I love homeschooling

I love homeschooling Ben and Shira. Can I say that again? I love homeschooling Ben and Shira!

I love watching how the knowledge percolates into their brains and then explodes in a flow of unstoppable, bubbling words.

I love watching their love of words grow. The two of them have remarkable vocabularies for 6 year olds and have a love of increasing them. Marc and I both have large vocabularies and we're not afraid of using them. Nor do we dumb down our vocabularies when we interact our children. Ben and Shira had to develop a large vocab just to understand their parents.

We helped them along by surrounding them with good literature. When they were around 3 we started playing audiobooks during naptime, bedtime, art time, quiet play time and in the van. We started off by playing them CD's by Jim Weiss. We started with the fairy tales they knew and loved and then we moved to stories that were unfamiliar. As their listening skills developed we moved to full length books. We focused on classics read by British voice artists. (The choice of British voice artists was mine. I just love an educated British accent and felt the need to expose our children to accents that were as far from a Tidewater one as I could). Before they were six, they had listened to all the Narnia Chronicles half a dozen times, ditto for Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, Heidi, Mary Poppins and Dr Doolittle.

As a result of all the 19th century literature they've listened to, they have a fairly quant way of talking. Ben told us the other day that he can count to three in three languages. "One, two, three. Uno, dos, tres. Once, twice, thrice."