Andrew Pudewa shares many humorous experiences (and painful lessons) he has learned over thirty years of teaching and homeschooling. You will be challenged, reassured, and sure to leave with an expanded vision of your calling as a home educator.

Listening and reading well, speaking and writing clearly, and thinking and debating effectively are abilities that most parents hope to cultivate in their children. With that goal in mind, Andrew Pudewa explores various environments and activities that accelerate the development of these language skills, beginning with the youngest students and continuing into the high school years.

Would a Renaissance education help bring about a renaissance in education? What sort of training and life did a young Shakespeare or da Vinci have? What elements of that can we recapture and apply in our tech-driven modern world? Andrew Pudewa contemplates craft, attentiveness, stock, imitation, constraint, freedom, and more!

Many teachers and parents assume that good readers will naturally become good writers. Others think that writing talent is a natural ability. Some have it. Others don’t. Both are myths. History and modern research demonstrate how good writers develop the two most critical skills needed for a high level of aptitude in writing. With humor and insight, Andrew Pudewa explains these two easy but powerful skills that build language patterns and nurture competent communicators.

As schools have made reading their new god, they believe that producing good readers will solve all their academic problems. As a result, many children—the dyslexic, the easily distracted, the auditorily challenged—are left behind in the rush to improve test scores. What schools do not know (but what many parents and teachers discover) is that reading is not simply being able to rapidly decode symbols with the eyes. With humor and insight, Andrew Pudewa shares stories and strategies for helping students who need to engage the cognitive processes of reading but who are more likely to excel through a wider variety of practical, creative, and imaginative approaches.