Homeschooling Preschool the Gentle, Classical Way

Can it even be done? If you do not have any older helpers, is homeschooling preschool with a multitude of littles going to send you to the insane asylum, or can you actually thrive teaching preschoolers at home? This is a question I have asked because I’m about to live homeschooling preschool in a few, short months.

I am so honored to have had the opportunity to sit down and talk with my friend, Laura McKinney Adams about homeschooling preschool at home. My four-year-old son is going to join our homeschool this upcoming school year. Not only did she encourage me, but I know she will encourage those of you who have preschoolers at home, also.

(Find the full audiovisual episode on YouTube and the audio podcast on your favorite podcast player. Listen here, as well.)

Homeschooling Preschool

Holly Lee: Hello, friends. Today I am joined by my fellow homeschooling blogger mom, Laura McKinney Adams. If you have young children and are trying to figure out how to homeschool all the littles you are in for a treat. Laura McKinney Adams is a wife and a second-generation homeschooling mother to three. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Liberty University. While at Liberty, she met her husband, who is a fellow homeschool graduate. Laura’s writings have been published in Greenhouse Magazine and Homeschooling with Heart. She writes about classical education, lifelong learning for moms, and homeschooling the early years at lauramckinneyadams.com. Laura has authored a comprehensive eBook entitled How to Homeschool Preschool. Welcome to Writers Talk Classical Education, Laura.

Laura McKinney Adams: Thank you, Holly. I’m glad to be here.

Holly: Great. Let’s get started with a question. I usually ask my guests a question at the beginning. To begin, I would love to hear about your homeschool experience, but to back up a little bit, you mentioned in your bio that you were homeschooled. I love your dedication page to your eBook. I’ll read, it says, “To my mother, for embarking on this adventure in 1999 and never giving up.” That is an awesome dedication page.

[laughter]

How did you, Laura, decide to homeschool your own children?

Laura: As I wrote there, my mom started homeschooling me in 1999 when I was four, and a fun fact about that is she’s actually still homeschooling now. My youngest sibling is in high school, so she’s in her last few years.

Holly: Wow.

Laura: I always say I grew up this way, [laughs] and so I always felt like it was a really positive experience for me and it was something that I wanted my children to have. Then when I went to Liberty, that’s where I was when I met my husband. Pretty soon after we started dating, we had the homeschooling conversation because that’s something that was really important to both of us because he had been homeschooled almost all his growing-up years as well, and so he really wanted to find someone who was willing to homeschool should the need arise, and we were both very on board with that.

It was always our plan pretty much from the jump which a lot of times people are like, “Oh, I never thought I was homeschooled, I never really thought I would put my kids in public school.” I guess it’s just how it shook out, but we’re really thankful for that. My children have very supportive grandparents. They are behind us 100% and so we have a really nice dynamic with the extended family. I think because of that background, which is just really a blessing.

Holly: That is a blessing. I imagine that it’s really neat. You can– If your mom has any materials or resources that she is ready to pass on, then you are probably a willing recipient.

[laughs]

Laura: Oh yes. She’s, it’s like she’s emotionally attached to some of her little kid stuff like preschool, elementary, but then it’s like, if it comes to my house, I’m like, “Well, you can still visit the books”.

[laughter]

Holly: I can understand those memories being wrapped up with some of those preschool things. That is a wonderful seg into our next question because a lot of new homeschooling moms coming into homeschooling might have multiple young children and a lot of the time don’t have any older helpers yet. I know we’ve all heard that advice, it’s well-intentioned advice for the mom who’s heard that phrase, “Just play, it’s preschool, just play.” Sometimes that’s a little– it comes off as a little overwhelming and it’s almost like a dreaded phrase. For that mom who’s heard that before, how would you convince her that it actually can be done with little kids?

