Scholé Sisters: Camaraderie for Classical Homeschooling Mamas

We are absolutely thrilled to have Susan Wise Bauer on the show today! Susan Wise Bauer is a writer, historian, educator, and farmer. She’s the author of twenty books and the founder of the educational publishing company Well-Trained Mind Press. Susan's parents taught her at home for most of elementary and middle school, and all of high school.  She went on to earn graduate degrees in divinity, English literature, and American studies. She has been married to Peter since 1990. They have four grown children, all taught at home; one child-in-law, one grandchild; and many, many sheep. Today’s discussion is all about giving ourselves the classical education we never received. That’s was Susan Wise Bauer’s book, The Well-Educated Mind, is all about, and it’s why we knew she was the perfect person to discuss this with. You are going to LOVE listening to her! *** Join the Sistership! Have you joined the Scholé Sisters Sistership yet? If not, you are missing out on some of the best conversations for classical homeschooling moms on the internets. There is always something going on designed to enrich your life as a mom for the better. Whether it’s a Sophie mentorship, a book club, or even a Scholé Everyday 7-day challenge with Abby, you’ll be glad you joined. Click here to sign up. *** Download this episode's Scholé Sheet! Scholé Sheets are designed to help you think through and apply the ideas you've taken in, then bring your thoughts into the Sistership and join the conversation happening there. Click here to download your copy for free. *** Click here to get the show notes for today's episode and download Your Scholé Sheet. Click here to join the Sistership. Don't forget to find us on Facebook! Click here to follow us on Instagram!

Today’s discussion between Brandy, Pam, Mystie, and Abby centers on the differences between communities and networks as spelled out by John Taylor Gatto in his wonderful little book Dumbing Us Down. To which do you belong? Is there an ideal? There's a lot of food for thought in this episode. *** Registration for Loving Well is now open! Registration is now open for this year’s online local retreats which will take place live on Saturday October 10th. The theme of this year’s retreat is Loving Well and our guest speaker is Karen Glass! This is going to be a wonderful time in which we deeply explore the topic of love as it relates to homeschooling, mothering, and continuing our own educations. Click here to register. If you want to host a local retreat event, just click here to fill out the form and we’ll help you pull it off. *** Download this episode's Scholé Sheet! Scholé Sheets are designed to help you think through and apply the ideas you've taken in, then bring your thoughts into the Sistership and join the conversation happening there. Click here to download your copy for free. *** Click here to get the show notes for today's episode and download Your Scholé Sheet. Click here to join the Sistership. Don't forget to find us on Facebook! Click here to follow us on Instagram!

Is there really such a thing as classical education for preschoolers? You may be surprised to learn that yes the ancients actually had opinions on what to do with the little ones entrusted to us. In today’s episode, Mystie, Brandy, and Abby discuss a bit about what Plato, Aristotle, and Quintilian had to say on this subject. *** Registration for Loving Well is now open! Registration is now open for this year’s online local retreats which will take place live on Saturday October 10th. The theme of this year’s retreat is Loving Well and our guest speaker is the one and only Karen Glass! This is going to be a wonderful time in which we deeply explore the topic of love as it relates to homeschooling, mothering, and continuing our own educations. Click here to register. If you want to host a local retreat event, just click here to fill out the form and we’ll help you pull it off. *** Download this episode's Scholé Sheet! Scholé Sheets are designed to help you think through and apply the ideas you've taken in, then bring your thoughts into the Sistership and join the conversation happening there. Click here to download your copy for free. *** Click here to get the show notes for today's episode and download Your Scholé Sheet. Click here to join the Sistership. Don't forget to find us on Facebook! Click here to follow us on Instagram!

