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Six Ways to Prepare for Challenge B Over the Summer

Some families take the whole summer off from home schooling. Some don’t. And I don’t think either one is right or wrong. We don’t and we have our reasons for it just like anyone who does take the summer off has reasons. The beauty of home schooling is that you get to do what works for your family. I love summer school because we have time to do things that we just can’t cram in during the busy school year. I also have found that if we take the summer off completely, the lack of routine destroys the peace in our home. So at the very least, we do morning school any morning we are all home.

I’ve also been noticing a lot Classical Conversations families wanting to find ways to prepare their children for the next Challenge level over the summer. Challenge is not an easy breezy academic picnic. It’s a lot of work and it can get overwhelming. Spending the summer gently preparing for the workload to come is a wise way to spend quiet moments over the summer. Just promise me, let your kids still enjoy summer. Doing a full school schedule in preparation for Challenge over the summer will suck the joy right out of the school year.

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Surviving Henle Latin (without Losing Your Love for Learning)

I have to start by saying that I love Latin. I am completely, 100%, fully committed to learning Latin and I believe wholeheartedly in all the reasons that classical education insists on Latin.

But I don’t always love Henle Latin. Sometimes I don’t even like it. And I’m not alone. The more time I spend on social media talking to other Classical Conversation directors and parents, the more and more and MORE I hear about parents wanting to quit Latin altogether because Henle is brutal. And that breaks my heart because there is so much beauty to be found in Latin and how it connects to all other subjects. I am hearing about more and more people quitting CC because the joy of learning is gone and a whole lot of finger pointing happens–and they are all pointing at Henle.

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The Pros & Cons of Staying “Off-Property” near Walt Disney World

There are, what seems to be anyway, thousands of hotels in the Orlando area. And then to complicate matters, past hotels there are countless Air BnB, VRBO, and other condo rentals available. Deciding where to stay can be a tough decision because there are just so many options. But overall, your choices can be split into three categories: Disney hotels, often referred to as “on property” which are owed and run by Disney; all the other hotels in Orlando which are considered “off property” (including, confusingly, several that actually are located within Disney’s property in Orlando); and finally, individually owned condos all over the greater Orlando area that can be rented through AirBnB, VRBO, etc.

This is the AirBnB we rented. It was exactly what we needed for that trip.

I like staying on property at Disney World. I like all the extras you get when you are not just a park guest, but a resort guest. I actually have a lifetime goal of staying at EVERY Disney hotel on property at least once. So far, I’ve been lucky enough to stay at Port Orleans Riverside, Port Orleans French Quarter, Art of Animation, Caribbean Beach, Pop Century, Animal Kingdom Lodge, Contemporary, and my dream resort, Polynesian (it was just as amazing as I had hoped and dreamed it would be!). (continue reading)

How to Introduce Children to Poetry from the Golden Age of Children’s Literature

Quality children’s literature is a top priority for most classically-minded moms. Sometimes it can be hard to weed through all the options to find the gems. We often want to read our children the classics, particularly those from the Golden Age of Children’s Literature, roughly the time from 1860 to 1920 when some of the most well known children’s lit was written, such as Peter Pan, The Secret Garden, and Tom Sawyer. But sometimes it is hard to get your hands on the lesser-known titles from those days. They are either not available at your public library, impossible to find online, or have disappeared completely and you don’t even know what you are missing, because they are out of publication and you’ve never heard of them!

Author Heather Lynn Harris has set out to reintroduce some of the lesser known authors from the Golden Age of Literature to modern readers. Through re-telling poetry and stories that have been lost through time, she is aiming to get these valuable pieces of literature back into the hands of children. She also illustrates the stories herself.

As one example, Heather has re-told the poem Five Hungry Mice by F.A.B. Dunning. As a woman writing during the Golden Age of Literature, Dunning’s works did not receive the attention they deserved and in modern times, it is nearly impossible to find anything still in print. I was able to find one book on Amazon, Gathered Leaves. My public library, which has never let me down and has always had every book I’ve ever dreamed of checking out, has absolutely nothing by F.A.B. Dunning. Heather Lynn Harris decided to take this matter into her own hands and do something about it.

I received a copy of Heather’s retelling of Five Hungry Mice to read with my son. It is a lovely poem set in Paris and there’s a cat in it. If you have read many of my posts, you probably know that my five year old is OBSESSED with cats. So of course, this book was a huge hit with him.

The illustrations in the book are quite lovely. My favorite part are the giant claws on the cat in the story. I am a huge advocate of The Paw Project, a national program aiming to educate people on the harmful health effects of declawing cats. The fact that the cat in this story has her claws made me smile.

Lovely toe beans on this kitty!

I also am the kind of person who says, “Yes! I should read my children more poetry!” but then do I? No, I do not. I love that this sweet little poem is presented as a typical children’s book. It feels effortless in this way to read a poem to my kindergartener. Heather Lynn Harris is an author/illustrator to keep an eye, as she helps us classical Mommas reintroduce these lovely poems to our children!

Yeah, he’s wearing football gloves. Don’t ask. Life in this house is full of mystery!

If you’d like to enjoy this chance to read Golden Age poetry with your children, you can find Five Hungry Mice by Heather Lynn Harris on Amazon. Or, you could head on over to my facebook page, because I’m giving away a copy!