Laura: Okay. I would say that I am probably a little more academically rigorous and academically inclined than some moms, and that’s just what seems to work well for us and our family dynamic, which is fine. I think on-school can be a very valid option for little kids too. Some of us really thrive on structure, some of us thrive on structure as moms and then some of us thrive on structure, we’ve got a kid who thrives on structure and they need to know what’s happening in their day and they just do better that way if they can know what to expect. For us, right now as we’re recording this, we’re on a break from school, but we have a designated time and our morning when we work on summer reading, and so my kids know that we have that.

Now are we doing a full-blown school routine right this moment? No, but they know that they have that and they like having that anchor to their day. I think for preschoolers, there’s nothing wrong with starting a gentle routine and a gentle little school schedule, I think when you have all little kids, the first year I homeschooled my kids were four, two, and a newborn baby who had health issues [laughs] so that was a lot. This was also in 2020, so globally, that was also a lot, but it was really kind of grounding and anchoring for us to have a little bit of routine.

I do think when you’ve got all little kids, you have to adjust expectations because I am by nature a very like type A scheduled personality, and I feel like God has really stretched me in that way because when you’ve got kids two years apart and everybody’s little, the way I do, you have to get over yourself sometimes, [laughs] because sometimes somebody needs you right then and they don’t care if it was on your schedule or not, because they have a need. I think I have grown through that in a lot of ways. I’d say the first thing is adjust your expectations.

Your homeschool is not going to look like somebody who has a 10-year-old girl in the mix, and so you need to make peace with that [laughs] and we each have our individual family scenarios in our family seasons and yours might not look like somebody else’s and that’s okay. I would say that’s probably the first thing. Then secondly, a lot of people are like, “Oh, it doesn’t take that long to do school with a young child.” Well, yes, if you can sit down for 20 minutes and knock it out and not be interrupted, if you’ve got all small children, especially if you’ve got an infant in the mix, you’re probably not going to have 20 minutes where you can just knock it out and be done.

I think one thing that’s really helped me cope with the stress of that is I will block off like way more time than it should “take” because I want to make sure we’ve got time for interruptions. When I’ve got that buffer time built in, I’ve found that I am more patient with those interruptions, and when I’m patient and calm and happy, that’s a good thing for everybody. [laughs] Then another thing that I talk about with my kids, and I don’t know how much of this has sunk in at this age, but it’s a conversation I like to start early is we really try to respect one another’s needs. In my scenario, I have three children and there’s one of me.

There are a lot of times very, very often where I’m helping one child, another child needs me, I can’t get to the second child right off, and so I’m like, “I love you, I’ll be there as quickly as I can. I need to help your sister right now.”, but I do try to get them to recognize that like, “Hey, my siblings have needs too and I will get my need met.” It just may not be instantaneously all the time.

Holly: Right. That’s good to be able to keep that communication going about how we are a family and we have to give and take a little bit and mommy’s only one person, we can’t clone mommy.

[laughter]

Yes. That’s good. That’s really good advice. I’m going to be taking that into this upcoming school year as well because we’re going to welcome our third homeschooler into our school, so he’s under the age of five. He’s four. Yes, it will be one of these things. I’ll be looking back at Laura’s book, I’ll say, “Okay, [laughs] what did she say about that again?” [laughs] Oh, and your eBook is really good. I recommend that people get it. I can put a link in our show notes for that, How to Homeschool Preschool. You talk about the weight of parenting and homeschooling being too heavy to bear if we do not partake of some necessary refreshment.

Laura: Yes.

Holly: Yes. You talk about this term called mother culture. Some of us might have heard it, but for those of our listeners who have not heard the term mother culture, what would you describe it as? What is it?

Homeschooling Preschool and Mother Culture

Laura: Okay, so mother culture is not original to me. I got that term from Charlotte Mason and when I read her original volumes, which I think are in the public domain, you may even be able to find those free online if you check out AmblesideOnline, potentially. I think they have those on there, but mother culture– Charlotte Mason had a great quote in one of her books and it’s. “Let the mother go out to play.” I think particularly when you have all very young children, the work of mothering is very physically draining. It’s not necessarily mentally draining. I have been told that as you have older kids with bigger problems, it gets more mentally draining.

