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Guest Post: Nature Study – How Can I Teach What I Don’t Know?
Irish nature lover and home educator Maireen has written a lovely post answering the question “How can I teach what I don’t know?” when thinking about studying nature. I have been chatting recently to a friend about homeschooling and nature study. She said she and her husband had been looking at my Instagram feed and he spotted the post on silk…
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Books & Curriculum, Books to Read Aloud, Irish Booklist, Irish Geography, Irish Nature Study, Uncategorized
Irish Living Book list – Classic fiction set in Ireland
This is the first post in what will be a series of posts listing living books for Irish home educators with children in primary school. Reading quality books is an important part of a Charlotte Mason education, whether snuggled on the couch reading aloud together or reading to themselves. I had difficulty locating living books set in Ireland and could…
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I want to read Charlotte Mason’s volumes – Which book should I buy?
I am delighted that you are at this page as it means you are planning to read Charlotte Mason’s volumes. When you go searching there are a variety of different printings of the six volumes which Charlotte Mason wrote and it can be a bit confusing. To clarify: the content in the different editions is the same. In the editions…
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Learning to Play the Piano in our Home
Why? ~ Introduction to Music ~ Our Piano ~ Piano for littles ~ Piano apps for a bit older ~ Starter Piano Song Books ~ Further Thoughts ~ Relationships “Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.” – Plato Like every subject in our homeschool, I think it is…
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What’s in our bag when we go out for a nature walk? Guest Post!
Irish nature lover and home educator Maireen has written a lovely post describing what she brings along for a nature walk. She has included some of her beautiful photographs of her family on a nature walk. You can see more of her photos on her Instagram. Maireen lives with her long-suffering husband, their two little girls and a motley collection…
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Making My Own Books
I was making some simple comb bound books as I get ready for more formal school. It is quick to make a book like this when you have a printer, binder and cutter, but fathoming it out the first time can take a bit of time. To simplify it for you, I made notes as I worked to create this…
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Irish Home Educators Online – Websites, Blogs, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook
Community is important to me. To support you in this, I have compiled a list of Irish home educators online that I have come across on my time on this home education journey, some of them very recently as I created this post! They are in no particular order. I have included links and the description from their page. I…
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The Hutchinson Treasury of Stories to Read Aloud
I wanted to recommend the book The Hutchinson treasury of stories to read aloud selected by Janet Schulman. This book was previously been printed under the title The 20th-Century Children’s Book Treasury. The content is the same. This book contains many books which are recommended on various US curriculum. It used to be on Sonlight’s PreK curriculum for families abroad…
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Learning Handwriting using Handwriting Without Tears
Both my children loved learning to write using the Handwriting Without Tears curriculum. I think this is a fantastic curriculum for learning print handwriting, and it is available here in Ireland from Sensational Kids in Naas and Thinking Toys in Co. Clare. The aim of the program is for children to learn to write legibly and quickly. It is used…
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Do I need to teach sentence diagramming in Ireland?
When I was investigating US writing curricula, I found that some of them include a lot of sentence diagramming, starting around 4th grade or so. I had never heard of sentence diagramming, never mind done any myself in school. I asked around and was told that three moms with older children had just crossed out those exercises in their writing/language…
