Your School of Love

M. Penny Agnes

Description

Homeschooling your children can be a beautiful and fruitful experience for both you and your children...but it can also be overwhelming. Agnes Penney, the popular author of Your Labor of Love and Your Vocation of Love, is here to help you along the way. Your School of Love is not a homeschooling curriculum, or a how-to guide, but a spiritual companion that will help you and your children get the most out of homeschooling. Your School of Love is packed with short chapters, perfect for the always-busy homeschooling parent, offering tips and advice on a variety of topics, including:- Homeschooling girls, boys, large families, young children, and teenagers- How to keep up with Homeschooling during pregnancy or with a new baby in the house- How to involve fathrs- How to encourage and balance your children's social lives- How to Balance Confidence and Humility while teaching your children- Making Homeschooling a prayerful endeavor- How to deal with the emotional struggles of homeschooling- And so much more (like how to avoid burnout, how to foster vocations, how to teach a child to read and write)Your School of Love is lovingly written by a homeschooling mother, and will be your constant companion throughout your homeschooling years, both as a guide, a spiritual reference, and a helpful friend who knows what it's like to deal with the struggles of homeschooling, and also how to embrace the great joys.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Open learning
• Catholic Church
• Homeschooling

Informations

• Publié par: TAN Books
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781618905970
• Langue: English

Extrait

TAN Books Charlotte, North Carolina www.TANBooks.com 2014
CONTENTS
Author’s Note
1. Homeschooling
2. Why Homeschool?
3. The Vocation to Homeschool
4. Burnout
5. A Learning Environment
6. To Grade or Not to Grade
7. Teaching Our Children to Think
8. Making Learning Fun
9. Teaching the Basics
10. Confidence
11. Comparisons
12. Humility and Patience
13. Teaching a Child to Read
14. Teaching a Child to Write
15. De-schooling
16. Discipline
17. Teaching Religion
18. Culture
19. Art Appreciation
20. Physical Activity
21. Prayer
22. Humor
23. The Greatest Lesson
24. Homeschooling during Pregnancy
25. Homeschooling with a Newborn
26. Spending Time with Our Children
27. Homeschooling on a Tight Budget
28. Homeschooling a Large Family
29. Homeschooling Toddlers, Pre-schoolers, and Kindergarteners
30. Homeschooling Boys
31. Homeschooling Girls
32. Homeschooling Teens
33. Self-Sacrifice
34. Nurturing Vocations to the Priesthood and Religious Life
35. Outside Activities
36. Delegation
37. Fathers
38. Natural Home Remedies
39. Grandparents
40. Struggles in Homeschooling
41. Homeschooling Children with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder
42. Winter Blues
43. Emotional Struggles
44. Guilt
45. The Weakness of the Saints
46. Our School of Love
Prayers for Homeschoolers
Prayer of a Homeschooler
Prayer in Time of Difficulties
Prayer of a New Homeschooler
Prayer to St. Thomas Aquinas
Prayer to St. Elizabeth Ann Seton
AUTHOR’S NOTE
T HIS is not a how-to-homeschool book. Nor is this a how-I-homeschool book. Rather, this is a spiritual companion for homeschooling mothers or fathers, both beginners and veterans, meant to refresh, inspire, and offer practical suggestions for those who dare to take charge of their children’s education.
Truth never changes and is the same for everyone, but not everyone will use the same method for communicating this truth. People have different personalities, learning styles, interests, and needs, and thus different families will find that different educational styles work best for them. As homeschooling parents, we shouldn’t assume the educational method that was used to teach us, or methods we’ve seen others use, are necessarily the methods best suited for ourselves and our children. I hope this book helps homeschoolers to discover the best methods for their unique families. To that end, I’ve made a lot of suggestions in the following pages, not intending the reader to follow them all, but hoping that if one suggestion doesn’t work for one family, another suggestion will. My goal is to encourage homeschoolers to try a more relaxed, more natural, less stressful style of learning. This will look different in different homes, and will probably change in each home as the children grow and their needs and interests change. While this relaxed attitude towards education will be applied differently in different homes, it should diminish burnout and discipline struggles wherever it is adopted, and provide a fun, unstressful learning experience for the whole family.
Not every meditation in this book will apply exclusively to homeschoolers. After all, homeschooling is just an extension of parenthood, requiring all the same virtues and habits and attitudes of good parenting—only more so, because homeschoolers spend more time and do a greater variety of activities with their children than non-homeschooling parents. Some chapters will talk about topics like how to cultivate humility in ourselves or encourage creativity in our children—issues equally applicable to homeschoolers and non-homeschoolers. Similarly, some chapters, like “Homeschooling a Large Family,” may contain some tips that could help both large and small homeschooling families. Each meditation is preceded by a quote from a well-known Catholic—often a saint—which can help us keep perspective in our daily battle against cluttered rooms, soiled laundry, and misplaced modifiers.
Most of the books and resources I recommend in this book are ones I’ve personally read or used; however, I did include a few that I have not read because I wanted to provide a variety of suggestions not limited to those I’ve had the time or money to actually look over myself. However, either my children or I have read the majority of the books mentioned, and I feel confident recommending them to homeschooling families. I encourage readers to look up book suggestions online and to look over online reviews or even read a few sample pages before making a purchase. Many of the books mentioned are no longer in print, but I did not want to limit the selection to books which happened to be published recently, particularly since finding used books has become easier than ever before with used book websites, where the treasures of the past can be rediscovered and cherished by families of today.
Taking responsibility for a child’s education is a huge and daunting task, sometimes frustrating and bewildering, often exhausting, but always rewarding. I hope to affirm you in your choice to educate your child at home and to assist you with spiritual reflections that have helped me in the daily grind of managing parenthood, discipline, laundry, cooking, cleaning, and—oh, yes—overseeing the academic and intellectual formation of my children. I pray that God will bless you in your efforts to raise cultured, literate, and virtuous children, and that my book might assist you a little bit in your journey.
“It is necessary not only that religious instruction be given to the young at certain fixed times, but also that every other subject taught, be permeated with Christian piety. If this is wanting, if this sacred atmosphere does not pervade and warm the hearts of masters and scholars alike, little good can be expected from any kind of learning, and considerable harm will often be the consequence.”
—PIUS XI, ON CHRISTIAN EDUCATION
1
HOMESCHOOLING