I’m not there yet personally but I would say for mother culture, mother culture is feeding your soul as the mom because children are born persons. Yes, but also mothers are born persons too, I believe Cindy Rollins said that. For me, I really love to read. That’s something that I make time for, even if it’s 15 minutes before I go to bed reading off my Kindle or something like that. That’s something that I find very life-giving and something that helps me to remember that I am a person too and I still have a brain, even if I’m not teaching anything super complex right now but that could look like different things for different people. Not everybody’s necessarily a huge book reader per se, but maybe your thing is you like to drink your tea in the afternoon and just take 10 minutes.

Maybe it’s playing some classical music. Maybe it’s, you like having flowers on your table just to make your home a little more beautiful. Anything like that. It doesn’t have to be elaborate and it doesn’t have to be expensive, but it’s just a little something to feed your soul so you can just find the wherewithal to go on.

Holly: Yes. That’s good. I think that a lot of us moms yes, we’re just doing, doing, doing and we forget to refill our supply. The life-giving things, that’s such a good reminder. Another thing that I found going into homeschooling when I started out was all of the philosophies that I was inundated with and I really wanted to learn. I really wanted to educate myself but educational philosophies, there’s a place for them. Your quote from your eBook states, “There are two things I want you to know about educational philosophies. I love them and they don’t matter.” I love how succinctly you put that. Some of us who are really married to our philosophies, and as I homeschool longer, I realize like the philosophy’s important but it’s not the most important thing. Could you please tell us why you wrote that?

Philosophy Isn’t Everything

Laura: What I like to think of as a benefit of, I pretty much knew from the beginning that I wanted to homeschool. When my oldest son was about, he was probably three. I started reading about homeschooling because I had lots of experience being the homeschooled child, but I did not have any experience being the homeschooling parent. Those are two different things, right?

Holly: Yes.

Laura: I got some advice from an older couple. They have grown children who are my age and they were like, “Well, if you’re going to homeschool from the beginning, don’t buy your child 50 billion worksheets, buy books for yourself so you can kind of think through where you’re wanting to go with this.” I really took that to heart and so I read all of the things, and I have a whole little collection downstairs by my shelf, which was very fun. I think I was able to kind of sort through what was important to me. When I was in high school, I read the book that The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey, and one of his seven habits is, “Begin with the end in mind.” Now, he wasn’t talking about homeschooling specifically, but I do think the concept applies because one of the things you want to think through is like, okay, what kind of person do I want my child to be when they leave my homeschool later?

What can I be doing to set the foundation for that now? I think there is very much value in that. That being said, why I say they don’t matter, what I mean by that is that I don’t care what the book says, at some point you have to stop looking at the book and you have to start looking at your child. What does this child need? This child that’s right in front of me, this child that I love, this child that I want the best thing for. What does this child mean? If it doesn’t match the book, that’s okay. That’s okay. The book doesn’t matter. The homeschooling police are not coming.

Holly: Do they ever come to your house, Laura?

Laura: No. I’ve-

Holly: [chuckles] in homeschool?

Laura: Well, I think it’s just really important to not lose sight of your child in the midst of everything. Sometimes we need to adapt. There are some children who really need explicit grammar instruction or explicit language arts and they just can’t get away with the Charlotte Mason way of teaching those things. That’s fine. It’s okay if you need to adjust that, but you want to keep nature study, you’re spreading the feast. You’re you don’t have to be so committed to being a purist about things that your kid gets lost because we don’t ever want our child to get lost. Also, I would say don’t overthink it the first year.

Sometimes, especially if I have a parent that I’m talking to who’s maybe pulled their child out of classroom pre-school, they’re like, “Ah, like, I don’t know what I should get. I don’t know what I should do.” Don’t put the pressure on yourself to have everything figured out the first year, because I think to some degree, as you work with your child, you’re going to pick up what they need and what they don’t need.

