Does history have to be stuffy and staunch or could it actually be enjoyable?!
We are revisiting an episode from earlier in the podcast, because everyone needs to be freshly inspired to enjoy homeschooling! Laura Baker, a veteran homeschool mom, shares how the literature she read with her two kids sparked their creativity and brought history to life!
In this episode, you'll hear about:
RESOURCES
Get our FREE ebook: 5 Essential Parts of a Great Education.
Attend one of our upcoming seminars in 2024!
Click HERE for more information about consulting with Carole Joy Seid!
CONNECT
Carole Joy Seid of Homeschool Made Simple | Website | 2024 Seminars | Instagram | Facebook | Pinterest
Help us share the message of homeschool made simple with others by leaving a rating and review. Thank you for helping us get the word out!
Does history have to be stuffy and staunch or could it actually be enjoyable?!
We are revisiting an episode from earlier in the podcast, because everyone needs to be freshly inspired to enjoy homeschooling! Laura Baker, a veteran homeschool mom, shares how the literature she read with her two kids sparked their creativity and brought history to life!
In this episode, you'll hear about:
RESOURCES
Get our FREE ebook: 5 Essential Parts of a Great Education.
Attend one of our upcoming seminars in 2024!
Click HERE for more information about consulting with Carole Joy Seid!
CONNECT
Carole Joy Seid of Homeschool Made Simple | Website | 2024 Seminars | Instagram | Facebook | Pinterest
Help us share the message of homeschool made simple with others by leaving a rating and review. Thank you for helping us get the word out!
I'm Carol Joy Side and welcome to the Homeschool Made Simple podcast. You're listening to Episode 50. This is a podcast to help you homeschool simply, inexpensively and enjoyably. Well, this morning I'm sitting in my dining room here at Sabbath Rest with my beautiful longtime friend, laura Baker. She can tell you a little bit about how we met and how our lives came together, but Greg and Laura are the parents of two grown children, whitson and Lily, and they live in Charlotte, north Carolina, where Greg is executive pastor at Central Church.
Laura Baker:Thank you for having me. I'm so glad to be with you. I'm so glad too.
Carole Joy Seid:This is better than a birthday party. So tell our listeners about, kind of, how the Lord brought us into each other's lives.
Laura Baker:Okay, well, getting a running start. I'm from Detroit, michigan, so it's a very blue collar place where I was surrounded by a very loving family and really my educational background would just be. You would consider it kind of uninspiring. It was very utilitarian, but I always like hoped especially when I became a believer that there was things that I didn't know about that I always wanted to know about, and so I always had this desire to know more about the beauty and the goodness and the truth that existed.
Laura Baker:I didn't even know those three words as I came to later understand but I couldn't have articulated it, but I always had that in my heart. So when Greg and I met and got engaged, we laughed and we were so idealistic and earnest but ignorant because we always said we wanted to adopt six children and we wanted to. You know, we'll have six children and adopt, and so we laughed. We have two, but we think we ended up with six in a roundabout way. Six people in two bodies, they're pretty live wires. But so we were so excited to start off our life and just that we were going to have this Christian family and just be really together and stuff. And the first bump in the road we hit was infertility issues and that was just so tough. And then we were so blessed to adopt Lily at birth and then that was eight years into our marriage and then two years later we gave birth to a biological son who he's surprise surprise, surprise, he's 23 now.
Laura Baker:And so I think it's because of that how precious that was to us, that we had this deep sense of calling with our parenthood and with even, you know, considering homeschooling and just that we wanted to really share the beauty of Christ with discipling our children. We just felt like the constraints of traditional school would really limit severely, and so, anyway, we just wanted to start this journey. We had friends at homeschool and we thought, well, if they can do it, we can do it. But the more I found out about it, I started breaking out in hives because it sounded kind of rigid and like workbooks and textbooks and I something about that just made my spirit kind of crumple. But I had no idea what to do about it. And so I'd gotten some catalog where there was five in a row on the front and it was literature based and I just thought, oh, that'll be fun to get me started, you know, because I just was ignorant and I didn't know anything else. So I kind of had that in the hopper when we first went to the homeschool conference in Winston Salem. So it was there that I received my booklet and something caught my eye right away.
