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Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you’d most like not to lose. — Neil Gaiman
- April 2018
- Note from Janice
- New books at Cincinnati
- Art of Cursive and a bundle special
- Context links at Excellence-in-Literature.com
- Conference schedule—see you in Cincinnati this weekend?
- Classics-based writing lessons
Happy spring (or fall, if you're south of the equator)!
Springtime in Virginia can be lovely—vivid with forsythia, hyacinths, and blossoming trees. As an additional treat, we have the occasional morning of snow showers on top of it all. It keeps us guessing!
I wanted to send a quick newsletter letting you know that we will be adding some new books to what we carry, and if all goes well, we will have them at the Great Homeschool Convention in Cincinnati. The new additions include Karen Glass's wonderful new book on narration, Know and Tell: The Art of Narration. It won't be on the website until we get home from the conference, but we're hoping our copies will be in Cincinnati before we are (if they aren't, you can still get the conference special by ordering there; we'll ship as soon as we get home).
I've enjoyed watching my grandson, Ira, master his bicycle over the past few weeks. I can always tell when a school break is happening—the door flies open and he and Imogen rush out and (usually) head for the woods. Sometimes it's a trek to the creek or the hammock; sometimes just a run around the house, but it always sounds like fun. I hope you've had chances to get outside and explore nature with the children in your life.
—Janice Campbell
P. S. Did you know that we are the only source for the Excellence in Literature book Complete Curriculum? We also offer a "Print Plus" bundle with print and a seriously discounted ebook together so you can use a single level with more than one student at a time (in your immediate family). |
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Conference Schedule
I'll be leaving tomorrow for the Midwest Homeschool Conference by Great Homeschool Conventions, and I hope to see you there (come for free shopping night Thursday, and stay for it all!). You'll find a downloadable schedule, workshop descriptions, and other details at GreatHomeschoolConventions.com) I'm looking forward to being there, and will be in booths 1118-1120. Be sure to stop by and say hello!
For talks, I'll be doing the Homeschool 101 track plus a couple extra:
How to Plan Your Homeschool Year
Thursday 5:00–6:00 PM Ballroom A
How to Choose Curriculum That Fits ( And Fix What Doesn’t)
Friday11:30 AM–12:30 PM Junior Ballroom C
Literature and the Arts Can Help You Teach—Here’s How!
With Professor Carol Reynolds
2:30–3:30 PM Junior Ballroom D
How to Teach With Living Books
5:30–6:30 PM Junior Ballroom D
How to Homeschool High School (Key: It’s an Education, Not a Rat Race)
Saturday 10:00–11:00 AM Duke 263–264
Spreading the Feast: How to Teach Great Literature to Teens
Saturday 2:30–3:30 PM Duke 206 |
| | | Penmanship Matters
Handwriting is important for a lot of reasons, some of which I've explained in "Penmanship Matters" on the DoingWhatMatters.com blog.
Whether you choose to teach cursive or italic or both, we have books that help your student learn beautiful penmanship. |
| | The Art of Cursive coloring book follows the CursiveLogic handwriting worktext and provides extensive practice in the CursiveLogic handwriting method (you'll want to learn the basic . As students are coloring beautiful pictures, they are practicing cursive letters, connections, slant, spacing, and more. Best of all, it’s fun and relaxing (I've colored way more samples than necessary)!
CursiveLogic teaches cursive in four simple lessons in a beautifully-designed text. Learning to write become something to look forward to, rather than a chore, especially when it's followed by The Art of Cursive.
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| | | Link updates at Excellence in Literature!
We have just completed a link update for the online context resources mentioned in the Excellence in Literature curriculum, and have also created a page for each module on the website, with the most updated current version of the links. I'm excited about this, because it means that I can keep links much more current than is possible when they are only in the book. The links pages are just the links, so students will have to refer to the book to know what they are supposed to look for and do, but I think it will make the curriculum even easier to use. You can reach all the links pages from the Curriculum User Content page.
The Excellence-in-Literature.com website now hosts a growing collection of over 800 pages of resources for the study of literature. These include poetry, short stories, and other context resources, plus a growing selection of how-to articles.
From Cathy Duffy's review: “Students completing these courses should be miles ahead of most of their high school contemporaries in their ability to read and analyze literature at a sophisticated level. The challenging writing assignments also promise to develop student skills in composition to a high level.”
You'll find a downloadable book list as well as links to the recommended editions of books studied in Excellence in Literature at Everyday-Education.com. You'll also find links on the description page for each study guide. You don't have to use the recommended edition, but there are reasons I prefer them, and you'll find my criteria listed on this page as well.
From a review at Joy in Our Journey: “I guess what impresses me so much is that this is written in such a straightforward manner that most junior high aged students could easily work through the entire curriculum on their own. And there are no ‘waste of time’ pop quizzes with those silly WWWWW questions to see if our children have actually read the book selections. You won’t find ‘busywork’ in this curriculum.”
And of course, all Amazon links are affiliate links, and help keep the website afloat (though it costs you absolutely nothing extra)! |
| | | | Have you tried my Classics-Based Writing Class atSchoolhouseTeachers.com?
There are a lot of other classes for all ages at SchoolhouseTeachers, plus many other great resources. It's inexpensive — you can try a month for just $5, so even if you use only a few classes, it's an amazing deal. |
| | Peaceful Planning and Record-keeping
I finally got around to creating some small planning and recordkeeping booklets that reflected the type of planning I did. You can read about the Peaceful Planning system at PeacefulPlanning.net. There are four booklets:
Lifetime Reading List
For quite a few years of homeschooling, I'd buy a teacher plan book from the teacher store or set up a big binder with highly organized and structured daily plans and overall organizational schemes. These usually lasted a few weeks (if I was lucky and tried really, really hard), but in the end, I always went back to keeping short, simple records in the 5.5 x 8.5" format of my daily planner. Somehow, it didn't seem overwhelming to pick it up for reference or adding more notes, and I would actually end up with what I needed to keep track of written down. With these little books, your plans and records can be simple and beautiful. I hope you find them helpful! |
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Learn cursive in four easy lessons with CursiveLogic, then practice and review with beautiful coloring pages in The Art of Cursive.
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HIgh School English
Excellence in Literature helps you teach classic literature and writing to teens even if you don’t know Virginia Woolf from Beowulf! - Full-length classics in historic, artistic, and cultural context
- Self-directed
- College prep
- Easy to use
- Grades 8-12
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Peaceful Planning
Transcripts Made Easy: The Homeschooler's Guide to High School Paperwork has been a trusted guide since 2001. It has always helped readers
—Keep simple, accurate records —Issue grades —Grant credit for traditional classes, unit studies, work experience, and other activities. —Award extra credit for honors classes, credit by exam, or dual-credit classes. —Calculate a GPA, with or without weighted grades. |
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| | | Everyday Education, LLC is the publisher of the Excellence in Literature curriculum, the 1857 McGuffey Readers with instructions for use with Charlotte Mason methods, Perfect Reading, Beautiful Handwriting; Transcripts Made Easy; and other homeschool helps. We've been online since 2001, which is a really long time in internet years.
The DoingWhatMatters.com blog has been online since 2007, and has quite a few articles on teaching with a classical/Charlotte Mason focus. We moved it from a different address a couple of years ago, so are still updating and relinking articles. There's useful stuff, there, though, so I hope you'll find it interesting. |
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