Holly: Those are wise words. I know it hurts my heart sometimes when I don’t get to latch onto a philosophy and the principles, being a very principled person, but when the rubber meets the road, you realize that you can’t be married to your philosophy and you need to not let that get in the way of your relationship and your of ability to teach your own children. That’s good. You guys have heard it from Laura. You have permission to be free to explore different things as they work for your own kids. I know you mentioned the book, is it The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People?

Laura: Yes.

Holly: Was that the book that you were going to talk a little bit about when it comes to the book that you read before homeschooling that informed the way you live today? Or was there a different book that you were on-

Books

Laura: Actually a different one. I read a lot of books. I have a book for every occasion. It’s okay.

Holly: That’s good. Hey, you’re a well-read lady.

Laura: Thank you. Let’s see, I think as far as books that have shaped me and how I teach, I’ve actually got three that I was going to talk about. The first one is called Teaching from Rest by Sarah Mackenzie. That’s a book I would really recommend to anybody. It’s less than 100 pages. It’s not super time-consuming, it’s not super dense. It’s very accessible, I think. That’s one that I revisit periodically because I think I do tend to do too much rather than too little. I think that always helps me remember to to calm down and smell the roses and all that sort of thing but I think regardless of like what kind of personality you have, I think that one’s really helpful. The next book that I think has really shaped how I educate is The Well-Trained Mind by Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer. Now do I do 100% of everything that is in that book? Absolutely not.

I do not, but I have been able to pull some of the broader concepts and some of those broader concepts have really worked well in my home. Things like they suggest doing history and science on a four-year cycle and you cycle through topics and you just keep going. For me, with my kids, having multiple kids and having the age gaps I have, that makes it really easy for me to combine for history and science. When the next child ages up into elementary, they just join us wherever we are in the cycle and we just keep going. For me, that’s put that on autopilot and I don’t feel like I have to agonize every year about what we’re going to do for history and science because I’m like, “Okay, we’re just going to go to the next thing.” That’s been really helpful for me but that’s also very much the type of book where like you don’t want to let it overwhelm you.

I think it’s easy to get overwhelmed. That’s my caveat but I have found some helpful information there and good curriculum suggestions as well. Then my third book, this is actually a fiction book. I have always loved Anne of Green Gables. I have loved Anne of Green Gables since I was probably 10, I think the first time I read one of those books. Love Anne, have always loved Anne. I think there are some books that as you revisit them later in your life, you take different things away from them. For me, the Anne series has very much been those types of books for me.

I read all of them when I was probably 11 or 12. I think there’s seven or eight of them total. Some of them move into Anne’s adulthood and her college years and when she marries her husband and when she becomes the mother herself and so forth. I enjoyed them at 12 and 13, but I think they definitely hit me a different way now that I’m a mother myself.

I recently, just like within the past six months or so, I reread Anne of Ingleside, which is I think the sixth book in the series but by this point Anne has several children and so she’s working through mothering them and discipling their little hearts and sometimes they make bad decisions and she has to help them through that and so forth.

Part of what I really love about that book is Anne is really a fully developed dynamic character because I feel like a lot of fiction books, there might be a mom thrown in there, but we don’t ever know much about her. We don’t really know anything about her personality. We don’t really know what’s going on there. With her, we very much do get her inner thoughts and her personality and how that plays out in different situations. She’s still very much herself, which I think it ties back into the mother culture thing. Anne was totally practicing mother culture because even in these later books in the series, she loves flowers and she knows the name of every flower on her property. She will tell you all about it and it goes on and on in these books. She’s very much feeding her soul– I mean she’s fictitious, she’s not real. I find that very inspiring and I really enjoyed that as an adult.

Holly: That’s very inspiring and I love that you said there’s a fiction book on that list because I think people downplay fiction and the importance of the role that fiction has in your ability to understand others and ability to understand the world around you and understand yourself. I love that. I love it and I love how you tied it back to mother culture too. I have the series, but I have not read it. I–

Laura: Holly, you have red hair. You have red hair.

Holly: I’m not allowed to confess that, but I just did. I bought the series with my daughter in mind. I could see us reading it to her or as she gets older, she could pick it up and read it herself. Now, you know what I’m just going to, Ann of Ingleside, is that the one?

