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Real Learning Revisited
**This book is in a fixed format. Please download and check a sample to be certain it can be read on your device before purchasing. Also, look for updates soon to format readability.** A new edition to a beloved classic! Answering the many requests to bring back her original homeschooling book, Elizabeth Foss has updated Real Learning to let readers know how it all turned out. Mostly, readers will gain insight into what lessons Elizabeth learned and how she would should tweak the very good thing that was the original vision. This book is not about "school at home"--it is about something better. It is about Real Learning.Homeschooling pioneer Charlotte Mason wrote with great wisdom about providing young minds with a living books education. She urged teachers to present great ideas and stand back, allowing students to form relationships with the ideas.Elizabeth Foss carries Miss Mason's philosophy from the ideal to the real. How does the busy home-educating mom balance the various needs of a houseful of children? How does she provide short lessons and free afternoons while ensuring that her children receive a thorough and well-rounded education? Exactly how does she use living books to teach history, geography, literature, and science? How does she incorporate nature study, the arts, and soccer practice? How does she create in her home an atmosphere of sanctity with Christ at its center, an atmosphere of love in which the whole family can grow in holiness day by day?How does she manage all this and still get dinner on the table?With passion and grace, Elizabeth Foss explores these questions and more. Real Learning is a rich and detailed examination of how to let "education" spill into every aspect of your family life. More than a curriculum guide, it is a look at a lifestyle which aims to nourish the whole child, the whold family--heart, soul, and mind.The new edition is all the richer for Elizabeth's thoughts on twenty years of lived experience and reflections from now grown children.
246 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 17, 2020
22 people are currently reading
256 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
February 19, 2021
A must read for homeschool parents; but lots of great info for all parents too!
This book is fantastic. It’s like sitting down across the kitchen table with an older mom, imparting ask her wisdom. I love the updated edition: we get the first take from a mom halfway through the journey with her oldest, and then an update from that same mom after her kids are almost all grown. This is a book about home education, and so naturally it’s a perfect fit for other homeschool families. But there’s a lot of other great wisdom just for families in general, particularly in the beginning and end chapters. I love how she clarified that we aren’t just doing school at home—that would never work. Home education is about creating a lifestyle of learning, and recognizing the learning in all areas around the clock. This is such a quick and easy read, full of reminders about how to love my kids and provide the resources for them to be about the business of learning (while I join them in the ride!), I think this is definitely a book I’ll be revisiting year after year.
This book is fantastic. It’s like sitting down across the kitchen table with an older mom, imparting ask her wisdom. I love the updated edition: we get the first take from a mom halfway through the journey with her oldest, and then an update from that same mom after her kids are almost all grown. This is a book about home education, and so naturally it’s a perfect fit for other homeschool families. But there’s a lot of other great wisdom just for families in general, particularly in the beginning and end chapters. I love how she clarified that we aren’t just doing school at home—that would never work. Home education is about creating a lifestyle of learning, and recognizing the learning in all areas around the clock. This is such a quick and easy read, full of reminders about how to love my kids and provide the resources for them to be about the business of learning (while I join them in the ride!), I think this is definitely a book I’ll be revisiting year after year.
May 19, 2023
What a gift this book is! I loved every word of it and find myself so inspired. Elizabeth Foss offers wonderful advice on developing relationships with your children and running a household while homeschooling from a gentle, individualized approach with an emphasis on treating your children with the respect and dignity we afford our friends. It further cemented truths in my heart that we’re out there by reading “For the Children’s Sake” by Susan Macaulay. Elizabeth Foss also includes a chapter on recovering from burnout for the exhausted homeschooling mother, which seemed to have a lot of wisdom and hope in it. If you are a homeschooling mother you won’t regret purchasing this book so you can highlight and underline and then revisit every year!
September 27, 2020
So inspiring and motivating!
August 24, 2020
I thought I knew what this book was about: Catholic homeschooling. It's not.
It's about so much more than that. It's about immersing your child into a world of wonder and beauty and the nourishing of their hearts and minds that will make you want to abandon everything you thought you knew about education and your role as their parent. I work outside the home, so the type of learning atmosphere Elizabeth describes seems out of reach for me...until I realize it isn't. This book has helped me realize there are so many opportunities I've missed to seize the moments I do have with my kids, but more importantly, it highlights the many, many more opportunities I have on the horizon to get it right. I'd only read two chapters in the book when I gathered my five children for read-aloud time and scheduled an impromptu trip to the beach to watch the sunrise and muse over tide pools (I should be resting up for tomorrow's beach adventure but I can't put the book down.)
