Recital 2026

The girls participated in an informal recital on Sunday.

It was Bethel Music Day, so Mr. Wade, their piano teacher set up a tent beside his studio with the instruments underneath. 

We sat under a lovely oak tree in the shade on our folding chairs. 

Passers-by could stop and listen as they came along the sidewalk behind us.

Over us, the lovely breeze drifted right along with the lovely music. 

Our best friends, the Beatties, also take lessons at the same studio and they performed right before our girls, so we got a picture of both families' students together with Mr. Wade. 

I'm so thankful God has blessed us with our community of friends. 

It's the richest of blessings to have other great adults in our kids' lives and other great kids to enjoy,  encourage, and watch grow up along with our own kids. 

 

Cooking and Baking in Our Homeschool

Adele has discovered cookbooks. 

And it's wonderful! 

She and I both enjoy reading them, and sometimes we actually read them together while sitting on the couch or table. 

Last week, she made the most delicious scones any of us had ever tasted. 

She also made sugar cookies (not shown here, but I can still remember the taste of them if I close my eyes.) 

She also made lemon eclairs- Twice!

Eclairs! 

What I love about Adele is that she's only thirteen, so in her mind, anything is possible as she reads these cookbooks. 

She doesn't have to work through failures/ baggage I've have to work through to try more difficult recipes. 

She just goes for it, and it usually ends up alright.  

So her attitude is very inspiring to an old cook like me. 

We're not eating everything she makes ourselves. 

We have had several occasions to share her baked goods with friends at church or dinners or parties.  

Now she wants to make meatloaf. This is thanks to Ree Drummond's cookbook with the most enticing, mouth-watering photographs. 

So I plan to let her help me make dinner one night this coming week. 

Her sister, Avril, can cook, too, of course. 

In fact, Avril's cooking the bacon in the oven for tonight's "breakfast for dinner."

But, Adele is the one really passionate about baking and cooking right now, and she's cranking out the goodies daily. 

And we all really appreciate this. 

I started making the girls bake/ cook several months back. 

I'd literally assign them a recipe as part of their homeschool day. 

And obviously, I'd give them the time to do it. 

I'd start with simpler things like a box brownie or muffin mix or a simple from scratch recipe like no-bake, nut-butter energy  balls. 

With repetition of those simpler recipes, they both gained confidence and competence and they can do harder things now. 

Like eclairs! 

And now that Adele has some skill and she has discovered the potential inside the pages of my cookbooks... 

Magical things are happening here! 

Learning Chemistry at Home

Avril's doing Chemistry in our homeschool this year. 

We use Apologia's text. 

She reads one module (or chapter) every one or two weeks, and she completes all the On Your Own Questions for every module. 

She or I or both of us together will check her answers to the On Your Own questions in her notebook with the text's answer key, and then she makes corrections as needed until she gets all the right answers. 

But she usually has very little corrections to make, because she read the material carefully to begin with. 

How quickly I make her move through the modules depends on how much time we have, which depends on how much vacation we've been taking. 

Right now, she's reading one module a week for the next few weeks to make quicker progress through the text, since we just took a few weeks off of school to go to Florida. 

I make her choose one lab from each module to complete. She gathers the materials and/or tells me what she needs if it isn't in our homeschool closet or kitchen. 

She makes a record of each lab and the results in a lab journal that I assess every week. 

She's using the same lab journal she used for Biology last year. 

I don't really believe in tests for Chemistry, so I don't make her take them. 

It's more important to me that she learns the virtue of steadily reading and working through the huge text and completing all the assignments and labs to gain and demonstrate comprehensive understanding of the subject. 

I want her to learn how to learn a subject like Chemistry as much as I want her to learn Chemistry.  

And I'm certain that since she's actually steadily working through the material, she's learning it. 

I can't tell you how often in public high school, I passed a class like Chemistry having never read the textbook or engaged with the material much with my own mind, but rather, the expert teacher lectured and gave tests on the lecture notes, and I just passed those tests on the notes and forgot everything before the next test.  

So I never really learned Chemistry. 

I believe I would have been better served by a Chemistry textbook and consistent time and quiet to read it and let the information become a real part of my soul.