Our special guest today is one of our favorite people, Karen Glass! Karen Glass has been homeschooling her children for 25 years, and she’s not quite finished yet. She is one of the founders of the AmblesideOnline curriculum project and has delved deeply into Charlotte Mason’s philosophy of education. She has lived in Poland, where her husband ministers, for over twenty years. In the last few years, she has begun writing books to share some of the things she has learned along the way. Today’s episode covers more about the fall retreat. In the first part we formulate our response to the extrovert revolt that took place after Episode 74. After that, we discuss the Loving Well theme and how each of us (including Karen, who is this year's guest speaker) plan to approach it in our talks. *** Early-bird registration is now open! Our annual fall online local retreats are something we forward to every year, and this year is no exception. Click here for early-bird registration for the Loving Well retreat. If you want to host a local retreat event, we are still doing this (in states where it is legal). Just click here and fill out the form and we’ll help you pull it off. *** Click here to get the show notes for today's episode. Click here to join the Sistership. Click here to follow us on Instagram. Don't forget to find us on Facebook!

Today’s episode is all about the fall retreat. In the first half, Brandy, Mystie, and Abby talk about Covid and lockdown … and how to manage a retreat if we’re still on lockdown (including what Scholé Sisters plans to do to help support unique situations). In the second half we talk about how we overhauled part of our program to make room for something super special from Abby. *** Get your Beginner’s Guide to Scholé! We have a special treat for you today! You can download for free our new Beginner’s Guide to Scholé. If you are not a beginner, you still will like it, but even more important is that we’ve set it up where you can share it. That’s right. You know all those friends you’ve been trying to share scholé with? This is the resource you’ve been waiting for! Our gift to you. ♥ *** Click here to get the show notes for today's episode. Click here to join the Sistership. Click here to follow us on Instagram. Don't forget to find us on Facebook!

Today’s episode is extra long! Our topic is scholé and how it changes with the seasons of motherhood. Brandy, Pam, Mystie, and Abby discussed having all preschoolers, starting to homeschool, the teen years, and then guessed what the particular challenges might be in launching children. It was a long episode because it’s a big topic! *** Join us in the Sistership! Many fun things are going on in the Sistership these days. Abby is prepping a follow-up contemplation session for Spring Training. If you wish Spring Training wasn’t over, you’ll be thrilled with what she has in the works. Also, all the Sophies are getting a bookbag this summer! They are very cute and we are super excited about them. Click here to get in on all this and more! *** Download this episode's Scholé Sheet! Scholé Sheets are designed to help you think through and apply the ideas you've taken in, then bring your thoughts into the Sistership and join the conversation happening there. Click here to download your copy for free. *** Click here to get the show notes for today's episode and download Your Scholé Sheet. Click here to join the Sistership. Don't forget to find us on Facebook! Click here to follow us on Instagram!

Our guest on the show this time is Dr. Kevin Clark. Kevin is the founder of The Ecclesial Schools Initiative, an organization that’s partnering with local churches to plant a network of affordable and accessible Christian classical schools. Kevin is an Alcuin fellow with The Society for Classical Learning and a member of the teaching faculty in the Master of Arts in Classical Teaching program at The Templeton Honors College. Most importantly, he is Taryn’s husband and father to Aubrey, Caedmon, Naomi, and Eleanor. In today’s episode, Mystie and Brandy have a rousing conversation with Kevin Clark about the trivium and grammar sections of the revised edition of The Liberal Arts Tradition. What changes were made to the book for this new edition, and why? You will really enjoy hearing his answers! *** Have you upgraded your Sistership membership to Sophie level yet? We highly recommend you do – Spring Training is included for no extra charge, plus you get access to all the other great things, including the Cutting Room Floor from this episode. We chatted with Kevin for over 90 minutes! Brandy had to cut a lot, and it wasn’t just his dog barking. As a Sophie Member, you can listen to the cutting room floor selections while you wait for the next session of Spring Training. Click here to find out more. *** Download this episode's Your Scholé Sheet! Scholé Sheets are designed to help you think through and apply the ideas you've taken in, then bring your thoughts into the Sistership and join the conversation happening there. Click here to download your copy for free. *** Click here to get the show notes for today's episode and download Your Scholé Sheet. Click here to join the Sistership. Don't forget to find us on Facebook! Click here to follow us on Instagram!

