2021-11-17_Homeschooling_and_Worldschooling_with_Mrs.

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00:00:29.000 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance,

00:00:32.000 | a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,

00:00:34.000 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need

00:00:36.000 | to live a rich and meaningful life now

00:00:39.000 | while building a plan for financial freedom

00:00:40.000 | in 10 years or less.

00:00:42.000 | My name is Josh Roschitz.

00:00:43.000 | I am your host, and today I have a special show for you.

00:00:47.000 | I have roped Mrs. Radical Personal Finance

00:00:50.000 | back onto the show.

00:00:51.000 | It's been a long time since you've been here, babe.

00:00:54.000 | - Six or seven years, maybe.

00:00:56.000 | - I don't think, I think you've been,

00:00:58.000 | you must have been on--

00:00:59.000 | - I think we did the baby show.

00:01:01.000 | - And that was baby number two, right?

00:01:03.000 | - Don't know.

00:01:04.000 | - I'm pretty sure it was a while.

00:01:06.000 | Anyway, welcome back.

00:01:08.000 | - Thank you, thank you very much.

00:01:10.000 | - You would think that it's easy,

00:01:12.000 | you would think we would do more shows together.

00:01:14.000 | In fact, listeners have frequently asked me to do shows.

00:01:17.000 | I think one suggestion that somebody made one time

00:01:19.000 | was to do kind of a live call-in show

00:01:21.000 | with Mrs. Radical Personal Finance

00:01:23.000 | answering all the questions about Joshua

00:01:25.000 | to see what Joshua tells the truth and what he says.

00:01:30.000 | Well, part of it is just hard to schedule, right?

00:01:32.000 | Even right now, it's late at night,

00:01:34.000 | and my voice is shot,

00:01:35.000 | and we'll keep this fairly short today.

00:01:37.000 | Maybe we'll sprinkle some more back in.

00:01:41.000 | But I wanted to have you back, partly to save me,

00:01:43.000 | 'cause my voice is not able to do a two-hour show

00:01:47.000 | by myself right now.

00:01:49.000 | But a bunch of people have been asking questions

00:01:51.000 | and inquiring about some of our experiences

00:01:53.000 | with homeschooling on the road, road schooling,

00:01:56.000 | and some of the things that we have done.

00:01:58.000 | And it's been quite a while since I've talked about

00:02:01.000 | kind of what we are doing,

00:02:03.000 | some of the things that have changed,

00:02:04.000 | some of the things that we're learning as our children grow,

00:02:06.000 | and I just thought it'd be a perfect subject to do with you.

00:02:10.000 | So I thought to begin with, let's share with the audience

00:02:14.000 | a little bit about what we're doing

00:02:17.000 | in terms of a philosophy of homeschooling,

00:02:19.000 | how we're approaching our homeschool.

00:02:21.000 | - Most people would call it eclectic.

00:02:23.000 | I call it half and half.

00:02:25.000 | We have half the typical workbook, follow a plan,

00:02:30.000 | have a checklist style,

00:02:33.000 | and then we have half of the Charlotte Mason,

00:02:37.000 | reading real books, living books sort of style.

00:02:41.000 | - Right.

00:02:43.000 | Yeah, so in homeschooling, of course,

00:02:46.000 | there's tons of different--

00:02:47.000 | Let's begin with kind of an overview

00:02:48.000 | of the styles of homeschooling,

00:02:50.000 | because for me, I often feel like,

00:02:52.000 | "Oh, they talk about this too much,"

00:02:53.000 | but then I talk to clients and I talk to people,

00:02:55.000 | and I realize that people are looking for kind of an overview.

00:02:59.000 | So if you look at the world of homeschooling,

00:03:02.000 | I think there's a continuum that goes from,

00:03:05.000 | on one end, basically taking a classroom,

00:03:11.000 | normal school experience, and repeating it at home,

00:03:15.000 | all the way to, on the other end,

00:03:17.000 | building kind of what they call unschooling

00:03:19.000 | or even radical unschooling.

00:03:22.000 | This may be radical personal finance,

00:03:24.000 | but I am not a radical unschooler.

00:03:28.000 | I'm a part of this Facebook group

00:03:29.000 | called Radical Unschooling,

00:03:31.000 | and I am very much convinced that that is not for me,

00:03:34.000 | what the parents in there are doing.

00:03:37.000 | And so unschooling is basically the idea that,

00:03:41.000 | "Oh, your child just naturally loves to learn.

00:03:43.000 | "Your child is naturally going to want to learn,

00:03:46.000 | "so you don't need to do anything.

00:03:47.000 | "Just leave them alone."

00:03:49.000 | - Well, it's not leave them.

00:03:50.000 | I think it's more follow their passions.

00:03:52.000 | If they're interested in sewing, teach them to sew.

00:03:54.000 | - Varieties, yeah, agreed.

00:03:55.000 | Right, go ahead.

00:03:56.000 | - That's all I was going to say.

00:03:57.000 | - There are varieties.

00:03:58.000 | - I mean, I know I have some unschooler friends,

00:04:00.000 | well, acquaintances, I think we met once,

00:04:02.000 | and I followed them on Instagram,

00:04:03.000 | so if you don't, friends.

00:04:04.000 | And their son does art, and he does painting and sewing,

00:04:09.000 | and he's been in art shows.

00:04:10.000 | It's not like they're doing nothing.

00:04:12.000 | And also, he wasn't really very interested

00:04:14.000 | in reading for some time.

00:04:15.000 | I think he was seven when he discovered

00:04:17.000 | that all his friends were doing Minecraft.

00:04:19.000 | And he was like, "Oh, I want to do Minecraft too."

00:04:21.000 | But his mom said, "All right, well,

00:04:22.000 | "you're going to have to read the screen for yourself.

00:04:24.000 | "I'm not going to sit in here and read it to you."

00:04:26.000 | And suddenly, he was reading.

00:04:27.000 | - Right, right, right.

00:04:28.000 | And so I appreciate a lot of the aspects

00:04:32.000 | of the unschooling philosophy for some subjects,

00:04:35.000 | but we're definitely not unschoolers.

00:04:39.000 | And I'm unpersuaded that unschooling

00:04:42.000 | is the right solution.

00:04:44.000 | Although I appreciate certain emphases that they have,

00:04:48.000 | we're not unschoolers.

00:04:49.000 | But neither are we like to redo

00:04:51.000 | the classroom experience at home.

00:04:54.000 | Where we're at would be,

00:04:59.000 | I think that the basic outline of schooling

00:05:02.000 | should be reading, writing, and arithmetic.

00:05:04.000 | And so the best, most important, most efficient way

00:05:09.000 | to acquire knowledge is through reading.

00:05:12.000 | And so reading should be core and central to all,

00:05:17.000 | it's the fundamental skill.

00:05:20.000 | Writing is the ability to express ideas,

00:05:24.000 | and arithmetic is its own language

00:05:26.000 | that has to be learned and has to be studied.

00:05:28.000 | And it doesn't seem to me that arithmetic

00:05:30.000 | is acquired in any way except by simply

00:05:34.000 | the child doing it, right?

00:05:36.000 | Building on it day by day, progressing, et cetera.

00:05:39.000 | So my theory has been,

00:05:42.000 | oh, and by the way, I've recently added,

00:05:43.000 | do you remember the other two things that I've added?

00:05:45.000 | - One of them was persuasion.

00:05:46.000 | - Right.

00:05:47.000 | - And the other one, coding.

00:05:49.000 | - Coding, right.

00:05:50.000 | So I've recently adjusted that three-part model

00:05:52.000 | of reading, writing, arithmetic.

00:05:54.000 | I stumbled into a guy, I think it was,

00:05:56.000 | it may have been Naval, actually it was Naval on Twitter.

00:05:59.000 | And he said the five skills are reading, writing,

00:06:02.000 | arithmetic, coding, computer coding, and persuasion.

00:06:07.000 | And I thought, that's good, I like that.

00:06:10.000 | And the argument is that persuasion,

00:06:13.000 | which usually, of course, means speaking,

00:06:15.000 | persuasion is its own discrete skill.

00:06:17.000 | And that's something that has to be developed.

00:06:19.000 | And coding, like mathematics, is its own discrete skill.

00:06:22.000 | I don't know how to code, but I come from a family of coders,

00:06:25.000 | and I definitely think that somebody

00:06:27.000 | who has some basic fluency in coding,

00:06:29.000 | I guess I did do, what did we do in school?

00:06:31.000 | C, what was that language?

00:06:33.000 | HTML, I guess, which--

00:06:34.000 | - I didn't even do that in school.

00:06:36.000 | I had to learn that from a job.

00:06:37.000 | I mean, it was pretty basic to pick up,

00:06:39.000 | just reading the code once in a while.

00:06:41.000 | - Right.

00:06:42.000 | So my five-part framework now is reading, writing,

00:06:45.000 | arithmetic, coding, and persuasion.

00:06:49.000 | But at the moment, it's just reading and writing

00:06:51.000 | and arithmetic.

00:06:53.000 | So we have two students right now, for context.

00:06:55.000 | We have two kind of formally schooling students,

00:06:58.000 | an eight-year-old and a six-year-old.

00:07:01.000 | Our eight-year-old is in--

00:07:02.000 | - Third grade.

00:07:03.000 | - Third grade.

00:07:04.000 | And let's talk about kind of what's working.

00:07:08.000 | So he is doing workbooks right now for a few things.

00:07:12.000 | - Right, we have workbooks for writing.

00:07:15.000 | We have a workbook for math.

00:07:17.000 | And then we have a workbook for, it's called language.

00:07:19.000 | It's basically grammar and the structure of composition,

00:07:24.000 | writing, composition.

00:07:25.000 | Right now, it's basic, like, how to formulate your ideas,

00:07:28.000 | topic bubbles, things like that.

00:07:30.000 | - And we're using Abeka.

00:07:32.000 | Why did you like Abeka?

00:07:33.000 | - When I was in school, I went to a school that used

00:07:36.000 | the Abeka curriculum.

00:07:37.000 | - And to be clear, you were never homeschooled.

00:07:38.000 | - Correct.

00:07:39.000 | No, I was in private school up until eighth grade.

00:07:41.000 | And then I went to public school for nine through 12.

