(gentle music) - Welcome, friends, to this episode of the Everyday Educator podcast. I'm your host, Lisa Bailey, and I am excited to spend some time with you today as we encourage one another, learn together, and ponder the delights and challenges that make homeschooling the adventure of a lifetime. Whether you're just considering this homeschooling possibility or deep into the daily delight of family learning, I believe you'll enjoy thinking along with us.

But don't forget, although this online community is awesome, you'll find even closer support in a local CC community. So go to classicalconversations.com and find a community near you today. Well, listeners, I'm super excited to talk to you today and to talk to my friend Brittany today about one of my favorite things to do, read.

I love to read, I've always been a big reader. And I have one of my dear friends with me today that I know is also a big reader, Brittany Lewis. Brittany, thank you for being with me today on the podcast. - Oh, it's my pleasure. I love this topic and I love speaking with you.

- We have so much fun when we're together. So you guys who are listening, it may seem like you are eavesdropping on a conversation between two friends 'cause we might really get to go in as we talk about reading. 'Cause I know that we're both pretty jazzed about what reading is and what it can do for us and for our families and for our communities.

Listeners, I know that some of you are probably big readers yourselves. Some of you probably have kids who already love to read, but I'm also aware that there are lots of us homeschoolers who don't particularly enjoy reading or maybe who grew up not really loving to read like we hope our children will.

And so the conversation today is gonna be all over the place. It's not just for people who love to read or have a whole row of books that they're waiting to read. It is for people who are wondering what reading together can do for our families and for our homeschools.

So it really is for everybody, even if you don't think of yourself as a big reader. Brittany, let me ask you this question just so everybody can get to know you a little bit. Are you a big reader? - Yes, I am a big reader. But not everyone in my family is a big reader and there definitely been lots of areas of learning that I did not enjoy reading.

Some I'm learning to enjoy. - Yeah, you mean like there are lots of different things to read and some of them you like to read and some of them not so much, huh? - Yes, yes. I think homeschooling's helped me become broader in my interests because I want to help my kids to be able to pursue those natural loves that are different than mine.

- Oh, that's really good. Now you know what, that's a great point. That's a way that we can love our kids well if we are willing to read things that aren't particularly winsome or interesting to us because one of our children is bent in that direction. That's really good, that's really good.

Were you always a big reader? Why did you like to read or why do you like to read? - I think when I was little my parents were great about taking me to the library and we actually belonged to a church that just had a fantastic kids section and I was really drawn to the fairy tales and the myths and the old stories and my parents were great about reading those things to me and encouraging us to pick up good books and so that did nourish my mind and encourage me to read.

I think in spite of my education, which sort of tended to feel like dry and I was just a public school kid. Sometimes I would have a good teacher who would want us to read Charlotte's Web together and then other times we would be handed pretty dry canned reading comprehension things that I just wanted to fly through it so I could go to the library and find something worth reading, you know what I mean?

- I so know what you mean. I had those same teachers. I had a teacher in the fifth grade who, and a lot of teachers I think believed that once you were in the fifth grade you were too old to be read aloud to. I blessedly had a teacher who did not believe that and when we came back from lunch every day she read us a chapter of Caddy Woodlawn and we had a double classroom and so she held Spellbound between 50 and 60 fifth graders just with her voice reading us that book and I absolutely loved it.

It was great and I was lucky to have, like you, a parent who took me to the library. I can remember my mom taking us downtown to Charlotte on the city bus to go to the big library and I loved checking out books there and at our church library so that's really cool.

So I can see how that growing up might have made you a reader. Why do you like to read now? Now I like to read. I think the longer I have homeschooled I just get hungry myself and so as I'm teaching my students, I'm a challenge tutor right now or as I'm just wrestling through something with my youngest who I'm still homeschooling right now, I sometimes just feel like dry in my spirit and I read for pleasure to kind of fill that up or I pursue something I know I need to learn and picking up a book on a subject that I don't particularly love yet but the person who wrote the book loves it and sees all the beauty so just being able to see the world or a subject through their eyes helps me to love it too and be able to pass on that excitement of learning something new to my students or my kids.