Elizabeth explores each academic subject and shares her philosophy on teaching it, then gives practical tips and examples for how it plays out. Even better, her golden nuggets of hindsight are sprinkled throughout this updated edition. Elizabeth's Charlotte Mason-inspired approach mingles beautifully with the quotes from St. Edith Stein on education.
She addresses burnout, with a prescription for recovery. She addresses children with special needs. She addresses the importance of sports, art, and leisure. I sobbed when I read the essay her grown son wrote as a summary of the fruits of the Foss family's educational journey.
If you are a homeschooler - read this volume. If you are a public or private schooler - read this volume. If you're a parent - read this volume. If you're a teacher, read this volume. If you love learning - read this volume. I anticipate rereading it from time to time to remind me of the great responsibility I have of teaching my children, always and everywhere, regardless of where they receive their "formal" education."
It's about so much more than that. It's about immersing your child into a world of wonder and beauty and the nourishing of their hearts and minds that will make you want to abandon everything you thought you knew about education and your role as their parent. I work outside the home, so the type of learning atmosphere Elizabeth describes seems out of reach for me...until I realize it isn't. This book has helped me realize there are so many opportunities I've missed to seize the moments I do have with my kids, but more importantly, it highlights the many, many more opportunities I have on the horizon to get it right. I'd only read two chapters in the book when I gathered my five children for read-aloud time and scheduled an impromptu trip to the beach to watch the sunrise and muse over tide pools (I should be resting up for tomorrow's beach adventure but I can't put the book down.)
Elizabeth explores each academic subject and shares her philosophy on teaching it, then gives practical tips and examples for how it plays out. Even better, her golden nuggets of hindsight are sprinkled throughout this updated edition. Elizabeth's Charlotte Mason-inspired approach mingles beautifully with the quotes from St. Edith Stein on education.
She addresses burnout, with a prescription for recovery. She addresses children with special needs. She addresses the importance of sports, art, and leisure. I sobbed when I read the essay her grown son wrote as a summary of the fruits of the Foss family's educational journey.
If you are a homeschooler - read this volume. If you are a public or private schooler - read this volume. If you're a parent - read this volume. If you're a teacher, read this volume. If you love learning - read this volume. I anticipate rereading it from time to time to remind me of the great responsibility I have of teaching my children, always and everywhere, regardless of where they receive their "formal" education."
November 15, 2020
I’ve only known who Foss is for a year or two and never read the first Real Learning, so her specific philosophies (though not radical or particularly different than my own) were unknown to me. I liked this book, I found it engaging and will take away some concrete ideas for moving forward in my own homeschool, although unfortunately, as most of the text is straight from the first edition, many of the resources she shares are out of print. I wouldn’t recommend this to just anyone because there is a thread running through it... an unseen but felt underscore... that you must do it perfectly. She never says it outright, and it’s probably something she wouldn’t agree with... but there are times when her prescriptions are just too overwhelming. I don’t think it’s for a newbie homeschooler - as is Sarah Mackenzie’s Teaching From Rest. And I don’t think it’s for an overwhelmed homeschooler, though she has a chapter on burnout. I had to guard against feelings of inadequacy and I’m a pretty confident homeschooler. Glad I read it, probably won’t buy a copy for my library though.
August 6, 2024
Good. The only thing that kept it from a 5 is that I’m not catholic. She definitely wrote it for catholic mothers and repeats that throughout the book. Other than that, I definitely learned from this book and plan to go back through it again at some point.
August 21, 2021
A great book I’m thankful to a friend for giving me. Much delicious food for thought, and a book list at the back as an inspired dessert. I would have appreciated more specific examples of what she was talking about or suggesting. This was the 2nd edition and I found myself looking forward to her “What I Know Now” sections as a self-reflective end of each chapter.
August 30, 2020
Gentle encouragement from time tested practice in the heart of Elizabeth Foss's home.
February 9, 2021
Still so grateful for this book. ♥️
August 17, 2025
I loved this book! It was so encouraging and I loved the Charlotte Mason and Catholic style she described. This is one of the very few books that I want to buy after borrowing from a friend.
March 7, 2025
5 stars - for all Catholic/Christian homsechooling moms, new and seasoned.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews