Why I Love Homeschooling Our Eight Kids

This year I will graduate my first homeschooler. It seems like only yesterday I was teaching our oldest child to read, and now she’s an adult taking college courses. For the last 14 years I’ve been knee-deep in educating our eight children, recently as many as five grade levels at a time, in a one-room schoolhouse style approach. Sometimes it has felt more like being in the trenches – overwhelming and chaotic – but as my older children daily demonstrate, homeschooling is a great way to educate children and grow them into intelligent, connected, focused, happy adults. Continue reading

John Bozeman: The Frontier Entrepreneur Who Forged a Path to Montana

John Bozeman took two bullets to the chest and died in 1867 at age 32. One can only imagine what he would have achieved with another 32 years.

One of the most interesting exports from Georgia to Montana was the namesake for the latter state’s fourth largest city. His name was John Bozeman. His short life is a tale of risk-taking enterprise in the wilds of America’s western frontier. Continue reading

Marie Curie: We Lost This Scientist To Radioactivity In 1933…

…but her notebook still holds a serious threat!

Considered to be one of the most famous 20th-century scientists, Marie Curie is the only person to win two Nobel prizes in two different fields. Defying the expectations for what a woman should be during her time, Curie paved the way for our understanding of radioactivity. She also discovered two new elements, but not without paying a horrific price… Continue reading

Two Moms Create a Forest School and Reach Thousands

We want to be as big as Boy Scouts, be that kind of a household name.” ~ Barefoot University Co-founder, Madeleine Braden

It was a cool, muddy morning in March when I pulled into the empty parking lot of a sprawling forest and nature preserve about 40 miles outside of Fort Worth, Texas. Soon, cars began arriving, filled with exuberant children of all ages, and their parents, who were ready to spend a few hours together in the woods. Donned in rain boots and parkas, these nearly three-dozen nature-goers were part of Barefoot University, a rapidly expanding national network of forest school programs for homeschoolers that was founded by Madeleine Braden and Amber Brown in 2019. Continue reading

Keil: Bring Wonder Back to the Classroom

Why do school-age kids seem to be less curious than preschoolers?

We don’t encourage students to ask the same kinds of questions they did when they were younger. Here’s something I wrote recently about the topic for Character Lab as a Tip of the Week:

A few weeks ago, my 3-year-old granddaughter Frances asked, “Why don’t cardinals migrate?

Frances’ question surprised me, both because she knew enough to ask it and because I had no idea what the answer was. When I failed to find explanations on my cellphone, Frances got bored with me and wandered off, asking others how to make red paint.

Preschoolers love thinking about possible explanations of interesting things. They feel free to wonder about anything and they do so with joy and creativity. Continue reading

Math Instruction Isn’t Working. Could Better Teacher Training Help?

For those of our readers who feel that they wish to leave their children in the Public School system. There are things that you can be aware of to help and better assist your Kinder – and I don’t mean ‘gartners‘. ~ Editor

Is 2/7 larger than 4/11?

The REAL reason for Common-Core?

That’s the question the middle school class was struggling to answer. Fractions hadn’t really connected with the students, says John Barclay, a teacher in Richmond Public Schools in Virginia. The concept just wasn’t intuitive.

But one student piped up: She’d noticed that if you figure out how much you’d have to add to the numerator to get a whole number, then you can tell which fraction is larger.

That really wasn’t the rule that she was being taught. Continue reading

May 9, 2023: Village of the Damned

History and civics scores drop for U.S. eighth-graders on national test
Scores in U.S. history and civics for eighth-graders are down across the U.S., according to recent results from the assessment known as the “Nation’s Report Card.” This year’s history scores are the lowest recorded since the assessment began in 1994, and the new data mark the first-ever drop in civics.

U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement that the results, from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, further underscore the “profound impact the pandemic had on student learning.”

The results follow recent national declines in reading and math among students in grades four and eight… (Continue to full article)

7th-grade student fights back after school told him to change his ‘There are only two genders’ T-shirt
However, he says the response from his fellow classmates was overwhelmingly positive. “Everyone in my homeroom and everyone in my gym class had supported what I had done,” he told Fox News Digital. Morrison, 12, added that no fellow student directly confronted him about the shirt or said it offended them or made them feel unsafe.

However, he was pulled out of gym class on March 21 and told to remove the shirt because several students and staff had reportedly complained. When he respectfully declined to take the shirt off, school officials called his father to come and pick him up

I have a right to have a voice,’ Liam Morrison said… (Continue to full article)

War for Profit: A Very Short History

Munition workers painting shells at the National Shell Filling Factory No.6, Chilwell, Nottinghamshire in 1917. This was one of the largest shell factories in the country, circa 1917. (Photo by Horace Nicholls/ Imperial War Museums)

As they did over a century ago ahead of World War I, the Merchants of Death thrive behind a veil of duplicity and slick media campaigns.