So, Avril's grade, at the end of this year, will be based on whether or not she did all the reading and questions and assigned labs, whether or not she actually did the very personal work of learning Chemistry. 

She will, most likely, get an A, because she doesn't move to the next module until she has completed all the reading, questions, and labs and gotten the right answers to the one before. 

Homeschooling through a subject like Chemistry doesn't take an expert; It isn't rocket science. 

It just takes consistent reading and engagement with the outstanding Chemistry textbook we have.  

Mastery of anything, even Chemistry, usually comes easily enough if you are simply willing to show up and actually do the work. 

Homeschool Community

For every picture I take of my girls with their friends, there's a group of moms behind the camera. 

And those women are my best friends. 

I'm grateful that I know and love the women who are raising my kids' best friends. 

And I'm grateful I get to know and love my kids' friends.

We all, kids and grown ups, get together and banter and laugh. 

And then we split into groups of grown ups and teens and banter and laugh with people in our age group. 

And then we come back together and banter and laugh.  

And then we all go home with our own kids and we banter and laugh in the car on the way home. 

I don't know how it is for women raising girls in a regular school setting. 

Do you get to know the parents of the kids your kids are friends with?

In a homeschool setting, we get to build an amazing community of interwoven generations and conversations and laughter. 

And memories. 

For every picture like this, I remember standing shoulder to shoulder with my dearest friends. 

Leisure Time Not Screen Time

When we take time off school during the holiday, we do not allow the girls to fill that leisure time with screens. 

No games. No movies, etc. 

This has been the case all along. 

And since what we say goes, the girls don't fuss. 

But with all the leisure time, the girls are often bored enough to be interested in doing real things. 

Case in point: Over the holiday break, Adele finished a miniature garden house. 

This sits between the books on her bookshelf. 

It's magical! 

Mid-day

Productivity is messy. We grab gym shorts from the dryer before running out of the house for weight lifting. I prep dinner but have to take a phone call before I can clean up. I am reading Plato and posting assignments online. The girls are doing Latin, and Math, poetry... and the books and notebooks pile up by the end of the day. I'm thankful for the beautiful things we get to do here every day, but sometimes, mid-day is not so beautiful unless one has eyes to see. 

Annie The Musical

Our church is putting on Annie The Musical, one of my favorite musicals since childhood. It’s a busy season with Adele in the orphan ensemble and Avril in the stage crew. The girls keep a volunteer notebook that accounts for all the hours they put into service and arts projects like this. They use the book to answer questions about volunteer work when it comes time to apply to colleges and scholarships. Adele has already been at the church over three days when you add up the hours she's been at rehearsals so far! I’m thankful for a church that nurtures the arts. 

 

Another Homeschool Year Begins

 

We've started another homeschool year. 

Avril is in 11th grade. 

Adele is in 8th. 

The girls started online classes last week. They both take art with Delightful Art Co. and Literature with House of Humane Letters, and Avril takes Speech and Debate with Kepler/ Colorado Christian College. 

This week is what I'm calling the "Pre-Week." We've started reading some of the texts we will be reading together aloud everyday like the Bible (chronologically) and Land of Hope (for American History) and The Roar on the Other Side (for Poetry), and the girls are doing some of the their independent work.  

Adele is reading The Phantom Tollbooth. Avril's started Chemistry, etc.  

Next week, we'll begin the complete schedule. We'll start reading everything we plan to read together every morning (including Shakespeare/ Plutarch), and the girls will start all their independent work like math, etc. 

It's been lovely having the freedom to ease into the school year adding a little more each week until we adjust to the full schedule. 

 

Homeschool Planning is Difficult and Time-Consuming But Invaluable

Arcus and I are spending a lot of time together in my homeschool classroom where his cage is, because I'm at the table, surrounded by books, working on a detailed plan for our next year of homeschooling. 

It's a lot of work to make my own plan! 

This will be our second year homeschooling without CC, but this is the first year I am making my plans with little to no reference to my old CC guides. 

I know many homeschool moms have been making their own plans from the beginning of their homeschool journey, so the work involved is no surprise to them. 

But for more than a decade, we got our homeschool plans from CC, and we were very happy do whatever we needed to do to follow their plans (as far as was humanly possible) to be a part of our beloved CC community.  

That worked for us and blessed us for many years, in fact. 

But even as a diligent CC parent and Challenge director, and I was very diligent, I often felt off balance and back on my heels, because I was always discovering what someone else had planned for me and my children.

As often as I read my guides and as carefully as I ever studied them, I was simply in the position of accommodating myself always to someone else's purpose and vision for every single assignment all year long. 

This was, in fact, exhausting and often exasperating. 

Now, even though it is difficult to make my own plans at the start, there are already some true advantages occurring to me as I work it all out for myself. 

First of all, I am moving forward into this homeschool year knowing exactly what I am doing and why and how.

I know the plan "like the back of my hand," down to the details and purpose of each assignment, and I am entering this year with a peace and a confidence that I didn't experience when I was getting my plans, as good as they were, premade.

Second, I would still consider our homeschool plans very challenging, even rigorous, but the amount of work will never venture into the impossible or the absurd.   

As a business, CC probably has no incentive to cut anything from their curriculum that may add to the value and appeal to their product, and they want to provide more than enough work for anyone/everyone in their programs, so one solution to the constant dilemma of too much work for many CC families was/is to "scale" or "taylor" and simply do less than what is assigned in the guides week to week. 

Now I can simply scale as I plan! 

My plans for this coming year are challenging. We'll have to be as disciplined and diligent as ever, and we will still need to stretch to accomplish it all. But my plans are much more humane to begin with, so we won't be demoralized by the amount of work, and we'll likely have the satisfaction of finishing our school work every week. 

The final and major positive to making my own plan is that we will finally be doing a lot of work together. 

When we were in CC and I was directing a Challenge level and the girls were in their age-assigned Challenge levels, we'd all be working in the same room, but we were each doing very separate work. 

I became more and more conscious of this fact and less and less comfortable with the reality of what CC was doing to our lives and even our homeschool. 

Much of the time, my daughters, who are best friends, were too busy doing their separate Challenge work to engage with each other over the ideas they were encountering during the school days for long. 

In fact, much of the time, I was too busy working for CC as a director or an SR to engage in my own homeschool for long before I had to get back to my CC work.  

So this year, we will read Scripture and Shakespeare together, study poetry together, and read American History together. 

The girls are in different levels of math and Latin, of course, so they will still have some independent work to do. 

But whatever we can do together, we will. 

I am certainly living with the consequences the choice to leave CC. 

Now I am forced into making plans to accommodate my own vision for our homeschool. 

So it is taking hours and hours of planning up front. 

But for once, I am actually giving myself entirely to the work of making a plan, and I will continue to be free to give myself entirely to our homeschool this year.      

In many ways, all this planning is proving an invaluable blessing. 

I have taken ownership of my homeschool, and I earnestly believe I will be leading my precious daughters in learning together better than ever before. 

Homeschool Update- Learning Continues Without CC and Through Summer

We are still doing some homeschool work through the early summer. 

In the photo above, both girls are doing their Latin. Adele is following my old Challenge A guide from Classical Conversations, but she's going much slower through all the same content. Avril is following my old Challenge 2 schedule, but we are also tailoring the work so that she does less Latin everyday. 

The girls are not in the same Henle book, but they enjoy working together, fellowshiping or commiserating as they work. Their attitude towards Latin depends on their mood and/or how hard the new material is at any given moment. I come in and help as needed, but Avril is often Adele's go-to helper. They work fairly independently, but I check their work at least a few times a week to make sure it's progressing and correct. 

This was the first year in twelve that we did not join a Classical Conversations group for support, so we did not have to follow their timing. For this year, we followed my old CC guides, but we made changes as often as we wanted to, and we usually took longer to finish everything. 

Sometimes, I feared we were not making good time, but as the year went on, I realized that those CC schedules for the schoolwork are, in fact, arbitrary, imposed on members because of the need to help community function. 

One of the real positives of homeschooling without Classical Conversations has been that we have the freedom to finally do what is absolutely best for us as far as timing goes. Who says you have to be done with your science fair project in one-two months? One real benefit of taking months to complete the project is that the science research, experiments, and conversations have gone on and on, and they became a more natural part of our everyday lives. How is that a negative? 

So taking it all slower was decidedly positive for everyone even though, yes, we are still working into June. But no one cried this year (including me) because they had too much CC stuff to do in one week along with all the other things our family was trying to do. 

