Laurel Elisabeth Stevens

A foundation of our early homeschooling journey was reading on the couch and talking about books. The length of the books grew with the children's attention spans, but there was usually a good mix of picture books and chapter books. My kids are three and a half years apart, so if Henry at age 18 months wasn't sitting next to us on the couch and along for the ride, he was on the floor playing or up in his room napping. Lessons had to be in short snatches because we did have a little interrupter. Reading and writing are the gateway to the world! Use this time to establish or strengthen their reading and writing foundation with a few simple things that can apply to all subjects-- 1. Read! Read good books, books that have intriguing words and deep characters. Read aloud to your kids and when you finish the chapter, ask them to retell, or narrate, the story back to you.  2. Narration-- Write down the narration word for word that your child tells you then read it back to the...

Summer travels took a detour this year, and in July the kids and I wended our way through hilly back roads of Missouri and found Laura and Almanzo Wilder’s little house in the Ozarks .  I’d heard a long time ago that there was a museum there, but I thought, “Missouri?  Laura never lived in Missouri!”  But she did.  It was not a move taken lightly.  After their marriage, written about in These Happy Golden Years , Laura and Almanzo suffered greatly in De Smet, South Dakota: they had lost an infant son, lost their livelihood in a drought, and their property in a fire.  So when their daughter Rose was seven years old, and Laura had saved $100 from sewing jobs, Laura and her husband packed up what was left, said tender farewells to Laura’s parents, and began the long trek to Mansfield, Missouri. In the house in Mansfield there is a picture of Laura and Almanzo taken in 1942.  Laura is 75 and Almanzo is 85.  Since they are the only two in the p...

Stefanie is our new German tutor.  She lives 30 minutes away, but it isn’t a freeway drive, so that is nice.  Instead we drive by farmer’s markets, over train tracks and under huge trees that have been trimmed for years away from the power lines so now they lean precariously over the road.  For the last three weeks we’ve been listening to a book on CD entitled Stowaway .  Sometimes when we arrive I’m wiping the tears from my eyes. On the first day when I asked Elisabeth if I should stay in the room with her she gave me a little push and said, “ Mom , I’ve been to school.”  Her session went by quickly and easily and I thought, “Wow! She knows a lot of German.”  Perhaps it is all about context--now that we are here, it seems like more.  Or perhaps I never gave her enough credit over there.  In any case, she is used to using her German in an academic context,  so this works well for her. Henry’s sessions are a little bit more like a t...