“The parents have been appointed by God Himself as the first and principal educators of their children … their right is completely inalienable.”
—POPE JOHN PAUL II
H OMESCHOOLING is what we make it. That’s why it is such an adventure. We decide just what our homeschool will look like. We determine the environment in which our children will discover the wonders of the universe that God has created, the amazing stories of the heroic men and women who have lived before us, the fascinating world of numbers and shapes, and the classic tales that the great minds of our civilization have written. We choose what books and resources to use, what atmosphere will pervade our home, and what crafts, games, artwork, and music will lighten the day’s load. We design our daily schedule, along with beloved family traditions, whether we read the life of the saint of the day aloud at breakfast, recite the Angelus at lunch, sing songs together in the car while doing errands, or pray the rosary as a family before bed.
Homeschooling is what we make it. We can imitate the conventional school system, buy a chalkboard, maps, textbooks, and workbooks, and keep our children busy all day with paperwork. Or we can follow the revolutionary lead of unschoolers and let our children initiate all their own learning experiences. Or, like most homeschoolers, we can choose a path somewhere in between, more or less rigid, more or less relaxed, more or less hands-on in our approach. It’s up to us. We should take the time to learn about different educational methods to help us determine what approach we want to adopt. Our choice will depend on our own temperament and learning style, the temperaments and learning styles of our children, as well as the time and resources at our disposal. Most of us have experienced conventional schooling at great length; to attain a more balanced perspective, we need to give some consideration to the ideas of Charlotte Mason, John Holt, John Taylor Gatto, Raymond Moore, Mary Hood, Rick and Marilyn Boyer, Suzie Andres, and others. Whether we agree with these educators or not, we can learn both from our agreements and from our disagreements as we grope towards our own educational philosophy.
Homeschooling is what we make it. Homeschooling can be exciting or boring, fun or tedious, inspiring or discouraging. We can feel weighed down by the tremendous responsibility and complain about the enormous amount of work we have ahead of us, or we can treasure this precious time we have to spend with our children, exulting in the opportunity to be with our children as they first count to ten, sound out their first word, look through their first microscope, speak their first sentence in French, gasp over Treasure Island , and cry over Little Women .
Homeschooling is what we make it. We can thank God for the unique advantages homeschooling affords our family: precious time spent together, shelter from the materialism and impurity of the world, and the ability to make our faith a part of every moment of our day. We can thank Him for the flexibility of homeschooling which allows us to accommodate the needs of each child, going slower where he needs extra work and advancing more quickly in subjects he finds easy. We can thank Him for the opportunity to focus on the interests of each child, choosing books that pique each one’s curiosity and adapting our teachings style to each one’s learning style. Those of us with children who have learning disabilities have special reasons to thank God for this flexibility, but all homeschooling parents will thrill to the sight of their child thriving in an environment where his intellectual interests, strengths, and weaknesses determine the curricula.
Homeschooling is what we make it. If we see it as a burden, it will be a burden. If we see it as a joy, it will be a joy. If we see it as a grave but rewarding responsibility, a vocation within a vocation, then that’s what it will be. If we see homeschooling as an opportunity to