100 Books that make Classical Literature Approachable – Leigh Bortins

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Join Leigh Bortins in a discussion about the 100 good books that prepare us to read the dozen great books.

Anyone can begin to read difficult classical literature if they just know where to begin. In this session Leigh Bortins, the founder and Chief Visionary Officer of Classical Conversations Inc. and the author of a dozen books on classical, Christian education , tells you just where to start.

Download Leigh’s list of 100 GREAT books here.

Learn more about Classical Conversations here.

Automated Transcript (Spelling and grammar errors are guaranteed!)

Yvette Hampton:           Welcome Back to the Homegrown Generation Family Expo and look who I am here with Leigh Bortins. I know that so many of you are so familiar with her, especially if you are a Classical Conversations family. You’re very familiar with the name Leigh Bortins. And so Leigh, we are so excited to have you here with us. Thank you for joining us for this event. Leigh is the founder of Classical Conversations and Leigh you have had a great impact and then just a huge blessing to so many families including our family. We actually did CC for three years when we were in California, had an amazing CC community there. I hope some of you are watching though. I happen to know that today’s Thursday and Thursday is their CC community day, so they’re going to probably watch this later. So hello to all my CC people back home. We miss you dearly, but we love to CC. It was just an incredible organization and, and a true blessing to our family for many years. And then we took off on the road and we’ve been traveling for the past three years, so we have not had a chance to be part of a community. But we are grateful for what you’ve done. So welcome to the, the expo. We’re glad to have you.

Leigh Bortins:    Thank you so much. It’s really good to be with you, you, Yvette, and all the listeners out there and viewers. I’m excited about this next hour.

Yvette Hampton:           Yes, it’s going to be lots of fun. You are talking today about 100 books that make classical literature approachable and I am totally intrigued with just the title.

Leigh Bortins:    It’s going to be fun and I can’t. Yeah. And the reason I came up with the title is so often we’re at a homeschooling conferences on classical education. People rattle off, you know, the best books and the, most of them are books. None of us can read cause this, the writing’s too hard or it’s too ancient. And I’m always thinking of books that can help you get to that place where you can read those books because they really are approachable and they’re really great books, but you, you almost need to read a thousand good books so you can read the top 10 great books. And so I want to begin that conversation today.

Yvette Hampton:           Yup. I love that. Before we jump into that, would you tell us a little bit about you and your family?

Leigh Bortins:    Sure. My husband, Rob and I are now grandparents. We have four sons and our eldest, Robert, is expecting their third grand baby. We are about to graduate our, our youngest David, from a school in California. And both William and John, the middle two live here by Classical Conversations and they, we see them all the time. And just our family super close. I w I’d like to say one thing that relates to the topic and my family lots of times really what’s different about homeschooling kids? There’s all kinds of great students and all kinds of great situations and or school situations I would say. Yeah. You know, there’s kids that will learn something in a cave if you just left them there. But the one thing that I’m seeing with my grown sons now that they’re men in their twenties and thirties is they choose to read books every single day. And very few men across our country read classical literature, sport, any kind of literature throughout the week. And so to see them as grown men reading the, and you know, John had a surgery a few months ago and for his recovery he re-read the challenge books. Right. So I just really love, I’m schooling and I love what you’ve been doing and I love my family. Yes, well we are very grateful for you and for the, the vision that the Lord has given you for the homeschool community. And I’m so thank you for all that you have done to serve at the homeschool community. So I’m gonna turn it over to you. I’m gonna step out. I’m going to go actually have a vanilla bean frappuccino that might do that sweet neighbor just brought to me and then I’ll jump back in at the end for some Q and. A. If you guys have put in your comments, that would be great.

Yvette Hampton:           So we can see them. But if you have questions we will answer those at the end. And by we, I mean Leigh will answer those at the end and I’ll help her kind of sort through those. But if you could put in front of your question, just put the word question so that we know that it’s a question and not a comment and then we’ll get to those at the end after Leigh has presented to us about these amazing books. So Leigh, thank you so much. I’m going to turn it over to you and I’ll be back in just a little bit. 

