Welcome to SUMMER ... and the 3rd Edition of A Thomas Jefferson Education Blog Carnival.   Although dozens of submissions were received,  I've only included posts authored by those who have actually read  A Thomas Jefferson Education by Oliver DeMille.  Thank you for your thoughtful contributions.   I hope you enjoy a peak into others' learning experiences as they relate to A Thomas Jefferson Education.

 TJEd Keys

A Woman With a Pen  writes, "A Thomas Jefferson Education  is a must read for everyone out there involved in a child's education, including their own inner child."  Read more at   A Thomas Jefferson Education: Get One.

Becoming A Heaven on Earth  presents Wrapping My Brain Around the 8 Keys.  I love her conclusion...."secure, not stressed, which by the way, is core!"

"My chief want in life is someone who shall make me do what I can." Ralph Waldo Emerson 

Mentors

 Daniel Felsted presents  What is the Purpose of Education?  posted at  The Internet Dark Ages.   He shares, "teach children they can accomplish anything they set their minds to."    Read more about mentoring, using the classics.

Mentoring through the classics can be as simple as starting a family book club.   Book Discussion Questions for Little Britches  offers opportunities for mentoring.

You Not Them

The best mentors  continually self-educate and challenge themselves to read and think at a deeper level.   Many new to TJEd principles wonder where to begin this process.  The Internet Dark Ages shares  A Reading List - A Good Place to Start.

Love of Learning Phase

Let's take a peak into a day in the life of a Love of Learning.  Traci Roddy presents Kidschool - Sharing what's mine  posted at Traci's TJEd blog. 

Classics

Oliver DeMille writes, "The classics make us struggle, search, ponder, seek, analyze, discover, decide, and reconsider."   More about reading the classics at Choosing Books Wisely.

 Macho Daddy has been pondering and analyzing since reading a few classics.   He  presents  Thoughts While Reading  posted at  A Day in the Life of Macho Daddy.

Your future blog articles for the next edition of A Thomas Jefferson Education Carnival are due by the 20th of each month.  If you have read this book, please share your entries using our carnival submission form.   Thanks for visiting.

Go to A Thomas Jefferson Education Carnival: 2nd Edition

Related Tags: A Thomas Jefferson Education, blog carnival, classics, mentoring, leadership, education

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The next edition of  A Thomas Jefferson Education Carnival will be hosted HERE.    Check back to read more about how others are implementing the principles of a TJEd in their homes.

You are also  invited to submit blog entries pertaining to any aspect of A Thomas Jefferson Education in your home.  Suggested topics include:  Core Learning Phase, Love of Learning Phase, Scholar Phase, Depth Phase.  Also accepting entries about the specific principles of a TJEd: classics, mentors, "inspire not require", "structure not content", "quality not conformity", book discussions, "you not them".  Share a peek into your typical TJEd day or examples of educating oneself.  Read a classic lately?  Share your perspective on a book's message or recommend a classic you've read recently.  Here's an example of a book review. 

If you have read  A Thomas Jefferson Education,  please share your experiences on your blog and send in carnival  submissions  by 2pm CDT on the 20th of each month. 

Related Tags: A Thomas Jefferson Education, leadership education, classics, mentoring, education, blog carnival, homeschool, home education

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Inspire Not Require

This is the hardest principle of  Leadership Education  for me to grasp and  implement.  "Inspire Not Require" is one of the seven guiding principles outlined in  A Thomas Jefferson Education by Oliver DeMille.   I am still in the process of letting go of  my firmly established  "requirement  habits"  in our homeschool.

DeMille convinced me to try a new way by pointing out how forced learning can teach lessons....but they may be the wrong lessons.  These include:

• Do the bare minimum.
• Learning, schooling and studying are no fun.
• Playing is when you don't have to learn.
• To be a student I have to study somebody else's interests.
• My own interests are not considered valuable to learn.

I've started meeting with each of the kids to discuss their long and short term goals.   I offer my input and help them chop some of the bigger goals into bite-sized pieces.  Sometimes they've chosen a pace which will not allow them to meet their goal in their given time frame.  I point out this type of error and we can analyze if the goal is worth working harder towards.

We also discuss our family's goals, including the core values which create these goals.   This often leads to a mutual need to add specific goals to the student's individual list of goals.