Laura Baker:There was a seminar by some lady named Carol Joy Seed, which you know. She got me in the German pronunciation later, but I was reading it and that's what I thought. And so it said if you were stranded on a deserted island and you could only bring one box of books, what would be in the box? So I said to my husband let's divide and conquer. You know, he had certain things that were more like technical, and then I was going for like the emotive flowers and music and art, you know. So anyway, I thought that sounds like you know me because I love to read.
Laura Baker:And so anyway, that was the first time I heard Carol speak and really by the end of it I was almost mad because I thought I'd only heard of one of the books or authors that she had talked about. And I said I'm 35 years old and I've been gypped and you know, I need to go back and read all these children's books that I never heard of, or even there was grown up books on there too. But I was like, okay, that's my first thing as a homeschool teacher, I need to build a library and have read some of these beautiful classics myself. So she was saying all these like romantical, sounding like exotic names, like it would just tumble off her tongue, like Marguerite de Angeli and Jean Stratton Porter, and I was like I literally think I wrote every word that you said. And so I got at the end of it. I was just like my hair was drooping down because I was just like I could run the gauntlet, you know.
Laura Baker:And so I said, forget all these other highlighted seminars, I'm looking for this lady's next one because I was going to rearrange my whole weekend around hearing, but then I thought, Laura, this is just like you. You're so emotional Like you, though your favorite book is the last one you read. You know that kind of thing. So just because I heard this first, very first person, now I think I'm all in for this and so I I sort of had this out of body experience, Like I was having a psychotic break up with reality, Like how can the first thing I heard be like the very cry of my heart, but yet look how beautifully the Lord really providentially, ordered my steps, because I felt that we were kindred spirits from that first. Can you believe that?
Carole Joy Seid:girl, I have to tell our listeners that you were wearing the cutest little Lilly Pulitzer outfit and I thought, oh, this woman is my twin,
Laura Baker:Well, I just thought I don't want to be, like you know, with the Jean jumper and the.
Carole Joy Seid:Birkenstocks and you know raising goats and saw that outfit and I thought, well, this is a woman after my heart.
Laura Baker:Oh, how funny. Well, you know, our church is in a big city, so it was like I probably would have actually really loved to be that person in Birkenstocks raising goats, but there I was landlocked and I just had to like, wear Lilly, that's right, that's exactly right.
Laura Baker:So anyway that's the first thing. So then I ended up meeting fortuitously through a neighbor, her daughter and she had children the same age and I was about to host you. I wanted you to come and talk more. I was just so thirsty at our church, and so we had an area seminar and I invited this new friend her name's Laura too and there we sat and we got the holy grail, our Bible's, the exalted pink sheets from Carol's seminar Back then.
Carole Joy Seid:I was just like they were all pink. Okay, but then, as years wore on, we color coded.
Laura Baker:So For the age no, just for the different topics, Like history's pink literature's blue, church history's boff, curriculum's yellow.
Carole Joy Seid:So we made it easier in the seminar to say turn to your yellow, okay.
Laura Baker:Back then they were all pink. Well, back then I was just a newbie and that's all I knew, so I had these. I was just like in awe and I have to say that just even the preliminary things about your family life and your Christian worldview, I mean all that ended up being extremely. I might start crying.
Carole Joy Seid:I know Laura's a big friar, you guys. So you already have the Kleenex next year.
Laura Baker:We do, we have it here, but like it was so transformational for me personally, casting a vision, yeah, like World Magazine, I didn't know about it, and since then just the whole world of apologetics and theology and politics, and why this is all important as a believer, so really it just I mean I cannot tell you and that's why I've just been so grateful for you because it didn't just help us, like, get through homeschooling, it really changed me as a believer and I'm so grateful for your discipleship of me, I'm so grateful for you, so it's mutual.