00:07:44.000 | So when I was in the private school,

00:07:46.000 | they used the Abeka curriculum.

00:07:48.000 | I didn't think anything of it.

00:07:49.000 | Don't even know if I knew the name of it at the time.

00:07:51.000 | It was just what you did.

00:07:52.000 | But when I got to high school, I found that I was advanced

00:07:58.000 | above the other students who had been in public school.

00:08:01.000 | And it wasn't because I was extra skilled or more talented.

00:08:04.000 | It was because the program I had been using was more advanced.

00:08:07.000 | So once I got to high school and found, wow,

00:08:09.000 | this actually was pretty good, then I got the name in mind

00:08:13.000 | and said, I think we should consider this.

00:08:15.000 | And when we did start schooling, we didn't just say,

00:08:17.000 | all right, this is it.

00:08:18.000 | We're going to use Abeka.

00:08:19.000 | We looked at some other options, too.

00:08:21.000 | And maybe there's better things for differently skilled children.

00:08:25.000 | But for me, I like Abeka because it worked for me.

00:08:28.000 | I think it's good.

00:08:29.000 | It has some similar qualities to other curricula that people like.

00:08:33.000 | For example, you've told me a lot about Saxon, how you love Saxon.

00:08:37.000 | And one of the things you liked was, I think they call it a spiral method.

00:08:41.000 | I don't know the name of the method.

00:08:43.000 | But basically, it teaches something new and reviews all the old stuff

00:08:46.000 | that you already learned.

00:08:47.000 | It teaches something new, reviews all the old stuff,

00:08:49.000 | so you don't forget the old stuff and just move on and not learn it.

00:08:54.000 | It really cements it in your mind.

00:08:56.000 | Well, Abeka does the same thing with their math curriculum,

00:08:59.000 | and they have pictures.

00:09:01.000 | Which is a big deal.

00:09:03.000 | I think it's interesting that I never cared about that.

00:09:07.000 | I always thought, oh, who needs pictures?

00:09:09.000 | But it's remarkable to me to see how much more the children enjoy doing their

00:09:13.000 | work when there's pictures.

00:09:14.000 | And how much they complain when there aren't any pictures.

00:09:16.000 | Absolutely, absolutely.

00:09:17.000 | So our eldest, I think, is unusually skilled with math.

00:09:22.000 | He seems to be ahead of --

00:09:24.000 | Well, maybe, maybe not.

00:09:26.000 | We started him with the first grade book in kindergarten.

00:09:29.000 | I looked at the kindergarten book and said, this is a waste of time.

00:09:31.000 | We're going to first grade.

00:09:33.000 | And if it takes us longer to get it done, that's okay.

00:09:35.000 | We have two years to do it.

00:09:36.000 | And he actually got it done.

00:09:38.000 | And then when we did the second grade book,

00:09:40.000 | it was so easy for him that he was doing two lessons a day.

00:09:43.000 | So that got him ahead enough to do the third grade.

00:09:45.000 | But since we've been traveling, we started third grade still in the third grade book.

00:09:50.000 | So it was probably a good thing we started ahead,

00:09:52.000 | because now we're kind of getting back on par.

00:09:54.000 | Right.

00:09:55.000 | And at the moment, we're not really running on a normal schedule.

00:09:58.000 | Basically, I think we should do school year-round.

00:10:03.000 | I think there should be some breaks.

00:10:05.000 | But we travel so much that generally the breaks just kind of naturally work out as,

00:10:09.000 | hey, it's a good time for a break because we're traveling somewhere.

00:10:13.000 | Yeah, instead of having spring break and Thanksgiving break and Christmas break,

00:10:18.000 | we have when we're home, we're schooling.

00:10:20.000 | When we're not home, we're not.

00:10:21.000 | Right, right.

00:10:22.000 | And so I think that a 12-month schedule, meaning a year-round schooling schedule,

00:10:26.000 | makes a lot of sense.

00:10:28.000 | I'm open to changing my mind.

00:10:30.000 | I read people's perspectives who change their mind and implemented summer breaks.

00:10:35.000 | But it just seems to me kind of a waste to go to -- for the child's brain to get flabby

00:10:42.000 | and then to have to spend a week or two coming back into things.

00:10:46.000 | Why not take more focused, shorter breaks?

00:10:48.000 | Many traditional school systems around the world do that where they have a three-week break,

00:10:52.000 | a three-week break, a three-week break.

00:10:54.000 | And, again, with our travel schedule, it seems like a natural thing.

00:10:58.000 | When we were in France, we talked to a missionary couple that we met at the church there

00:11:03.000 | whose girls had been in the French system, and they shared with us a little about the culture there.

00:11:08.000 | And apparently the French have a right to rest, and this means that every six weeks,

00:11:14.000 | they have a certain amount of time off.

00:11:15.000 | I don't remember if it was a week or two weeks or whatever.

00:11:18.000 | But every six weeks, they have a break, and this is because their minds need to rest.

00:11:22.000 | And the woman we spoke to, she's an adult, and so they were in this language school at one time.

00:11:29.000 | And, of course, they had to have a rest because the French have a right to rest.

00:11:33.000 | And they took a little break after six weeks, and she said when they came back,

00:11:36.000 | they actually had advanced a lot from having had that rest.

00:11:40.000 | Interesting.

00:11:41.000 | Yeah, and so with me, I would love to see our children do a math lesson every day.

00:11:47.000 | I would like to do six days a week.

00:11:49.000 | We are not doing six days a week right now because we're often using Saturday,

00:11:53.000 | but I'd like to do six days a week, and hopefully as our eldest child becomes more self-directed

00:11:59.000 | and requires less input, it's my hope that we'll be able to get back to that.

00:12:04.000 | Because if you do a calculation, you say the normal school schedule is 183 days per year, right?

00:12:11.000 | 180 or 183? I think 180.

00:12:13.000 | Más o menos.

00:12:14.000 | Yeah, I think about 180.

00:12:16.000 | If you just go from five days a week to six days a week, and you go to year-round,

00:12:23.000 | you go from, let's just say, 180 days to something like, even if you go to 250 days,

00:12:30.000 | you still have 90 days free for travels and rests, etc.

00:12:36.000 | You can easily go from 180 days of schoolwork to 250 or more days of schoolwork.

00:12:45.000 | And you chart that out in terms of something like math,

00:12:48.000 | to me that's a no-brainer to help a child achieve his math faster.

00:12:54.000 | And since math is something that just needs to be done little by little, day by day,

00:12:58.000 | in relatively short periods, I don't think it's in any way a hardship to expect a child

00:13:03.000 | to do 30 minutes of math every day, regardless of anything else.

00:13:07.000 | And so we just begin with that every day.

00:13:09.000 | So we're using Abeka math as the point.

00:13:12.000 | We talked this year about switching to Saxon math,

00:13:15.000 | but I don't think that our Elders could handle the requirement of basically writing out the problems.

00:13:22.000 | It would cause too much conflict.

00:13:25.000 | Abeka comes with one page.

00:13:28.000 | He does one page front and back.

00:13:30.000 | It's a simple, discrete lesson.

00:13:33.000 | It's not too much. It's not too little.

00:13:35.000 | It has pretty pictures, which he still needs.

00:13:37.000 | And so I think we've made the right decision on that,

00:13:40.000 | and we'll continue to assess as time goes forward.

00:13:43.000 | Yeah, it's easy to just say, "Do this lesson," and he knows it starts here, it ends here,

00:13:48.000 | and then you're done.

00:13:49.000 | Whereas I've seen a couple of Saxon books, I may not understand it totally right,

00:13:53.000 | but as I understand, it seems like you kind of have to choose a starting and stopping point,

00:13:58.000 | and then whatever you decide to do, the child has to write out all the problems on a different paper,

00:14:04.000 | which can be good.

00:14:05.000 | People like it because you don't have to buy a separate book for each child.

00:14:09.000 | Right, right.

00:14:10.000 | Yeah, I've been inspired very much by Art Robinson, RobinsonCurriculum.com,

00:14:16.000 | and his experience with his children, the way that he does it is his children wake up,

00:14:21.000 | and the first thing they do, or the way he did it back when he was doing this,

00:14:25.000 | he'd wake up in the morning, children do the first thing, do a lesson of math.

00:14:29.000 | In their case, they would do, I think, about two hours of math per day.

00:14:35.000 | We're not at that point yet, right, Errol?

00:14:37.000 | This is eight, and sometimes the lesson stretches to two hours.

00:14:40.000 | But it's not supposed to.

00:14:42.000 | That is not the goal.

00:14:43.000 | The goal is to keep it at basically 30 minutes.

00:14:45.000 | And so we're using that now as a tool of just teaching him the skill of focus

00:14:50.000 | because he's wildly unfocused and can easily sit and dawdle and daydream.

00:14:54.000 | And so just trying to teach him the skill of focus, to sit and to focus.

00:14:58.000 | But it's not a--anyway, he's where he should be.

00:15:01.000 | He grasps the concepts easily, which is why we're using it as a tool of discipline

00:15:05.000 | to say sit down, focus, and work your way through it steadily.

00:15:08.000 | Right. He's never had any trouble with the concepts.

00:15:10.000 | I mean, if he were, we would ease off, we would do some extra practice or something,

00:15:14.000 | but he's just kept right along with the book.

00:15:17.000 | And, oh, another good thing about the book is it explains everything in the book,

00:15:20.000 | which is another thing people like about Saxon.

00:15:22.000 | Like the instructions are there, so it's not as teacher-intensive.

00:15:25.000 | And Rebecca does the same thing.

00:15:27.000 | There has been like two times where I have found the teacher guide had something extra

00:15:32.000 | that wasn't written in that student book,

00:15:35.000 | but it really--I don't think we've really needed the teacher guide much at this level.

00:15:40.000 | Right. So we're pleased with Saxon--or sorry, with Rebecca at the moment.

00:15:44.000 | And I think that at least for right now we'll finish the fourth grade book

00:15:47.000 | and then reassess and see, but we'll probably--I would guess we'll probably continue on

00:15:51.000 | because he's doing well with that.

00:15:53.000 | We're also using an Abeka workbook for writing.

00:15:57.000 | Now we started early with the decision that we were going to do all cursive all the time,

00:16:02.000 | which is something that you can do with Abeka.