Disclosure: Buffalo Herritage Press provided me with two free copies of Five Hungry Mice in exchange for writing this review. All opinions are my own.

Early Morning Magic at Magic Kingdom: Is It Worth It?

On our most recent trip to Disney World, we had the opportunity to try Early Morning Magic at both Hollywood Studios and Magic Kingdom. It was kind of meant to be–we were only doing two part days, and we had already determined which would be Hollywood Studios and which would be Magic Kingdom. And then BAM, Disney offered Early Morning Magic at the correct parks on the correct days. How could we say no to that?

So what exactly is Early Morning Magic? Don’t confuse it with Extra Magic Hours, which are extra park hours open only to those staying at Disney resorts. We were staying in a rental house this time, so Extra Magic Hours did not apply to us. But Early Morning Magic is open to everyone (at least, everyone willing to pay for it). At Magic Kingdom, you are allowed into the park at 7:45am and are walked back to Fantasyland as a group. Then you get until 9am to ride rides in Fantasyland with virtually no wait at all. And you have until 10am to go eat breakfast, which is included in the price of admission to Early Morning Magic. We had breakfast at Pinnoccio’s Village Haus, but it has since moved to Cosmic Ray’s.

We started our day as a group being walked back to Fantasyland by several cast members. The group will “feel” too big to you. THat’s because you are with people who have 8am breakfast reservations at the castle, at Crystal Palace, and at Be Our Guest. On top of that, you also have the people who have 8am appointments at Bibbidi Boppiti. I felt a little annoyed at first that they were letting SO MANY people into Early Morning Magic. At Hollywood Studios the crowd was very small. But then I realized so many of them did not have EMM wristbands on–they were going to other reservations around the park. In reality, by the time we entered Fantasyland and got on our first ride, we really had a fairly small crowd, although it was bigger than at Hollywood Studios.

Entering Magic Kingdom for Early Morning Magic

We headed immediately for Seven Dwarfs Mine Train and rode it without a wait.

Ready to board!

In fact, we were able to ride Seven Dwarfs Mine Train a total of six times. And we also rode Peter Pan and Winnie the Pooh once each. When we went, those were the only rides available. Now pretty much all of Fantasyland is open (other than Barnstormer and Dumbo) so you have a lot more options. We just rode Mine Train over and over and over again.

Breakfast after all the riding was very good. You can check out the official Disney Website to see what is available here. They continually restocked the buffet tables with food right up until 10am, so you really had plenty of food, even if you rope dropped other rides and came back at 9:45 or so to eat–which is exactly what we did.

We decided to rope drop Big Thunder Mountain. We thought we’d get a head start being so deep in the park already but in reality, they held us and walked us over so we reached Big Thunder at exactly the same time was those entering the park for normal opening. I was really disappointed in this. Allowing the few of us who already paid insane amounts of money for Early Morning Magic to have a 3 minute lead on those just entering at 9am would not affect their wait times at all. By holding us, it created absolute, terrifying chaos when we were shoved into the hoards of people entering and rope dropping Big Thunder. A fifty year old man grabbed me by my shoulders and tried to throw me to the ground, just to get in front of me in line. And I was holding hands with my five year old at the time. Disney really made the wrong decision on this front. I have never been so scared for my physical safety and I was inside a Disney Park. This is just not cool.

I would guess, however, that now that breakfast is served at Cosmic Ray’s, you would have a far easier time rope dropping Space Mountain or Buzz Lightyear because they are letting you into Tomorrowland anyway for breakfast. And that would be the wiser way to go–ride everything in Tomorrowland, ride Dumbo and Barnstormer, and then go back and do breakfast. Save your fast passes for Splash and Big Thunder, and a third ride of your choice.

So was it worth it? Not as much so as Early Morning Magic at Hollywood Studios, honestly. In that park, there are so few rides that lines build up so fast. Even on a low crowd day, you might wait 45-60 minutes per ride in Toy Story Land. Early Morning Magic eliminates those waits and leaves you free to do anything else all day while the crowds fight amongst themselves in Toy Story land. But at Magic Kingdom, there are so many rides available, and so many fast passes available, that it’s not as big of a deal if you get a head start on Fantasyland. The exception is on an especially busy day–we were there Thanksgiving week so it was nice to have Peter Pan, Mine Train, Big Thunder and Splash Mountain all done by 9:30am. The rest of our day was slow paced and easy. We took our time and enjoyed everything.

Other notes are that we were in the very first row of the parking lot because we had to be there so early. And no one works the parking booths that early, so we didn’t have to pay to park. So that was a bit of savings, I guess. And it was nice to not have to wait for the tram at night in the parking lot, because we were in the front row and could walk.

Developing Discipline: The Habit Tracker Method

I am completely consumed by Classical Conversations Challenge B this year. I am directing it, and my oldest child is enrolled it. Many, many things are covered in Challenge B: categorical and propositional logic, the history of astronomy, creationism vs. darwinism, intro to Chemistry, Latin, current events, mock trial, math, persuasive writing, reading novels, reading short stories, and writing one of their own. But overall, what we are truly studying in Challenge B is discipline. All that school work? It is really just the tools we are using as we learn to become disciplined.