The senseless slaughter of World War I began with the murder of a single man, a Crown Prince of a European empire whose name no one was particularly familiar with at the time. Archduke Franz Ferdinand Carl Ludwig Joseph Maria was the presumptive heir to the Austrian-Hungarian empire in June of 1914.

His assassin was a young Bosnian Serb student and the murder of the Crown Prince set off a cataclysmic series of events resulting in the deaths of over 20 million people, half of whom were civilians. An additional 20 million people were wounded. Continue reading

Chicago Public Schools – A Microcosm of Our National Problem

Watching Fox News last evening (4/13) Tucker Carlson commented on the sorry situation in Chicago Public Schools. Tucker noted that lots of Chicago public school students can’t read, or can barely read, yet you can’t fail them. Why think of what they would do to their self-esteem! Lots of us have been saying for years now that public school students across the country have been taught almost nothing worthwhile, yet have been conditioned to think they are brilliant. Why any parent in Chicago, or anywhere else, would trust their children’s education to the public schools is beyond me. Continue reading

Peoria school board member tells parents to pull kids from public schools

School Board Member Rebecca Hill says she disagreed with the decision to reject a bathroom policy for transgender students

PEORIA, AZ (3TV/CBS 5) – The Peoria Unified School District board voted 3-2 to reject a policy that would make students go to the bathroom that aligned with their biological sex at birth. The vote happened Thursday night. At the end of the meeting, Continue reading

Lincoln’s Main Target Was “Anarchy” and Secession, Not Slavery

President Abraham Lincoln

In a recent column, I discussed an argument about secession made by Abraham Lincoln and sympathetically expounded by Michael P. Zuckert in his important book A Nation So Conceived. Lincoln maintained that a nation once formed could not allow secession because doing so would open it to unlimited fissiparous tendencies, culminating in anarchy. This argument did not address the problem of slavery, surely relevant to the concrete circumstances of the Civil War. Zuckert has a suggestive, though in my view mistaken, discussion of Lincoln’s view of secession and slavery, and in this week’s article, I’ll try to explain Zuckert’s position and the difficulties he faces defending it.

Zuckert’s position is this: Lincoln considered slavery to be morally wrong and contrary to the Declaration of Independence, which he took to state universally valid truths that were binding on the American nation. Continue reading

…The insanity will not end…

Get your children OUT of the System – NOW

Parents Urged to Flee Public Schools, Rescue Kids From ‘Poison’
Plenty of children these days are so obsessed with having internet access that they will It’s not a question of if – not even a question of when. Michele Bachmann says parents should withdraw their children from public schools immediately!

Keep them at home…

Trust between schools and parents has been irreversibly damaged, the former U.S. congresswoman and 2012 presidential candidate said last week during an interview on the “Understanding the Times” radio program – adding: “Our school system is completely gone now.”

Whether it’s the mission to teach Critical Race Theory as fact or the full embrace of the gender dysphoria movement, Bachmann – now dean of the Robertson School of Government at Regent University – says America’s public schools have set themselves up as the sole authority on social issues involving their students… (Continue to full article)

These Government Indoctrination Centers We Refer To As ‘Schools‘
One government indoctrination center in Vermont has decided to eliminate the words male and female from the 5th grade curriculum. Students can’t use the words boy and girl in school because, after all, this school is in the process of becoming woke, and using such antiquated terms as boy and girl omits the other 126 sexes some flaky scientists and politicians have only recently informed us are now in existence.

How many other public schools are like this one nationwide? More than you’d like to think about. But you’d better start thinking about it because the Theology of Woke will be coming to a public school near you if it’s not already there.

In the April 10th issue of the New American magazine a homeschooling dad commented on what he learned about public schools after he removed his son from one. He observed… (Continue to full article)

The Real Reform of Education

Unlike any other point in the prior four decades, the push to reform the education system through school choice has serious political support and is likely to be passed in many states in the coming years.