Leigh Bortins:    Thank you, Yvette. And while you vet leaves this, I just want to just give her and her husband a lot of kudos. That advertisement that we saw before I came on, about Schoolhouse Rocked. I mean it’s critically important and that they’re creating that movie and I Just want to encourage you to support it and I echo everything that was said in there, I think was a true and encouraging and I really hope that we get to see that movie on the big screen one day. I also want to let you know, I see all of you that are sending in chats and comments and I appreciate your enthusiasm and like Yvette said, hopefully we’ll have someone, we’ll have some back and forth towards the end of the hour. Okay. So I tend to do my kind of due diligence and the duty things first before I speak cause I’m afraid of forgetting the most important parts.

Leigh Bortins:    And that is of course making sure that if you don’t get to listen to the whole broadcast or get questions answered, you know the resource in order to go find questions and I mean to get your questions answered. And that’s of course ClassicalConversations.com but I really want to promote more today or book site, ClassicalConversationsBooks.com because all the books that I’m going to be referring to are for sale. They’re also, because they’re classics, the majority of the books are available, used and then this all over the world on websites. So we appreciate when you buy them from us. But I know that if you’ve been homeschooling for a while, good, many of them are on your bookshelf already. And so this might be a fun time to revisit books you read with your younger children or look forward to reading with your older children cause maybe you read them in high school or college.

Leigh Bortins:    So then I also need to let you know we have prizes. And so if go to ClassicalConversations.com/homegrownthere’s a place to register and you’ll be able to get, let me make sure I get this right – $100 worth of CC merchandise. will be doing drawings from the names of the people who register. And so that will be our gift to a few of you. And then right now you should be able to do the Facebook page and get my actual PDF of the a hundred books. Just, you know, they’re it’s way more than a hundred books in the CC curriculum. And so one thing that some people say to me is like I don’t see any books by say Aristotle or Augustine or some of the other classics and the reason why is they may be in our [inaudible] or in like our, we have a short story collection which has classic lists in it as well as we have an American document collection that has classical lists in it.

Leigh Bortins:    So we don’t always have the title by author on our book site. And so I just wanted you to, and I know that if you look at the anthologies in the list of the authors there, you may find some of these stories that we’re going to talk about today. I think that’s about it. There’s one more thing I want to talk about actually before we get dive into the books. We are now able to accredit our high school students that are in the challenge two, three and four program specifically in some literature courses. So in other words they can get college credit. And something that’s been really wonderful I think is the challenge. Three and four communities are now getting waiting lists because parents want their children to be able to get not just the CC experience, but also the credits for college that go along with that.

Leigh Bortins:    And one of the reasons we have a waiting list for the college credits we have, it’s been super popular is because we cannot get enough people to grade the children’s papers. They do the same assignments as Classical Conversations does just nothing added to it. But we have to have an accredited professor with their masters in order to say yes, they did the work that they said that they did. And so think about this as an opportunity. Parents, I’m asking any of you that have a masters to contact customerservice@classicalconversations.com and ask about being a greater for our CC Plus program, you can actually be paid while your children are in challenge. So this is a new opportunity we have. And one of the first things that we’re gonna be doing is beefing up our literature program and our literature credits instead, of course goes along with today’s title.

Leigh Bortins:    So I wanted to be able to say something about that. So thank you for humoring me. And if any of that information, the bookstore, the signup for the prizes or information about being paid to be a greater for CC, tell your friends, listen to the beginning of this tape if or this audio, if they’re not willing to the whole thing. And I’ll review a few of those things when we sign off for those that signed up late. So let’s talk about reading and literature. A lot of people don’t really know a lot about me in the sense of how I learned to read or you know why I’m so adamant about literature and classical education. So I thought I would take a few minutes, explain a little bit about my background. I was one of those girls who just said four or five years old could read very little instruction.

