I’m excited to be part of Brave Writer’s Summer Camp event tomorrow, Tuesday July 19! I’ll be doing a live readaloud for kids at 1pm Eastern time. Always fun! Here’s the scoop from Julie Bogart:
Brave Writer Summer Camp ⛺️ is coming to a phone 📱 or computer 🖥 screen near you! It’s a day long set of webinars and is a highlight of every summer around here!
Fun, helpful, and FREE: as in no moola, no pocket change, no bicentennial quarters!
The Brave Writer staff and I are spending a day teaching you all things homeschool and Brave Writer for FREE while giving your kids delightful activities to do so you can concentrate.
We offer a product discount code to LIVE attendees (Aussies and Kiwis, contact customer service if you can’t be awake during those hours).
SESSIONS Eastern Time
🔴 11 AM – Online Classes: Writing is the Key to Learning Any Subject (Kirsten Merryman)
🟠 12 PM – Brave Learner Home: The Resources and Community You Need (Julie Bogart)
🟡 1 PM – For Kids! Author Melissa Wiley Reads Aloud! (Melissa Wiley)
🟢 2 PM – Brave Writer Products: Unlocking Learning Through Literature (Dawn Smith)
🔵 3 PM – Raising Brave Learners and Critical Thinkers (Julie Bogart)
🟣 Register: bravewriter.com/summer-camp
June and July were mighty full months for me & my gang. I hardly ever travel, but this summer I’ve made three separate trips! The
Brave Writer staff retreat in Ohio (I’ll be teaching two sessions of
Comic Strip Capers this fall); a big family wedding in Virginia Beach;
Lynda Barry’s Writing the Unthinkable workshop; and then back to Ohio for the Brave Learner Conference, where I was part of a panel with Julie Bogart, her mother Karen O’Connor, and Dottie of enchanted art table fame! AND THEN, back here at home, we wrapped up July with a long-anticipated event: a (minor) spinal surgery for the 15yo. (It went swimmingly and he’s recovering well.) And in the snippet of time between the conference and the surgery, Scott drove to San Luis Obispo to move Jane to Portland. She had an Americorps position at the university that wrapped up last month, and now she’s HERE. All my chicks back in the nest for a while. Color this mama hen very happy.
As for me, I spent the days between conference and surgery on a housecleaning spree. (Channeling Mrs. Ray expecting Betsy or Julia home from a trip, you know.) I get organization frenzy every summer. And my poor garden, oof, after two months of neglect it needed some serious TLC. When it’s too hot to clean or garden, I’ve been embroidering a lot, catching up on Cozy Blue Stitch Club projects.
So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to look at my grid today and realize it’s been a week since I posted? I’ve shared tons in my Stories, so it didn’t feel like that much time had passed. But it has! I had hoped to take a little down time in August, but I’m seeing that wasn’t entirely realistic. The multiple trips left me feeling like I could use a vacation, but now I gotta catch up from the trips! Fortunately I love my work. 😄
How about you? Enjoying a low-key summer, or suddenly feeling like fall is peering at you through the window?
Heads up, homeschooling friends! I’ll be teaching two sections of my Comic Strip Capers class at Brave Writer this fall. Registration is open now & this course usually fills up quickly. Can’t wait to see the comics your kids will create!
note: not a real snake
A WordPress update caused some hiccups for me yesterday and I broke my whopping two-day posting streak. The noive!
Ah well, here I am on a Thursday afternoon, finishing up my last BraveWriter Arrow of the year. I think that makes a total of 17 Arrows I’ve written in the past two years. Wow, it’s a lot when I add them all up! This one’s on By the Great Horn Spoon, a most beloved novel in the Wiley-Peterson household. I just revisited the old post in that link—written FOURTEEN years ago, can you believe it?—and am sitting here cracking up at poor little four-year-old Beanie:
It’s been a rough morning. Our wagon tipped over while fording a river, and we lost fifty pounds of salt pork and our only shotgun. Then Rose took sick—cholera, we think—and died before we could do anything about it.
My girls are undaunted by this stunning double tragedy. They push on across the prairie, estimating the number of miles to the next fort. Maybe we can trade our mule for a new gun.
“At least we still have the fishing pole,” says Rose. She seems to have accepted her own death gracefully.
“I don’t like wattlesnakes,” announces Beanie.
Jane cracks up. “Who does? Remember when I got bit, back before we crossed the Platte?”
Of course now I’m remembering our actual in-real-life wattlesnake (or racklenake, depending which of my toddlers you asked) encounters. We’ve had more than our share!
this one was all too real
February, 2012:
Then something will happen to remind me why I don’t go hiking more often, like OH SAY A RATTLESNAKE WILL APPEAR ON THE TRAIL THREE FEET FROM MY CHILDREN.