Laura Baker:So there we go. So then we did a little consulting to kind of get nuts and bolts, and it really helped me clarify, like you know, planning and being intentional about making sure that we began with the end in mind, like we really wanted to do things.
Laura Baker:Yeah, have that vision. And I was reading Charlotte Mason and I was thinking about what you were saying and Greg was so appreciative, he just loved it so gratefully. I have such an amazing you know partner where we were never at odds about it, and my heart really goes out for those that you know, I do, I do, I just my heart is with you. But so the so Carol encouraged us because our children were still so young. Why don't you start with my friend Kathy Keller's book? It's called Turning Back the Pages of Time, a guide to American history through literature. And the reason why is because Kathy was a girl like me once upon a time, who had come to the seminar. Her children were too little. Carol's is really ideally for third and up right. The pink sheet, the pink sheet.
Carole Joy Seid:The pink world history, world history, and so I like people to start with American history, because it's concrete and it's not. There's nothing supernatural and weird like Egyptian gods Correct Greek gods.
Laura Baker:Perfect. So such wisdom on that, spiritually, because of what we know about children's early years.
Carole Joy Seid:Yes, development.
Laura Baker:So we started off first thing out of this shoot Vikings. Laura and I decided because our husbands were awesome, taking the kids out swimming or doing something fun we sat down and we planned a unit study using Kathy's books by Carol's method, and we started with Laf the Lucky. And what ended up happening out of that is I realized I sort of had this talent of reading the book and then writing a script.
Laura Baker:So springboarding it. And so what we did was we started with an end of the unit party in mind where we were gonna cook like a Viking meal. Have the dads come? We made these little cheesy like. We went to Walmart and got that acrylic fur, fake fur, and we made like we laced it with the leather lacing like vest for the kids.
Laura Baker:And then we got this is just. I don't even know where we got all this stuff us born books or the internet by that time, I don't know but we cut like gallon milk jugs and we paper machéed Viking horns and like they, we painted them and they like we got the boys like spears and it was just totally a blast and they did this little play and, oh, the dads clapped and it was just like super easy, super simple. We read by day and then we had this you know wing ding at the end and it was super fun.
Carole Joy Seid:And so, laura, let me interrupt you. Okay, there are people saying, oh, I hate messes and I hate projects, but the beauty of reading these books is it gives it all to you. As you're reading during the wall, you're learning about nights and castles and monasteries in the middle ages.
Carole Joy Seid:And as you're reading, life's the Lucky, you're learning about Norsemen and their traditions and their clothes and their food. Exactly Right. And so you don't have to be a creative genius, no, and you're not staying up nights because you're doing this. You're learning with your children as you read.
Carole Joy Seid:So a lot of the unit study approaches that our generation, my generation, tried. They'd be like well, you stay up all night and you create this whole process and then your kids get up and you spew it all back to them and then they go to bed and you stay up all night again and your husband's like, hello, where are you? Because it consumes your life. Right, but my method is based on the scripture that Jesus says Yoke is easy and His burden is light, yes. And so, as you're reading out loud, your kids are saying can we make a Viking feast like they're having Exactly.
Carole Joy Seid:You're not having to come up with this on your own.
Laura Baker:Not really. I mean it was very organic. I mean we had these were picture books, and so you could at a glance sort of see where it was going. So we had some ideas, but our criteria was that it couldn't be like taking over our life either.
Laura Baker:Right, so we just balanced that with the kids' enthusiasm because they were such happy campers. They totally were, and so then from there we went on and we did a unit on the Puritans, and it was around Thanksgiving time, so we tied that in with some Indian stuff and we did. After that, I remember that we went into westward expansion and we decided to use the Little House books for the entire year.