I like that. I was gonna ask you what is so great about reading and I love what you just said that you can almost catch the excitement from somebody else. If you are reading about a passion that's not yours but you can tap into the author's excitement or understanding or zeal, then you can catch a breath of that.

That's cool. That's true. That's a good reason to read. What else? What else is so great about reading? What does reading do for us or teach us? I think it helps us. I mean, aside from, of course, reading the book of all books, the Bible, which is a living word.

That is, I'm just assuming that we all agree that that's worth our time, spending that for ourselves and with our kids and then also just reading old books and new books helps us participate in that great conversation that's been going on between human beings for all time because the Lord created us.

We're Christians. We are supposed to be people of the word and to be about words and learning. And so I think the more we read, the more we learn about his world and the better we're able to read his word too. And also to kind of govern our own words as we learn from others.

Yeah, that's really good. There's a lot to think about there. And what you said, I appreciate that. You shared with me one time an Isaac Watts quote that reminds me about this. Will you share it again? Sure, yes. I've been researching him. He was a great hymn writer and pastor, Isaac Watts.

And he also wrote a logic book and was the authority for lots of Ivy League schools and schools across the Atlantic too for many years. So that's interesting. I didn't know that about him. But he wrote a book called "The Improvement of the Mind" and in it, he was just expressing some general rules for the improvement of knowledge.

And this book actually influenced the great scientist Michael Faraday and his development of the scientific method. Isn't that wonderful? That's cool. Who would have thought that a scientist and a hymnist would be connected in what they think about learning and reading? Right, and he begins his rules for the improvement of knowledge with this quote.

So I'll read it to you. Yeah. He says, "No man is obliged to learn and know everything. This can neither be sought nor required for it's utterly impossible. Yet all persons are under some obligation to improve their own understanding. Otherwise it will be a barren desert or a forest overgrown with weeds and brambles.

Universal ignorance or infinite errors will overspread the mind, which is utterly neglected and lies without any cultivation." So that image of that metaphor that he says, if we don't continue to learn that our minds can become a barren desert or a forest overgrown with weeds and brambles, I thought, wow, that sounds really biblical.

I think I need to keep reading. That's been an encouraging thing to learn from someone in the past like Isaac Watts. I've actually been sharing like one of his, I think it's 12 rules. And so I've been sharing one rule a week with my challenge students right now as we've been thinking about just being humble before the things we're learning and continuing to read and to learn.

That's a great idea. I bet your challenge students, that gives them something good to chew on, too. I like that because it helps us. You know, Brittany, as homeschooling parents, when our kids are little, reading is all about giving them that skill of decoding these letters and these sounds so that they can read.

And as home educators, we feel like reading is kind of the gateway skill that makes everything else approachable and open to you. But the whole idea that reading stays important, even after you learn how to do it, right, that it stays important because it's how your mind grows and flourishes and adds new ideas.

I love the whole image of books tickling your mind. You know, when I was, you know, when children are ticklish, you know, you can just tickle them and it stimulates them and it makes them move and jerk and giggle or shriek or run or cuddle or whatever. It provokes you.

And I think that that's why reading is like tickling my mind. It provokes my mind in new directions. It either provokes me to reject something or to grab a hold of it or to look at it or to laugh at it or to argue with it. I just, the Isaac Watt quote of the whole idea that your mind might become a barren desert without taking in new ideas is really cool to me.

- It is. I was struck recently by one of my students said, what do you have to do to a garden to get it full of weeds? Nothing. And I went, oh yes, yes, that is right. That is right. - Oh wow, that's very profound. That's very profound. So listeners, you don't want to do nothing and let your precious gardens be ruled by weeds.

And so don't just teach your children to read though. Read with them, read good things with them. Like Brittany said, old books as well. Think of the great conversations that have already happened in the world. I don't want to be left out of some of those great conversations. And the only way to get in on it at this point is to read those old books.

That's cool. - That's right. So how do we get kids interested in reading? So we've taught them how to read and they become proficient readers. And some kids I think are like we were as little girls, Brittany. We were just into, I used reading and fairy tales and mystery stories and legends as escape literature and just the world of the mind.

