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Over a month! Yikes!

I had very good intentions! Lots of things to blog about. Strangely they were never blogged.

Let us go back.

In February 3 friends, one other baby, Meg, and I went to Pennsylvania for the Homeschool conference. It was fabulous. I really enjoyed the time spent in the car with 3 other more experienced mommies. I really picked their brains, let me tell you. They are all already homeschooling at least some and I see the fruit of their hard work raising their children in their children. The conference was really enjoyable. Dr. Veith, from World Magazine, opened the conference with a talk about the historical practice of Classical Christian Homeschooling. I only wished he had notes with some dates and spelled names (Johannes Sturmm? Storme? Sturme?) Anyway, he was very encouraging that this can be done. After the opening session there were three seminars you could choose from. I chose 1) Introduction To Classical Christian Education, 2) Introduction to Poetry (but ended up in the session about teaching Bible and catechism to our children with a fussy baby girl), and 3) a session about Art and the Hudson River art Movement. I wish I hadn’t gone to the Intro to Classical Christian Ed because I had already devoured Susan Wise Bauer’s The Well-Trained Mind. I felt like I ought to go to it because it was my first time at the conference, but there wasn’t really anything new for me there. The Poetry lecture was quite good. I chose that one because Poetry doesn’t really do much for me (I tend to skip those posts at Buried Treasure. Sorry Carmon) and I want to understand it better. I enjoyed about the first half, and had to take Meg into the cry room where I heard the second half of the talk on teaching Catechism. I enjoyed that too, although he encouraged use of Training Hearts, Teaching Minds which Jason and I are already using as we grew up not knowing the catechisms. The third session, again by Dr. Veith, on the Hudson River art school was excellent. I learned a lot about what to look for and what not to look for in paintings. I need to get Heather’s notes and copy them. The closing session was done by Matt Whitling who gave a very compelling talk that we homeschool not as a reaction to society/schools, but to teach our children to think, tear down bad arguments, and take dominion. I’m not very postmillenial, but this was a great clarion call and made me *want* to be postmil.

Heather and I decided to split the cost of buying the tapes, and I’m looking forward to hearing the rest of the Poetry talk, Dr Veith’s other session, and relistening to the Art and Closing sessions.

I told my friends that this trip was a “recon” mission for our family. It was absolutely worthwhile, and I’m pretty convinced this is the way we wish to educate our child(ren).

I also managed to buy only three books and two cds from the book room. More about them in the next post. I hear Meg waking from her nap 🙂