Laura: Ann of Ingleside, yes.

Holly: Okay. That’s the one I’m going to read first.

Laura: That’s the most relatable to your life stage, probably.

Holly: Yes. As a child. I did read Anne of Green Gables, but it has been so long and I cannot even tell you. That’s an inspiration. I will pick that one up first since I have it. Thinking about the way we educate our children and the title of this podcast is Writers Talk Classical Education. I know that you love classical education and I would love to hear about how you would describe a classical education to someone who wanted to know more.

Classical Education

Laura: Nobody has the trademark on classical education as a term, which can be a good thing and sometimes I think it makes the whole scene a little bit more confusing than would probably be ideal. You’ve got the overarching umbrella term classical education, and I would say that we’ve got three major streams within that umbrella. One stream is the literature-centered classical education. I would say an example of that would be AmblesideOnline, they usually call themselves a Charlotte Mason curriculum. The thing is, when Charlotte Mason was alive, everybody was educating classically.

Everybody was because progressive education really did not come in play until the 1920s. That was a little after her time. There is very much a good bit of crossover there with Charlotte Mason and the very traditional how Charlotte herself would’ve done it sincem and classical education as we know it today. I would say a book on that topic, that is really helpful if you’re interested in getting into all the intricacies of that is Consider This by Karen Glass, which a fun fact about that, that’s actually how Holly and I got to be friends because she was reading it and I slid into her Instagram DMs. I said, “I just read that book too.”

Holly: Yes, I remember that.

Laura: Here we are all these years later.

Holly: I love it.

Laura: I would say there’s the literature centered, I would say that’s your first subdivision of classical education. I would say your next one is your history-centered classical education. Some examples of that would be things like classical conversations because they do the three cycles that they repeat and they go through the history cycle that way. Then also things like Well-Trained Mind does a history cycle. Well-Trained Mind really encourages people to try to match up their literature to their time period, their studying in history. I would say those are some examples of more of a history-centered classical education. Then the third branch I would say we have is the Latin-centered classical education.

There’s actually a book called, I believe it’s the Latin-centered curriculum that is published by Memoria Press. That really talks about the importance of Latin and how you can cover so many other subjects that way and really goes into a deep dive on that. I would say an example of Latin-centered classical education would be Memoria Press and their programs because they start Latin from a very early age, I believe they start in first grade and they carry it all the way through. That’s what a lot of their grammar instruction is coming from and a lot of other things, a lot of vocabulary.

I would say most things within the classical education space fit under one of those three categories. I don’t really think there’s a wrong and a right category out of those three, but I think that is maybe a helpful way to think about it.

Holly: That is very helpful and I appreciate that visual, the umbrella, and the three streams. I really appreciate that, you did such a good job explaining that-

Laura: Thank you.

Holly: -better than I could. Much better than I could. Going into the homeschooling world, about how many years ago would that be for you?

Laura: I started homeschooling my oldest, let’s see, three years ago.

Holly: Okay. Three years ago.

Laura: On the parent end.

Holly: Read some books. You had an idea that you liked classical method. When you started preschooling him, you I assume had some learning objectives, and what some of our listeners may not know is that you are a former preschool teacher yourself.

Laura: Yes.

Holly: I know that you had learning objectives in that situation. Homeschooling your own child, what were your learning objectives for the preschool years?

Homeschooling Preschool Learning Objectives

Laura: When I taught preschool in a classroom environment, I always taught four-year-olds. Then the way it shook out the first year I homeschooled my son, he was four. I planned to start when he was in kindergarten and then life happened. In a way, I really felt like that was helpful for me because I felt good about what to do with a four-year-old. It made the transition a little easier for me. I took what I did with my class kids and I more or less kept about the same thing with one exception. That one exception was we had to really push handwriting in four-year-old preschool because those kids were mostly going to public school or private school.