Over time, education reformers have met with success in showing how the education system, despite sucking up ever more taxpayer funds, has declined so precipitously that many teachers and schools fail to achieve the mission of educating America’s youth. Far too few of America’s youth can read, write, or perform math anywhere near what’s needed for them to fully engage in American society. Continue reading

Man Born in 1846 Talks About the 1860s and Fighting in the Civil War

I was nearly four months old at the time of this man’s passing. I am proud to have been alive during his waning days. May he be resting in piece. ~ Editor

Julius Franklin Howell (January 17, 1846 – June 19, 1948) joined the Confederate Army when he was 16. After surviving a few battles, he eventually found himself in a Union prison camp at Point Lookout, Maryland. In 1947, at the age of 101, Howell made this recording at the Library of Congress. Continue reading

Loudon: Why Parents and Grandparents Need to Teach Their Children to be Curious

More and more, children are being left by the parents for the teachers to do all of the preschool and academic training for their children. Parents and grandparents can do a tremendous amount of brain skills learning, especially at very young age and it is a great benefit for the children. If they are prepared for preschool when they are 5, then they are far ahead of the group, and experts say that these ready pre-taught children usually stay ahead of the class all the way through school. ~ M. Loudon

There is no better lifetime achievement than to teach your children or grandchildren to be curious. One of the greatest examples ever written is in the biography of Albert Einstein.

Albert Einstein’s parents understood the importance of teaching their children to be curious. They began to encourage Albert by getting him enrolled in the greatest math and physics schools in Europe. But another event at the age of 10 years also had a lot of influence on Albert when his father gave him a compass. Albert was fascinated with the compass and very curious about how the needles moved and what force was moving the needles. Curiosity about the movement of the needles never left Albert and was a great inspiration in his mind for learning everything about the compass. Continue reading

4 Tips for Financial Stability from Noah Webster

With inflation, prices, and bank failures all on the rise these days, many of us are looking anxiously toward our pocketbooks and wondering what we’ll do when the financial crisis inevitably hits. Will we have to start over with our retirement fund, or will we be impoverished in a matter of months?

There may not be a surefire way to completely shield ourselves from potential ruin, but there are ways to safeguard against it. One of those ways is tucked away in an obscure corner of American founder Noah Webster’s American Spelling Book. Entitled “Domestic Economy Or, the History of Thrifty and Unthrifty,” Webster (1758-1843) spins the tale of two men, the one a financial wizard, the other a financial failure. Continue reading

Homeschooling IS an American Tradition

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, John Adams and Teddy Roosevelt: What do these American Presidents have in common? They were all homeschooled.

When we think about traditional education in America we tend to think of public schools, classrooms, and a one-size-fits-all curriculum designed to educate the masses quickly and efficiently. This type of education is not only inefficient, but inconsistent with the very essence of what it is to be American. Being an American means having freedom of choice, freedom of expression, and the opportunity to pursue life, liberty and happiness. Public education offers the antithesis of these values and has, since its origins, been a means of indoctrinating its students with whatever values the leaders of the time wanted to pass on. Continue reading

Children Learn What They Live

Over many years of my life – and specifically – during the lives of my granddaughters, I have found numerous versions of the following Message from the author – and my copy dates back to 1972. ~ Editor

If a child lives with criticism, he learns to condemn.

If a child lives with hostility, he learns to fight.

If a child lives with fear, he learns to be apprehensive.

If a child lives with pity, she learns to feel sorry for herself.

If a child lives with ridicule, she learns to feel shy.

If a child lives with jealousy, she learns to feel envy.

If a child lives with shame, he learns to feel guilty.

But…
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40 years ago ‘A Nation at Risk’ warned of a ‘rising tide of mediocrity’ in US schools – Has Anything Changed?

The National Commission on Excellence in Education’s release of a report titled “A Nation at Risk” in 1983 was a pivotal point in the history of American education. The report used dire language, lamenting that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

Using Cold War language, the report also famously stated: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.Continue reading

Creating ADHD is the goal of education

Pharmaceutic
PHARMACEU’TIC

PHARMACEU’TICAL, adjective [Gr. to practice witchcraft or use medicine; poison or medicine.] Pertaining to the knowledge or art of pharmacy, or to the art of preparing medicines.

A Spoonful of Sugar makes the medicine go down…” focuses on professionally administered and prescribed drugs and pharmaceuticals. Initially on conception this category was developed to deal with the aspect of the abuse of children, ie; Ritalin, Prozac and other legal, “Mood altering” drugs. As time went on – we chose to attack the poisons that we are ALL being fed by our medical ‘professionals.’ The overpriced products of BIG Pharma are slowly – or rapidly killing us.

~ Foreword ~
What you have just read is the introduction to the Category, “A Spoon Full of Sugar” from our site DrKelley.net, which was originally developed to pay homage to the character – and to specifically deal with the phony issue in the public school system of ADHD. It still applies today – within the Public FOOL System. Stand by and READ the words the author – and thank you Mary Poppins! ~ Editor
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