What is discipline? In a nutshell, it’s self-control. I sure have collected a lot of quotes about it to share with my class throughout this year. Here are just a few:

So I’ve been sharing these quotes on discipline and giving pep talks to these kids that if they just focus on discipline NOW, their entire lives will be easier because they will have already trained themselves to do what needs to be done, even if they don’t “feel like it.” And then I looked at my own life and said, “Oops.” I have gone way off track lately. And some of it can be excused–I was feeling really lousy for awhile there until I was able to see the correct doctor about some health issues and get my body working properly again. That took nearly six months of appointments, blood work, etc, to finally get to a point where I am a functioning human being again. Hooray! But while I felt lousy, I got lazy. And the thing about laziness is that sometimes it just becomes a habit. At first it was because I felt cruddy and couldn’t do anything. But then when I finally felt better, I looked around and realized that I was still doing NOTHING because that’s what I was used to doing. CC and especially the Challenge program is all about modeling for the kids what they should be doing. We don’t so much teach them and lecture them, we just show them what to do and hope they follow our lead (they usually do).

So here I am, halfway through Challenge B and just now deciding it’s time to be serious about developing discipline. And at first I wasn’t really sure how I wanted to go about that. I tend to get too crazy with my plans and schemes and then I can’t follow through.

I decided to go with a habit tracker. Here’s what mine is looking like at the end of January. Note: this is not color-coded. I just have a bunch of gel pens and grab whichever one is nearby.

Here’s my little habit tracker.

I’ve purposely cut off the image so you can’t see what habits I am working on–every one is different and what I am focused on will not help you develop your own self-discipline at all. We don’t need to compare ourselves. However, I do have some advice on coming up with the items on your list and some general ideas of what I have on my list.

Make your habits clear, actionable, and measurable. Do not say, “eat healthy”. Because how do you define that? One day you may decide that having dessert after dinner is ok because you ate well all day and another day you may decide that you shouldn’t have had cake and therefore you can’t check off the “eat healthy” box. Instead, break it down. Drink 1 glass of water. Drink another glass of water. Drink a third glass of water. Eat a piece of fruit. Don’t eat chips. Don’t drink soda. Make EACH of these items, whatever specific things you want to qualify as “eating healthy” a SEPARATE item on your habit tracker. For one thing, you will be able to keep a clear definition of eating healthy. For another, if you have eat a serving of fruit, eat a serving of veggies, drink water, take a vitamin, don’t eat fast food, don’t drink soda all as separate items guess what? If you mess up on ONE of those items that day, you can see clearly that you did not ruin your entire day. So you drank a soda? Well, you didn’t eat fast food, you had an apple at lunch, and you drank about a gallon of water. One bad decision does not mean you end up making five more. When they are each separate items, you can fail on one and still conquer the others. If you had just put “eat healthy” well then, you are out of luck if you make even one teeny bad decision in your day.

I also don’t say “Do the laundry”. I actually make each step a separate item–wash a load, dry a load, fold a load, put it away. I am trying to develop the follow through of doing one load of laundry a day so that I am never behind on laundry. I have had a bad habit of letting a load sit in the wash until it smells funny. So having separate lines for each step has helped me get into the habit of completing the process.

The same goes for exercise as well. I put each small thing on it’s own line so that I do each thing. I don’t just say “Workout” because that isn’t clear or measurable. I say XX minutes on the treadmill. XX pushups on the Total Gym. XX pull ups on the Total Gym. And so on. Again, this makes my goals clear and then I can follow through on them.

Another category of items on the list have to do with home schooling. We got into a really bad habit of not doing our morning time together and so I put that on my list. We have only missed one morning since I added it to my habit tracker and it was the morning the little guy kept fainting, so clearly we had other priorities that day. The cool thing about this habit tracker is that in the past, I would’ve said, oh well, we broke our streak. Let’s quit because we weren’t perfect. But with this tracker, I am able to say, you know what? I didn’t do it yesterday but I can still get it done today!

Morning school getting done!

I also have a category for blog work. Social media posts are a lot of work to remember and I’d all but given up, to be honest. But now that I put each thing on my list (post to Facebook, post to Instagram, comment on other home school posts on Instagram, pin to Pinterest, etc), I am really upping my social media game for the blog.

Don’t be afraid to have a LOT of items on your list. It may seem overwhelming at first but when you are breaking down “eat healthy” into 7 or 8 actionable steps and “do the laundry” into four steps, it’s going to seem like a lot but it’s actually just going to motivate your more because you get to check off more boxes throughout the day.

I’ve already mentioned a lot of reasons this works but I’d like to point out one more. When you get to fill in little boxes with pretty pens, you get a tiny little surge of “I did it!” and, after reading the book The Power of Habit, I know we need that little reward. That’s why I only use my special pens to fill it in. I personally buy them one at a time at the checkout at Michael’s, but you can buy a multi pack on Amazon. I’m obsessed with these pens!

My favorite pens have their own special home.

I’ve also set goals for myself. I challenged myself to get 600 “points” this month. A point is a square filled in. I didn’t start until a little later in January so I didn’t have a full 31 days to work on it. But I’m still very, very close to reaching my goal. As of publication, I have 533 points and 3.5 days to go. I think I’ll make it!

Over the month, I have discovered some things that were flawed about my list of habits. A couple of things really only need to happen once a week and shouldn’t have been on a daily list. A few things I thought were good goals have turned out to be unreasonable (the amount of water I was aiming to drink, for example, is more than my poor bladder can take!). So I have decided to not be committed to this list for an entire year, but rather, I will edit it monthly to reflect what is going on and where my focus needs to be. Next month I am adding an item called “Do something from your weekly list” and then I will work my way through the tasks I need to get in the habit of doing once a week. More discipline practice!

I have a lot of big projects I’d like to be working on. I am trying to write a super detailed and awesome Disney Vacation Planning Journal. But I was getting so bogged down with my to do list every day that I was never finding time to get around to that. And part of me doesn’t want to get around to it because it’s big and it’s scary and I am afraid of failing at it. So I would just keep adding more chores to my to do list and never “find the time” to work on it. But using this tracker has made me say, “No, I’ve done the laundry, I’ve loaded the dishwasher, I’ve done school with the kids. I have plenty of time to sit down and focus on this project.” I have freedom to work on my projects now.

Wait a minute… the theme of Challenge B is Discipline. And the theme of Challenge I (the year after B) is… wait for it… FREEDOM. Oh. I get it now. LIGHT BULB MOMENT! Discipline brings freedom. Boom. Living that out myself so I can model it for my students. CC life at it’s best!

To make your own habit tracker, you can use notebook paper, graphing paper, a spreadsheet program, or whatever you have available. I use Numbers on my Mac, personally. Anything that allows you to make a list and have a space to check it off daily will work just fine. Keep it simple and follow through! Good luck!

Preparing for Challenge B Second Semester: The Good, the Bad, and the Murder

Everything was moving along so smoothly this year in our Classical Conversations Challenge B.

Community day had found its groove. Start the day with Logic, then Latin. Celebrate that our two most difficult subjects were completed! Move on to Expo/Comp and work through the newest elements of persuasive writing, then discuss the novel we were currently reading. Math presentations. Lunch. Math games. Research presentations and discussion of the astronomer of the week. End the day with the most fun element–debate. Discuss the current events topic, then split into two groups and create a presentation based on the side of the topic you were assigned. Present the topics. Go home.

And at home, things were moving along just fine. In some ways, Challenge B is so much easier than A because there isn’t nearly as much to memorize. Most of Latin is review from Challenge A. Nearly all of Lost Tools of Writing is review. Math is the same as always in class and at home is moving at the pace appropriate for your student, so it’s not a big deal. Research and Debate are FUN and not a one of my students complained about the workload involved. Logic was our rough spot but we found a way to even make Logic more enjoyable–we have movie nights and get together to watch the DVDs. There is junk food, laughter, and friendship and when you toss a logic video into that environment, somehow logic doesn’t seem so bad after all.

One of our logic nights.

But then came Christmas break and my preparations for second semester began. And I hit a wall. I guess I really did not see this coming even though I knew that things would change gears for second semester. I didn’t realize how completely they would. Our groove? It’s gone.

The thing you really need to know about Challenge B is that second semester is a fresh start in nearly every strand. This can be very, very good. Or it can be very, very bad. Challenge B is more like college, with the new semester being nearly completely different classes than the previous semester.

If you student struggled through first semester, this fresh start is very, very good. I’ve sat done and encouraged students that they get to put first semester behind them and give it another try. It’s fantastic news!

But if your student was sailing along with barely a bump in the road, the big changes that come along with beginning second semester of Challenge B can really throw them for a loop. And if you as a parent or director felt that you had a good groove going, be prepared to have it completely shaken up.

Here’s a run down of how each strand changes for second semester and some tips and thoughts on how to schedule your days at home:

Latin: Put away Workspace A, and move on to Workspace B. The best news in second semester is that now that we’ve moved to Workspace B, you can actually use the assignments listed at the top of each page of the workspace to break up your week. Celebrate! We missed this feature during first semester. As for the work itself, nothing changes, but everything gets a little harder. We are stepping out into the unknown, new topics that were never touched in Challenge A. We are facing new concepts like passive verbs. To me it feels like there are overall less exercises assigned in second semester. If your student struggles with English grammar, this is a great time to spend some of your Grammar strand time on English grammar review–a book like Our Mother Tongue or whip out the good ole Essentials charts and write some of them out. It is not time wasted to do so. Latin should still be done every day four one hour–no more, no less. Students should never be spending six hours a day on Latin. Set a timer for an hour, get as much done as possible, and then walk away.

Irregular adjectives are a new topic this semester.

Logic: Goodbye, Introductory Logic, hello Intermediate Logic! Did your students struggle with Intro? Good news, we are moving on to an entirely different area of Logic. Did your students LOVE Intro? Good news, Intermediate is taking that to a new level, in a new way. Does your student hate Logic but love math?!? This semester is basically applying math to words. We get to put away the Intro book completely and move on to Intermediate. And that begins with the seemingly torturous assignment of copying all of the Appendices 25 times each. Ouch. But trust me, mommas, this is not busy work. This is the classical model at work before our eyes. We are asking our students (and ourselves, if we do it with them) to memorize without understanding. We are asking them to tuck these things away in their brains so that when it’s time to understand, we do not have to waste time memorizing. It’s already there and the process will move along so much smoother from memorization to understanding. Trust the process. Do the appendices. Logic at home should look the same as it always did. Spend an hour per day. Read the chapter. Review the vocabulary. Take the quizzes and tests.

Truth tables are fun… for me, anyway.