Today’s episode was recorded BEFORE the demise of 2020, before quaratines, lockdowns, and economic tragedies. We cut a couple things that no longer made sense, but the rest of it survives as useful and oh so encouraging. Our special guest today is Andrew Pudewa, the founder and director of the Institute for Excellence in Writing and a father of seven. Traveling and speaking around the world, he addresses issues related to teaching, writing, thinking, spelling, and music with clarity, insight, practical experience, and humor. His seminars for parents, students, and teachers have helped transform many a reluctant writer and have equipped educators with powerful tools to dramatically improve students’ skills. Although he is a graduate of the Talent Education Institute in Japan and holds a Certificate of Child Brain Development from the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, his best endorsement is from a young Alaskan boy who called him “the funny man with the wonderful words.” He and his wonderful, heroic wife, Robin, have homeschooled their seven children and are now proud grandparents of fourteen, making their home in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Andrew Pudewa helps us be brave and not hide our homeschooling light under a bucket. He says we should be practicing homeschool evangelism. And when he said this, NO ONE KNEW the entire country would be doing school at home by the time this went live. What Andrew says here is even more applicable than when he first said it. *** Don’t forget to register for Spring Training 2020! Did you know? If you sign up for a Sophie level Sistership membership (or already have one) Spring Training is included, along with all the other great things (I’m looking at YOU, Kelly Cumbee’s amazing Shakespeare mentorship)? If you aren’t a Sophie, click here to go sign up. If you already are a Sophie, we highly encourage you to go through the Spring Training 2019 sessions if you haven’t already as a way to prepare for this year’s Spring Training. *** Don’t forget to download this episode's Your Scholé Sheet to think through and apply the ideas from this episode, then bring your thoughts into the Sistership and join the conversation happening there. Click here to download your copy for free. *** Click here to get the show notes for today's episode and download Your Scholé Sheet. Click here to join the Sistership. Don't forget to find us on Facebook! Click here to follow us on Instagram!

We’ve been promising you a bonus episode for a while and today is the day! The only thing is, Abby made us do a Scholé Everyday, and then we talked too long, so we did the logical thing in this situation: we decided to make it a “real” episode. What does this mean for the season? Well, it’ll just be longer. There will be nine episodes instead of our usual eight, making this a sort of bonus after all. Today, we're discussing an article on education written by Steven Rummelsburg that originally appeared in The Imaginative Conservative called The Problem of Language and Our Schools. If you’d like to read the article before listening, just click here. This is a rousing conversation on an excellent topic and also ... listen up because we're making a very big announcement! *** Registration for spring training is now open! Titled "Great conversations about the Great Conversation: How to develop an understanding of a Socratic Seminar as it ought to be," this series of three sessions (LIVE at 5pm on May 11, 18, and 25) transcends all the crazy swirling around us and gets to the heart of truths that matter, even when things feel chaotic. *** Don’t forget to download this episode's Your Scholé Sheet to think through and apply the ideas from this episode, then bring your thoughts into the Sistership and join the conversation happening there. Click here to download your copy for free. *** Click here to get the show notes for today's episode and download Your Scholé Sheet. Click here to join the Sistership. Don't forget to find us on Facebook! Click here to follow us on Instagram!

Our special guest today is Renee Shepard. Renee has been married for 14 years. She and her husband, who were both homeschooled, are now homeschooling their six children. She is currently finishing her graduate degree in Classical Christian Studies at New Saint Andrews College, where her favorite things to study are theology, Latin, and literature. This episode is a follow up to an episode we did last year called Someone Stole My Socrates. Brandy, Mystie, and Renee discuss a work by Plato called Gorgias. (Brandy likes to call it Gorgeous.) Whatever you call it, it’s a Socratic dialogue. We decided that if we want to know what Socratic discussion is all about, we should go straight to the source. It’s great fun! *** Sign up for our 30-60-90 planning session! Quarantine got you down? It’s not too late to check out or 30-60-90 planning session from last weekend. Just click here to register. This will send you the planning pages and the replay to watch. We’ll help pull you out of your slump so that you are faithful and fruitful during these admittedly weird times. *** Don’t forget to download this episode's Your Scholé Sheet to think through and apply the ideas from this episode, then bring your thoughts into the Sistership and join the conversation happening there. Click here to download your copy for free. *** Click here to get the show notes for today's episode and download Your Scholé Sheet. Click here to join the Sistership. Don't forget to find us on Facebook! Click here to follow us on Instagram!