This is a dry erase board we started using recently.  Across the top it says Goals for Today.  We each have a column to jot down some things we want to get done during the day .  I'm pretty much in the habit of doing it every day.  My scholar phase 14 yo daughter also likes to write out her goals.  My love-of-learning phase boys are not in the habit yet.  They prefer to "free lance" their days.  But they also are still growing into the art of articualting their goals.

"Goals for Today"

This is a Saturday list.  I jotted my "To Do" list on the board in the morning and was surprised to see they followed suit    I suspect because my husband was on a long business trip, they had lost track of the day of the week.  Of course I kept quiet about it until they were almost done with their studies!  We had spent quite a bit of time doing activities outside the home that week, so were all happy for a quiet day at home to catch up.     I've observed the best ways to inspire my children are:

• Always focus on my own phases of learning first.
• Consistently model the guiding principles of Leadership Education.
• Purposefully live out our family's canon and core values.

Inspire does NOT mean ignore.  In fact I've learned, affective inspiration often requires much perspiration!

Related Tags: A Thomas Jefferson Education, mentoring, educational goals, life mission, self education, leadership, scholar phase

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Have you ever been uncomfortable reading fairy tales to your children?  When perusing early childhood reading lists, many parents ask,  "Why fairy tales?"   It's a good question for selective moms scrounging book store shelves, libraries, and garage sales for suitable children's literature.  

Consider the following defense for reading fairy tales to your young children:

1. Fairy tales bring joy into a child's life. Joy works toward physical health, mental brightness, and moral virtue.  Joy is the mission of art and fairy tales are art products.
2.  Fairy tales give the child a power of accurate observation.
3. Fairy tales strengthen the power of emotion, develop the power of imagination, train the memory, and exercise the faculty of reason.
4. Fairy tales are play forms.  The fairy tale, because it presents an organized form of human experience, helps to organize the mind and gives to play the values of human life.
5. Fairy tales extend and intensify the child's social relations.  His sympathies are active for kindness and fairness, especially for the defenseless, and he feels deeply the calamity of the poor or the suffering and hardship of the ill-treated. He is in sympathy with that poetic justice which desires immediate punishment of wrong, unfairness, injustice, cruelty, or deceit.
6. Fairy tales introduce real literature to the young child, so that having enjoyed real literature, he will later be eager to satisfy his own desires.  (Source text)

And what do G.K. Chesteron, C.S. Lewis and others think:

"If you happen to read fairy tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other--the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery-tales."

~G. K. Chesterton~
All Things Considered
1908

 ***

"Sometimes fairy tales may say best what's to be said"

~C.S. Lewis~
Of Other Worlds
1966

*** 

"Deeper meaning resides in the fairy tales told me in my childhood than in any truth that is taught in life."

~Johann Christoph Friederich v. Schiller~
German Poet
(1759-1805)

***

"If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales."

~Albert Einstein~
Scientist
(1879-1955) 

Related Tags: fairy tales, children's literature, education, imagination, A Thomas Jefferson Education

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Our family "book club" recently read Little Britches by Ralph Moody.  I wrote Mentoring Boys to Men to summarize some of the highlights of this book.  Here are our family discussion questions:

1.  If Little Britches were your son, how would you react to some of his mischievous behavior? 

2.  Share an example of Little Britches’ mischief that made you laugh or fearful for him?

3.  Little Britches was told to build a character house:

     a. What building materials are you using to build your character house?

     b.  Are there “natural disasters” which threaten your character house?

     c.  How do you protect your character house from that which may destroy it??

 4.  Do you have a rudder to steer your boat through the storms of life?

 5.  Have you ever done the RIGHT thing, but suffered a loss because of it?

 6.  How do adults in your life teach you right from wrong?

What other questions could YOU add to this list?

Related Tags: classic literature, book clubs, reading lists, A Thomas Jefferson Education, family reading

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 The book,  A Thomas Jefferson Education by Oliver DeMille  was the impetus for this meeting.   We came together to discuss some key questions:

• Are you pondering the meaning of education?
• Do you know the secrets of great teaching?
• Do you want a better education for your children than the one you received?
• Are you looking for a framework to unify the various curricula you’re using?
• Do you want to introduce your children to the classics?
• Do you want to teach your children to think for themselves and be leaders in their chosen fields?
• Do you know how to be an effective and inspiring mentor to your children?