Carole Joy Seid:The best. We read them all nine books for the year and the Little House Cookbook and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Songbook.
Laura Baker:Right. Well, what happened was maybe that wasn't here the Laura Ingalls Songbook? Yeah, I think it is. Okay, that's probably where I got it. So what had happened? We had gotten a computer and I could look up on the internet and hold books. So I saw this beautiful book about all the songs that Pa did with his fiddles, exactly, and it was all there, sheet music lyrics.
Carole Joy Seid:But the problem with the books is it doesn't give you the music. So you're reading those books and faking how to solve them. You don't even know you're making up a diddy.
Laura Baker:So when I saw that there was a book and there's some other ones that are easier to get than one I had was put together in the 50s, very old, but I found it on eBay and I took it to Kinkos and they cut off the binding and did a spiral so we could literally lay it flat because I can kind of plunk on a guitar. Right, and I mean I think I know like four chords, but like the kids didn't know that I really didn't know what I was doing.
Laura Baker:It was enough to make it sound like they thought they were like big stuff singing, and then Greg could play the piano and we taught the children a bunch of the songs throughout the year. Then we made these things called Indian story robes. So this is just a piece of like brown, felt, like cut, like a you know like how the hide would be Well the hide of an animal because it was Indians.
Laura Baker:Okay, so then when we would finish one of the books, we would have the children draw a little picture and color it and we ironed it on because Indians actually made story robes, and so it was like what's that the Native Americans would make your own robes, yes, and so, anyway, well, they would put their exploits from their lives to tell the pictures of what you know.
Carole Joy Seid:And as they were telling their family history exactly.
Laura Baker:So we did that with the little house books, and so that was super fun. So then by this time the children were getting older, and so they could be way more involved with doing these things. So we decided at Laura's Sode and I Sode, and so we got patterns and we made little house outfits for the girls. And then we kind of just I don't know. We kind of Did you have a square?
Carole Joy Seid:dance. Did you make maple syrup snow, I mean, when I read your books, the ideas. There you go Like you could have done any of that right, and you don't have to pay any money for someone to give you these ideas.
Laura Baker:No, you're just doing a book and the kids are outside playing what you just read out loud to them Right and like you will know when you start reading, you will know what works for your family, what you see, their eyes start to twinkle, they get jazzed up. So we did little like dress-up outfits, we did the story robes, and then I was determined to find a pig bladder to make a ball and throw it up in the air like a balloon.
Laura Baker:We did it, you did. We found a Hispanic market that they did their own in-house butchering Right and I called and said would you happen? They said, yes, we'll give you a pig bladder. So we washed that thing in vinegar and we stitched it up and blew it up and stitched it up. And the kids played with it the whole night of our wild expo.
Laura Baker:Yeah, so we just had so much fun, so they just sang songs and, you know, told, they told, they narrated the stories to the fathers on their robes, they told, and the dads were just so awesome, so that's what we did. It was beautiful, so on and on it went. So then we got launched, you know, eventually into the pink sheets. We kept going from there, but so the pink sheets were studying world history, world history.
Carole Joy Seid:So that started with creation and the flood and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Reformation.
Laura Baker:Correct. So I can just say that we went on and on in the same fashion, wow, and I will say that along the way we got so much out of honey for a child's heart, like with their free time reading.
Laura Baker:I just wanted to put a plug in for for Gladys Hunt, because that was such a blessing for us. And then, of course, we had the book list from from Carol, and the kids loved her books. They were like we it would. We would go online and put the books on hold at the library if we could get them yeah, oftentimes not, and I would get them from Carol, or even sometimes I could go on eBay or whatever. But like it would just be like Treasure. It would be like Christmas Day when we would go get the books and bring them home. It was just so much fun. Oh, we would do books on tape in the car and we I explained to her that our family was 12 hours away in two different Directions like his parents one way, mine the other, we would. I would read all the way up and down the United States of the United.