Rose and Beanie spotted him at the same time—they were in the lead, fortunately; they’re sharp-eyed lasses and I was distracted by a hot, red-faced, cranky Huck. If this had been the part of the trail where Huck suddenly charged ahead and we larger folk had to scramble to catch up, he’d have been on that snake before any of us saw it. It was lying quite still at first, stretched out across our path. Rose had just enough time to ask “Is it real?” before it twitched, and I took in the triangular head and the rattle and hollered EVERYONE BACK UP IT’S A RATTLER GRAB THE LITTLE ONES!! (I used more exclamation points.)
We edged back a yard and stood watching it. Huck, who’d been begging me to carry him, now clamored to be put down. Not a chance, pal. The rest of us were still and silent. After a long moment, the snake began to move; it slid across the trail into the underbrush.
“This is the best thing that EVER HAPPENED TO ME,” Rose declared.
August, 2012 (you’ll note Beanie’s shift to a more wattlesnake-inclusive position):
“I adore rattlers,” said Beanie.
The firemen raised their eyebrows. “Well, maybe don’t adore them,” one said.
“From a distance,” said another.
“Me don’t like racklenakes,” announced Huck.
“ME EITHER,” declared his big brother in the firmest of tones.
ME EITHER, reiterates their poor mother, all these years later. Neither the wattlers nor the racklers. Nor, for that matter, the rubber kind, which have given me no less than seventy minor heart attacks over the years.
Heads up: I’m the guest on this week’s episode of the Brave Writer podcast! I had a fantastic time chatting about tidal homeschooling and other good stuff with the brilliant Julie Bogart, who became one of my very first online friends in the mid-1990s. We finally met in person at last summer’s Brave Writer Retreat. I always come away from a conversation with Julie feeling energized and happy, and this interview was no exception. Enjoy!
You can find show notes at the Brave Writer blog. As an avid podcast listener, I gotta say this is an extremely cool bonus feature—quotes and highlights from the discussion. So handy!
If you’re visiting Bonny Glen for the first time, welcome! Here are a few posts to help you get to know me:
Tidal Homeschooling Master List
Kon-Mari for Homeschooling Moms
Read-Alouds for Four-Year-Olds
I admit it: when it comes to writing curricula, I’m a snob. After all, Scott and I both write for a living; we are the kind of word geeks who sit around discussing sentence structure for fun. I’ve never felt the need to use a writing program with my kids: that’s one area I can handle on my own.
But every time I go to a conference, people ask what writing curriculum I recommend. In an effort to do justice to this frequent question, I’ve purchased several books and programs for review. None of them was anything I felt enthusiastic about passing on to other families—until I encountered Julie Bogart’s Bravewriter.
A friend tipped me off to Julie’s website, and I visited it in the same informational spirit in which I’d reviewed various other writing resources, to see if this was something I could wholeheartedly recommend to inquiring homeschoolers. Imagine my surprise when I found myself chomping at the bit to try out her ideas on my own kids—and heck, on myself! Julie’s energy and insight get me jazzed up to sit down and work. She’s a writer who loves writing about writing, and the dish she’s serving up is like mental energy bars—she makes you want to get moving, get those words down on paper! Life is rich; let’s articulate it!—that’s Julie’s message.
So I couldn’t resist. I ordered The Writer’s Jungle, joined Julie’s Bravewriter Lifestyle list, and began serving up her feast to my kids. Jane (who served as a reluctant guinea pig for trials of certain other materials whose very names now cause her to wrinkle up her nose) thinks Bravewriter is delicious. Tops on her list: doing dictations from her beloved Redwall books (full of quite challenging words to spell, I might add) and freewriting, which she loves for its license not to worry, for the moment, about spelling and proper punctuation. I’m including her latest freewrite below. Her mission was to spend ten minutes writing anything she wanted about a subject she “knows a lot about and wants to know more about.” Here it is exactly as she wrote it, spelling errors and all.
I think that Brian Jacques CONTRADIKS himself! On the Redwall “ask Brian” webpage thing they had a cople of years ago, one question said “will there ever be a good rat, fox, ect. or any bad badgers, mice, ect.” and Brian replied, NO! All the bad guys are BAD & all the good guys are GOOD. There are no crossovers, no gray areas.” But not 1ce but 2 times he contradicts himself! First in Mossflower, the wildcat Gingervere & later his wife, Sandingomm. And then again The Bellmaker! that time a searat named ______.
(“I have to look up his name, Mom,” she told me when she’d finished. “I can’t get the book now because it’s in the bedroom where Beanie is napping.”)
What I love about this piece of writing—besides its obvious passion and intensity—is that it is the beginning of legitimate critical analysis. In the weeks to come, Jane will return to this piece and flesh it out. I’m eager to hear more. In what ways do Gingervere, Sandingomm, and the unnamed searat shatter the bad-guy mold?
And what a great topic for discussion! She thinks Brian Jacques is mistaken about the nuances of his own characters. Can writers be wrong about their own work? This was a hot topic in my grad school lit classes; it’s meaty stuff. Ten minutes of scribbling at the kitchen table revealed a bubbling stew of opinion I hadn’t known my 9-year-old possessed. We’ve had great fun lunching on these ideas all week.
Looks like I finally have an enthusiastic answer for those conference inquirees.
