Hope you are all enjoying a nice winter break and Happy, Happy Holidays! Here at Summerly, we’re enjoying lots of quiet family time, but are also busy working on things for 2017 — more (and more regular) blog posts, interviews with interesting homeschooling families, and adding unit study pdfs to the store. Look for all Read More
Year: 2016
Alternatives to College
This article originally ran in Home|School|Life magazine. by Shawne Taylor There’s been a push over the last 20 years or so for everyone to go to college. Families start planning for it when their children are still in preschool. High School students are pushed to take the hardest classes, fill their transcripts with extracurricular activities Read More
Ten Reasons Why I Play Minecraft
By now, everyone has heard of Minecraft. And most likely you either have a child who plays the game or know a child who plays the game. But how many parents are playing too? I started playing this year when my now-adult son and my seven year old both asked me to join in. I’d Read More
Soul Cakes
Youngest son and I made soul cakes today, to take to the World History Grab Bag class that I teach on Mondays with our local homeschool group. We’ll be discussing the history and traditions of Halloween, so it seemed like a great time to get into the kitchen and try out a new (to us) Read More
Changing Course
I thought I had our homeschooling plans loosely worked out for this year. But two months in, I’m tossing the plans aside and changing course. When my oldest son was younger it took me a while to figure out how he liked to learn and what worked best for us. We tried a lot of Read More
Take A Hike!
This post originally ran on the Atlanta Homeschool blog, Fall 2015. Five Great Fall Hikes in Atlanta and Beyond Fall in Atlanta is beautiful. The trees are bursting with color, the oppressive heat of summer is gone, and the pollen count is lower than what we find in spring. To me, this makes fall the Read More
Product Review: Age of Mythology the Board Game
My boys and I spent last Sunday playing a three hour game of Age of Mythology. We’ve had this board game for years — since the oldest was about 8 years old (he’s now 19) — but it had been years since we’d played it, and our youngest (the 7 year old) had never joined Read More
How to Fill 4.5 Hours
New homeschoolers may sometimes feel overwhelmed with the idea of filling the equivalent of “4.5 hours per day, at least 180 days a year” as required by Georgia state law. But, if you let go of the idea that education has to look like school, you may find that it’s not as difficult to fill Read More
The Bliss of an UnderScheduled Life
This post originally ran on the home/school/life blog, Summer 2015. We have had a lazy summer. Not lazy in the sleeping all day, not getting anything done sort of way (though there were days like that, I admit), but lazy in the most generous sense of the word – relaxed, unstressed, the following of our Read More