For close to 40 years home schoolers have enjoyed a simple communication process between themselves and their Education Service District. Our legal obligation has been to notify the ESD of our intent to home school and provide them with three essential pieces of information: · Your child’s and your name along with your address. · Your child’s birth date….
Hello subscribers, There’s hope in the new year! If you’ve tried everything and your child is still struggling academically, please read the guest article written by Susan Leckband of the HELP (Help Elevate Learning Processing) organization below. Their services and expertise may be the very thing your child needs to succeed. Be sure to click…
Last Friday, I wrote about the particular power of a single New Year Resolution, that of taking responsibility or ownership. This resolution had a profound effect in the life of Maxwell Perkins, a famous editor who worked at Scribner’s years ago. You can read about it here. The idea of “taking responsibility” means accepting where you find yourself and resolving…
At the turn of the century (1900) in New Hampshire, two teenage boys, Tom and Maxwell, decided to go for a swim across a deep pond. Tom, not a strong swimmer, began to panic and grabbed Maxwell in an attempt to stay afloat. They both began to go under. Maxwell, now panicking himself, freed himself…
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I’m going to add a 6th rule that I think should inform how we teach our children to read critically. We must teach them to rarely cancel or censor a writer or blogger simply because he or she takes a position that from our perspective is intolerable. Freedom expression is after all, the first amendment in…
The final rule in this series of posts, brief tips on how to help our older children read critically, is to encourage them to read with their eyes open. In other words, all books are bound to contain some errors. I’m not talking about factual errors although that can sometimes be the case. I’m mainly thinking…
That’s the title of a book written by Steve Brown, one of my favorite authors and speakers. His life and theology has been to a certain degree a series of U-turns- thinking that he understood something, only to later on change his mind. He’s open about this, and very much the opposite of the person…
Soon after my conversation to Christ, one of the youth pastors of the church I was attending preached a sermon whose provocative and funny (to me anyway) title has stuck with me over the years. He titled it, “Flesh Finders and Sin Sniffers.” As you might guess, the pastor was referring to church members, usually…
Earlier this fall I started a five- part series of posts on how to teach our children to think critically. Rule number 1 was “be gracious” to those who hold contrary views. Why? Because somethings can’t be reversed. Posts, texts, tweets, are permanent, apologies and retractions notwithstanding. On to rule number 2. Ignoring this rule leads…