Dear D.O.C.S., Board of Studies, Grandparents and Telephoning Friends,

Posted on September 2, 2015 by alicemayburke

What is a homeschooling mother to do…when someone calls your home and one of your children answers the phone, and you hear them say, “Um, not much, we haven’t really been doing school lately.”

You and your husband look at each other with horror, jointly imagining raised eyebrows and plans to notify the Department of Community Services on the other end of the line.

“Did you remember that I read you a chapter of a classic children’s novel this morning?” you immediately ask – with what you hope is not even a hint of condemnation or defensiveness – when they have handed on the phone. “And a poem by an Oxford don? Did we not listen together to a movement of Gustav Holst’s “The Planets” Suite? You read aloud to me from a Scholastic textbook on Saturn. And did we discuss a picture of a bronze statue of Saturn as Father Time? What about our little session on the DNA of caterpillars and butterflies? And the lesson on pruning the grapevine, right before lunch? Do you remember the documentary we watched about Scotland, and the radio programme from which you took two pages of notes on astronomy at breakfast time? What about watching your brother install the wiring for an air compressor on a vehicle this afternoon? Have you not also both begun and completed a craft project today? Not to mention the hour you spent picnicking on the roof (yes! A lesson on risk management!) while you and your sister each read your own historical novels, with a view! Have you also fed the ducks and collected the hens’ eggs and ridden the pony and baked two recipes from scratch? And did you not then follow the echidna on his twilight waddle through the paddock just now? Did we discuss current affairs from the newspaper at the dinner table as a family, followed by a time of Bible reading and prayer? And has this litany of educational opportunities not been procured solely from the past 24 hours?”

You pause breathlessly and notice your hands are on your hips.

“Oh. Sorry,” said child apologises. “I forgot about that. But I did tell them I did some vacuuming!”

This Homeschooling Life…

Posted on August 14, 2014 by alicemayburke

Evergreen

Posted on February 15, 2014 by alicemayburke

We woke at 3:07am on Saturday morning to a resounding crash. It was the creaking groan of a breaking bough and the splintering fall of timber. Adrenalin quivered in my fingertips as the needles shook on the ends of their own spindly limbs.

The tree stood all ragamuffin at the corner of the verandah, and the french doors were open for any minstrel of a breeze. February means hot summer nights on this antipodean farm.

February also means a new school year for us, so Saturday afternoon finds me in the study, reading about poetry and history and art… (We study history like a multi-stranded rope, snipping it open at a given point and investigating some variegated threads: literature and music and science and language and art and technology and ideas, all woven into one spectacular, linear story…).

This season we’ve selected the thread of our own family history: a familiar strand for the littlest students in our home to grasp, while we introduce them to the foreign, to the further afield… And so family stories and photos and timelines are spread out over the study table, for the fleshing out of a paper family tree.

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If history is a story – and the universe, as Aristotle said, requires a beginning, a middle and an end… then it follows that history has an Author. And an Author who transcends but writes Himself into His own story: that is the golden thread running through the centre of the rope, from ‘In the beginning’ to ‘Amen’.

So we study His Words, and discover what He has to say about the parts of the story to which we’ve turned.

In this case: a Family Tree.

One might be forgiven for expecting a list of unpronounceable ‘begats’… But instead it is the words of an ancient prophet which speak the Author’s heart and thrill my mother’s soul:

I had written it in gold on the study window…

George Macdonald has defined art as “the revelation of the true through the beautiful”, and it is not until I see the fallen tree branch through the chalked study window that I recognise it as art: Truth and Beauty superimposed.

“They will be called Oaks of Righteousness…”

This, this is our charge. Entrusted with acorns: to raise strong saplings.

To so nurture the branch of a family tree in our home that when drought comes, its roots are deep and it knows where to find the Source that will quench desperate thirst.