 We had a guest speaker to facilitate our discussions.  As a follow up, several of us will be attending a seminar at the end of June, titled “Navigating Education.”

 It was such a joy to meet enthusiastic moms and share stimulating, intellectual conversations.  It was a comfort to know we are not alone in our endeavors to develop our children into the best people they can be.  It was a revelation to meet e-friends today who will likely become real-life friends of our future.  It was an investment in the future of our children’s scholarly studies.  It was the beginning of new adventures together in days to come!

Though we were diverse in creed and homeschool methodologies,  we enjoyed learning and discussing our educational goals together.   Wanting the best for our children became our uniting theme.

 Have you heard about  A Thomas Jefferson Blog Carnival  yet?

Related Tags: A Thomas Jefferson Education, classic literature, mentoring, Leadership Education, reading the classics, homeschooling, support groups

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Welcome to A Thomas Jefferson Education Blog Carnival

I've received MANY submissions for this new carnival, but most articles are unrelated to the principles of A Thomas Jefferson Education.  I've only included posts from authors who have read A Thomas Jefferson Education by Oliver DeMille.  Quality not quantity is the goal for this blog carnival.   Presenting the 2nd Edition:

You Not Them

Redneck Liber shares from the heart in Finding INCREDIBLE Epiphanies Anywhere.   Peg asks, "How do I get myself a superb liber education while changing diapers, mopping floors, doing dishes, cooking meals, changing diapers, doing laundry, educating my masses? Screaming out loud when do I get my turn?"

Inspire Not Require

Lara at the Lazy Organizer gets down to basics, sharing her experience with the concept of Inspire not Require.  Sometimes we forget just how practical and simple this principle can be to wrap our heads around.  Thanks for the humorous visual of all your efforts towards inspiration!

Mentors & The Classics

Mentoring Boys to Men shares how parents can be mentors to their children through shared expereinces; specifically,  reading aloud from classic literature.

Love of Learning Phase

I asked a question about finding good books, and other learning opportunities for the 12-13 year old boys at my house.  Literary Testosterone offers some suggestions.

Submit your future blog articles to the next edition of A Thomas Jefferson Education Carnival using our carnival submission form.   Thanks for visiting.

 Go to A Thomas Jefferson Education Carnival:  Inaugural Edition

 Go to A Thomas Jefferson Education Carnival:  3rd Edition

Related Tags: A Thomas Jefferson Education, classics, literature, mentor

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  Welcome to the Inaugural Edition of the Thomas Jefferson Education Carnival.  

Based on principles set forth in these books:

Core Learning Phase

Traci Roddy presents Core Phase posted at TJEd blog.  Traci does a great job of describing the necessity of the core phase and the rhythm of a home in executing core phase.

Inspire Not Require

Aine presents Becoming A Heaven on Earth posted at texasblu,  Aine says you need to know your child's needs to inspire them, and do what's best for THEM,  even if it is not the norm.

Praveen presents Refrain from Active Teaching posted at Tao of Simplicity.   Sometimes it really IS that simple.

Love of Learning Phase

Juliainsk presents A Homeschool Experiment posted at Musings of A Prairie Girl.   Julia describes a day of relaxed schooling.....and that's where the love of learning grows!

The Tour Marm presents The Educational Tour Marm: Whatever Wednesdays : Christina Meets Thomas Jefferson posted at The Educational Tour Marm.

Scholar/Depth Phase

Alvaro Fernandez presents Brain Teaser: how are Memory, Stress, Exercise, Brain Games, Stanford and Harvard connected? posted at SharpBrains, saying, "An expanded understanding on what Learning is."

Rebecca Newburn presents Information Age Education: 21st Century Skills posted at Information Age Education, saying, "What are the skills that are needed for students and citizens of the 21st Century? This presentation provides a starting place for a discourse on the type of leadership needed in education."

Book Discussions

Barbie McNutt presents Laddie, A True Blue Story by Gene Stratton Porter (Part One) posted at Simple Letters to Great Minds, saying, "This article is the first of a two part article on Laddie by Gene Stratton Porter."   Barbie did a great job on Part 2 also.

Alvaro Fernandez presents Books on neuroplasticity and memory training posted at SharpBrains, saying, "Notes on a few books that explain how Learning changes our Brains-literally."  In my opinion, these recommendations are more for the moms feeling like their brains may be going to mush, than for our young scholars!