Math: Obviously math doesn’t change. Keep on doing what you’ve been doing. Although, if what you have been doing doesn’t seem to be working, this is a great time to try out a new curriculum because so much is changing anyway.

Math review games.

Those three strands should be covered each of the four days at home for about an hour each. They need the repetition and review. The other three strands, not so much. They can each be knocked out a little more quickly and don’t require daily attention.

Research: Here comes our first major change. Goodbye, astronomers. You shall be missed. I loved the astronomy unit. I loved coming in on community day and hearing nine different papers on these amazing people. My students had a healthy competition going to see who could come up with the strangest fact about each astronomer and we learned all kinds of weird things. We are moving on to reading Defeating Darwinism and then Discovering Atomos. And the thing about this that needs to be really stressed is that we are not reading these books just to read them. We are reading these books to learn how to RESEARCH. Each week as they read the chapter, they should create an outline. They should make a list of vocabulary they don’t know (and then look it up), a list of people mentioned, and then summarize each section of the chapter, listing a few facts they found interesting. It should be no more than 1-2 pages of notes. This is the skill they are learning. This is the entire point. Do not let that slip by and let them just read the chapter. They will be missing out on the research element of the research strand! The good news is, the chapters are short. You can spend one day at home on research and then put it away until community day. When the time comes for Discovering Atomos, it may require a little bit of vocabulary review each day, but probably not a full hour.

Exposition: Goodbye, Lost Tools of Writing! I mean, not FOREVER. We’ll see it again in Challenge I. But for this semester, you can tuck that book away and say see ya later! This semester we need Words Aptly Spoken Short Stories. We’ll be reading short stories each week and the kids are working on writing their own short stories. At the end of the semester, most directors will publish all of the short stories into a book for them all to have a copy. I would suggest that they spend one day reading the short stories, and the rest of the week working on the writing assignment for the week. Some weeks this may be half an hour, other weeks it may actually require an hour per day. When they get really into their stories, you may find them even working on the weekends, who knows!

Debate: Current events is over. I loved this strand so much more than I anticipated and I’m sad to see it go. And that is forever–beginning in Fall 2019, current events is being replaced by American History. I do not know all the details yet. But anyway, Debate changes gears second semester regardless of what first semester looks like. Because, dear mommas, it is time for Mock Trial. It is time to dive deep into the murder of John Barrett and wrestle with whether or not Barbara Barrett is guilty. Is Lee Porter lying? Is Chaney an incompetent officer? Who was Tootsie? Does it matter? We shall soon find out! I would suggest that students spend two days per week on their mock trial assignments. At the beginning of the semester when they are re-writing the witness statements in their own words, they should spend one day bringing the statement down to a key word outline. Then they should put it away for at least 24 hours before taking the keyword outline and rewriting it in their own words. Most likely, your director is going to collect each student’s rewritten statement. Eventually, whoever becomes that witness will get all those copies to help them develop their character and memorize their part. Keep on encouraging your student that they CAN do this.

Brainstorming everything that comes to mind when we hear the word trial.

I’ve yet to find a new groove in class. Research doesn’t take very long when we no longer have nine papers to hear presented each week. Math is getting really dull with the same old presentations week after week after week. Logic is hard and the kids sometimes check out. Short stories is going well, at least. I am hoping to have some grand advice sometime soon on how to make it all work out. But so far, I’m still wading through it and struggling. If you are a Challenge B director reading this, share what’s going well for you in the second semester!

Home Schooling and the Marie Kondo Method

Boy, oh boy, is Marie Kondo and her book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up a hot topic these days. Some people love her, some people hate her. But overall? Most people really misunderstand the heart of her method. There are memes, memes, everywhere making fun of the “spark joy” concept or the idea of only owning thirty books (Marie never actually enforces this, friends). And people are upset at the concept that she thanks the items before she donates them. And to all those people, I just want to say, “READ THE BOOK.” Marie Kondo’s method has completely changed our home–and our home school. But it required reading the book, not just reading a few memes or watching an episode on Netflix.

My fireplace, post-KonMari method is a reminder that my home is now a peaceful, calm place that I enjoy.

It’s easy to make fun of or disregard something that you don’t actually understand. For example, her Netflix special is very good but I feel like the editors never read the book because they completely missed her method in most of what they did. I have been sad for all the people who are decluttering their homes based on the Netflix show because they are going to attempt it completely wrong and it’s not going to work.

Another reminder to enjoy my home–and my home school.

Because the heart of Marie Kondo’s method is not actually about throwing out things that don’t spark joy (like the electric bill and your treadmill, as the memes say) and it’s not about talking to inanimate objects. And it is FOR SURE not about getting your book collection down to thirty books.

Our bookshelf after the KonMari method. The only books not up there are the ones we are using for school this year. Those get kept in our school supplies instead. The basket on the bottom shelf holds our current library books.

The KonMari method is about two things: dealing with your emotions and how they affect your house, and decluttering by category instead of by location.

Every other decluttering method on the planet tells you to clean out a bathroom or clean out a closet, and work from location to location. But that doesn’t work and that’s why your house ends up a cluttered mess again.

Instead, Marie has you work by category so that you have to face how much you really have. You see ALL your shoes and can assess whether or not you really need that many. You gather all your office supplies in one place and realize you have 500 pens and maybe you should stop buying them. You put all your books together and work through them. And when you put your stuff away, you keep those categories together from then on. So instead of having six piles of pens around the house, they are all together, always. Then you can SEE when you really need more

My pile when I was KonMari’ing all of our toiletries.