When you were in a classroom environment, the teacher does not have time to sit around writing answers for everybody, so you really need kids to be writing for themselves as quickly as possible. Now, if you are preparing your child to go to kindergarten in a homeschool environment, it’s not as big of an emergency. You certainly can work on handwriting and whatnot, but I did not feel a need to stress about it quite as much as I did with my class kids because I knew my son was going to continue being homeschooled for kindergarten. My goals for him, my first one was I wanted him to learn how to write his first name.

That was another thing we really pushed in the classroom, just, it makes everybody’s life easier if they can just do that themselves. [laughs] That was one thing. The second thing was letter identification. I wanted him to know uppercase and lowercase letters and be able to identify them cold because when you go to read and you’re trying to sound out words you need to not be wasting time on,”What letter is this”, before you can even get to, “What sound does this make?” That slows you down too much. I really tried to push, we look at the A, we know it’s A fast, fast, fast. You can do that in a very fun, relaxed play-based way.

My son really liked puzzles so I got him like probably a $5 wooden alphabet puzzle from Walmart and he would pull up the piece and I’d be like, “Beeb”, and he’d be like, he thought this was hilarious. It doesn’t have to be a really stressful kind of thing, but I do think that’s really important to know. Then I tried to make sure he was solid on his letter sounds. Some people would say, wait until kindergarten for letter sounds. I think use your discretion as a parent, either way, it’s fine. I went ahead and taught him his and it was fine. Then I worked on counting to 20 so we could see the pattern.

The reason for 20 rather than 10 is because then you can see how with two-digit numbers there’s always the pattern. In the ones place it’s still 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and so forth. Then I also tried to work with him on being able to sit and listen to me read a chapter of the Bible to him. Just working up on attention span. It’s more of a soft skill, but I felt like that was important.

Holly: That sounds good. Hey. People should be taking notes right now. I will for my incoming preschooler. How would I know if I should use a preschool curriculum?

Laura: I think there are good reasons to use one and there are bad reasons. I’m going to just quickly hit on the good reasons. Number one, a good reason to use a preschool curriculum is if this is your oldest child. Why? A younger child has a naturally more enriched environment by mere virtue of being around older homeschooled siblings.

Holly: True.

Laura: For example, my daughter, who is my third child, she picked up some of the memory work that we worked on last year because she was around while I worked with her brothers. My oldest child, if I wanted him to memorize something, it was not going to happen unless I was very intentional about that. I think that’s one thing to consider. Is this your oldest child? If it is your oldest child, I think it’s a helpful tool for them and for you. Secondly, I think a good reason to use a curriculum is if they are going to go to kindergarten in a classroom setting because kindergarten in a classroom setting has more intense expectations.

I think it’s kinder to the child to get them adjusted to that before you send them there. Thirdly, does your child thrive on structure? Some children do. I have some of those children living in my house. Fourth, do you thrive on structure? Because something we have to think about and we have to consider is, do I like what’s going on? Because who’s the person that’s putting this plan into motion and making sure it actually happens? It’s mom. Mom. We have to then think about what’s going to get us going? That’s another thing to consider. Then finally, I would say if you’re still learning how to have the mind of an educator, and so what I mean by that is people who have taught for a while, be it in a classroom or at home or whatever, after a while, they get to a younger child.

They’re like, “Oh, Susie, help me unload the silverware out of the dishwasher. Oh, Susie, we have three forks. Let’s count the forks. One, two, three.” That’s not necessarily intuitive to people who haven’t been teaching and been in that world. A lot of times older moms will be like, “Oh, just do that for preschool.” That’s really intuitive now. Was that intuitive to me five years ago? No. If you are feeling overwhelmed by that type of thing and you want a list and more specifics, I think that’s a scenario where a curriculum is helpful.

Holly: Thanks for breaking that down for us. That’s good. What would you say to a homeschool parent who is currently in homeschool survival mode?

