Friends, I am behind! I had hoped to have my last Montessori piece and my first Charlotte Mason piece up by now. I did a really absurd amount of research! My poor partner has had to listen to “just one more quote from this book I’m listening to before bed” way to many times. And yet, I still don’t have it for you. Why?
Well, the first reason is that I am disabled and neurodivergent and my estimates for how long things are going to take me are um, variable and unpredictable. Which is a nice way of saying they are wrong, those estimates are always wrong. But the other reason is that I am finally closing in on the end of a project that I originally thought would take me a month at most.
Drumroll please….
I’m about to release A Journey Through The Hobbit, a four week long block of lessons based on the classic fantasy novel.
Now, if you have been following me on Instagram, you may recall me saying that I was close to finishing it before. Again, I have no idea how long stuff takes. Those times I was maybe halfway through the rough draft and thought you know, I could probably knock this out in a weekend, right? And then something would always come up and I would get discouraged.
But this time, this time, is different. How different is it? I’m like, editing and adding images! That means I already have it written!!!! It’s like, an honest to goodness file that exists and is currently around 27 pages long.
Y’all. I am so proud of this thing. I’ve taken what I did with my own daughter in first grade and really expanded it to make it easier to implement, relevant to more ages, and more in line with where I’m at in my research on education, pedagogy, and the brain. It’s so much more than just “draw something on one page and then write something on the next!” It’s completely secular, uses the Waldorf elements I love while throwing out the nonsense, and is just all around a good time. It includes lots of free drawing but also lots of guidance for how to take kids through a guided drawing, including one that is completely step-by-step with illustrations! It includes instructions for painting, both abstract and representational. It includes two potential baking projects! If you follow this, you’ll be ready to teach four weeks of awesome Hobbit lessons for four or five days a week (you decide) to a wide range of ages, ending with an adorable Hobbit Tea Party with honest to goodness seedcakes.
It’s also fully customizable and easy to adjust, because look I can’t follow instructions to save my life and I am just assuming that some of you can’t either.
I have been working on this for so long. I am so excited.
I am hoping to have it available for sale on Monday. I am not going to promise you that, because we all know that if I promise, I will absolutely get sick or hit by a car or something. But if you’ve been missing my emails, this is what has been keeping me busy (that and you know, homeschooling my own child, taking care of my animals, feeding my family, little things like that).
This is only the beginning. My hope is to publish all of the literature blocks that we do together, which means that afterwards I’ll be working on putting together a guide for Where The Mountain Meets the Moon. Hopefully, that one won’t take nearly so long, now that I’ve done this one and I have some experience with how putting these together generally goes. And after that? Well… let’s just say that I may have something special for those who will have five and six year olds in September!
Thank you for your support. Watch this space! Tell your home educator friends! And hopefully sometimes next week we’ll get back into the pedagogical deep dives, because let me tell you, I have some things to say about Charlotte Mason.