. And if you keep all your swim towels together, all your travel toiletries, all your extra blankets, etc, each in it’s own space, you can tell when you have too many or too much because the space becomes too crowded and you can thin it out a little bit. This means your entire house never again gets out of control because when you keep everything put away by category, you can quickly declutter a spot when you need to. You just have to put in the energy ONCE to get it done right and then the rest of your life, your house can stay organized.

Our living room during the very long KonMari process–it took us about four months from start to finish. It is a commitment to a marathon, it is not a weekend sprint.

It sounds crazy but it’s true. We KonMari’d our home three years ago and it’s still in working order, with three children running around. Of course, we have to resort through different categories as the kids grow and interests change. By now that we did the one BIG declutter, we can touch up small categories on an as-needed basis. And now every item in our home has a place. Guess what? The kids know those places as well and they all know how to clean up and put everything away. No matter how messy our house gets, it never, EVER, takes more than 45 minutes to have it completely put back together. Thank you, Marie Kondo. I have so much more time to myself, which is how I manage to write this blog, run an Etsy shop, home school my kids, AND direct Challenge B. I could not have done that before KonMari, plain and simple.

My Etsy shop office. It used to be a closet, overstuff with all kinds of junk. Now it’s a functioning office!

The other aspect of the KonMari method that seems to get tossed aside is the part where you deal with your emotions about items in your house. It’s not easy, friends. It’s not easy to pick up something that was a gift that was given to you by someone you aren’t friends with anymore and realize that every time you look at it, you feel sad and it’s time to let it go. It’s not easy to hold a book that you always meant to read and admit that you WISH you were the kind of person who was going to read that book but you just aren’t. And let that book go. It’s painful. It’s hard to give up clothes that you know are never going to fit again and admit that. It’s hard to hold things in your hand that bring back bad memories and say it’s time to kick those memories out of your home.

After finishing the process, we laid new floors in the ENTIRE house by ourselves. We couldn’t have done that when we were overrun by clutter. But it was possible after! We also were able to discover, by getting rid of so many things, what we really liked. And that made choosing a new couch fairly painless. We knew exactly the kind of furniture that sparked joy for us.

I’ll give you my biggest example from my KonMari journey. Someone gave us a free piano. Of course I said yes! We are home schoolers! Home schoolers are supposed to have a piano in the house. It’s like a RULE. But having that piano in our house made me feel guilty. Because we didn’t use it. There is nothing in life I hate more than listening to children play instruments poorly. Maybe that makes me a horrible person. Maybe that means I have to hand in my home school card. But it’s the truth. My kids do not take music lessons because I am not emotionally strong enough to listen to them practice. I’m just not.

And having that piano in the house made me feel like a failure. It whispered to me daily, a reminder that I wasn’t a perfect home school mom. That I wasn’t good enough. That I was failing. That I was an absolute, and total failure. But then I read Marie Kondo’s book and she taught me that what I needed to do was accept this part of myself and admit it freely! So, here I am telling you all, “I AM NOT THE KIND OF MOM WHO CARES IF MY KIDS TAKE MUSIC LESSONS!” What a weight off my shoulders! And that piano? It left my house, along with my insecurities and doubts and feelings of being a failure in that respect. Goodbye, piano, goodbye.

My kitchen cabinets had been dark wood and there was ugly apple wallpaper on the walls. But I didn’t have time to care or change things when all I did was fight our clutter. After the KonMari method, I was freed up to finally peel the wallpaper and paint the walls and cabinets to be something that makes me truly happy.

Marie asks you to work through those emotions with every item in your house. And obviously not every item in your home is going to draw out THAT kind of reaction. But you may be surprised by how many DO. I sure was. I let go of books on home schooling theory that left me feeling like I was not doing it right. I let go of stacks of books that “good classical educators MUST read”. I let go of supplies for science projects that I knew in my heart we were never going to get around to doing. But in that process, I also found some science supplies that I forgot we had that I really WANTED to dig into–so we did. And clearing out the piles upon piles of books that I “should have been reading” to my kids, I came out with a smaller pile of books that I loved and WANTED to read to my kids. We now only own books we LOVE. We get so many books from our amazing public library every week, we get to find out what we love and what is worth owning. And about once a year we go through our book collection and see if we’ve outgrown any of them and want to pass them along to someone else.

Working through the KonMari process helped me find focus, purpose, and peace in our homeschool. And you know what? The summer that we worked through the process (this is not a weekend project, expect it to take 3-6 months!), we discovered Classical Conversations. And I realized as I was finally truly discovering my goals and my purpose in home schooling, my shortcomings, and my strengths, that Classical Conversations was the perfect complement. It matched my goals and my purpose and made up for my shortcomings (the kids do art, science, and music at CC so I don’t have to feel any guilt when we don’t do those things at home!). And for me personally, Classical Conversations has really changed my life and given me so many opportunities for personal growth. So when Marie Kondo calls it “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up” she’s not kidding. When you narrow down the items in your house to match what really matters to you, you end up finding out who you really are and where you belong.

Our CC wall. Before the KonMari process, I never would have been able to find a whole blank wall to create this and it is something I absolutely love.