Leigh Bortins:    I can remember having a Dick and Jane book in front of me and that was it. I just read. So imagine my discouragement when I had four boys and they just didn’t think reading it four or five was a great thing to be doing. And I was pretty frustrated. Isn’t that what people do? They just start reading when they’re four or five who needs lessons. So as a homeschooling parent, I was in the same place as so many of you. I had to learn how to help my children become good readers. They weren’t natural at doing so and so the first person that needed kinda change their attitude about that was me, myself. And so I began studying how to teach reading and writing as well as Latin and the classics while my children were still preschoolers. Now it’s not so much that you know, I had this great vision for homeschooling or CC at that point.

Leigh Bortins:    I just was a voracious reader and so I loved reading and you know what? The babies are nursing or they’re on this wing or at the playground. It’s really easy for me to just read a book. So I chose to read books that taught me how to be a better homeschooling parent for them. I also was fortunate that they were babies when I knew I was going to homeschool. So I had that free time to get ready. So my advice for those of you that made me feel like you’re not ready to read Aristotle or to read Chaucer or to read even, you know, the King James Bible, start as young as you can and read with your oldest student for as long as you can every day and you will improve. My daughter-in-law April says she’s learning how to homeschool with the classical list with her children.

Leigh Bortins:    And that’s what I did too. None of us arrived knowing how to be great moms and dads in the homeschooling community. And probably the best thing that I could share with you today is that tomorrow when you wake up with your children, you will never have been the parent. You’ll be tomorrow with the time that you have tomorrow and with the children that you have tomorrow. So be sure to know that you will be frustrated, that there’ll be failures, that there’ll be things you can’t do, that you wanted to do. And that that’s just normal. It’s part of life and that homes practicing living out to know God and make him known. And so if you feel like you’re struggling with curriculum or material, you’re supposed to be struggling with curriculum and the material. Don’t feel like you need to be a really great reader in order to homeschool your children and to raise them to be lovers of literature.

Leigh Bortins:    So I was fortunate that I could read and I read voraciously and, and I re read early, but that wasn’t the same as knowing how to teach reading or how to write. There’s just so much that you can internalize and be dialectic into a point, but you’re not rhetorical in it. You need practice teaching it. And so praise God, he gives you tiny little babies and they’re going to give you a lot of practice over 18, 19 and 20 years. And I’m still happy that my children today in their twenties and thirties call me to say, mom, you need to read this book or to ask questions about a book that the two of us are reading and so I pray for you that you have that kind of relationship with your children well into there. Adulthood is they’re raising their own children also. I think that loving books was probably the best thing all of us got out of homeschooling for us personally.

Leigh Bortins:    You know, you’ve read a couple of different schedules that I’ve printed because my family changed just like your family’s changed at one point only had little boys and then I had little boy, big boys and babies and then I only had big boys because we have four sons and so of course we adapted to whatever their needs were. But in general, we woke up every day reading the Bible and reading books and we went to bed every night reading the Bible and reading books. And I knew I could Pat myself on the back if we got through the day without anybody going to the hospital because this boys are outside playing their hardest for most of the day as well as we got through Bible study and we got through talking about really great ideas and the books that we read. So that would be my wish for you as far as feeling successful and every day that if you could just be sure to read the Bible, I will waiting with them.

Leigh Bortins:    It’s enough. It just doesn’t always feel like it’s enough. So that’s just some general information about us. One thing that I think makes it difficult for people to really love literature is they’ve only been taught how to read one way. In other words, they’ll take a science book or a a instruction manual on how to use spreadsheets or a math book. A novel history, whatever the John rhe is, and they read the book from the beginning to the end. And if they don’t like the book, they stop reading it. And what people are really good at reading do is they read every kind of book differently depending on the purpose of the book. And so sometimes you want to have the skill where you’re just surveying books and you’re quickly through them. Sometimes you need to dig into books and people are all aware of that depending on what kind of I would just [inaudible] excellent.

Leigh Bortins:    You’re trying to get from Carol. But when we’re helping our children learn to be readers, there’s three levels that we should try to practice. The one is your children should be read aloud to above letter level. So in other words, if they’re little children, you should read them adult books every day. They should just hear your love of books and you building their vocabulary and then learning to sit still and to listen to the books. And I know that something that’s really important is to, with the little children, is to read them in different voices. I know one day my husband looked at me and said, the reason the boys won’t read is because you read so well to them. And I thought, well, I guess I’ll just have to stop that, but I couldn’t. I love books so much and I’ll let my boys so much.

