool movies.
You don’t have to choose between the book and the movie in these terrific adaptations — enjoy them both. We’ve rounded up some book-and-a-movie combos perfect for cold weather marathon sessions.
Tales of the Night (2001) + Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books
Though not a literal adaptation of the classic fairy tales, this inventive film about the enchantments of imagination, set in an abandoned theater, channels the same storytelling spirit — and may inspire some living room reenactments.
The Iron Giant (2005) + The Iron Man by Ted Hughes
Really, this animated film — about a boy who teaches a warmongering robot how to love — should get more respect than it does — and Hughes’ lyrical storytelling in the source story is as memorable as his poetry.
The Great Mouse Detective (1986) + Basil of Baker Street by Eve Titus
Sherlock Homes sometimes used the alias Basil, so it’s no surprise that’s the name of the Sherlock Holmes of the mouse world, who — accompanied by his biographer/assistant Dawson — solves baffling crimes.
A Little Princess (1995) + A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The action moves to New York and there are a few other changes in this lavish adaptation, but it slow-paced, dreamy film-making and a terrific Sara Carew make this movie a must-view.
My Fair Lady (1964) + Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
Shaw’s play may feel like heavy going to readers new to his style, so take advantage of the delightful musical adaptation to appreciate its nuances — and to kick off the never-ending argument of what a happy ending to this story would actually be.
The Secret of Moonacre (2010) + The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge
Maria’s quest to save her family from an unfortunate curse is the crux of this fantasy book and movie combo. (The book was J.K. Rowling’s favorite as a child.)
National Velvet (1944) + National Velvet by Enid Bagnold
The film version gets the full Hollywood treatment (star Elizabeth Taylor definitely doesn’t have book-Velvet’s cottony hair and buck teeth), but it manages to hang onto the story of one stubborn girl’s determination to win a horse race.
The Secret World of Arietty (2012) + The Borrowers by Mary Norton
Though it wanders from the book’s storyline, Studio Ghibli’s adaptation captures the sheer visual magic of the Borrowers’ tiny world with gorgeous animation.
Easy Homeschool Dinner Ideas
When everyone’s getting hangry and you seriously need a supermarket run, these speedy from-the-pantry dinners will get you through the dinner hour with your sanity intact.
When everyone’s getting hangry and you seriously need a supermarket run, these speedy mostly-from-the-pantry dinners will get you through the dinner hour with your sanity intact.
SHAKSHUKA
Chop a small onion and sauté ’til soft in a little olive oil. Add a couple of teaspoons of chopped garlic (about four cloves), salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes. Stir in a can of chopped tomatoes (28 oz.), turn up the heat, and crack four eggs into the mixture when it starts boiling, spooning the sauce over the eggs so they cook completely. Sprinkle generously with feta and parsley, if you have them, and serve with pita bread.
TOMATO-CHICKPEA SOUP
Heat a couple of cans of tomato-basil soup (20 oz.) in a pan over medium heat. Stir in a can of drained chickpeas (15 oz.) and a package of frozen spinach (10 oz.), and cook over medium heat until spinach is thoroughly cooked, about 10 minutes. Serve with a swirl of sour cream and a scant handful of croutons.
PASTA WITH BREADCRUMBS
Cook pasta. (Bucatini or fettuccine are good options, but any pasta will do.) Meanwhile, sauté a generous handful of breadcrumbs in butter; add Parmesan cheese and garlic to the pan. Stir in cooked pasta with a little cooking water, add salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes, and cook for a few more minutes.
CHICKPEA SALAD SANDWICH
Mix a can of drained chickpeas (15 oz.) with 3 Tbsp. tahini, 1/2 tsp. Dijon mus- tard, 1 Tbsp. maple syrup, a pinch of dried dill, a little chopped red onion, and a scoop of toasted, unsalted sunflower seeds, if you have them on hand. Serve on toasted whole-grain bread with avocado slices and onion.
RAVIOLI LASAGNA
Spoon one-third of a jar of tomato sauce (26 oz.) into a baking dish, top with a layer (about 12) of thawed cheese ravioli and thawed, drained frozen spinach. Sprinkle with shredded mozzarella and Parmesan; repeat layers until ravioli is gone, ending with a layer of cheese-sprinkled sauce. Bake at 350° for 35 minutes.
MIX-AND- MATCH DINNER POTATOES
Bake foil-wrapped potatoes in 400° oven until tender (about an hour). When potatoes are done, split in half and heat a package of frozen broccoli in cheese sauce (10 oz.) and/stir a cup of chopped ham or bacon into a jar of alfredo sauce (10 oz.). Let your crew top their own baked potatoes.
Homeschool Unit Study: The Harlem Renaissance
Black History Month is the perfect excuse to celebrate the Harlem Renaissance, a flourishing of African-American culture that lit up the creative landscape of the 1920s with its epicenter firmly located in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood.
Black History Month is the perfect excuse to celebrate the Harlem Renaissance, a flourishing of African-American culture that lit up the creative landscape of the 1920s with its epicenter firmly located in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood.