00:16:05.000 | You can have all of their books ordered with all cursive all the time.

00:16:09.000 | And we were persuaded at the beginning that that seemed--that it all made sense.

00:16:15.000 | I've recently become less persuaded that that's important

00:16:18.000 | after watching our children with their struggles with cursive.

00:16:22.000 | Well, their struggles are with manuscripts.

00:16:24.000 | Well, that was the point. Go ahead and tell the story.

00:16:26.000 | Yeah, they see--they read--everything's in block letters.

00:16:29.000 | Like when you read a book, it's not going to be in cursive.

00:16:31.000 | You need cursive so you can read the Constitution, but we're not reading that right now.

00:16:34.000 | So everything they read is in print, you know, block letters from a printer.

00:16:38.000 | So they want to write that way, but they have never had any instruction in manuscript, none.

00:16:43.000 | So their letters are not formed properly.

00:16:46.000 | And they come out all different ways.

00:16:49.000 | We have capitals mixed with lowercase, not on the lines.

00:16:53.000 | We have improper shapes. It's almost illegible.

00:16:58.000 | So that's something I didn't expect that surprised me

00:17:00.000 | because I thought, "We'll just do all cursive.

00:17:02.000 | We'll just ignore the fact that printing exists,

00:17:04.000 | and we'll just teach our children when they learn to write to write in cursive."

00:17:07.000 | But what has happened is exactly what you're saying,

00:17:12.000 | is that now we need to get, and we will get, a book on remedial instruction for printing

00:17:18.000 | so they can learn how to make their P's properly and make their B's

00:17:21.000 | and just do them because it's painful to watch them write.

00:17:25.000 | They just naturally do it, but it's just painful because the stroke order is not optimal.

00:17:29.000 | And because they learned cursive first, they start at the bottom instead of starting at the top.

00:17:33.000 | Right, right.

00:17:34.000 | So they don't stroke a P down, where you P down and then make the side part.

00:17:39.000 | They do it like a cursive P, but they create it in printing.

00:17:43.000 | And the I's go up from the bottom, the T's go up from the bottom.

00:17:47.000 | Right, right.

00:17:48.000 | We've got to get a manuscript book.

00:17:50.000 | So that's--and then the other thing that I read that persuaded me is I read an essay

00:17:55.000 | where somebody was talking about the technology of cursive.

00:17:59.000 | And cursive is a superior way of writing to printing, to manuscript, for those who write.

00:18:08.000 | I write--whenever I'm writing, I always write in cursive.

00:18:11.000 | It's a superior way of orthography.

00:18:14.000 | It's a superior skill of orthography.

00:18:16.000 | But we no longer live in a world in which manual writing is particularly important.

00:18:22.000 | And so unlike the world of 40 years ago, when you could expect that your whole lifetime you would be writing,

00:18:30.000 | today, virtually, you don't really ever write by hand unless you're writing notes, keeping journals, etc.

00:18:39.000 | And so the need for the superior technology of cursive no longer exists

00:18:45.000 | because the technology of cursive has been replaced by an even superior technology of typing

00:18:51.000 | or entering with your finger--thumb typing on a mobile device or just simply dictation.

00:18:58.000 | And so since most students seem to be naturally resistant to cursive really at any time,

00:19:07.000 | it just seems like--it's not--I'm not as persuaded by the cursive arguments as I was three years ago.

00:19:13.000 | And to this point, I think that if even we dropped cursive,

00:19:17.000 | knowing that they're going to spend their whole lives typing on a computer,

00:19:20.000 | I probably wouldn't be as upset about it today as I would have been three years ago.

00:19:24.000 | I don't know. We came across a picture of the Constitution in their My America book,

00:19:28.000 | and I was like, "I can read this." I don't know if you're going to be able to. This is a problem.

00:19:32.000 | We'll see on that one.

00:19:34.000 | What has been a real challenge, though, is our eldest child really, really despises writing.

00:19:40.000 | He really, really struggles with writing.

00:19:43.000 | And it doesn't make sense to me why he does, but he does.

00:19:46.000 | Yeah, it's not his strong point. He has better skills in other subjects.

00:19:50.000 | So we've--I firmly believe that the skill of writing is very important,

00:19:56.000 | and I had major ambitions that, "Hey, my children are going to be wonderful writers,

00:20:01.000 | and they're going to write page after page after page."

00:20:04.000 | But we're down at this point in time to one page out of his writing book.

00:20:09.000 | That's the lesson. It's one page.

00:20:11.000 | Yeah, but the point is, one page. It should not be that big of a deal,

00:20:15.000 | but we're down at this point to one page.

00:20:18.000 | And there's a simple warm-up. There's practice with letter formation.

00:20:23.000 | Then there's two sentences, just two sentences for copy work.

00:20:28.000 | You trace the sentence, and then you write it.

00:20:30.000 | And it's a daily battle on that one.

00:20:33.000 | I mean, it takes him literally 10 minutes per sentence, which just boggles my mind.

00:20:39.000 | So we're still pressing forward on that,

00:20:42.000 | and I don't think we should go to any less than what we are doing,

00:20:45.000 | but that is not a strong skill set right now for that one.

00:20:48.000 | That's okay. We all have our strong points.

00:20:50.000 | Right, right. Now, where we are doing well is reading.

00:20:54.000 | And so I think at this level, good writers are always good readers too.

00:20:59.000 | So where we are doing very well is reading.

00:21:02.000 | And so you mentioned Charlotte Mason.

00:21:04.000 | We're using the Ambleside Online book lists and reading lists as a foundation.

00:21:11.000 | What do you like about Ambleside Online?

00:21:14.000 | I like that they have already--

00:21:17.000 | these are moms that have used the Charlotte Mason method with their own students.

00:21:21.000 | They've already read all the books.

00:21:24.000 | They've coordinated the chapters of the different books into the same time periods,

00:21:29.000 | so I don't have to do that.

00:21:31.000 | They're not textbooks. They're real books.

00:21:33.000 | They call them living books that are meant to engage the child and not just be dry text.

00:21:38.000 | There are no questions at the end. There's no quizzes.

00:21:41.000 | You read for enjoyment and information,

00:21:44.000 | and you take from it what's interesting to you.

00:21:48.000 | They call it a delectable feast.

00:21:50.000 | I think there's a podcast called The Delectable Feast based on the Charlotte Mason method.

00:21:54.000 | And the idea is that even if you had questions at the end,

00:21:58.000 | you're still only going to retain the information that's interesting to you.

00:22:02.000 | So maybe you still get your Henry's confused in Britain because that's just not interesting to you,

00:22:08.000 | but maybe you really think that Sir Walter Raleigh was pretty cool,

00:22:12.000 | and you dig really far into explorations in the 1500s.

00:22:16.000 | So the idea is you spread before the child a delectable feast

00:22:20.000 | and allow them to taste of each of the different ideas and topics,

00:22:27.000 | and then they can, from that time, dig in more to the things that interest them.

00:22:34.000 | Yeah, and you spent, for the first couple years, a huge amount of time doing the read-alouds.

00:22:39.000 | Right. Before he was reading, or before he was reading at the read-aloud level, I did the read-alouds, yes.

00:22:45.000 | Right. And so with our second child, you're doing all--she's not yet reading.

00:22:50.000 | She's been working on it, and she's getting there,

00:22:52.000 | but she's still not to the point of fluent reading and not able to read just for enjoyment.

00:22:58.000 | And so we do them as read-alouds.

00:23:01.000 | But now with our eldest, though, he's able to do all the reading himself,

00:23:05.000 | even though a lot of the texts are intricate. Is that right?

00:23:10.000 | Yeah, they're not--they're old. We'll put it that way.

00:23:13.000 | Yeah, they're old, and they're intricate. But he's able to do that.

00:23:16.000 | And so we just go through the Amblesight Online reading lists using the living books.

00:23:22.000 | And I'm very well persuaded of the value of living books. To me, that's the key.

00:23:27.000 | And I'm also very well persuaded of the idea of just simply having a student read.

00:23:32.000 | When I reflect on my own schooling, the only things I remember from school are the things I cared about.

00:23:38.000 | And the things I cared about, I just read regardless.

00:23:40.000 | I don't remember any of the other stuff that I didn't care about.

00:23:43.000 | And so as I see it, there are some basic skills that a child needs.

00:23:48.000 | First and foremost, the child needs a skill of learning.

00:23:51.000 | And there are some basic things--basic ability to read, basic ability to do arithmetic,

00:23:56.000 | a little bit of basic scientific understanding, etc.

00:23:59.000 | But beyond that, the only thing a child is ever going to retain are the things he's interested in.

00:24:04.000 | So our job as parents or as educators is to lay out the feast of ideas

00:24:09.000 | and allow the child to pick and choose, sample from everything,

00:24:12.000 | and then in time, the child's interests will develop.

00:24:16.000 | And then as the interests are developed, then feed those interests

00:24:20.000 | while simultaneously challenging with other things to see what else comes along,

00:24:23.000 | and then let the child repeat the process.

00:24:26.000 | And so at this point, the reading lists are fairly simple and straightforward,

00:24:30.000 | and he just does the readings chapter by chapter.

00:24:33.000 | And using the Ambleside Online curriculum, they have all the readings laid out.

00:24:36.000 | And these are all open-source materials.

00:24:38.000 | Most of them, yeah.

00:24:39.000 | Most of them.

00:24:41.000 | And so what we have done is we've switched to Kindle reading, especially while traveling.

00:24:45.000 | So what are your thoughts on making that switch?

00:24:47.000 | Because we had zero devices of any kind for a very long time.

00:24:51.000 | Right. We have done zero devices, like no screen time at all of any kind.

00:24:58.000 | So when we went traveling, we realized we couldn't bring along

00:25:01.000 | all of the books that we would have liked to have.

00:25:04.000 | I still prefer a physical book.

00:25:07.000 | I like to have something to hold, something to look at.

00:25:10.000 | I don't want to have to go tapping when I want to find a page.

00:25:14.000 | But I recognize that with traveling, the Kindle is invaluable because it's so small,

00:25:19.000 | and it holds all the books.

00:25:21.000 | And let me be clear, this is the Kindle that is just the white background with the black words.