That concludes the inaugaral edition of the TJEd Carnival.  It is a simple start, but all carnivals start small.  Several submissions, not directly related to the principles of a TJEd, were not included in an effort to stay focused on the goals of TJEd.  Submit your blog article to the next edition of A Thomas Jefferson Education Carnival using our carnival submission form. One entry per edition please, and focus on the principles set forth in A Thomas Jefferson Education.

Technorati tags: a thomas jefferson education carnival, blog carnival.

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  Mentoring is a key concept in the book,  A Thomas Jefferson Education.  DeMille writes, “A good mentor is someone of high moral character who is more advanced than the student and can guide his or her learning.  Parents are natural mentors of children.”    Parents know this intuitively, but are sometimes at a loss as to how to mentor their children.  Spending quality time together, teaching them life skills and reflecting on character lessons learned by their mistakes are just a couple ways a parent forms a child.

Is it possible that reading good books aloud to your children is actually a form of mentoring?  After reading Little Britches by Ralph Moody, I think it can be!  Moody artfully relates an adventure story of a boy full of mischief and boyhood curiosity.  Told in first person, the author expounds on memories from his own childhood.  This perspective provides a fascinating portrayal of how young mischievous boys think and rationalize their way into all kinds of disasters.   Through each crisis and mishap, the reader observes Father forming this boy into a man of character through discipline/boundaries, counseling and modeling.

For example, most children at one time or another tell a lie.  Little Britches lies to his mother about something Father gave him permission to do.  In truth, Little Britches just WANTED to do something he knew his parents would not likely permit.  Without giving away the story, predictable disaster results from his actions.  In addition to a suitable punishment, Father shares these wise words, “A man’s character is like his house.  If he tears boards off his house and burns them to keep himself warm and comfortable, his house soon becomes a ruin.  If he tells lies to be able to do the things he shouldn’t do but wants to, his character will soon become a ruin.  A man with a ruined character is a shame on the face of the earth.”    Father has taught a life long lesson in character with an analogy a young boy can see in his mind's eye.

In another example, Little Britches DOES tell the truth about some mischief he was involved in with his class, but only a few children admit to their role in the damage.  The school children, who misrepresented their involvement by claiming innocence, were not punished.  But Little Britches was severely punished by school personnel.  Father comforted Little Britches by saying, “Sometimes a man has to take a licking for doing the right thing.   A licking only lasts a short while, but failing to do the right thing will often make a mark on a man that will last forever.”   This poignant episode creates another picture-lesson easy for a child to remember.

In a final example, Little Britches wants to “hang out” with some friends who likely do not share the same value system in which he was raised.  This IS part of growing up and becoming independent.  Little Britches has already become wiser but Father has sage advice to share.  In spending some time down by their favorite creek together, whittling boats from tree branches, Father uses the opportunity to explain, “You know, a man’s life is a lot like a boat.  If he keeps his sail set right it doesn’t make too much difference which way the wind blows or which way the current flows.  If he knows where he wants to go and keeps his sail trimmed carefully, he’ll come into the right port.  But if he forgets to watch his sail till the current catches him broadside, he’s apt to smash up on the rocks.”  Isn’t this what we all want to say to our kids, but don’t have the poetic words, the whittling skills or quiet time together along a creek?

Reading well written, classic children’s literature aloud has many benefits to a family.  Little Britches by Ralph Moody is one of those not-to-miss books!  It portrays parents as positive role models in the life of a child, and teaches both parent and child the value of mentoring our boys to men.  (Copyright April 2007: use only with permission of author, Maureen O’Brien)

Related Tags: Thomas Jefferson Education, Mentor, Core Phase, Classics, Scholar, Leadership

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An intriguing dialogue with engaging  characters and a twisted plot does not always a good book make!   As parents,  if we want our kids to know  "Whole" or "Healing" stories ,  we need to research what's being offered in the contemporary children's literature market.   The book,   Bridge to TerabithIa  has recently been relased as a movie.  Read what  The Moral Premise  has to say about seeing this new blockbuster.   Of course, read the book FIRST!

Some of my favorite resources to research children's literature recommendations:

Facts On Fiction

 The Good Books

For Real Learning

Ambleside Online

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