I lived in my imagination. I went on a thousand trips as a child just from reading. But how do we get kids who maybe are just learning how to read well enough that they could enjoy pleasure reading on their own or any kind of reading? How do we get kids interested in reading?

What's been your experience? - Well, my experience has been rocky actually. I mean, like it's been difficult at times because two of my three kids are dyslexic. So reading didn't come as naturally as it did to one of my kids. And so it was extra challenging. And, but I also think it was, I'm so grateful for all of those extra days and hours of reading together side by side of me reading to them.

And then for a much longer time period, way past the fifth grade, having them read to me. Even now, I mean, I love listening to my daughter who's in challenge three read out loud. And we do that regularly in seminar where we are reading something together and to listen to it out loud together and to practice reading together.

I've found even with adults in book clubs, it's good to practice. It helps us get better as we read aloud together. But I think trying to set aside time each day where we give our students, our children at home, the best stories, sitting side by side, doing what we can to make it enjoyable.

I know I did things in my house, like we did a morning time, which I know that a lot of our CC families are familiar with and Scribblers in particular does such a wonderful job of encouraging a morning time of reading. That was really foundational to my kids to help them love reading and love stories.

And even though for some of my children, it was harder for them to, they could really struggle against just anxiety over reading or frustration or even humble feelings of I'm not smart enough to do this kind of a fear, which wasn't true, but something they had to battle. In spite of all of that, my kids would say that they don't regret any of it, that they're really grateful.

They still love to read, but they went through times where they didn't want to read. And I worried about it, that they weren't naturally drawn to when they had time not studying to go read a book. I really worried about that, but I think their souls were just full.

- Maybe it was time just to think about what they had read or what you had read together. - Yeah, or go play. I mean, just the mind continues to work on those things. - That is so true. That's really, that's good. That's very good. I know that I had one daughter who loved to read and she immersed herself in stories, and one who loved to read as a family.

She loved reading aloud time and story time. And like you, we continued to do it well into high school. So we read aloud as a family. We still, actually we still read aloud as a family and my girls are grown and married with families of their own. But when they come home for holidays, we still read aloud together.

So even my daughter who did not love reading as much as her sister found a lot of warm fellowship in reading together and it drew our family together. And I know that she and I read a lot of the challenge, upper challenge literature together because I had not done as much of that with my older daughter.

And I felt like I had missed something. And so she was gracious enough to share the read aloud time with me. And it was a real bonding experience for us. I felt like I got to know her as I saw her reactions to things that we were reading together.

And I wouldn't trade anything for that. - I agree, that has been our experience too. And I think it creates like a shared culture. There's jokes my kids say to one another because of stories we've read or audio books we've listened to or dramatized things that we've listened to and enjoyed together that just creates a whole family culture and those close relationships because you spent that time listening and imagining together.

- Yes, yes. And asking the what if questions and why did this have to happen questions and why did that character do that and what else could have been said or done. - Yeah, I think that is one of the benefits, I think of reading together is that you get somebody to go back and forth with.

And another big benefit to me of reading together is that you get the benefit of somebody else's point of view. I know sometimes I read something and it hits me a certain way and I will say out loud what I got from that or how that character seemed to me or what that argument either was persuasive or wasn't.

And I'm always for some reason shocked to find that somebody else thought differently. Somebody else got a different message from that story or had a different problem with the logic used in an argument than I did. And so one of the benefits is just getting somebody else's perspective. Does that ever happen to y'all, Brittany?

Do you like all the same things that your kids like? - No, I don't love all of the same thing. We're, interestingly enough, the Lord just really gives us children that are very different from us. And that's been such a gift. - Isn't it funny? - Yeah, yes, it has been a good thing.

I have enjoyed learning about rockets and historical battles and things that I wasn't naturally drawn to with my son. I've enjoyed trying to become more of a lover of the natural world and science with my second born, my daughter who is going to nursing school. And I've enjoyed learning about all kinds of hands-on type arts and cooking and baking and things that maybe I was drawn to too, but it's been fun to experience that with my youngest who's artistic and loves to learn about all kinds of things that are drawing her as well.