00:25:27.000 | There is no color. There is no games. There is no pictures.

00:25:31.000 | Right, right.

00:25:33.000 | What has been wonderful about the Kindle is just being able to load it up with the Delectable Feast.

00:25:38.000 | And we've been able to use this to good advantage with a lot of fiction reading.

00:25:44.000 | I think that doing a lot of fiction reading is the way that you stabilize a young reader.

00:25:49.000 | And a young reader is going to be mostly interested in stories.

00:25:52.000 | And so tee up the stories and let the skill of reading become effortless,

00:25:57.000 | so that then when you move into the more meaty reading,

00:26:01.000 | the actual act of decoding the text is something that is easy.

00:26:10.000 | And so one of the things that's nice about the Kindle,

00:26:12.000 | we loaded it up with a bunch of series before we started traveling full-time.

00:26:16.000 | We had one suitcase full of homeschooling stuff, but still, we had a few--

00:26:20.000 | Now hold on, that was a shared suitcase.

00:26:22.000 | That is true.

00:26:25.000 | Pretty amazing packing you did when you were traveling full-time.

00:26:28.000 | But for example, I found the whole set of Tom Swift books.

00:26:34.000 | And so one of the things I love to do is I go on Amazon.

00:26:38.000 | And the Kindles, I can put the books onto the Kindle by hand.

00:26:43.000 | But because we're using the Amazon Kids settings for managing content,

00:26:50.000 | that works best if I just simply use the traditional Amazon system of sending the books.

00:26:57.000 | Right, you cannot put a PDF on a child profile.

00:27:00.000 | Right, right.

00:27:01.000 | And so since we have it set up with a child profile,

00:27:03.000 | then I can't just--I've got all the e-books that usually I would put on it,

00:27:07.000 | but now I'm using the Amazon servers to do that.

00:27:10.000 | So I guess the best example is I put on there the entire Tom Swift collection.

00:27:18.000 | I think it was something like 1,600 pages we should check out.

00:27:21.000 | But at this point he's 1,200 or 1,300 pages into the 1,600-page Tom Swift collection.

00:27:29.000 | And so the nice thing about it is--and we've got tons of books on there--

00:27:34.000 | is that I think the Kindle is a really good complement to reading paper books.

00:27:42.000 | We have a very large home library of paper books,

00:27:45.000 | but the Kindle works as a really nice complement to that

00:27:48.000 | to allow reading to be done based upon interest level at different times

00:27:53.000 | and to allow voluminous reading to be done with very low friction.

00:27:58.000 | If you laid out for a lot of readers what 1,600 pages looked like,

00:28:04.000 | a lot of people were intimidated by it.

00:28:05.000 | I don't think our reader would be intimidated by it.

00:28:08.000 | It's just kind of what he's always known.

00:28:10.000 | But still, when you realize, "Here's 25 books that you're working your way through,

00:28:15.000 | and I got them for $1.99 or 99 cents just to pay the person who compiled them

00:28:20.000 | because they're all open source or public domain at this point in time,"

00:28:25.000 | it's pretty powerful.

00:28:26.000 | So I really like having the Kindle.

00:28:28.000 | We're also using the Kindle a lot with foreign language reading.

00:28:31.000 | So one of the nice things that Kindle does is you can use foreign language dictionaries on there.

00:28:38.000 | And so when we're traveling, of course, I want to keep him--

00:28:42.000 | because he's reading in Spanish also.

00:28:45.000 | We've talked about that. I've done episodes on that.

00:28:47.000 | Yeah, you had him on one time, I remember.

00:28:49.000 | Yeah. So we've talked about that.

00:28:51.000 | And so that continues to be good.

00:28:52.000 | And basically, I believe that reading is the foundation of education.

00:28:59.000 | And so my rule is for myself is that I will get any book that I think is interesting,

00:29:05.000 | regardless of the cost.

00:29:07.000 | I'm not going to worry about the money cost of a book.

00:29:10.000 | And my commitment, although I haven't told him, is basically I'll get him any book that he's interested in,

00:29:15.000 | no matter what.

00:29:16.000 | And so I've just tried to find--of course, with proper supervision,

00:29:21.000 | but meaning that I've just tried to surround him with the highest quality books that I can find,

00:29:26.000 | and that's worked.

00:29:28.000 | It's worked in Spanish. It's worked in English.

00:29:30.000 | And so the nice thing is he doesn't make any distinction between those two languages,

00:29:36.000 | which has been awesome to see because that's something that you and I--

00:29:39.000 | that's a level you and I never reached, right?

00:29:42.000 | Spanish, even though you have a college minor in Spanish, Spanish was never easy for you to read.

00:29:48.000 | No, and even with having lived in a country, even in the United States,

00:29:56.000 | where they've got radio stations in Spanish, I would listen to the radio station

00:30:00.000 | just to keep my ear fluent, but the speaking has never come easily to me.

00:30:05.000 | Whereas our 8-year-old, he does what we learned was advanced Spanish effortlessly.

00:30:14.000 | Right. Yeah. And so, you know, we're back in the United States.

00:30:20.000 | We're not in any kind of Spanish-speaking community,

00:30:22.000 | but I'm totally relaxed to not try to even facilitate any kind of talking.

00:30:26.000 | I just want to keep him reading.

00:30:28.000 | And I figure as long as you're reading in your target language regularly, then that's great.

00:30:32.000 | And so I keep plying him with more novels I keep finding,

00:30:35.000 | and I spend all my time searching for books.

00:30:37.000 | I spent hours and hours searching for books, some books that I can find on Kindle,

00:30:41.000 | ordering old books on eBay, searching the globe.

00:30:44.000 | We went to Spain, scouring all the used bookstores in Spain to find books that are suitable and--

00:30:51.000 | And quality.

00:30:52.000 | Yeah, I don't-- just wanted to be twaddle.

00:30:55.000 | But that's been really great.

00:30:57.000 | But back to kind of the Kindle, now we've added in French.

00:31:01.000 | And this year, the project was after the good success we had with Spanish,

00:31:05.000 | so I thought, "Let's see if we can repeat it with French."

00:31:08.000 | So we started the year strong, and then everything just died.

00:31:11.000 | The whole project fell apart.

00:31:13.000 | And the reason it fell apart was I had bought a bunch of French-graded readers,

00:31:16.000 | and we started those strong at the beginning of the year, and we all got bored.

00:31:18.000 | I got bored reading them.

00:31:20.000 | They weren't interesting to me to read, the graded readers.

00:31:23.000 | But I couldn't get any other French books.

00:31:26.000 | And so when we went to France, we bought a bunch of French books.

00:31:33.000 | Basically, we found a great bookstore, searched through,

00:31:37.000 | and I bought the first five of every long series that I could find.

00:31:42.000 | And then we tested them out and started to see what worked.

00:31:45.000 | Our big winner has been the Magic Treehouse series.

00:31:48.000 | Right, La Cabane Magique.

00:31:49.000 | That has been the big winner.

00:31:51.000 | And I think that that is an optimal--

00:31:53.000 | we could do a standalone show on just children's literature

00:31:56.000 | and go over some of the books in the series and whatnot we found useful.

00:31:59.000 | But the Magic Treehouse series, I think, is perfect material for language learners

00:32:06.000 | because it's an actual story.

00:32:09.000 | It's a simple story, but it's an actual story.

00:32:12.000 | It's not as boring as a lot of the graded readers are,

00:32:17.000 | but it's a simple enough story that your brain kind of automatically fills in the words

00:32:21.000 | and fills in the vocabulary.

00:32:23.000 | And it's got enough pictures to grab children's attention.

00:32:26.000 | But it's enough text.

00:32:28.000 | It's not a children's book.

00:32:29.000 | It's not just lots of pictures and little text,

00:32:31.000 | which that's not good for language acquisition.

00:32:33.000 | You need the text.

00:32:34.000 | You need the actual story.

00:32:36.000 | And so that has been a real linchpin,

00:32:39.000 | is that I had the first five of the Magic Treehouse series,

00:32:43.000 | and even the day we got them, he started going through them.

00:32:47.000 | Right, without our saying, "Hey, you read these."

00:32:49.000 | We just left them on the table, you know, surreptitiously.

00:32:52.000 | I told the audience how you salt the house or seed the house with books.

00:32:58.000 | So that, I mean, he started going through them.

00:33:03.000 | Then I started reading them, and my secret is I start reading aloud,

00:33:06.000 | and that will pique his interest, and then I leave the book around strategically,

00:33:10.000 | and he just can't help but go and read the book himself.

00:33:13.000 | Plus we give him no options.

00:33:15.000 | We don't have a TV.

00:33:16.000 | We don't have any iPads.

00:33:18.000 | We don't have any phones for them to play with.

00:33:21.000 | They have nothing.

00:33:22.000 | They have books.

00:33:23.000 | They have books and more books.

00:33:25.000 | Hey, it works.

00:33:26.000 | It works.

00:33:27.000 | We've been talking a lot.

00:33:28.000 | I feel like we're at the point where we need to go ahead

00:33:30.000 | and start adding in more computer stuff,

00:33:33.000 | but we're quite conscious of the fact that the day we open the door to that,

00:33:37.000 | it's going to just filter on down, and we're going to lose this really powerful--

00:33:41.000 | Right, because we've got a 2-year-old,

00:33:44.000 | and if you start the 8-year-old watching whatever,

00:33:47.000 | then the 2-year-old is going to watch it too,

00:33:49.000 | and when it comes time for him to read, he's going to be like,

00:33:51.000 | "But I want to watch how it's made."

00:33:53.000 | Right, right.

00:33:54.000 | So I think we're going to need to cross that over pretty quickly here

00:33:58.000 | because we're at the right point to start those skills in,

00:34:02.000 | but neither of us really wants to do it

00:34:06.000 | just because we've seen the benefits of not having a choice with this approach.

00:34:12.000 | So the point is, with the Kindle, I've been able to recently, just this week,

00:34:17.000 | I went ahead and started him reading the--is it Marc Thiel?

00:34:22.000 | I think you said that was his name.

00:34:24.000 | Yeah, he's a modern French author who's written a series of children's books.

00:34:27.000 | They're simple stories.

00:34:29.000 | Histoire à lire le soir.

