Well, I’m off of my summer fiction kick and back into the swing of my usual non-fiction! Last fall I binged on food literature, but this year I’m into the topic of homeschool.
Homeschool itself is another story for another time.
On the same vein, I have cracked into an absolutely life-changing book which I HAVE NOT been able to skim. I checked out the Read Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease thinking it would be a nice little reference to help me get familiar with some age-approriate read-aloud titles. I am halfway through the book and have not yet reached that section because the author has been handing me buckets of research about literacy and what reading aloud does for your child If I wasn’t a book zealot before, I am now! Recommended to parents far and wide, whether home schooling or public schooling!
The other learning book I have on order is called Better Late than Early by Dr. Raymond Moore. My mother-in-law sent me this interview and his name has been coming up often in the Wild and Free community as an advocate for the academic and emotional benefits of delaying formal education. I can’t wait to crack into it!
Not a book, but I’ve been really getting into several podcasts lately that some of you might really like. I’ve been listening to What Should I Read Next with Anne Bogel all summer. I just recently added At Home and Read Aloud Revival with Sarah MacKenzie. Since I quit exercising at the gym this fall (BOO), I’ve been trying to walk thirty minutes a day and I have found that walking to podcasts is my new favorite!
On the subject of podcasts, I subscribed to Wild and Free and started receiving their monthly digital content bundles! Wild and Free is a natural and traditional home school community (philosophies like Charlotte Mason, Montessori and Waldorf). Each month members are sent a bundle contains a gorgeous magazine, a bunch of feature articles, tutorials, and several podcasts highlighting a different topic around family and home schooling. (September was Mornings and October is Leaves.) The contributors, who are all homeschool moms, share everything from ideas for morning routines, to discussing what it’s like to homeschool a dyslexic child. This content has been gold to me in my homeschool journey; I can’t recommend it enough. If you’re home schooling or thinking about it, you can download a free trial bundle.
From the Kindle, I read Shauna Neiquist’s Present Over Perfect and Jen Hatmaker’s For the Love.
Last but not least, my photography dreams have come true because I am FINALLY taking Life Captured Inc.’s Photo Organisation class! The course teaches you how to consolidate your personal photos and utilize tooling in Lightroom to catalog for memory keeping. (This is my Christmas gift from David) One of my life goal’s since we got married has been to organize our digital images and make memory books from them and I’m finally taking the first step! Plus, I mean, two things I love…photos and organizing.
It will take me months to unravel this hot mess we have on seventy different devices and hard drives, but Life Captured’s images of gorgeous, minimalist memory books and journals are really spurring me on!
I tried not to use too many words on this post and I hope you appreciate that. It was hard, but I did a lot of deleting of over-enthusiastic sentences about books and children’s books and how the drawings make me want to be cozy and turn my house into a little hollowed out tree house where friendly field mice drink chamomile tea out of acorn tea cups and have bundles of herbs hung upon the hearth in the earthen kitchen in which lattice top apple pies are baked by a friendly Mother Bear.
These are the thoughts in my head. Sometimes my husband asks me what I’m thinking and I have to tell him things like this, which is really embarrassing. That being confessed, I think I’ll awkwardly and abruptly end this post here. HAPPY READING!
If you enjoyed this post, I think you’ll love my free download, The Ultimate Homeschool Mama Book List!
For an archive of I’ve read through the years, you can go here. To see all of the curated book lists on my blog in one place, click here.
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