And that gives me a broader perspective and a way to love her better too, to participate in that with her. - I asked my kids like, "What are your favorite stories we read?" And they all had such a variety of answers. It was fun to hear that certain things stood out as their favorite and they were all different.

That was really fun. - Isn't that great? I like that. I like something that you just said. I'd like to chase that rabbit for a minute. You said that reading with your children helped you to know them better and love them better and appreciate them more. In what way is that true?

- Yeah, yeah. I think in reading things that my kids were naturally drawn to that I wasn't, I was able to figure out kind of their bent, like the way that the Lord had crafted them and always been praying and like looking for where, what is this child going to become?

Where are they called to be used in the world and where will they go? What will they do? What will they love and pursue? And that's been a wonderful gift. My son is interested in all kinds of things that as a kid, he loved the old anything heroic hero type stories and often things that were really challenging and even frightening to me, he thrived on it.

I remember him coming to me one day and saying, "Mom, give me a mission." And I thought, who is this child my son is becoming? But you could see it in the things that he was interested in and at the same time is very musical too. So that was just, our home is filled with guitars and piano and I didn't grow up in a house like that.

We love music, but my youngest is following in her brother's footsteps and that, learning how to do those things. And yeah, I just think reading together, we start to have glimmers into our kids' souls that we wouldn't have known otherwise. So if we have sharp eyes and prayerful spirits, I think the Lord is good to show us that, to show where we need to encourage them.

- That's great. That is great. That's a really good thing. That's something I'm gonna chew on for a while. Especially as I'm blessed now to have a grandson who when he was tiny, he would sit in your lap. As long as you would read, he would sit in your lap.

Now he's about 15 months old now and he has found his legs and he likes to go, go, go. But he still likes to hear a story, but when he was really little, he was constantly bringing a book and he would just bring a book and hold his arms up and he wanted you to pick him up and read that book.

And I am looking forward to knowing him through his story choices and getting to know him through what he might like to spend time learning about with me. And I kinda wanna, at this point, it just occurred to me that we've talked a lot about stories and fairy tales and myths and adventure tales.

There are lots of other kinds of things that we could read. What are some other kinds of things that lend themselves to reading together? - I think history and explorations of nature. I think biographies are really helpful because we need examples of others. There's tons of wonderful missionary biographies and stories of heroes and leaders of the past that are worth our time together.

I know that that can shape us and give us examples from which to draw. Poetry, there's all kinds of nonfiction. I know that we've, at my house, have a wide variety of things that my kids have naturally been interested in. So we've given them books for Christmas, for instance, that I thought were beautifully illustrated or particularly appealing to that particular kid.

Some of those things we've ended up sharing together because they were excited to share those things. - I think that a lot of times, especially if we as an adult, as a child, if we loved reading fiction and we loved stories and we loved all kinds of adventures, I liked all kinds of stories.

I liked historical stories. I loved biographies when I was a kid. I loved mystery stories. I loved adventure stories. I loved stories of children that were set in other countries, so I like to read about other countries. I loved stories, and I think sometimes, if that's what we loved when we were little, we don't think about other things to suggest.

We have a bunch of maps. We have books of maps. We have at our house, 'cause my husband is a map-loving man, and so we have a lot of books that trace the history of the world through maps. So we have tons of map books, and one of my daughters was really interested in the presidents when she was little, and so we have a lot of biographies of the presidents.

We have some kid books about the Constitution. So these are obviously all nonfiction things, but they were things that my girls really enjoyed, and that you mentioned poetry, and I can remember loving poetry as a child and reading it and reciting it to my girls when they were little, and I did more reciting it to them when they were little, and I don't think they realized for a long time that there could be a book of poems, and we could read these poems in a book, and so that was a lot of fun, but I have, for years I've been able to speak at practicums around the country, and I've had people come up and say, we had to really look hard to find things that our kids liked to read.

Some people would say, my kids never liked to read, and I was opposed to it at first, but we've got some graphic novels, what we used to call comic books, and we've read those, and then I had one person that said, my kids were fascinated by names in history or in stories that we read, and so we got a book of names that told the history and the meaning of all kinds of names, and I thought, that's a wild thing to read aloud, but it gets your family reading together and talking together and thinking together, and so that's a great thing to read.