(Not Quite) Ten Tips & Tricks for Visiting Kennedy Space Center

We recently had the opportunity to visit Kennedy Space Center. We had been wanting to go for quite some time. That desire became more urgent after completing cycle 3 of Classical Conversations and first semester of Challenge B–both of which have a focus on astronauts and astronomers. But our last few trips to Florida had been by plane, and without a car, we had to stay on Disney property and use Disney transportation. This Thanksgiving, we drove down to Florida and with a car, we finally were able to head over to the Space Coast.

It was worth the wait!

We had such a great time at Kennedy Space Center. And what I really found impressive was that we ALL had a great time. The adults, the teen, the pre-teen, and the five year old. The entire place is so well thought out to have options available for absolutely everyone to enjoy each area together. We visit a lot of museums. It’s an important part of our family time. But no other museum has come close to what Kennedy Space Center offers. It is organized, has great crowd control, and plenty of fun mixed in. We learned a few things along the way and I’m passing my tips and tricks on to you to make your visit as smooth as possible

  1. Look for coupons. Sometimes there are coupons on their website. For example, when we visited, there was a coupon for fifth graders to get in free. And for home schoolers, it was all children born in 2007 and 2008–so my middle child got in free. That was a savings of $50, so it’s definitely worthwhile to check in on their special offers page now and then as your trip approaches.

2. Bring your own food if you’d like. Soft sided coolers are allowed, so you can bring your own bottled water and snacks. This is especially good news if you have a kid with food allergies or a picky eater. It’s also good news because you can save some money this way! We ended up eating lunch at Little Caesar’s. It was fine because it’s familiar and I knew the kids would eat it. But seriously, we paid something like $7 each for personal pan pizzas that were half the size that a personal pan is at an actual Little Caesar’s–and there you pay $5 including a drink! So it wasn’t super cheap but at least the kids would eat it. We did bring our own snacks and bottled water to save money, though.

Little Caesar’s for lunch

3. Plan your day, beginning with an understanding of what is and is not included in your admission. A general admission ticket includes all the museum exhibits and a bus tour of the grounds and entry to the Saturn V building (part of the bus tour). But there are special tours and meals available as add-ons to your base ticket. My advice is to just do a regular ticket on your fist visit. There is more to see than you can possibly see in a day without adding extras on to your day. We were there from open until close and felt like we barely scratched the surface.

4. Take the bus tour first. As soon as you enter KSC, head to the line for the buses. If you do the bus tour first, you will end up ahead of the crowds at the Saturn V center and then when you return to the main area, you will have the rest of the day to walk around without waiting on a bus. Note: they will stop you to take a family picture before you get on the bus. More on that later.

Little guy thought he was hot stuff using a seat belt instead of being in a car seat!

5. Dedicate 1.5-2 hours to the Saturn V building. There is so much to see in there. There is a place to grab a snack or lunch if you get hungry, so there’s no real rush to leave. We were able to touch a moon rock, dress up like astronauts, and see two shows. Don’t rush back to the bus–take time to see all this building has to offer.

Green Screen fun! You have to buy the photo package to keep the images. I’ll talk about that later.
Touching the moon!

6. Enjoy the Atlantis building. When your bus tour is over, your next stop will be the Atlantis building. The entire building is incredible. There is a fabulous introductory show about Atlantis, plus an exhibit where you can be up close and personal with Atlantis. Seeing it so close is really a moving experience. I am not a big space nerd or anything but I felt very emotional getting to be so close to the shuttle that traveled back and forth to space successfully so many times. Incredible. The Atlantis building also has the Shuttle Launch Experience, which is a ride that rivals Star Tours at Disney. You can’t have ANY loose items on this ride but you are able to rent a locker for free. We even had to take our little guy’s heart monitor off, but it was just for a few minutes and we were able to lock it securely in a locker, so we were comfortable with doing so. The Atlantis Building also has a play area for kids and a GIANT slide. The kids could’ve just played on the slide all day and been happy!

Atlantis!

7. Don’t wear green. Friends, hear these words. Do. Not. Wear. Green. If you want a lovely family photo to remember your time at Kennedy Space Center, don’t wear green. But if you are up for a most hilarious memento of your day, well, wear what you what.

When you wear green at Kennedy Space Center, beware…

8. Buy the photo package. We were extremely pleased with it. It was far better than what we got from Legoland and we made tons of Christmas gifts for family members from the photos. We did the digital package, which gave us a code to enter on an app and all our pictures were available. I could even download them directly to my phone to share on social media. Particularly if you spend time doing the green screen photos in the Saturn V building, you will want the photo package. Those pictures are included plus you get any other pictures you took all day.

9. Plan to spend two days. My list is incomplete for all of you because we did NOT plan to spend two days and therefore we missed so many of the available shows, exhibits, and features. I intended to have ten tips for you but there are only eight. Why? Because we ran out of time and I did not actually see all the things I wanted to write about! Learn from my mistake, and spend two days. Legoland we did in a day and it was fine. Kennedy Space Center, not so much. And we didn’t even do any of the add-ons!

Kindergarten: Our Super Simple Approach

A few months ago, I shared about my frustrations with Kindergarten. You can read all about it here but in summary, it wasn’t going well. I was feeling like a failure and my kindergartener was less than pleased with how we were approaching things. School should not be a negative thing when you are five years old. It shouldn’t even be a negative thing when you are fifteen, or twenty-five, or fifty-five. Learning should always be a source of joy.

