I live in a Pig Palace

I don't remember how young I was.  Much too young, I'm sure.  I was probably caught between the trap of being a preschooler, an only child, having a "pack rat" father and a tidy mother, and never having been taught how to declutter and purge.

Inevitably I got to an age, probably 5 or 6 at most, where I was expected to have developed cleaning habits and skills in the face of a daunting amount of STUFF in a room much too large for someone my age to be fully in charge of.

Autobiography

I think I'd like to use this absolutely brilliant "Portfolio" assignment for an 11th grade writing course (following a creative writing course), although I'm considering working it in sooner rather than later and doing the assignments for myself alongside my son working on them. The end-product of this year-long assignment is a publishable autobiography. The teacher who created this curriculum packet has had a great amount of success with other teachers adopting it as well, including foreign language teachers, and has used the assignments in literature classes as well (where you write the portfolio assignment "as if" you are a character in a book).

Creative Writing

Hamlet on the Holodeck

If things in homeschooling, assuming we homeschool, go the way I plan, then my son's remedial writing will focus strongly on expository writing skills. Thinking far ahead, in ways I probably shouldn't, I think the follow-up would be dedicated creative writing. I took creative writing twice in High School and again in College, and I believe it strengthened my overall writing abilities tremendously. My son's reading interests are very close to mine back then, and I can explain to him the importance of having the skill of creative writing. It doesn't hurt that he's read some of my own fantasy stories and liked the style and thought it was good.

The Myth of "Socialization"

How much "socialization" does a child get in school? How much does a homeschooled child "miss out" on this so-called socialization.

First, the term "socialization" makes it sound like something deliberate, like animal husbandry. You pair kids in the corral for purposes of "socializing them." Anyone who has been to a school knows this is simply not the case; the schools group children together based on their classes, which are usually based on their abilities and at the starting level children are grouped simply based on their chronological age. If we were to purposefully socialize our children, wouldn't we pair or group them based on common interests?