- I agree, we've even had Calvin and Hobbes and joke books that were fun. I remember my kids have all gone through periods where they found the joke book pile and wanted to share those, which has been so fun. I gained a whole vocabulary for construction vehicles and space exploration for myself.

- Yeah, I didn't think about that, yeah. - I had no idea, I was like, what's that thing? And he would know, I mean, he would just pop up and I had to learn that vocabulary with him 'cause he wanted to know what's that, what's that, what's that? - Isn't that great.

I think it's really one way that parents can chase the read together is find the hobby that your child is interested in, and like Brittany said, find a manual of how to do that thing. If your child is all of a sudden, is a Boy Scout interested in camping, then find some camping books or find some trail books, some trail descriptions, some camping or hiking books that you could read together and pursue, that's you pursuing your child's love, pursuing their passion, and you're gonna read together will give you ideas of things to talk about together.

- Let me ask you this, Brittany, 'cause you said you had some kids who like to read more than other kids, so I know that you've got some experience with this. Is there hope for parents whose kids just do not like to read? - Yes, I think it's one of those areas that we have to take on faith and keep sowing those daily seeds and try to do things that make reading together pleasurable, like reading out loud in morning time, or we used to do, my kids were like, "Poetry, I don't wanna read poetry," so we did Wednesdays, Tea and Poetry.

We would take a break from all of our studies and I would make it special, something to drink, it wasn't always tea 'cause they weren't into tea, some sort of snack we'd have together. For my child who liked to bake, she would often bake something for us and we would have just a few minutes together, finding, remembering that you can read with your ears is important, there's great audiobooks and dramatized versions of stories that might get your child interested.

Reading outdoors, you don't have to read in a chair. Reading in hammocks, one year when I noticed one of my struggling readers kind of was starting to take off, well, they love to be outdoors, so my husband put a hammock in our front yard. Between the only two trees that were close enough to hold a hammock and they were constantly in that hammock reading and it became a thing of pleasure.

Inviting others in, I know our campus, our littles have, our young learners have had a book club of their own that moms have made really pleasurable. But I think most of all, oh, and for little kids, I mean, some of my children haven't enjoyed sitting still, so giving them something to do with their hands and being really generous with the kinds of things that they would enjoy and just being, if it gets a little noisy, it's okay.

Just trust that they're listening anyway, even if they're actively moving. In fact, one of my kids needed to move in order to listen. - Yep, absolutely. - I think the more you can just kind of encourage their natural event and just be patient, try to give them books so beautiful and so good that they'd wanna eat them.

I think is what one publisher said about their books. But that can be, it might just be that the child needs to grow and learn or come upon a subject they're hungry to learn about and they, because of your example, they know how to do it. So they might leap off on their own at some point and start using all the tools of learning to learn about that thing.

And that can be just so encouraging to us as parents to remember the days of, "Oh no, what have I done wrong? "My child doesn't like to read on their own yet." - Yes, oh, Brittany, you have been so encouraging. All of those seem like such inspired suggestions, but they are also very hopeful.

They are, I love, love that you said, "Make it pleasurable and be regular." And then all the good ideas that you have offered our listeners, changing the venue and let them move and most of all, be patient, be patient and keep building the relationship. I think some of the things that my girls remember the most about reading together is not what we read.

It was how it made us feel. It was warm and we were together and they felt special and they had my full attention. And we built, like you said earlier, a family culture, lots of inside jokes and lots of joint memories. And that to me is one of the beauties of reading together.

Before I let you go, 'cause I always get good ideas from you and I've got my pen at the ready. Tell me what are three books that you are reading now? I know you're reading way more than three, so I'm just asking for three. - Yeah, well, I try to read old books and new books 'cause I remember C.S.

Lewis said, "It's a good rule after reading a new book "to never allow yourself another new one "until you've read an old one in between." - Kinda like that too. - Yeah, or if that's too much, read one. He says read one, old one, to every three new ones.