Jacob Lawrence, 1917-2000, To Preserve Their Freedom, from Toussain L'Ouverture series, serigraph, 1988-1997. Museum of Arts & Sciences, Daytona Beach.
The Harlem Renaissance is one of my favorite periods of U.S. history to explore in our high school homeschool. My students get excited by the sheer abundance of possibilities: You’ve got art, you’ve got literature, you’ve got music, you’ve got social criticism, you’ve even got food. On apparently every front, Black Americans were bringing their culture and creativity into play, and the result is almost an embarrassment of riches. There are several directions you could go with this unit: Treat it as a literature unit, and dive into some of the period’s most important works, or use it as a jumping-off point for a big, interdisciplinary study of early 20th century African American history. We usually do the latter, since the Harlem Renaissance also provides an impetus and meaningful background for the civil rights movements of the mid-20th century.
READ
Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois
The sociologist and activist W.E.B DuBois was in many ways the father of the Harlem Renaissance, and in this, his most important work, DuBois makes a claim for re-thinking of African-American identity that was to resonate with a generation of African-Americans. DuBois was himself a remarkable figure — the first African-American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University, he wrote many books, founded the Niagara movement, which opposed Booker T. Washington’s policies of conciliation, and fought for the rights of African-Americans to vote and enjoy the same privileges as other Americans. Souls of Black Folk memorably and movingly describes DuBois’ dawning awareness of his “double consciousness” as an African-American, “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
“The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” by Langston Hughes
One of the central debates of the Harlem Renaissance was the question of what art, specifically African-American art, was meant to do. Should the concern of black artists be to counter white stereotypes or simply to portray black life as realistically and authentically as possible? While DuBois thought the former, a younger, more militant generation of black artists, most prominent among them the poet and novelist Langston Hughes, aimed to show all of Black life in their art. In this essay, published in the Nation magazine in 1921, Hughes criticizes those middle-class Blacks who are ashamed of their race and calls on African-Americans to embrace their own heritage and “indigenous” art forms, such as jazz.
Cane by Jean Toomer
Blending poetry with sketches of black life in the South and North, Toomer’s Cane is one of the literary masterpieces of the Harlem Renaissance. Toomer was a racially mixed man who could pass as white and, according to Henry Louis Gates and Rudolph P. Byrd, often chose to.
Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-Tales From the Gulf States by Zora Neale Hurston
Though best-known for the classic (and staple of high school English curricula) Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston began her career carrying out anthropological field work in the South. This collection of her sketches from her travels in Florida, Alabama, and New Orleans show how central the African-American experience in all parts of the United States, not just in Harlem, were to members of the Harlem Renaissance
LOOK
Carl Van Vechten
Van Vechten was one of the most unusual figures of the Harlem Renaissance. A prototype of what Norman Mailer would later call the “White Negro,” Van Vechten saw himself as a champion of African-American culture, and though his involvement in the movement was controversial, he was instrumental in bringing the work of African-American writers and artists to a wider public. A novelist, dance critic, and Gertrude Stein’s literary executor, he also photographed many of the Harlem Renaissance’s prominent figures, including DuBois and Zora Neale Hurston.
Aaron Douglas
The visual arts were central to the Harlem Renaissance, and Douglas’s African-influenced modernist murals caught the attention of the leading intellectuals of the movement like Alain Locke and W.E.B DuBois. Douglas’s best-known work were the illustrations he created for James Weldon Johnson’s books of poetic sermons, God’s Trombones.
LISTEN
“Prove It On Me Blues” Ma Rainey
Big, bold, and fearless, Ma Rainey was one of the first female blues singers to achieve fame. Though she didn’t have a great voice, Rainey delivered the double entendre-laden lyrics of her songs with a power and intensity that paved the way for later female singers like Bessie Smith. Here, Rainey sings in remarkably bold terms about her romantic pursuit of a woman, and of her preference for lesbian relationships. The theme of homosexual love was central to the Harlem Renaissance, the historian Henry Louis Gates even arguing that the movement “was as much gay as it was black.”
“T’aint Nobody’s Business if I Do” Bessie Smith
More than any other singer, Bessie Smith embodied the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance — its emphasis on race pride, its uncompromising view of the value of African-American lives.
“Black and Blue” Louis Armstrong
Originally written by Fats Waller for the musical Hot Chocolates, “Black and Blue” became, in Louis Armstrong’s hands, a defiant statement on what it was like to be black in America (Ralph Ellison riffs poetically on the song in his great novel Invisible Man.)
WATCH
The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross
Henry Louis Gates’ sweeping survey of African-American history provides a good general background to the movement and his section on Black popular arts and film of the 1920s is particularly helpful.
Against the Odds: Artists of the Harlem Renaissance
Focusing mainly on the visual arts, this documentary shows how art and politics were inextricably linked for members of the Harlem Renaissance.
Langston Hughes’ “The Weary Blues”
Jazz cadences and rhythms can be found throughout the poetry of Langston Hughes and in this spoken reading, Hughes reads his own poetry to jazz accompaniment, from a broadcast of The 7 O’Clock Show, 1958.
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