How to Use This Site

Background

When I started homeschooling my children, I wasn’t satisfied with any of the standard curricula. I knew I wouldn’t be happy implementing those plans, and I also envisioned something quite different from typical homeschool or traditional school. I wanted something hands-on, progressive, creative, and fun — and weird and joyous and ambitious, too.

But while there are plenty of great individual lessons and experiments online, I couldn’t find anything that gathered lessons, readings, and experiments into a cohesive whole and that represented the kind of school I wanted to be a part of. So I started from scratch with each of the themes here, researching and reading and (finally) testing them all by doing them with my children.

The “Teach Kids About…” posts here document my lessons, as I did them.

Anatomy of a Post

Each “Teach Kids About…” post is broken into several parts:

  • “Read On” lists and reviews the books I liked and used for the topic. Most of these books are referenced in the lessons below.
  • “Resources” contains links to helpful outside materials.
  • “Explorations” is the full lesson plan. You’ll find reading recommendations (and page numbers), links to videos or games, and suggested activities and tips, all organized by sub-topic. For instance, if you want to do a Yayoi Kusama art project but would like to read a good book about the artist first, or watch an interview with her, it’s all right there together.
  • “Read On, Grown-Ups” lists and reviews books for adults that I found helpful or interesting in thinking about these topics.

How to Use the “Teach Kids About…” Posts

You could do the lessons just as I did, or use them as a jumping-off point for your own spin on the topics, but I hope the site is also useful as a collection of resources, a place to check if, say, you want to read about architecture with your child and perhaps do an activity about it, too. Or if your child is fascinated by microbes (as one of mine was), and you can’t find enough books on the topic, I hope my book lists will give you something new to read and enjoy.