00:34:32.000 | His book is Stories to Read at Night,

00:34:34.000 | and he's got a few mystery stories and simple things like that.

00:34:37.000 | So the nice thing about those is I've been able to get those

00:34:39.000 | on the audiobook version and the same text on Kindle.

00:34:45.000 | And so by having it on Kindle,

00:34:47.000 | he can use the built-in functionality of the Kindle,

00:34:50.000 | just like I love to do myself using LingQ, L-I-N-G-Q,

00:34:54.000 | which is where I do all of my reading in foreign languages.

00:34:59.000 | He can do that on the Kindle and translate any words he may be struggling with.

00:35:04.000 | Right, and he's getting the audio at the same time as the reading.

00:35:07.000 | Right, right.

00:35:08.000 | And so I'm not worried about oral or written expression at this point in time.

00:35:13.000 | I just want to get him reading and then fill him with French books.

00:35:17.000 | And he's been able to pick up the French pronunciation scheme better,

00:35:20.000 | but we'll do a bunch of audiobooks with these books that I can find.

00:35:23.000 | So that's been--those are big wins right now, and that's working well.

00:35:27.000 | Yep. One thing I think we could improve on is our P.E. program.

00:35:31.000 | We have nothing in place.

00:35:33.000 | They have scooters now, and they like riding them.

00:35:36.000 | It's just been hard with all of our traveling that--

00:35:39.000 | I meant to take this more in the conversation--well, let's do it.

00:35:46.000 | How do you think traveling has impacted education?

00:35:50.000 | What are your thoughts?

00:35:51.000 | Overall or the P.E. part?

00:35:52.000 | I'm just giving you a nice softball open-end question for you to share your thoughts.

00:35:57.000 | All right, well, it totally disrupted the schedule for sure.

00:36:00.000 | I have checklists.

00:36:02.000 | I have a grid of what is supposed to be done in a week, and that did not work.

00:36:09.000 | In case it's not clear, my wife is the checklist maker.

00:36:12.000 | I'm the, "Oh, come on, honey. It's okay. Look, they're learning.

00:36:16.000 | No, we've got to get this done." That's you.

00:36:18.000 | Yeah, I'm the checklist maker.

00:36:20.000 | I like to have it written down.

00:36:22.000 | This is what we're doing today.

00:36:23.000 | This is what we're doing tomorrow.

00:36:25.000 | These pages, these books, you check it off, and it's very lovely when it's done.

00:36:28.000 | Very lovely.

00:36:30.000 | But when we were traveling, we didn't have the checklists.

00:36:33.000 | We paired it down to math and language, I think, for each child, math and language,

00:36:39.000 | and then whatever we could fit on the Kindle.

00:36:41.000 | I may have brought a couple of graded readers.

00:36:43.000 | Yeah, I put the Bob books on the Kindle for the first grader who was in kindergarten at the time.

00:36:49.000 | So she read the Bob books on the Kindle, and then she did math, and she did language.

00:36:53.000 | And then the older student did math, language, and Kindle reading.

00:36:56.000 | So we were able to keep up with his reading, his Ambleside Online reading pretty well,

00:37:00.000 | and then the math and the language with the Abeka books, which worked pretty well with minimal books.

00:37:06.000 | We didn't do any writing.

00:37:08.000 | I mean, I think we did one postcard home, but that was it for the writing.

00:37:12.000 | We did get a lot of swimming done.

00:37:13.000 | They all improved in their swimming quite a bit.

00:37:15.000 | Right, which was--my point was, like, P.E., which I totally agree with you, right?

00:37:22.000 | I'm not a sports guy.

00:37:23.000 | I don't throw balls.

00:37:24.000 | I don't do sports things, and you don't either.

00:37:27.000 | So we're just not really sports parents.

00:37:29.000 | But I do want to have more exposure to that.

00:37:31.000 | But the exposure has been kind of weird traveling exposure.

00:37:35.000 | And we've wanted to change it, one of the things, one of the ambitions we've had.

00:37:40.000 | And, in fact, when we had a house rental in Florida, before all that fell apart,

00:37:45.000 | we had gone and found a local swim club.

00:37:48.000 | I was looking at martial arts gyms and had everything lined up.

00:37:52.000 | And then, of course, the house had mold, so we had to move.

00:37:55.000 | But it is important.

00:37:58.000 | But we've also had some good experiences.

00:38:02.000 | Yes, we have.

00:38:03.000 | Yes, we have, for sure.

00:38:04.000 | I can't ignore the fact that world travel does count as some degree of education,

00:38:08.000 | even though you can't put it on a checklist.

00:38:10.000 | Right.

00:38:11.000 | So I'm always telling my wife, like, look, world school is where it's at.

00:38:15.000 | Like, all the cool people understand this word "world school."

00:38:18.000 | And she's like, it doesn't fit in my checklist.

00:38:19.000 | It doesn't matter.

00:38:20.000 | But it was pretty amazing, right?

00:38:22.000 | We've done some pretty remarkable things.

00:38:25.000 | And I actually fear that we've done too much.

00:38:29.000 | I feel like our children have no concept of the lives that they live.

00:38:33.000 | What was it?

00:38:34.000 | We were somewhere last week, and someone was saying, oh, our dream.

00:38:38.000 | Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:38:39.000 | We were touring.

00:38:40.000 | We were in Tennessee doing the Ruby Falls tour.

00:38:44.000 | And the tour guide said, I'd really like to do--we were having a conversation.

00:38:49.000 | This came up.

00:38:50.000 | I'd really like to do this--I don't know if it was a race or something.

00:38:53.000 | He's like, it goes from the Pyrenees to the ocean.

00:38:56.000 | And I was like, oh, we just came from the Pyrenees.

00:39:00.000 | It's a little bit remarkable.

00:39:02.000 | And he's like, oh, we just came from the Pyrenees.

00:39:04.000 | And you realize that the child has no concept of the life that he lives based upon--

00:39:11.000 | for a lot of people, it's a lifelong dream to go to France, right?

00:39:16.000 | So I do wonder if we don't do too much, but how do you know those things?

00:39:20.000 | One thing, though, because they are so young, you would think that their geography would get better with the travel,

00:39:25.000 | but no, no, no.

00:39:26.000 | They think everything's a country.

00:39:28.000 | Their favorite country is Florida, or their favorite country is Mexico, because those are the same.

00:39:33.000 | Exactly.

00:39:35.000 | So I guess the point would be that--let me rephrase it in a question,

00:39:40.000 | because I'm trying to draw your perspectives more.

00:39:45.000 | Do you think that the travel has been worth it for our children's sake?

00:39:53.000 | If we were doing it for our children's education, do you think it's been worth it?

00:39:58.000 | I don't know.

00:39:59.000 | Some of them are so young, they won't remember.

00:40:03.000 | For the older one, I think it's been cool for him.

00:40:07.000 | I think he'll remember a lot of it.

00:40:09.000 | The child might remember some of it, though the confusion about countries remains.

00:40:15.000 | But we were able to do some traditional schooling on the road, and it's a very cool experience.

00:40:22.000 | We have lots of pictures we can show them--you did this, you did that--and they may remember some of it.

00:40:28.000 | I don't think it's worth it for the younger children.

00:40:31.000 | I agree with you.

00:40:32.000 | I think that basically my observation is about the age of six would be the youngest.

00:40:36.000 | I don't expect the child to get much benefit from bouncing around or seeing things, and even then not much.

00:40:42.000 | Right, because you can't do the museums, you can't do any kind of tours.

00:40:46.000 | We did one 30-minute tour, and we had to walk out with the baby because he was not having it.

00:40:52.000 | Right, and they just don't have the attention span for it.

00:40:56.000 | So I feel like it's a lot wasted.

00:40:57.000 | People are always telling me, "Oh, it's not wasted, it's not wasted."

00:41:00.000 | They're going to remember it, and I don't buy it.

00:41:03.000 | It is wasted.

00:41:04.000 | We take lots of pictures, but I haven't traveled for them.

00:41:08.000 | Right, we traveled for us.

00:41:10.000 | Right.

00:41:11.000 | And we remember it.

00:41:12.000 | Exactly.

00:41:13.000 | My point is that some people, though I think it unnecessarily idealistic about, "Oh, it's just going to be great to go travel with my five-year-old,"

00:41:20.000 | I don't think your five-year-old's going to care.

00:41:22.000 | It's going to be a whole lot of work for you to take your five-year-old places.

00:41:26.000 | You better make sure that you want to go for you, not for the five-year-old, because the five-year-old, it really doesn't matter.

00:41:32.000 | They just want to go to the park.

00:41:33.000 | That's really all they care about.

00:41:35.000 | Exactly.

00:41:36.000 | Where's the nearest park?

00:41:37.000 | Exactly.

00:41:38.000 | So I don't think that the whole world schooling or road schooling thing, it's just wasted on the young.

00:41:44.000 | I really think it's not worth it.

00:41:46.000 | I think it's better to wait until the children are older if you're doing it for their sake.

00:41:50.000 | Again, I'm not sad we've traveled, but we've traveled for us and just dragged the children along because they're dragged along with us.

00:41:58.000 | I think we have been able to enjoy relationships together in a good way.

00:42:05.000 | We are at this point together with the children 168 hours a week, and that has led to a closeness that I think a lot of people don't have.

00:42:14.000 | But that also does lead to weaknesses and defects.

00:42:18.000 | We're always talking. We have some challenges with children in how they relate to other authority figures.

00:42:27.000 | They're not as respectful as we would like, and they don't really relate to other authority figures very much.

00:42:35.000 | So we talk about ways to kind of integrate more of that.

00:42:39.000 | We work hard to have lots of socializing opportunities.

00:42:46.000 | We're constant with other people, but usually we're around.

00:42:49.000 | And so I think we need to continue to work for more opportunities for socializing, but in other contexts where there are other adults, other parent, other figures, etc.

00:42:58.000 | So it's not all perfect, but it is not bad either.

00:43:01.000 | It's different.

00:43:02.000 | I think either way you're going to have tradeoffs.

00:43:05.000 | If you go the traditional school route, you're going to have less family time, but possibly different social skills.

00:43:12.000 | If you go the home route, you may have to work a little harder at the social skills, but the family time is built in.