So an old book I'm reading is, it's called "The Annotated Alice." It's "Alice in Wonderland." And the second book, "Through the Looking Glass," and it's beautifully illustrated and has all kinds of interesting footnotes. I've always been fascinated with her and my youngest loves "Alice in Wonderland" too. So "The Annotated Alice," the definitive edition, it's by Lewis Carroll and Martin Gardner, who's a Lewis Carroll expert, edited that.

So that's been fun, it's helped, it's been fun to figure out those mysteries that are in that book and the funny parts, the jokes that I don't get all the time. I'm reading, I just finished "The Inklings" by Humphrey Carpenter. It's about the, all the groups, the writers, C.S.

Lewis and Tolkien and Charles Williams and others. Yeah, and kind of their, how they were educated and how they grew up and then how they encouraged each other's work. I just thought, what a good thing to learn about community and learning in communities. That's been really helpful because they did, a lot of them receive a classical Christian education and we're trying to recover that.

So that's been interesting. I listened to it on audio book. That was good. And then my last one has just been super fascinating. It's really short. It's called "Lifting the Veil, Imagination and the Kingdom of God." And it's by Malcolm Guy. He's a living poet, used to be a '70s rocker.

The Lord converted him through poetry in a similar way to C.S. Lewis. And he's just a wonderful gift to, I think, the Christian world and the academic world. He's a sonnet writer, but he wrote this lovely, it's really small. It's called "Lifting the Veil, Imagination and the Kingdom of God." And that's just been encouraging to me to think about how the Lord gave us both reason and imagination and how they kind of have a Lord bridge those.

- Wow. - Himself. - Yeah. - So those are three I'm reading right now. - That is cool. And I like it that you and I have talked about this before, that we're hardly ever anymore just reading one book at a time. I was saying to you earlier, Brittany, that I feel there are different parts of my personality.

And so I need to feed all those pieces of myself. And so it takes different kinds of books to do that. And so parents, listeners, we encourage you to read, to minister to yourself, to grow and to learn and to keep learning yourself so that you will not become a barren desert.

So don't read only to encourage your children, but read to embolden yourself as a lifelong learner and as a grower. And in that vein, Brittany, I want to ask you the question, what makes you an everyday educator? - I think because I'm a human being, we're learners. I'm a parent, soon to be a grandparent.

I'm an ambassador for classical Christian education renewal, a CC lover, an advocate, and I've learned that what we learn is meant to be shared. And so when we share it, we gain new friends, we get to see the world a new way, and we encourage others to do the same.

And that helps us all to know the Lord and to make Him known. - I love that, that is lovely. That's a great reason to be an everyday educator. If you listeners want to keep learning, to keep educating yourself as you educate your children, reading is a great way to do that.

And I know that Brittany has been a blessing to you today as you have thought about the whys of reading together and the what could we read and even how can I encourage my children to keep on reading. Thank you, Brittany, this has been a great time together. Listeners, I want to encourage you to look toward another great time that we could all have together.

This is gonna sound like I'm telling you something that is so far ahead, you're gonna wonder why I'm even mentioning it. Our national events weekend for 2024 has already been set. So you could mark your calendar now for the annual national events weekend on May 2nd through the 4th in Southern Pines, North Carolina.

And why am I telling you about this now? Well, it is because registration is opening November 1st. So if you are interested in attending the national events weekend in Southern Pines, you can check that out at classicalconversationsfoundation.org. This is a conference that's put on by Classical Conversations Foundations. It's a great time, families from all over the United States come and have three full days of events and learning about classical education, but also celebrating the hard work of students.

Some of the things that happen at national event weekend include national conference where you get to hear lots of great speakers, but also national commencement. It's our official graduation ceremony for challenge grads and their parents. And this year you will get to see the National Memory Master Championship where 16 foundation students compete for the esteemed title of National Memory Master and a grand prize of $10,000.

There's tons of stuff to do. There are food trucks, there's a celebration party, there are outdoor adventure camps for kids. If you're interested, go, like I said, to classicalconversationsfoundation.org and check out. Registration opens on November 1st. The conference is May 2nd through the 4th. Brittany, thank you again for being with us.

Listeners, I hope you will go and read something together with your family today. See you next time. Bye-bye. (gentle music) (music fades)