Leigh Bortins:    And they did all learn to read. So we read literally one to two hours a day. I would read out loud to them. Then they need to read a whole lot below level. So say you’ve got that fourth-grader. I’ll just use myself as an example. In fourth grade I read every Nancy drew novel three or four times and now when I look back in that year of reading, what was I learning to do? I was learning how to not see the words I was reading. Now what do I mean by that? So Nancy drew books were very much below my reading level at that point. But I love the mystery and I wished that I was Nancy drew. And so by reading the same style book and the same author over and over again, I was learning to see through the words to the meaning. And I was teaching myself to speed read.

Leigh Bortins:    So if you look at amusing ourselves to death by Neil postman, he talks about how reading is not specifically natural to human beings. If you think about it, the majority of human beings have only had books for the last few hundred years. And yet they were intelligent and communicated before the printing press was made. And so reading isn’t specific, particularly a human thing to do now in the sense of I’m speaking right? We all just started actually speaking to one another unless we have some sort of you know, deficiency. But reading’s not quite that way because as Neil postman describes it, you have to learn to attach a sound to a squiggle that’s in a series of squiggle that’s in a bunch of words, in different sequences and not see them. In other words, to not read phonetically all the time, but to be able to read quickly through the words that you know very well.

Leigh Bortins:    So that you can concentrate on the meaning of the sentence structure, the paragraph, the authors meaning. So for instance, if it’s in the top 10,000 words in a book and as far as usage goes, like the words a and the, and, and I don’t even see them when I read my eye goes right through them and right past to the nouns and the adjectives and the descriptive verbs. I don’t see the is and the was and the were right. The being verbs. And this is because I read Nancy drew books for nine months straight and everyone around me left me alone and let me read. So part of that is because I had a horrible education, no fault of my parents. Homeschooling wasn’t something they would have thought to do. And basically in fourth grade I was at a really very bad school.

Leigh Bortins:    We were, we were in the middle of moving and we only lived in that district for one year. And my mom was very proactive parent. I love her to death. She was great. She went to the principal and said, this school is horrible. I want you to stick Leigh in this closet and let her just read books all day long and leave her alone. So that was back when parents had authority and so that was what I did. And then of course the following year we were in our new home and my parents made sure I was at a safe school at that point where the teachers had something to teach me. So I look back and what it could have been a really bad situation is actually being a good situation and knowing that the Lord redeemed all things. So if you feel like your children are being pulled out but bad public school situation or you yourself really haven’t been great at teaching them reading, it’s okay.

Leigh Bortins:    It’s something they’re going to do for the rest of their life. But don’t overlook the, I want a voracious reader where when a reader starts becoming voracious and reading the same things over and over again, that’s a really important stage in their development. So that’s all below level. But of course you want to stop him each day and say, okay, wait a minute. You need to struggle with reading a little bit today. And so they read at level also each day. And the reason they’re reading at level is of course so they can learn to wrestle with ideas they haven’t thought about before. Sound out big words I haven’t seen before. A string together ideas they’ve never thought of, listened to voices that they’ve haven’t heard from before, from history or science or you know, whatever John job that they’re reading. So I just said a lot of words there.

Leigh Bortins:    So let me recap. Re read a lot aloud to your children. Let them read a lot below grade level, whatever that means for them. And then each day in their so-called reading lesson read, have them read a little bit at their own grade level to keep improving. And a lot of times what that will be is out of the book you’re reading aloud to them. If it’s above their level, just have them read a sentence or two out. So what age group am I talking about here? All of them. That never changes. If tomorrow I want to go learn something new, I will have to get a really easy reading book and practice reading through that and take notes and slow down and, and you know, go slowly through it. And then as I get better at it, I might be able to read a history or a science book or a novel that relates to that topic that’s more at my level.