Now, as we finish with math books, geography plans, or biology texts, the girls just stop that subject altogether until fall, so their school days get lighter and lighter as we go further into summer. By July, the girls should be done with everything, and we should enjoy a nice break through a few weeks of July and early August until we start again with next year's work. 

Next year will look very different. I don't plan to use my old Challenge guides as a base like I did this year. I'll be venturing into making my own plans, combining my favorite CC resources with many other excellent resources to make my own plan.  

One Room Homeschool

Adele will often go to Avril for help with Latin. She doesn't have to go to her sister. She could come to me. But she likes going to her sister. And it's fun for me to watch them together discussing, laughing, commiserating. This picture represents what I love about homeschooling. There's no competition or compulsion. Learning is something we do together as a way of life, and those of us who are further along are constantly helping those still coming along the way and gaining even more mastery as we help them. 

Let Them Bake Cake!

Adele's reading "A Gathering of Days" for our homeschool right now. She came across a cake recipe in the book that she wanted to try, so I let her.  We're able to do more of that sort of thing since we aren't working on a homeschool community schedule that demands we finish a certain amount of material in a given week. Now that we're homeschooling solo, we can set our own limits on the week doing more or less, depending on what we want. 

In general, I'm letting the girls do more cooking and baking now, but not only that, I'm also asking/ assigning them to cook or bake something consistently as part of of their chores or schoolwork, depending on how the recipe fits into our day.

Looking back on the years homeschooling their older sister, I wish I had allowed her to cook and bake more, but she had so much homeschool work to do in a certain amount of time to be ready for our homeschool community meeting once a week that I couldn't imagine adding cooking or baking to her schedule. It would have been cruel to add more. 

But she might have been more prepared for adult life with more consistent practice. Though she is cooking and baking well anyway. She made black bean soup and tomatillo salsa for the family just a few days ago. So, as it goes, one can always learn things later, of course. 

But I would have had more help with the cooking and baking once she had learned to cook. That's the thing about Mom insisting on doing it herself. Mom ends up being the only who can do stuff, and that's no good for Mom or anyone else. 

So that's been one of the greatest blessings of letting go and letting the younger girls get in there and cook and bake (and make messes) in the kitchen more- there are simply more cooks and more baked goods in the house! And the more often they do the same thing, the better they get at it, and the easier it is on me, because the messes usually get smaller and smaller as they become more experienced. 

Paint Your Way Through Biology

Avril's taking another semester of Paint Your Way through Biology with Delightful Art Co. 

She makes a beautiful page like this weekly, incorporating art with the biology she's studying this year. 

Biology is full of facts, but it's all so beautiful! 

It would wrong not to take time to notice that. 

So I'm glad her ability to see the beauty in Biology is being nurtured right along with learning all the content and facts. 

Note: She's working through Apologia's Biology, doing some labs, keeping a lab journal, writing a few, formal lab reports, and she's also reading the text/ watching the videos of Devotional Biology as well.

 

Grandma's Autoharp

Dwayne's mom (Grandma Karen) gave the kids her old (but like-new) autoharp. Avril's piano/ guitar teacher taught her how to tune it, and gave her a quick lesson on how to play it. She's been playing and singing with it consistently this week. Our house is filling up with instruments! But the Bible says a wise woman's house is filled with "rare and beautiful treasures" and musical instruments qualify as treasures in my book. 

Collected images of our homeschool this week:

 

Paint Your Way Through Art History

Pictures of two of Avril's recent projects in Paint Your Way Through Art History at Delightful Art Co. 

The first project is a copy of Durer's "Saint Jerome in His Study." 

The second is a copy of "The Oxbow" by Thomas Cole. 

She'll be getting college credit for this class through Bryant College. 

Paint Your Way Through Latin

Adele is in Paint Your Way Through Latin, an online art class hosted by Delightful Art. Co. In her most recent class, they painted a mural found in Pompeii. 

Homeschool Science Fair (without the fair)

Adele is doing a science fair project without the fair, since we are no longer a part of a homeschool co-op that does a science fair. 

We still aren't sure what Adele's specific science fair question will be or what her experiment will look like. 

That will come later. 