00:43:17.000 | Right.

00:43:18.000 | I do think that what I like about homeschooling is the flexibility.

00:43:23.000 | I wouldn't give it up for anything to me, meaning that the flexibility that we feel.

00:43:29.000 | But I also recognize that some of that flexibility will be coming to an end here pretty soon as I have to integrate more of our children's goals and ambitions and plans into our family plan.

00:43:41.000 | Whereas right now I kind of just do what I want and figure for they'll follow along.

00:43:45.000 | But but in the coming years, that's not going to be the case.

00:43:50.000 | As you've reminded me many times, that's not quite as close as you might think it is.

00:43:54.000 | Yeah.

00:43:55.000 | So I still I still it's there, but I feel like it's breathing on my neck, even though I still feel like I got about four years.

00:44:01.000 | But but I that is something I think about.

00:44:08.000 | You tired of being on the road?

00:44:10.000 | I'm ready to be still for a while.

00:44:12.000 | Yeah, me too.

00:44:13.000 | Me too.

00:44:14.000 | Definitely.

00:44:15.000 | I think that's one of the other things that I appreciate about doing things about traveling and you don't have to hold back.

00:44:21.000 | You can say you're tired.

00:44:24.000 | But I definitely.

00:44:28.000 | You know, you live in a house and you look forward to traveling and then you travel a lot and you realize how much you're looking forward to living in a house.

00:44:37.000 | What are your thoughts on full time travel for a family?

00:44:41.000 | What are your thoughts on this?

00:44:42.000 | Like totally nomadic thing we've been doing for the last six months?

00:44:45.000 | It changes your perspective on what a home needs to be or have.

00:44:50.000 | For example, when we unpacked all of our stuff from the storage unit after being on the road for three or four months, I said, why do we have so much clothes?

00:44:58.000 | Why are there clothes popping out everywhere?

00:45:00.000 | We don't need this.

00:45:01.000 | This is a taking up space.

00:45:03.000 | Also, someone recently asked me that this person was involved in the building industry and he said, so what is your ideal house like?

00:45:13.000 | I thought, well, I've been in tons of houses and they've got places to cook, places to sleep.

00:45:19.000 | They've got place to go to the bathroom.

00:45:21.000 | That's that's pretty ideal.

00:45:23.000 | Right.

00:45:24.000 | Right.

00:45:25.000 | Definitely changes like your space expectations.

00:45:27.000 | I've been in so many small hotel rooms that, you know, we're totally comfortable taking one hotel room with the four children.

00:45:36.000 | They're accustomed to it.

00:45:37.000 | Even if we do put three of them in a bed and one of them on the floor, like usually we have enough beds, they can all have bed space.

00:45:43.000 | But on occasion, it's just a small space and that's just normal.

00:45:48.000 | So you go into many houses and the house feels like a massive upgrade, even if it's just a modest little house.

00:45:53.000 | We were in an Airbnb last week that was just a modest little house in a normal neighborhood, but it had fresh paint on the walls and it felt like luxury after being in a hotel room.

00:46:02.000 | But I've talked about publicly, we don't need to dig into it, but I do not believe that full time travel, like the digital nomad thing, is a great lifestyle with children.

00:46:14.000 | It's really not.

00:46:16.000 | It's just too much work on mom and dad.

00:46:19.000 | I would live as I would, I would myself would love being a digital nomad if I were single.

00:46:25.000 | You wouldn't love it if we were a couple with no children, because that's just not really your.

00:46:29.000 | I think it would depend on exactly what you meant by digital nomads.

00:46:32.000 | Some people are digital nomads and that just means they move to Mexico and then they live there.

00:46:36.000 | I mean, like, just never having one fixed house for months and months.

00:46:40.000 | Oh, you mean like three months here, three months there, three months in the next place.

00:46:44.000 | I mean, the three weeks or the one month rentals, like that kind of thing.

00:46:47.000 | Like that, you would not be in.

00:46:49.000 | That would be a little fast for me.

00:46:50.000 | Yeah, you would not be into that.

00:46:51.000 | You're a homebody.

00:46:52.000 | If I didn't drag you out of the house, you'd never leave.

00:46:55.000 | So, like, but the point is that I think that you and I would do fine, would do, given the caveat that you don't love that, like you like to have your routines.

00:47:06.000 | You mean a typical couple would do fine with a nomad lifestyle?

00:47:09.000 | A typical couple would do fine, right?

00:47:10.000 | You have your, each of you have your computer, each of you have your books.

00:47:13.000 | And we have some friends who do that with no children.

00:47:16.000 | They travel a lot and they love it.

00:47:18.000 | Yeah, and I think the point is that it's not uncomfortable, right?

00:47:21.000 | I can sit down at just about any desk and as long as it's quiet enough for me to work, it doesn't really matter.

00:47:30.000 | I can sit down in any hotel lobby and I can put my earphones in and I can work.

00:47:35.000 | The problem is what are children going to do, right?

00:47:38.000 | And that's what I think is underestimated.

00:47:39.000 | What are the children going to do?

00:47:41.000 | Because...

00:47:43.000 | Just stick them on an iPad. They'll be fine.

00:47:44.000 | That's the thing is that especially like we're the weirdos that are hardcore.

00:47:48.000 | So, you take travel, you take small spaces, you take all the parks closed with COVID.

00:47:55.000 | So, you can't get them, they can't get their wiggles out at the park.

00:47:58.000 | And that's not fun, right?

00:48:01.000 | That's one of the challenges of traveling with children.

00:48:03.000 | That's not fun.

00:48:04.000 | That was one of the really nice things about staying in so many hotels because a lot of them have the pool.

00:48:08.000 | Right.

00:48:09.000 | And that has been invaluable.

00:48:11.000 | Right.

00:48:12.000 | So, the point that I'm trying to make is that why is travel with children not so much fun?

00:48:17.000 | It's because the children don't have enough things to do.

00:48:20.000 | And so, as a parent, you wind up having to constantly find things for them to do.

00:48:26.000 | If you're in your house, they're comfortable with your house.

00:48:28.000 | They know where their toys are.

00:48:30.000 | They know what they have and they can enjoy playing.

00:48:33.000 | But if you're not in your house, you're always worried about, "Are we going to break something?

00:48:37.000 | We don't want to be too loud.

00:48:39.000 | What am I going to give them to do?"

00:48:41.000 | And you have a little Ziploc bag with toys.

00:48:45.000 | It just doesn't go that far.

00:48:47.000 | Yeah, when you've got just the coloring book and the sticker book and you didn't bring your 40,000 bin of Legos.

00:48:53.000 | Exactly.

00:48:54.000 | It gets old a little fast.

00:48:55.000 | It gets old.

00:48:56.000 | And so, that just creates a lot of work for parents to find things for children to do on the road, for young children to do on the road.

00:49:04.000 | And so, when we got back, rented a house, got the stuff out of the storage unit, got out a big bin of trains,

00:49:12.000 | and it was like, "Ah, the children, there they go.

00:49:15.000 | They've got things to do for the next hour and a half, and we don't have to tell them what to do."

00:49:18.000 | Yes, they were so happy building with the Lego blocks and the trains.

00:49:21.000 | It was like, "Yes!"

00:49:23.000 | And I forget that because it's totally uninteresting to me to build with trains.

00:49:27.000 | I don't want to do that.

00:49:28.000 | I don't want to play with cars.

00:49:30.000 | It was just such a stark, obvious contrast of being on the road and then not knowing what to do,

00:49:37.000 | and then all of a sudden, here's a giant box of trains, and then they're taken for hours.

00:49:43.000 | One good thing, though, about their having been on the road so much and having limited toys was they got to express their creativity.

00:49:50.000 | They rolled suitcases all over the house.

00:49:52.000 | They built what they called catamarans, which were kind of like mobiles with all the hangers in the closets.

00:49:59.000 | And they had to use what we had with us.

00:50:03.000 | They put their jackets on, and they built tents with the sheets and the chairs that were in the house.

00:50:10.000 | They just had to use the home furnishings to come up with stuff to do, and they managed.

00:50:14.000 | Agreed.

00:50:16.000 | So I guess what I'm trying to tell other parents is it can be done.

00:50:21.000 | We've done it.

00:50:23.000 | We've been on the road full time.

00:50:25.000 | I mean, depending on how we count the days right now, it's a little bit mixed up with the different things we've done,

00:50:31.000 | but we've been on the road full time without a home, and we were planning on at least--

00:50:36.000 | I was planning on another six months before we decided to cut it short with COVID.

00:50:42.000 | So you can do it, right?

00:50:44.000 | Here we are doing it.

00:50:45.000 | We've done it with a two-year-old, four-year-old, six-year-old, and eight-year-old.

00:50:48.000 | Problem is it's a lot harder to be productive on the road,

00:50:52.000 | and I think that's the biggest thing that's always been difficult for me is that I need to work.

00:50:56.000 | I want to work.

00:50:58.000 | We're living in this golden age of opportunity.

00:51:01.000 | I'm surrounded by so much opportunity on all sides, and yet I can't--as a husband, I can't put you in that situation.

00:51:12.000 | I'm like, "Here, honey. Here's a hotel room and a hotel key, and you've got a pool, and that's all."

00:51:16.000 | That's just unlivable.

00:51:18.000 | It's too much for you to not have those things.

00:51:20.000 | And so in order for me to work, I've got to give you better infrastructure.

00:51:25.000 | And imagine if I had some kind of work I was supposed to be accomplishing.

00:51:28.000 | There'd be no way.

00:51:29.000 | It's not possible.

00:51:30.000 | No.

00:51:31.000 | I don't understand.

00:51:32.000 | I do not understand.

00:51:34.000 | I read about all these mega super moms who are running their mom blog and making millions with their Instagram posts

00:51:44.000 | and also being moms of children.

00:51:46.000 | I don't understand how they do it.

00:51:47.000 | It's not possible.

00:51:49.000 | I can't do it.

00:51:50.000 | Anyway.

00:51:51.000 | Kudos to those moms.

00:51:53.000 | Kudos to them.

00:51:54.000 | But no, I could not do it.

00:51:56.000 | So I guess anything else you want to share from your experience?

00:52:00.000 | Because the audience always wonders what your thoughts are on all the wacky stuff that we've done.

