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Our first grade year is upon us and I couldn’t be more excited about the curriculum and resources we will be using this year! A quick heads up: it may seem like a lot going on here, but we actually have a very relaxed approach to homeschooling. We like to use multiple resources, but we plan for flexibility and make plenty of room for inspiration.
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Any Charlotte Mason fan worth their salt is familiar with the concept of narration–the oral or written demonstration of knowledge and understanding as an alternative to the “memorize, regurgitate, repeat” model of testing used by the majority of public school systems. Narration is a uniquely profound way to discover what your child has absorbed, retained, and taken a deeper interest in during your work together. However, it can sometimes feel awkward or stilted, especially early in the game when your children are young, or the concept of narration is new to them.
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It never fails to amaze me how effective simple things can be when it comes to homeschooling. Copywork–probably the most basic of concepts you could possible conceive of–can cover everything from spelling to handwriting to grammar to punctuation and composition. Dictation and French dictation–also very simple as in concept–reinforce all of these. Put them together,
I’m not really sure which aspect of the Brave Writer lifestyle I fell in love with first. Was it our first poetry teatimes, calling out Shel Silverstein poems over the roar of the jungle rain? Or the permission to devour audiobook after audiobook as we drive through forests and fields together, and call it school? Or was it the idea that the excited words of my tiny daughters as they told me stories were the very first seeds of their writing selves, and that I should catch them on a page like a teacup catching rain, so they could see the significance of their ideas?
I discovered a lot of amazing things in my first two years of homeschooling: blogs I binge-read until late in the night, libraries bursting with resources like a Christmas stocking, free workshops held at state parks and open spaces almost weekly, and some of the most beautiful books I’d ever laid my hands on (Nature Anatomy comes to mind!) But when I stumbled across Brave Writer, it was a whole new world in the best possible way.
Brave Writer is the kind of program I wish I had been part of as a child. Being the kind of little girl