Customer Reviews

Well-trained Mind, The

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I had read a number of books about homeschooling before finally discovering The Well Trained Mind, and many of those had left me feeling inspired but not very hopeful that I could actually deliver a quality education at home. What Susan Wise Bauer and her mother, Jessie Bauer, do in this book is remarkable: they lay out a 12-year plan to structure a complete education for your child. What is more, they break it down so that each year seems manageable.

The Well-Trained Mind offers curriculum suggestions and ideas for building your own program based on the yearly goals that are set. I love the flexibility of the whole program, yet the comfort of knowing that I am not wholly on my own.

I highly recommend this book for anyone considering homeschooling.

I found this book to be very helpful in planning my approach to homeschooling my daughter. I like that the book gives specific curriculum suggestions to cover each grade as well as general suggestions for teaching. This book explains techniques, books,and extra resources for every subject including art and music.

Every time I read this book, I feel inspired and encouraged to continue home schooling.

For the parent thinking of educating your child at home I strongly recommend this book. Even if you are not going to embark on a classical education this book is a wealth of information on different curriculums and methods in educating. For each year (pre K to Gr 12) the book outlines desired outcomes, discusses how to implement the curicculum and provides a thorough book list with a brief review of the major text recommendations. Before deciding how to educate my child, I researched a variety of homeschooling models: Montessori, Waldorf, un-schooling, unit studies and a few others, and felt that the classical education model would give our child the most options in her life and fit best with our lifestyle.

The book lays out the trivium. Basically three phases of learning used for the last couple of centuries with great success. It’s flexible enough to adapt to different strengths in children but doesn’t let skills atrophy in areas where the child isn’t particularly strong.

The book evaluates different curriculum available on the market that fits into the classical method. It also talks about some of the products that the authors sell but not to the detriment of other curriculum. I have looked at the original and the revised and have failed to find any dropped products. Everyone I’ve spoken to thought this was an extremely valuable resource in evaluating homeschool products.

The authors are obviously from a Christian background, but don’t push one brand of Christianity over another. I don’t think the book evangelizes.

The authors recommend a great deal of Christian homeschool material particularly in the early grade language arts but only because there's just not a lot of solid secular stuff out there.

Read more: [...]