Each weekend during the merry month of May, the Tennessee Renaissance Festival takes place near a castle located along State Route 840 (between I-24 and I-65) just south of Nashville in Arrington, TN. It is the only Renaissance festival held on the grounds of a real castle residence in North America. A few homeschool families […]
Reviewing Geography with Legos, Beans, and… Trash?
Though I don’t recommend it, we are proof that a family can complete three geography displays in a matter of hours (on the day of their homeschool group’s geography fair). When pressed for time, we made an important discovery: geography fair displays don’t have to be complicated after all! These ideas can be adapted as […]
See Rock City (and 7 states at once)! {50 states}
Rock City near Chattanooga is one of our favorite touristy Tennessee/Georgia hotspots! I mean, where else can you look across seven states at the same time (with a cheatsheet right in front of you to help you identify what’s what)? The landscape, trails, and rock outcroppings are beautiful… and include things like Lover’s Leap, […]
Cycle 3 Reading Plans
Here’s our Cycle 3 Reading Plans which we used during a previous trip through Cycle 3, and I’m sharing it here for others who wish to add some reading and activities to their Cycle 3 memory work. For those in the Classical Conversations Foundations program, you can always just start with the basics. :: A Bible (No […]
Trash to Treasure: Trashman Marionette
Thanks to 4-H, our children have been a bit obsessed about turning trash into treasure. (And here I thought we’d need a cow and a chicken to join 4-H two years ago! Boy, was I wrong!) Instead of raising farm animals this spring, we’ve collected trash to transform it into… other stuff. In fact, I […]
Classical Conversations and The Well-Trained Mind
As a follow-up to my previous post on The Well-Trained Mind Schedules, I’m attempting to answer some questions I received about how The Well-Trained Mind fits in with Classical Conversations®. For those who are not familiar with Classical Conversations®, click here for a description of what a day in the life of a Foundations community looks like. In […]
Supplementing CC on a Shoestring
At one time we used Classical Conversations as a spine around which we built our school year. If you want to supplement the memory work but are lacking funds to go hog-wild with buying boatloads of books, here’s a list of supplemental resources that you might want to check out. Most of them are in […]
Minecraft Chicken (or Duck?) Piñata
When our oldest son walked up and saw these boxes stacked together amongst the mess on top of the stove… he saw something I did not. As we prepared for David’s Minecraft birthday party, I was ready for a simple idea for the piñata. And so…. with a little duct tape… …a rope, and some […]
Revisiting Plans and Schedules with The Well-Trained Mind
Believe it or not, I’m a highly distractible mom who gets sidetracked easily and chases rabbit trails to infinity and beyond. But… maybe this is why plans are so important to me. If I don’t have a plan in place, our homeschool derails. And life provides enough derailing for me to not run off the […]