Homeschooling With Ease
28 poems on 28 postcards. 28 days to contemplate and pray for peace. This project hits all the right notes.
Sign ups close on January 28, but I’ll be applying on this Saturday. You come too! Then we can be in the same group and send each other poems.
Head here to get all the details.
One morning years ago, when I should have already been moving my attention toward our school day, a tweet from Sally Thomas flashed on my screen and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
Question that struck me today: if you can have a Latin-centered curriculum, why couldn't you have a poetry-centered one? How wd it look?
— Sally Thomas (@SallyThomasNC) September 18, 2014
The internet can be rather magical like that. You’re happily drinking a second cup of coffee, and then an idea shows up that will captivate you for years.
Lindsay Crandall, a photographer whose light and composition sing, recently posted about her plans for a year long Literary Happiness Project, a way forward in her reading and writing life. I was immediately intrigued.
Then I saw a comment from my sweet friend, Tresta Payne. So I wasn’t the only one who was intrigued! Lindsay replied to Tresta about the similarities between the Literary Happiness Project and Tresta’s Homeschool MFA. Ah, another thread!
Homeschool MFA comes from Patricia Zaballos, one more homeschooling mama mentor whose life is saturated with writing. I’ve started using #homeschoolMFA to document my own learning, and Tresta is writing about her learning journey as well.
One the same day that Lindsay posted, Sally Thomas offered this excellent poetry submission advice:
Get 'em back, send 'em out again. Lather, rinse, repeat. (and if, when you get 'em back, you think, "YOUR LOSS, SUCKERS," well, that's part of the story, too).
Posted by Sally Thomas on Tuesday, January 8, 2019
And wouldn’t you know it, I got a rejection letter that same day. So, I followed her advice. I said the litany of humility and sent another selection of poems out. I’m especially inclined to take Sally’s advice just now. I’m taking her wonderful poetry class through Homeschool Connections. It’s a recorded class for high school students that is rich and thoughtful and a good next step in my own Homeschool MFA.
We started back to school last week, but we waited until Epiphany to fully leave behind our Advent memory work. We’ve still been singing “Joy to the World” and reciting most of Luke 2. But tomorrow we’ll start a new cycle including Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
At the library I found a picture book version of the poem illustrated by Susan Jeffers. The wintery world of the poem is punctuated with small bits of vibrant, almost glowing, color. The man with the wondering horse is out to bring nuts and berries to the forest creatures–very much still the work of the Christmas season! The dust jacket includes a piece of vellum that slips over the scene. It makes it harder to see and more mysterious. I told the kids that if this book was all I showed them all year long, it would be a good year!
We’ll be pairing this with a new biographical picture book called Papa Is a Poet. It tells about Robert Frost’s early poetic career from the point of view of his children. The book includes a large selection of poems, including “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” We learned this by heart during our Fall Co-op. Joseph, the 5 year old, declared it too rhyme-y! I wonder what he’ll think of the rhymes in “Stopping by Woods”? In fact, my own distaste for rhyme is part of the reason I chose these poems. Frost still moves me even though I don’t care for rhyme. I’ve got a Joseph Brodsky essay on Frost at the top of my stack of books, right next to his Nativity Poems.
So, this New Year looks like it might be a good one for poems. If only the weather would turn and we’d get some snow!
Here’s a printable version of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and “Nothing Gold Can Stay” with illustrations by Gertrud Mueller Nelson in case you need some poems for Monday’s Circle Time!
Let everyone who is thirsty come
Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift. –Revelation 22.17
The days are growing short. The Long Night’s Moon is growing full, and Solstice will be here soon. But there’s still time to make a little room for the baby who is coming! We can turn our attention to three areas that will open up a little space.
Attending to our physical spaces can work as a threshold, a way to access what’s most true. Tonight after dinner light a candle. Then you can do the dishes–not as a chore but as a gift.
Can you block off a day or two or even an afternoon between now and the end of the year when there’s nothing to do? Can you make intentional space to read aloud or work on a puzzle or color together? These quiet, reflective practices give us new eyes to see.
Especially during these holy days, the pressure to feel a certain way can weigh on us. Maybe this year we aren’t feeling connected or full of hope or at peace. But it’s in this practicing, in this lowly, daily tending that we make room for the holy to come.
