“Why do I have to do this English page, Mom?”
Why do you teach your children Language Arts? What are you hoping to accomplish? What is the goal, the end of the road?
It is so essential for me to keep that end-of-the-road milepost in constant remembrance! Without it, we quickly get side-tracked into reflexive pronouns, antecedents, inverted sentence order and more. For me, the goal I hope to accomplish by teaching my children Language Arts is that they can express themselves clearly in the spoken and written word, so that they may influence others for good. It is a simple goal, and keeping it foremost in my mind helps me avoid detours.


I’m a book-a-holic and live in a regular-sized house, so books get tucked here, there and everywhere. Naturally, when one of my children asked a question about the bottom of the ocean, I wanted to show them that wonderful book with the great picture of the ocean floor . . . but where is that book? By the time I’ve dug through this shelf and the cabinet and this drawer, they’ve lost interest.
Here’s one mother’s clever way of motivating her children to do excellent work!