Laura Baker:States and we would just be crying, or the kids would be cheering, or and Even we would take trips with my parents and they got swept up to and into it and, before you know it, my mother was reading our books that we were studying in school and then we were like doing nature walks and nature journals and to this day I will say that's one of my greatest Blessings is how my children love nature and love to be outside, and how they are so Comfortable and not afraid. They know what things are and they understand. We did so many fun things with that. They learned a lot of household chores. We had so many opportunities to serve, which was the three-legged stool that you talked about Work and study and serving and and so I hope I'm saying that- right, did it perfectly.
Laura Baker:And actually we had a really neat opportunity To come alongside a friend of our family that was running for our state's Supreme Court and we became his campaign managers for the biggest county in North Carolina and which basically consisted of going to some meetings and putting signs around and giving signs to other people, but we just told everybody about our friend Paul, newbie, and and they've just been so sweet we took meals to shut, shut ins, we did a lot of poem and hymn memorizing, which is very Charlotte Mason. So really, with what Carol says, you know your Bible, your math book and your library card, it was literally just like life. But we were learning and they were so excited. And when I asked the kids, like what would you want me to say about our time Learning together when you were growing up, our daughter Lily's Thing that she said was like when she got together with kids from church who weren't necessarily homeschooled somewhere but, like she said, they talked about their grades, like their oh, I gotta be in this class or whatever. Lily said, mom, it never occurred to me to talk like she said. It was like bragging. But she said what I wanted to talk about is what we were learning, like how cool the world is and like what God did and this and that and like you know. And so she just had this very different like zesty thing and with our son. He has a real gift for language and so all this reading out loud, I mean I, you, I know this might sound crazy, but like I really think that he has a gift like that, he could be a songwriter, you know, and and he's still in the formation stages of that, but I've really encouraged him in his gifting and that's a real strength for him.
Laura Baker:So that that worked out amazingly well. Then that worked into. You know, we did stuff with on Musical theater and just had a great time. So we, I will say that when we got to your portion of learning with ancient history, the children absolutely loved it. I mean, they had been sort of primed with American history, so they got it, we were in our rhythm. And then I will say that what happened was our magnum opus was the ancient Greece unit study, yes, and we did the Rosemary Sutcliffe books, black Ships Before Troy, and I can't remember the other one, but it was basically the Iliad and the.
Laura Baker:Odyssey. And so again, me reading these out loud to our children, just so effortlessly. It was so like I cannot tell you the energy and joy that I would get from reading these stories because they were so enthralling, so rich in every way. And what we ended up doing with that is I wrote a script and we actually reenacted the Trojan War in Laura's backyard with their treehouse. We built a Trojan force out of a refrigerator box. I mean, these are the things the kids did, because by this time they're like 10, 12 years old. They're making the decisions.
Laura Baker:Exactly, and like we had, like these Grecian headbands that we glued banana curls like to look like Grecian, and we made these just simple, stitching up the sleeves and then the belt, and so, and then we did, like you know in the Music man, how you Lely the mayor's wife did like one Grecian urn and they reenacted these Greek freezes.
Laura Baker:Well, we had the girls do all these famous poses of sculptures from Greece, like that from the Music Band. It gave me the idea. So we had this whole tableau of poses and you know like I would read what it was where it was found and the girls would strike the pose and freeze and we would take their pictures.
Laura Baker:It was beautiful. Then we did ESA fables and then we did the tortoise and the hare and the boys were running around like wild Indians in the backyard and that was like huge, like we probably had 50 people at that, and we put sticks under their chairs and when the battle scene came, we told them ahead of time grab your stick, the boys are going to come with their fake swords and all the grandparents were like sword fighting with the little kids. So super fun. So, carol, I just want you to know. This is why you keep getting thank you notes in your mailbox for me for decades, because my cup runneth over and I have treasure. I wouldn't trade it, I wouldn't go back and do anything different and it was worth what little messes that we did make. So thank you for sharing.