Tea Time with Annie Kate Rotating Header Image

High School

NaNoWriMo: Novel Writing for Kids (and Adults)

How does the idea of getting your children to write a novel in a month sound to you?  Incredible?  Well, it might be, but last year 35,000 kids were involved in NaNoWriMo’s Young Writers Program.  NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. Last year Miss 17 and Miss 12 participated.  For the entire month of November they […]

Homeschooling Success…Despite Distractions

Well, we had another week of distractions like Thanksgiving, harvesting, preserving, cleaning up the garden, and more, but we had some major homeschooling breakthroughs despite that. Miss 8 can read!  She whizzes through the instructions in her workbook, hardly stumbles in her reader, picks up easy reader books for fun, and comments on what I’m […]

This Week at Home: 3R’s and More

The highlight of  this week is that we’ve had no frost yet!  A few times it’s been close enough that we had get up early and sneak outside to see if there was frost on our deck. If the deck had been slippery, we would have bundled up and sprayed the entire garden with water to […]

Beekeeping

Mr. 15 and the Bee Man have been busy all summer, caring for bees and expanding hives.  In fact, they expanded the hives so much that there is only enough honey for the bees this winter, with none to spare for us. That is a bit of a disappointment, but the Bee Man surprised us […]

How We Study Dutch

I speak Dutch, my husband understands it somewhat, and our children are learning it in a very casual but effective way, mostly through stories and songs.  To increase vocabulary and improve speaking skills, the children also use Rosetta Stone, a program that effectively reviews many simple words and concepts, but the real meat of our learning […]