But it wasn’t. Kindergarten was feeling like a disaster. It felt that way for the entire first semester. But thank God for Christmas break because my brain was able to get some true rest and reset and think clearly instead of feeling so defeated that I couldn’t even come up with a plan.

I remembered the number one rule of Classical Conversations: KEEP IT STICK IN THE SAND. What does that mean? Keep it simple, Momma. Keep it simple. Kindergarten (and pretty much every other grade) goes a lot more smoothly with less props, less fancy manipulatives, less expensive curriculum. Kindergarten should be about learning to use those little fingers, identifying letters and numbers, and basic math skills. He also listens to the Foundations memory work with the rest of us and participates in our morning basket time that we do as a family–we cover everything from art to math drills to microscope usage during that short time each morning.

So I took it back to basics. We are continuing with Math U See Primer because he is absolutely rocking it and it is a great fit for him. Not all math curriculum fits all math students, so I am feeling lucky that we got it right on the first try with this kid.

We also use Addition Facts That Stick to review the math facts that he is learning in Math U See. Again, we hit math hard because he truly enjoys it. Using an additional math book may not be appropriate for some kids but for him, it works. We really like the penny flip game that practices adding 1 and 2 to numbers. We play it multiple times a day! All you need to play is a drawing of two rows of ten squares, two buttons and a penny. That’s pretty “stick in the sand”!

The only other official curriculum that we are working with is A Reason for Handwriting. I like that every other page is a coloring page and I like that the method they use for teaching handwriting. He seems to like it, although he doesn’t really enjoy letters at all.

Past that, I’ve got some super simple tools that we are using for letter recognition. My kindergarten is having a lot of trouble with letter recognition. I really believe it has to do with all his medical trauma, all the tests, all the doctors, all the appointments. For whatever reason, all that anxiety bubbles up when it’s time to learn letters. So we are taking a very, very simple route to learning letters. It’s slow going and we aren’t getting there as quickly as I’d like. But he is making progress and I can’t ask for much more than that.

First, I found these alphabet blocks at the dollar store. They are super lightweight, and they were only a dollar. There’s plenty of better quality blocks out there but what I like about these is that there are only 9 but that’s enough space to have every letter and 0-9 printed on a side. Actually, there are also math symbols and punctuation marks so I think I must be missing one of the blocks. Ha! Anyway, for a dollar, these can’t be beat. We roll them like dice and whichever letter shows up on top, he has to try to remember the name of. If he can’t, we roll that block again. It only has six sides so eventually, he either rolls something he knows, or he repeats one he had before and remembers this time. He likes it, it only takes a few minutes, and he doesn’t complain about it. Win. Win. Win.

Our other stick in the sand letter recognition game is made with a stack of 3×5 cards and a pencil. Cards = sand and pencil = stick. We’ve got this. So I cute the cards in half, and I wrote a letter on each one. We started with 4 letters and I think I did each one twice, in upper and lowercase, so 4 cards total per letter. And then I added 4 cards with silly faces on them. I punched a hole in the corner and put them on a ring to keep them together (you could also just use a sandwich bag, I happened to have rings in my supplies).

How to play? I flip a card over and he says which letter it is. Then he flips one over and I say what letter it is–this way he’s also hearing me say correct answers, which gives him more exposure. And those silly faces? When we flip a silly face card, we meow! You could make whatever sound you want. You could roar like a dinosaur, bark like a dog, fake sneeze, whatever makes your kid giggle. My boy likes cats, so we meow. So he is always hoping to get a silly face card instead of a letter, and that keeps him engaged in the game. It’s so simple and it’s working! I add two new letters every few weeks, as he gets bored and seems to be mastering what he already has.

Finally, we are working on using those fingers. I read an article about how there is an impending shortage of surgeons in this country because kids are so used to swiping a screen instead of using their hands that there will be no kids left who have the dexterity to operate! How crazy and sad is that?!?

I hit the Kumon offerings pretty hard for this. We did this maze book, which he finished quickly and is begging for the next one. The mazes get increasingly difficult and require more focus and hand control as you go through the book. We are also working on cutting and gluing with this book. And then we are working on folding skills with this workbook. And the great thing is that the paper is nice and thick and easy to hold while you work. You could definitely just print your own things, but I do like the quality of the paper and the way it slowly builds to more difficult skills throughout the book. It isn’t as stick in the sand as drawing a shape on a scrap of paper and having them cut it out, but it’s also not super expensive and the books make him smile. And learning should make kids smile, right?!?

And then, I tuck it all inside a simple 12×12 scrapbooking case I bought at Michaels’ when it was on sale. Normally they are $10 each, but they often go on sale for 3/$10 and that is when I buy them! You can see what they look like on Amazon, but they are far cheaper at the craft store. The only thing I can’t fit in the box is his Math U See blocks, but they have their own carrying case, so it’s fine. I also keep a whiteboard, dry erase marker, pencils, scissors, and a glue stick in the box so everything we need is right there waiting.

We sit down on my bed and open up the box and take everything out. We do one activity from each thing in the box (one page of each workbook, one round of each game). We put each thing back in the box as we finish and when everything is back in the box, he is DONE with school for the day. Or so he thinks. Playing is learning and so he’s really still doing school when he plays with his toys. He just doesn’t know it.

Please don’t tell him.