Brave Writer

Our guest MacKenzie Koppa (aka Bold Turquoise) is the creator of a slew of resources for families: the Cultivating the Lovely podcast, the Lovely Homeschool online course, and the brand new The Same Page podcast. The Same Page is practically designed with Brave Writer families in mind. The core of each episode is memory work encompassing poetry, Shakespeare, historical facts, and scripture. So in...

Homeschooling changes when you transition into the scary world of teenagers, so today I want to discuss teens in general and what you can expect from a homeschool with teenagers. After home births, breastfeeding, babywearing, cosleeping, and having a wonderfully close relationship with her young children, Julie thought that she would seamlessly move into the teen years and escape all of the weirdn...

Before Julie started Brave Writer, she worked as a freelance writer, freelance magazine editor, and a ghostwriter – which is to say, yes, you can simultaneously pursue a dream or passion and homeschool! Whether you want to earn money, go to grad school, start a business, or write a blog, you can do that and still be a phenomenal homeschooling parent. In today’s episode, Julie shares some of her ex...

After working with parents for years, we have learned that there is often a reluctance to giving your own efforts to your child’s writing. But kids with parents who are involved in their education get better grades, and as a result, they feel more successful – and children who receive no support end up performing worse. Because parental involvement in education is what produces the greatest r...

There’s a difference between correct writing and good writing. You can check off all the boxes and put together a series of grammatically correct sentences, but does that engage the reader and make them want to keep reading? Probably not! Even academic writing, at its best, should compel the reader – that’s it’s #1 job! But many popular writing curricula keep perpetuating myths about good writing,...

One of Julie’s most popular talks is called “Updating Charlotte Mason to the 21st Century,” so when she stumbled upon Leah Boden – AKA Modern Miss Mason – Julie knew that she had found a kindred spirit. You can download show notes for the podcast here: http://blog.bravewriter.com/category/podcasts/ Resources: Learn more about Modern Miss Mason Connect with Leah on Instagram: @leahvboden | @modernm...

Imagine this scene: your child is reading a book, and they’ve been reading for a few months now. Suddenly, you think, “What if I had taught them to read this other way? What if I had used this other philosophy from the beginning? What if my child were in school?” When the "what ifs" show up, they can trigger worry, envy, and despair – and they can show up everywhere – but that isn’t serving you or...

We recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Barbara Oakley, Ph. D., educator, writer, engineer, and perhaps most importantly, a female Indiana Jones! Barbara’s work focuses on the complex relationships between neuroscience and social behavior, and we think that any Brave Writer fan is also going to be a fan of Barbara’s newest book – Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School Without Sp...

Do you ever feel stressed out talking about home education philosophies? When Unschooling, Classical Education, or Charlotte-Mason come up, do you ever feel like you’re going to have to defend yourself? Have you ever felt this way in an academic homeschooling community? It’s weird, isn’t it? In this episode, Julie discusses the importance of safe communities, the dangers of ideological purity, the...

Before getting into the topic of this episode – the top 10 things to have done by the end of highschool – we want to make something clear: you can’t teach your children everything by the time they’re 18. As a matter of fact, your education wasn’t finished when you turned 18, either! It’s okay to save or discover some things in adulthood. And truly, life would be so much less satisfying if learning...

A disclaimer for this episode: we are not trained experts and our specialty is not special needs, so anything we share today is based on our own efforts to do research and learn from other trained efforts. So nothing in this episode should be considered clinical diagnosis or expert referral – this is all parent-to-parent sharing. And Julie’s children are all adults now, so the stories she has to s...

Are you a happy family… or are you not? Today, we hope to solve that dilemma! There’s a temptation to only consider the family identity when we think about our families, and that can be a wonderful identity to share! But a family is a collection of individuals and we can’t forget that. The friction of human beings living in a family space together is always going to feel a little bit like controll...

We often see families join Brave Writer or The Homeschool Alliance who get excited about this style of living, but then we struggle to find other like-minded individuals out there in the world. Even in the homeschooling community, there can be a big disconnect between your theory of education and a friend’s. This may be someone you like personally, but they have a different vision of homeschool an...

Today we want to talk about the roles in our families – and the incredible power of choice. We delve into the labels and roles we use to characterize our kids, how those may limit our children, and how to let young people explore who they want to be through choice. Homeschooling is an empowering choice, and we can leverage that power to provide the best learning environment for our kids! You can d...

Julie spends a lot of time looking at the homeschooling zeitgeist, and she notices a common theme coming up every so often: the search for the one thing that’s going to magically create a flawless homeschool. But really we shouldn’t be aiming for perfection – we should be aiming for progress! You can download show notes for the podcast here: http://blog.bravewriter.com/category/podcasts/ Resources...

In the last episode , Julie started breaking down some research on brain-based learning, or the science behind what it looks like to be a good learner. Today, we’re going to dig into the rest of that research so that we have a holistic understanding of how our children learn! You can download show notes for the podcast here: http://blog.bravewriter.com/category/podcasts/ Resources: Check out this...

When Julie started learning about home education, she read a lot of work by home educators. Of course this makes sense because she wanted to understand the philosophy behind home education. However, learning the philosophy didn’t teach her to understand how learning functions inside a person’s brain. So much of educational training is focused on organizational skills, but it’s also important to un...

Julie coined the term Party School when she was developing her own homeschool experience. Today, we’re going to look at the properties of Party School and how you can turn it into a practice that brings a little enchantment to your homeschool. With these tips and some imagination, you can transform the study of any subject into something more engaging and fun! You can download show notes for the p...

As we get older, we go through many different stages of our lives, and it can be challenging to discuss the topic of “Awesome Adulthood” because of this fact. Not everybody feels like they’re in a position to add anything to their lives, let alone an awesome new passion, hobby, or career choice. If you have children under the age of five years old, for example, your primary job to to take care of...

As home educators, what does it mean to have a satisfying adult life? How can we nourish and enrich our lives when we are so depleted from giving away so much to our kids? What happens if we spend so much of our time preparing our children that we end up watching our own lives go by? Today we’re going to address these questions, and many more, with a conversation about Awesome Adulting. You can do...

In 1989, homeschool curriculum programs were few and far between; parents had to assemble products piecemeal, and this problem was far worse overseas. However, Sarita Holzmann decided to help by creating book lists for parents living abroad and then shipping those books to them, all before Amazon and the modern Internet. Fast-forward to present day: Sarita is the co-founder of successful homeschoo...

When Julie started homeschooling, all of the curricula she saw focused on what tasks the kids should do – there was nothing explaining to parents what it actually looks like to facilitate that process. In other words, most writing programs and teaching methodologies said what to do, but not how to do it. So when Julie started Brave Writer, her goal was to help parents and children become partners...

What’s the difference between Brave Writer and some of the other writing programs available online? Julie originally saw the writing process as a relationship between trusted allies; the child and the parent. You don’t grow a writer simply by focusing on the skill and act of writing – you also have to establish bonds of affection and joy around language. And it’s so easy and natural to find that j...

Anne Guarnera has always been passionate about learning, languages in particular. Anne shares her passion for language learning with her husband, Daniel, and they are now introducing that love of language to their two young sons – and the rest of the homeschooling community through Language Learning at Home. In this episode, Anne shares how cultural learning can be integrated into any homeschool c...

Today I want to talk about hominess in homeschool, and how you can you help your kids stay on task, while still experience the peace and comfort that home provides all of us. At Brave Writer, we steadfastly resist images of yellow #2 pencils, school buses, and apples because we are not bringing school into our families. We want to reinforce the properties of home, as opposed to reinforcing the qua...