00:52:05.000 | We haven't even talked about countries.

00:52:06.000 | We haven't even talked about--let's save all that for another show.

00:52:09.000 | Well, one overview comment, as I've seen all the stuff in the news with the controversies on, you name it, in schools, masks, safety.

00:52:18.000 | Oh, vaccines.

00:52:20.000 | All the controversy in the schools, it makes me say, "If I didn't already homeschool, I would start."

00:52:27.000 | And I think I am definitely convinced that homeschooling can be very simple.

00:52:34.000 | Our schedule is pretty simple.

00:52:37.000 | We do three workbooks and reading.

00:52:40.000 | Yeah, three workbooks and reading.

00:52:42.000 | And our eldest is not narrating at this point in time.

00:52:45.000 | One of those workbooks is writing, which is copywork.

00:52:48.000 | That's all he can handle right now.

00:52:50.000 | But we've got three workbooks and reading.

00:52:52.000 | I think that's enough.

00:52:54.000 | Mathematics, reading, writing, and arithmetic.

00:52:58.000 | And the foundational ones, writing can come later.

00:53:01.000 | You just need reading and arithmetic.

00:53:04.000 | Right, and with the first grader, we're really focusing on the reading.

00:53:08.000 | So even sometimes we don't get through all the read-alouds.

00:53:11.000 | We don't get to the foreign language because we're just focusing on the reading and English.

00:53:16.000 | Right, and I think that with those skills, if you will surround a student with things that are interesting,

00:53:24.000 | then children are naturally curious.

00:53:26.000 | What I find so funny is when I was younger, I used to love reading the encyclopedias.

00:53:33.000 | My parents had one of the sets of encyclopedias, and I just thought it was so fascinating to read all the different things.

00:53:39.000 | I loved the pictures.

00:53:40.000 | And so I always try to buy the encyclopedia-type books.

00:53:46.000 | We've got a set of encyclopedias locked away in a bunch of boxes somewhere.

00:53:50.000 | But I try to buy the encyclopedia-type books.

00:53:54.000 | Like the Dorling Kindersley books are phenomenal.

00:53:57.000 | And I just lay them out.

00:54:00.000 | So what I find is funny is we'll go through and we get our homeschool day done.

00:54:05.000 | And we're like, "Okay, here are the three workbooks, and here are all the assigned readings."

00:54:09.000 | Okay, you can go and obviously play time, but then at nap time, that's quiet reading time for the ones who aren't napping.

00:54:18.000 | It's like, "Okay, you need to go and read."

00:54:21.000 | And so the break, the relaxation from homeschool is to go and read an encyclopedia book about the human body.

00:54:31.000 | Right?

00:54:32.000 | Yes.

00:54:33.000 | Sitting there studying how the stomach works and the acid and then how the neurons.

00:54:38.000 | And so I just am constantly buying these new books.

00:54:41.000 | And so when I look at science education, the idea of going through some kind of science textbook to me is anathema.

00:54:50.000 | Like, what's the point?

00:54:52.000 | There are a ton of nice science books out there.

00:54:54.000 | Costco is awesome, right?

00:54:56.000 | But I mean it's like a textbook, right?

00:54:57.000 | Because that's always been my argument to you in building the philosophy.

00:55:00.000 | Like, I did physical science in seventh grade and marine biology in ninth grade.

00:55:05.000 | And I don't care about any of that stuff.

00:55:07.000 | I don't remember any of it.

00:55:08.000 | It was all worthless because I never had any interest in it.

00:55:12.000 | And it wasn't presented in an attractive way.

00:55:14.000 | It was presented as intellectual stuff.

00:55:16.000 | If I had just had books left out about marine life and whatnot, those are the things that I remembered.

00:55:25.000 | And so the physical science or the human biology that I'm interested in has always come from books on human performance or on weight loss books or things like that.

00:55:35.000 | And then if I don't know something, then I got to go fill it in.

00:55:38.000 | But it's not something that I was taught in eighth grade.

00:55:41.000 | It's something that I recognized.

00:55:43.000 | I don't understand this particular thing, and I'm going to need to buttress my knowledge in this area.

00:55:49.000 | And so to me, education really is that simple.

00:55:55.000 | If you are an uneducated person and you need to become educated, then it's basically a matter of finding the right books to begin with and then finding the right people and knowing how to talk to them.

00:56:11.000 | That's pretty much what education is.

00:56:15.000 | Speaking of the right books, I wanted to go back to something you said earlier about I forgot the exact phrase you used, but you said basically we just bring on the novels, bring on the fiction, fill them up with fiction.

00:56:31.000 | I totally agree with the added point that we are quite discriminating in our fiction choices.

00:56:39.000 | We're not reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

00:56:41.000 | I hate that book.

00:56:43.000 | That's a very good point.

00:56:45.000 | It's a constant work.

00:56:47.000 | I don't mind good fiction.

00:56:49.000 | I want my children to read fiction, but I want that fiction to have some benefits.

00:56:56.000 | Number one, I want the fiction to be morally pure.

00:56:59.000 | I want it to be complex, appropriate syntax.

00:57:05.000 | One of the things that is shocking to me is how much time and effort I have to put into buying old books.

00:57:14.000 | I just bought a set of, I figured our eldest was probably almost at the point for Hardy Boys.

00:57:21.000 | They're still making Hardy Boys, but you pick up one of the Hardy Boys.

00:57:28.000 | They've actually recently redone.

00:57:30.000 | I looked at all the Kindle versions.

00:57:31.000 | For those who don't know, there is an author way back in the early 20th century named Edward Strattmire.

00:57:41.000 | He created the Edward Strattmire Syndicate.

00:57:46.000 | This is an organization.

00:57:48.000 | He had the idea of basically building these novels that had characters who didn't age and that were all published under a pen name.

00:57:59.000 | I don't remember what the original one was.

00:58:03.000 | It may have been the Rover Boys.

00:58:05.000 | It may have been Bobsy Twins.

00:58:07.000 | I can't remember.

00:58:08.000 | But they started publishing all these different series.

00:58:11.000 | Many of the ones that people know of as kids books, Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, Bobsy Twins, Rover Boys.

00:58:24.000 | There's lots more that are lesser known, but that are still out there.

00:58:30.000 | These were all published by the Edward Strattmire Syndicate.

00:58:33.000 | They're still doing this.

00:58:36.000 | They're still publishing new Hardy Boys books.

00:58:38.000 | They're still written by Franklin W. Dixon.

00:58:43.000 | Who just miraculously never ages either.

00:58:45.000 | They're just being updated with the times.

00:58:48.000 | But you can go through these.

00:58:50.000 | You read one of the modern ones.

00:58:52.000 | There's Joe Hardy.

00:58:54.000 | I picked up one somewhere.

00:58:56.000 | I guess it was the introduction on Amazon.

00:58:58.000 | There's Joe Hardy in Paris putting pictures on his Instagram.

00:59:02.000 | There's all the tags up there of what it is.

00:59:05.000 | I grew up reading the classic blue-bound ones that you can find in the library.

00:59:12.000 | But what's interesting is those themselves were actually a reprint of the first edition.

00:59:17.000 | You can go back and you can find the early ones.

00:59:20.000 | They're not yet in the public domain, but you can find the early ones.

00:59:23.000 | Some of them that you really can't find, they were a little bit racist,

00:59:28.000 | and they kind of changed out the language and made them a little bit more appropriate.

00:59:32.000 | But there was a major language update between the first set

00:59:36.000 | and even that classic blue book set that was set in the 1950s.

00:59:41.000 | I have to go on eBay and I buy these old collections of books

00:59:45.000 | just so I can go back and get the original language.

00:59:48.000 | - And then we tape them all back together. - Exactly.

00:59:51.000 | Here, be very careful with this book.

00:59:54.000 | But the point is I do it because of the language.

00:59:56.000 | The language is much richer. The imagery is much more vivid.

00:59:59.000 | It's much more evocative, and it plays.

01:00:02.000 | Now, here's what's amazing.

01:00:04.000 | When Stratemeyer-- I don't know how to say his name, Stratemeyer, Stratemeyer--

01:00:07.000 | but when he first started publishing those books,

01:00:11.000 | they were considered to be twaddle for that time.

01:00:16.000 | And everyone's like, "Why would you read-- we've got great literature.

01:00:19.000 | Why are you letting children read Hardy Boys?"

01:00:22.000 | Today I'm saying, "Yeah, go read Hardy Boys or Bobsy Twins,

01:00:25.000 | but read the original language because it's much richer in content."

01:00:34.000 | So I look for books that are morally pure.

01:00:39.000 | I look for books that have good, rich language, that are complex language,

01:00:45.000 | because the ability that you have in language is going to measure the ability of your thoughts.

01:00:52.000 | That's not to say you should always use complex language.

01:00:55.000 | I think a real skill of persuasion is using simple language,

01:00:59.000 | that if you want to persuade people, you should be able to use simple language.

01:01:03.000 | I struggle with this.

01:01:05.000 | But your skill in language, the ability to use language,

01:01:11.000 | is going to mark the complexity of your thoughts.

01:01:14.000 | If you are-- that's the point.

01:01:18.000 | I'm also looking for books that are going to set a set of ideals,

01:01:22.000 | because if you put a novel in your child's hand,

01:01:25.000 | the child is going to naturally come to see that the protagonist in that novel is a hero.

01:01:32.000 | So be very careful what those protagonists are doing before you put it in your child's hands.

01:01:38.000 | Right. And even with some of these old books, like you mentioned about racist things popping up,

01:01:43.000 | even with the books that we've chosen, we've had a couple of discussions like,

01:01:47.000 | "This is not what we do. I'm sorry they're treating people this way. This is not how we treat people."

01:01:53.000 | Right. I mean, you go-- that's what--

01:01:56.000 | one of the big complaints on the internet about Amblesaw Online was like,

01:01:59.000 | "Why did you put all these racist books in there?"

01:02:02.000 | You can't get out of that when you're reading old books, any of it.

01:02:05.000 | But it's really important. I think it's better to deal with it straightforward than to hide it.

01:02:12.000 | So a couple of book lists, and then we'll wrap up.

01:02:15.000 | So we've mentioned Amblesaw Online.

