Bio for homeschool events

Photo credit: Jennie Baker

The spring of 1995 was a landmark time for me: first baby, first book contract, and first modem. By the time that baby was crawling, I had discovered the AOL homeschooling boards and Growing Without Schooling Magazine. I knew right away that homeschooling was for us. We were gung ho from the start.

Twenty (!!) years later, that baby has graduated from Cal Poly with a computer science degree, and there are five more kids behind her, ages 19, 17, 14, 11, and 8. Four girls, two boys. We live in a cute house in Portland Oregon, crammed wall to wall with books and art supplies. My husband Scott writes comic books and I write children’s books—mostly historical fiction and early readers, including The Prairie Thief, Fox and Crow Are Not Friends, and the “Inch and Roly” series. Our freelance lifestyle allows a lot of flexibility for family homeschooling adventures.

I call our educational style “Tidal Homeschooling,” a term I coined to describe our ebb-and-flow homeschooling rhythms. We alternate periods of concentrated, literature-based studies with periods of unschoolish, interest-driven meanderings. These rhythms have worked well for our family for many years and allow a lot of free time for our various passions, including gaming (especially Minecraft and Harvest Moon), sketching, and butterfly gardening.

I’ve been blogging about our tidal homeschooling adventures at Here in the Bonny Glen since January, 2005. I love fountain pens, snail mail, traveler’s notebooks, booklists, and Monty Python. Most of all, I love a good read-aloud!