Seven Quick Takes on Summer Reading, Special SALE, Health Experiments, and MORE!

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Summer reading is still going strong around here. I thought you’d enjoy hearing what the children are reading.

First up, E-Age-Fourteen just finished Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quintet. He spent so much time this past year reading Don Quijote that I think it’s been a great relief to him to read other books — simpler books. I wasn’t aware there were five books in this series until recently. Growing up, I only had the first three. He liked the first three best, so there’s that. But he did say the last one was interesting and included a visit to Noah’s Ark, which is something.

A-Age-Eleven recently finished Cinnabar, The One O’Clock Fox. I thought we owned everything Marguerite Henry wrote, but apparently I was wrong. So we added this to the collection, and Daughter A. read it in one day. She loved it and declared that “there should be more books like this one in the world.” I haven’t read it, but her endorsement was compelling.

Q-Age-Nine is devouring everything Redwall right now. She’s currently reading Triss, and also complaining that we don’t own every single book in the series. “I’m having to skip some of them,” she says. I’m trying to decide if we have the shelf space to add any more of them to the collection! With that said, they are delightful books, so perhaps I ought to make room {or buy more shelves!}. We read the first one aloud years ago — I still highly recommend it.

O-Age-Seven is slowly working his way through the first Christian Liberty Nature Reader. They are just a tad bit too hard for him, making them perfect for exercising his reading muscles. This book made him feel like a “real” reader — we had lots of easy reader type books, but none of them really belonged to him. Having this book be his very own was a big deal to him. He also feels “big” because he’s reading about nature like his big sisters. It’s been pretty cute.

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I’m doing a special 10-day sale of Newbie Tuesday. Someone commented that it is fantastic poolside reading and I decided … I agree! So why not encourage everyone to enjoy it while it’s still swimming season? Indeed! So, from now until Monday, July 25, 2016, you can use the coupon code POOLSIDE25 to get 25% off all 71 pages of Charlotte Mason awesomeness.

Make sure you share the code with your friends before it expires!

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This week’s links collection:

• How Police Chief David Brown’s whole life prepared him for the Dallas shootings from Dallas News
  • “The chief carries the burdens of this history with intense stoicism.” Like Brutus.
• Remember that study about liberals and conservatives? from The Common Room.
  • I laughed when I first heard about the retraction, and I laughed again when the DHM posted about it. Irony is funny.
• On Radical Acceptance (& Not Fixing Your Kid) from Star In Her Eye
  • I know this post might be controversial in the sense that a lot of us have fought really hard for our kids — and they are better off for this. With that said, I still loved this post. It reminded me of m sister, who is SO amazing with my nephew, born with a minor deletion on his 16th chromosome.
• TROUBLE IN BAKERSFIELD from First Things
  • In which my pastor makes the news… {Also here.}

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This month in 2010:

It’s hard for me to believe that I wrote this six years ago — I don’t feel like it’s been that long since I blogged through Charlotte Mason’s third volume!

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On Saturday, Mystie and I recorded Episode 1 of Season 2 of the Scholé Sisters Podcast! Next week, we’ll record Episode 2 with Pam. We were clapping for ourselves because we’ve heard more than once that the average podcast doesn’t make it past 8 episodes — those who start them don’t realize how much work they are, and they quit once reality sets in.

But not us!

He he.

It helps that E-Age-14 is our engineer and puts everything together for us once we have our final cuts.

One of the things that I was excited about was that our list of ideas for Season 2 was bigger than we needed! To mean, that means the future looks promising.

:: 6 ::

So I was reading a bunch on xenoestrogens and chronic fatigue and all that stuff. As usual, I decided to use myself as a guinea pig. Sure, population one is a smallish sample size. But I maintain. Anyhow, my current experiment began this week, and it’s calcium d-glucarate. In plain English, this supports the liver and the detoxification process in general. Some say it’s also great cancer prevention. I simply read something that made me want to try it. Funny enough, I didn’t save the article and now I can’t find it.

But no matter. Article or no article, I will still be able to observe what, if anything, happens.

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Answering Your Questions:

• Question: We have dabbled in Latin but find it slips by the wayside. I seem to recall that you mentioned an online Latin class that one of your children was using, and I thought I wrote it down, but surprise, surprise! I can’t find it. What would you recommend for Latin grades 4 and 8 that will keep us on track and that could be done together?
  • Answer: My answer is Visual Latin! I love it love it and highly recommend it, and if you’re beginning Latin, I don’t see any reason why you can’t all do it together. Eventually, You’r Year 8 student might want to go faster, but in the beginning, you can all keep pace together. The nice part about the DVDs is that one student can start going faster without you personally teaching two different lessons of the same curriculum. So a couple things about this. First, the Compass Classroom back to school sale starts August 3. If you want Visual Latin, this is usually the best price of the year! Second, when your Year 8 student really takes off — so maybe 9th or 10th grade — I would switch him to Dwane Thomas’ online lessons for Lingua Latina, if you can afford them. They are excellent.

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