brave writer vs the good and the beautiful

The current favorites are Bananagrams, Jr.

We play many games that center around language, as well as math, geography, herbs and plants, nature, and science. I love gameschooling, and look for every opportunity to insert games into our homeschool life. We’ve listened to hundreds of hours of audiobooks on the road–from Pippi to Jo, from Anne to Matilda, and the entire Ramona series at least four times.

Yes, audiobooks count, which we love because we do put in a lot of miles. Reading aloud is the essential foundation of the Brave Writer lifestyle, and the easiest to implement. We also do a “bedtime basket.” This basket always starts with Life of Fred, then my oldest reads from Frog and Toad or Little Bear (or something similar) and we end with selections from the library. We snuggle on the couch to read from our morning basket–a mix of fiction and non-fiction, from nature lore and Shakespeare to biography and poetry to Louisa May Alcott and Laura Ingalls Wilder. It’s built into the rhythm of our mornings and nights together. But there are elements that we incorporate regularly–some daily, some weekly, some when inspiration strikes. Well, every week is different and that’s what I love about it. But many of you have asked me what it actually looks like to integrate the Brave Writer lifestyle in our homeschool week. Whatever it was, it’s got us hooked, and if you’ve been reading my blog for some time, you know I’m not shy about saying so. Or spend a day wandering an art museum with a stack of postcards and learn more than we could in a month of lessons at a desk. Was it our first poetry teatimes, calling out Shel Silverstein poems over the roar of the jungle rain? Or the permission to devour audiobook after audiobook as we drive through forests and fields together, and call it school? Or was it the idea that the excited words of my tiny daughters as they told me stories were the very first seeds of their writing selves, and that I should catch them on a page like a teacup catching rain, so they could see the significance of their ideas? Or maybe it was the joy of discovering that we could bypass workbooks and instead languish on the beautiful words of the literature we loved together. I’m not really sure which aspect of the Brave Writer lifestyle I fell in love with first.

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Brave writer vs the good and the beautiful