For now, Adele is interested in preserving cut flowers, so that's the topic we are researching everyday more and more in depth. 

As we sit together and search for sources and read through information, we naturally ask more and more questions about the specifics involved with the topic, and we write those questions down, too. 

So, after only a few days of research, we already have several questions to answer. 

So at this point, we aren't afraid we won't know what to do next; We have enough questions already to keep us busy for days, and I'm sure more questions will arise.

This research portion of the project may take weeks. 

Adele has started keeping handwritten research notes (and she also records all the new research questions that come up) in a composition book. 

After a Google search using a few key words or phrases about the topic or questions, we click on articles or sites that seem promising and legitimate. 

After a brief scan of the website or article, I can usually tell if a source has valuable information that answers all or even part of one or more of our questions about her topic. 

At that point, we read the content together and we discuss it and I explain complicated things (if I can.) 

Note: If I can't explain difficult content, I just tell her I can't explain it or I don't understand it (yet), and then I have the opportunity to model to her how to keep going in the face of uncertainty. 

Once we have read a source and we know what content applies to her research topic directly, I will either print the article and highlight the content that needs to go into her notebook, or I will copy and paste words and phrases from an article or website into a word.doc that I print for her. 

Then she hand copies all the important notes and info into her notebook. 

She's also keeping track of the specific sources and the relevant website addresses, so she can make a bibliography. 

It's a very time consuming process! 

And, as you can see, I help her a lot. 

Part of what I am doing is showing her how to research, and that is something that needs to be modeled elbow to elbow. 

After the first day of research, after more than an hour of taking notes by hand, Adele still said, "This is fun!" 

I agreed with her that it is fun, indeed!

It's fun to learn about the specific content she wants to research- flower preservation. 

But it's also fun to learn that you can learn about anything that you are curious about by simply being willing to ask and answer questions about the topic. 

One of the main things I want her to take away from this project is the knowledge that she can learn anything if she's willing to do the work. 

Visit to The Met

We met up with our friends at The Met. 

The Met is one of the only field trips we ever take, and we like to take it a few times a year. 

We like to find works of art that are our old favorites. 

And we always something new that strikes us. 

I recognized this head across the room, because I'm reading Aristotle for grad school right now! He is taking up all the extra space in my head, and I couldn't be happier about it! 

And I'll be reading Socrates soon! 

Illuminated manuscripts are always some of my favorite things to see. The vibrancy of the colors is astounding. Even the best printers can't match these colors after hundreds of years. 

Taking a break after walking around for hours

Avril recently painted her own imitation of this painting in her Art History class through Delightful Art Co. 

We met this lovely artist named Dwight and purchased one of his prints, which he signed and dedicated to our family.

This is a photo we've been taking and retaking for years now- the three girls in front of the three graces. 

This field trip of all field trips never is a waste and never grows old to us. 

Gather and Display Homeschool Work

I like to display my daughters' homeschool work on our mantle. 

I purchased a few display stands, and I use them to display the most recently finished essays, visuals, artwork, etc. 

All the artwork from a certain class goes in the same folder with the newest art on top. 

All the history essays and their visuals go in another folder. 

All the literature essays go in another. 

All the science research reports and visuals go in another. 

This way, by the end of the year, in almost every subject or class, there's a "book" worth keeping and rereading, and as you turn the pages, you step your way back to beginning of the school year. 

Gathering their work into "books" and displaying their work is a wholesome way to encourage healthy pride in their work.  

It also provides a means of accountability.

If your homeschool students know their work will go into a book that they will keep and look at again and again, and if they know others will see their work and engage with them about it, they tend to care more and do a better job. 

This is also a practical way for the whole family to share in what they are doing and continue enjoying their work long after it is complete. 

One of my daughters' favorite things is to go find and read through the book that their older sister has made back when she went through a subject. 

Their dad is usually at work all day, but this way, he can take down their essays at his leisure and read them and discuss the ideas with them when it is convenient or interesting for him to do so. 

Displaying their work, too, is a way to fill our home with "rare and beautiful treasures" like Scripture says. 

Artifacts made by our own hands make some of the rarest and most beautiful treasures in my opinion. 

The mantle works best in our home, but you could choose another location that works better for you if you like this idea and want to implement it, too.