Laura: First off, it happens to all of us. I don’t think anybody gets through 10, 15, 20 years of homeschooling without anything ever going wrong. That’s just not reality. I will say that for us, the first year we homeschooled, one of my children was dealing with health issues and so we were in and out of specialists. My father-in-law was on the decline and ended up passing away partway through that year. We’ve had other years where I’ve struggled with my health, and none of those things were fun to deal with. I do feel like there was a real sweetness that came out of the bitterness in those scenarios. Sometimes in those scenarios, I think we learn a lot of character things, and we learn a lot of soft skills. We learn a lot of being compassionate for other people. There’s a lot of good that’s going on there, even if you didn’t get to everything that was on your list. Especially if your survival mode craziness year, your oldest child is young. I would say young as in under eight or so because you’ve got a lot of time to make up any potentially lost ground. You’re going to be okay.

Holly: That’s good.

Laura: Which is not easy when you’re going through it. Part of why I do the writing and speaking that I do is because I have not forgotten. Because my oldest child is seven, and I distinctly remember when my kids were four and two and a baby because it wasn’t that long ago.

Holly: Absolutely. You talk about that on your blog. I remember talking to you and reading your blog about, not very long ago, you talked about a time when you were under the weather or out of commission for a while. It taught your children some skills that they wouldn’t have picked up on had that not have happened. It’s not wasted time. That’s good. What’s the most impactful book you’ve read with your children?

Laura: I would say that I have really fond, warm memories about the original Winnie the Pooh series by A.A. Milne. When I say that, not the Disney ones. The original ones that he wrote himself. There’s Winnie the Pooh, House at Pooh Corner, and then two poetry books that he wrote that are in his original Pooh series. They are so sweet and so cute and so hysterical. They’re so funny. We’ve just really, really loved those. Then also I’ve read to my children out of my childhood copy of Winnie the Pooh so that does add another layer to it for me.

Holly: That’s so special. We studied A.A. Milne last year, and I remember reading some of his poetry, and they’re very sweet.

Laura: A lot of people don’t even realize he wrote poetry, but his poetry is super cute.

Holly: Apparently, he learned to read at age two. He was pretty smart.

Laura: That one’s interesting. I didn’t know that.

Holly: That’s neat that you guys had that connection over Winnie the Pooh. I know we’re running short on time, and I know we could talk about this for a lot longer, Laura. I have a couple more questions. Where can our listeners find you on the internet?

Laura: I am at lauramckinneyadams.com, and you can probably check Holly’s show notes for how to spell McKinney. Laura Adams was taken, so I am lauramckinneyadams.com. I am Laura McKinney Adams on Facebook. I am Laura McKinney Adams on Instagram, and I am Laura McKinney Adams on Pinterest, so you can find me any of those places. I also do have an email newsletter that you can sign up for on my website. If you’d like to get just convenient, easy links to my latest pieces, that’s probably the easiest way to do that. I think that’s all.

Holly: Your blog, recently one of my friends, she’s my sister-in-law, she read one of your blog posts. I posted it up, and it was about what we– I’m trying to remember. It was titled What We Dropped.

Laura: Oh, What We Dropped this year? Yes.

Holly: Yes. She said that was so encouraging, and she wanted me to tell you that.

Laura: Oh, thank you.

Holly: Go to Laura’s blog because it’s really good. She writes in a way that is very succinct to the point but gives you all the information you need to know. It’s very good. Laura, it has been a joy. I’ve really enjoyed talking to you, and I’ve enjoyed learning about classical education and just mother culture and the preschool years. You’ve given us all some great encouragement. Now I’m starting to believe it’s possible, and I’m not going to stress as much about this endeavor of homeschooling a preschooler. It was great, Laura. Thank you so much for joining us on Writers Talk Classical Education.

Laura: Thank you for having me, Holly.

Watch on YouTube

Let’s Stay Connected

Book Launch Opportunity

To help me launch my biography with Blue Sky Daisies, I’m asking if you’d be willing to spread the word about my G.K. Chesterton book between now and the new year. If you’d be interested in finding out more information, take 10 seconds to fill out the form below. Thanks for supporting me in my writing!

Click here to subscribe