01:02:17.000 | Right. Amblesaw Online.

01:02:18.000 | Okay. Amblesaw Online is wonderful.

01:02:20.000 | What is that living book search engine that they have?

01:02:23.000 | Is that Delectable Feast that does that, or who does that?

01:02:27.000 | No, there's-- somebody has--

01:02:30.000 | But you did just mention the Delectable Feast podcast.

01:02:32.000 | Yeah, but there's the-- who's the big Charlotte Mason podcast website?

01:02:37.000 | Oh, Simply Charlotte Mason.

01:02:38.000 | Simply Charlotte Mason.

01:02:39.000 | Sonja's website.

01:02:40.000 | Sonja has a really great book listing on her website on Simply Charlotte Mason

01:02:46.000 | where you can go in there and you can search for different topics,

01:02:50.000 | and they have their living books.

01:02:52.000 | So that's a really good solution if your child's really into horses

01:02:55.000 | and you're trying to find living books on horses.

01:02:57.000 | That would be a great solution.

01:02:59.000 | I also am using the Robinson Curriculum Book List,

01:03:03.000 | which lines up nicely with a lot of the Amblesaw Online stuff

01:03:07.000 | and making sure that our children read through the Robinson Curriculum Book List.

01:03:12.000 | And then we just always look for other book lists that we find.

01:03:15.000 | In English, this is easy.

01:03:17.000 | I just found a new one I was telling you about today.

01:03:19.000 | Mensa for Kids actually has a book list,

01:03:22.000 | and I was very impressed with their book list,

01:03:24.000 | and so I've added those to the checklist to make sure that all of that literature

01:03:27.000 | is sourced for our children to read through.

01:03:29.000 | Right, and that one was refreshing when you showed it to me this afternoon

01:03:32.000 | because a lot of the books on there are stuff that are not on all the other book lists.

01:03:37.000 | Right, right.

01:03:38.000 | What we've really struggled with is finding those foreign language book lists.

01:03:41.000 | I have spent hours and hours searching through the classics for classic Spanish literature.

01:03:48.000 | I can find the book lists for college-level stuff, right?

01:03:54.000 | I can find the book lists for that.

01:03:57.000 | What I cannot find is the classic children's books in Spanish or in French

01:04:02.000 | because when you do web searches and whatnot,

01:04:05.000 | I guess the homeschooling community is not as big in those languages as it is in English,

01:04:08.000 | but when you do the searches, you always wind up with just the same books you have in English

01:04:13.000 | but a Spanish translation.

01:04:14.000 | Right, we joke that the Hispanic culture wrote Don Quixote and then said,

01:04:19.000 | "Well, we can't top that."

01:04:21.000 | Right, right.

01:04:22.000 | By the way, if any of you know of good Spanish-quality literature written in Spanish,

01:04:27.000 | we would love to know about it.

01:04:29.000 | Right, because I feel bad because a lot of the books that we're reading right now in Spanish

01:04:32.000 | are all in translations from English, which is better than nothing,

01:04:35.000 | certainly better than nothing.

01:04:37.000 | The translations are very good, but still I'd rather have--

01:04:40.000 | What you lose with the translations is you lose the flavor for the place

01:04:44.000 | and the deep flavor for the language.

01:04:46.000 | Right, we found a whole-- I found at a used bookstore a bunch of the Hollister books in Spanish,

01:04:53.000 | and so I bought all those.

01:04:55.000 | And those have been great, but still you're getting, you know, Baytown--

01:05:00.000 | Is it Baytown or where they-- I can't remember--

01:05:03.000 | Does the town even have a name?

01:05:05.000 | It's fictional anyway.

01:05:06.000 | Exactly, you've got Meadowbrook and Bayport and whatnot, all these made-up places.

01:05:09.000 | Which actually are totally hard to pin down to.

01:05:12.000 | You're kind of like, "Well, I think they're in the Northeast."

01:05:14.000 | It's Northeast USA, right?

01:05:16.000 | So you're getting like this any town, vanilla Northeast USA experience, but in Spanish.

01:05:22.000 | Well, that's better than no Spanish, but I don't want that.

01:05:25.000 | I want my children to have a different sense of place that comes through in the literature.

01:05:30.000 | But I can't find those same series, those same books that are set in Valencia or whatnot.

01:05:37.000 | So it's really cool when you find it.

01:05:39.000 | Recently, our eldest has been working his way through the audiobooks for Los Futbolisimos,

01:05:45.000 | which is a story that was placed in Spain.

01:05:49.000 | And so it's been wonderful to have the locations be in Spain and to have more of that experience.

01:05:54.000 | Right, even that one is a little advanced for his age.

01:05:56.000 | It's got some themes that we have to talk about.

01:05:59.000 | But still, you know, it's something.

01:06:02.000 | Well, I think we're done for tonight.

01:06:04.000 | I just wanted to share.

01:06:07.000 | I'm like, "Why is anyone interested in our homeschooling?"

01:06:09.000 | But I find out people are.

01:06:11.000 | And so I guess I would just say that the thing that I love about homeschooling is you can make your homeschooling match you.

01:06:18.000 | I was homeschooled when I was a child, and I have a bunch of siblings who all have children.

01:06:23.000 | And they all homeschool in different ways at different times and in different reasons.

01:06:29.000 | But they're all very different than my wife and I are.

01:06:32.000 | I've got one sibling that's super into classical homeschooling and super hardcore on those themes.

01:06:39.000 | I've got one sibling who's totally into relaxed homeschooling.

01:06:42.000 | I've got another who kind of mixes it up here and there.

01:06:45.000 | And one child's in private school and one child's in homeschool and kind of going back and forth.

01:06:50.000 | And the point is, as a parent, it's your responsibility not to be committed to a dogmatic approach,

01:06:56.000 | but to say, "What's best for my child right now?"

01:06:58.000 | And with homeschooling, you have the ability to adapt, to change, to adjust, and to relate to the needs of that child.

01:07:05.000 | And that's the ultimate goal that we all have is to see our children flourish.

01:07:09.000 | We love to do what we love with the travel and the stuff that we're into.

01:07:14.000 | I'm into languages. I think it's fun. I think it's neat. I think it's a cool thing to do.

01:07:19.000 | And that rubs off on the children.

01:07:21.000 | I think I've discovered good techniques that have made it easy, but some people aren't into that.

01:07:27.000 | And that's totally fine.

01:07:28.000 | Quick note on techniques. With our child that's in first grade but not yet reading and also not taking naps,

01:07:34.000 | we have found audio books to be invaluable.

01:07:37.000 | So she does part of the time listening in Spanish, which has been really hard to find good books for that.

01:07:43.000 | So hard.

01:07:44.000 | And part of the time listening in English.

01:07:46.000 | Yeah. If any of my audience members are speaking in Spanish, there is such an opportunity,

01:07:52.000 | at least that I think there's an opportunity, for some really good Spanish homeschool blogs.

01:07:57.000 | I've read a few of them. There's some in the Charlotte Mason world.

01:08:00.000 | But what is happening is there's so much English influence from kind of just the American homeschooling stuff

01:08:07.000 | that there's not enough authentic materials in Spanish.

01:08:11.000 | And so like audio books for my first grader, I'm forever searching.

01:08:15.000 | I've spent hours combing through Audible, finding and trying different things.

01:08:21.000 | I've bought dozens of books at this point in time, trying to find something that will grab her with the story.

01:08:28.000 | The thing that has been the biggest success is the boxcar children in Spanish.

01:08:33.000 | Los chicos del vagón de carga.

01:08:35.000 | They love that. But the problem is there's only first five of them.

01:08:39.000 | There's hundreds of them in English.

01:08:40.000 | And they're all available as audio books.

01:08:42.000 | But in Spanish, they only translated the first five.

01:08:45.000 | And so I've got all five of them on audio books, but I don't have Spanish translations.

01:08:51.000 | I have commissioned my own readings of books in Spanish and made my own private audio books from a native speaker

01:09:06.000 | just to try to solve this problem.

01:09:07.000 | But there is not enough good quality Spanish audio books available for first graders.

01:09:16.000 | What is available is usually twaddle.

01:09:19.000 | I know that's kind of a Charlotte Mason-y word, but to describe it,

01:09:21.000 | it's either just the same old bedtime stories, bedtime stories, or just dumb stuff.

01:09:27.000 | And what I'm looking for is stories that are going to be actual stories with a plot and especially series.

01:09:35.000 | Like our first grader right now is really into the Bobsy Twins.

01:09:38.000 | And thankfully with LibriVox, I can get at least 20 or so free audio books there.

01:09:45.000 | And she loves those.

01:09:46.000 | But I'm desperate for that in Spanish, and I can't find it.

01:09:50.000 | It's been super hard to find stuff in Spanish.

01:09:52.000 | Every time we look, it's just fables, fables, and more fables.

01:09:56.000 | And they're just junk. It's all junk.

01:09:59.000 | And we've already had her try to listen to Platero y Yo.

01:10:02.000 | She didn't really love that.

01:10:04.000 | That worked.

01:10:05.000 | And some of the good ones, right?

01:10:07.000 | I started her on the Anne of Green Gables series in Spanish, but it's just beyond her age.

01:10:14.000 | It's not interesting to her yet.

01:10:16.000 | Right, and we tried with Jerónimo Stilton, which we thought was hilarious.

01:10:20.000 | But she hasn't really grabbed onto it.

01:10:22.000 | We'll find it. We'll find it.

01:10:23.000 | Just pointing it out that there are options out there.

01:10:25.000 | And as an educator, a lot of your challenge is just finding the right books.

01:10:28.000 | And if you can find the right books, everything is easy.

01:10:30.000 | But you spend hours searching for those books.

01:10:33.000 | Another reason we love Amblesight Online, because I don't have to search for the books.

01:10:37.000 | They're just there.

01:10:38.000 | They've been pre-read by people who share my values.

01:10:41.000 | And I can just endorse them without having to pre-read them.

01:10:45.000 | Absolutely.

01:10:46.000 | So, thanks, babe, for coming back on the show.

01:10:48.000 | Thanks for having me after six years.

01:10:50.000 | We'll try to make it less than six in the future.

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2021-11-17_Homeschooling_and_Worldschooling_with_Mrs._RPF