Leigh Bortins:    And something that would really benefit me is if somebody who also was interested in that subject would discuss it with me or read aloud to me or help me understand instruction manuals. But somebody who was above my level of understanding was helpful to me. So a place where we can start talking about approaching the ability to read the best books ever written is to think about our middle school children and a couple of ways. So one is that most homeschooling parents attempt phonics or whole language or some sort of instruction and reading where they know they need to spend some time with that child and get them to the point where they match the sounds with this wiggles in the words. Nobody would think otherwise that you wouldn’t want to help a child do that. But one of the things that I see is a lot of homeschoolers don’t help their middle schoolers in the same way they think because they can read, they can read anything and that’s just not true.

Leigh Bortins:    So as an example for my own family, where that became apparent to me was when we first started challenge. And I had my own children in American documents because that’s what you do in high school. You should read the constitution and the Northwest ordinance and the poetry of the time. You know what the founding fathers said and what the real laws are for our country and how to be a citizen. Right. All those things that you want for your children. I wanted for my children. And so we opened up the books and I went, huh, I don’t even know what this says. So together we would treat it like it was phonics books while we were reading the constitution or the Northwest ordinance or any of the books that are in our words, aptly spoken American documents. And so therefore it challenged one, one of the things that we have our students do is rewrite those documents because it makes you learn how or it makes you slow down and read it well enough and try to understand what the author is saying.

Leigh Bortins:    And so when you’re given a 20 or 30 word sentence where 10 to 1210 to 15 of be like fit, 60% of the words, you don’t know what they mean. Don’t give up. It’s just like when you were learning Onyx, you have to take the time to back up through the articles and the words. Now that’s what I mean about spending a little bit of time each day on that level of reading. Because of course you want your challenge one student to just race through the books that they love and read them over and over again and still have read alouds as a, as a within your family, but they need to continue practicing reading hard things. So that’s one of the steps to getting to the place where you can read great classical literature of history. The other way to do that is to start with what I call coming of age stories.

Leigh Bortins:    There’s a reason that there’s new Berry winning books and I would caution you to stick before about 1960 and the books you read, but the majority of them are coming of age books of children who are the same age of the children that are reading those books, middle school age, who are specifically trying to figure out how to live in a, in an adult world. So before the 1960s, Newberry literature, books that are, they’re award-winning books. There’s lots of good books that never made T, you know, the new barrier list. But books before that time period tended to have expansive vocabularies for middle school children. All right. So let’s take a break from that idea. So when I realized that I could not read Shakespeare easily or American documents easily, or Aristotle or Augustine or the church fathers, I said to myself, I have to figure out a way to get there.

Leigh Bortins:    So what I did is I started reading all the classical or what was to say as junior classics out loud to my boys. And I began to change and of course they were changing because one, they’re growing, they’re gonna change anyway. But they were beginning to hear words and ideas that we had never discussed as a family because we didn’t know how to broach those ideas. And so one of the main purposes of the challenge literature program is to put into the family’s hands books that prepare you to be able to read the best books of history. I’m hoping that makes sense. Chris is nodding. It makes sense. Okay. Well we’ll see what your questions are at the end. So let’s go ahead and start looking at this. Have you guys time, I’m apparently on Facebook somewhere. There’s this list. It looks like this. It’s a PDF of four pages, 20 out of print it front or back. There’s four and I’m going to refer to a few of the books. I am not going to go over all 100 of them by any means. We could be here for three days, but I want to talk about why these books help you to be able to read the best books.

Leigh Bortins:    Now before we talk about the books that get you to the best books, if you have that PDF, look at the last page and the page it was before. You’ll see after the number 100 it says best. A lot of times this would be an interesting book discussion for you to have. It’d be an interesting blog page for someone to write. What are the 10 best books that every proficient reader should aim to be able to understand. And we can cheat a little and talk about authors or collections rather than the actual, but what I’ve pulled out here are the actual books that we read in our Classical Conversations program to show you that comparatively in those first hundred books, what do we have here for best four, eight, 12, six about 20 best books, but they read a hundred in order to get to there.

Leigh Bortins:    And just for those aren’t in Classical Conversations. This is only in our literature program. This is not in the history. They, they still read lots and lots of books in the history program, the science program, the logic program. A lot of our science books require, you know, different kinds of reading. So there’s actually almost 500 books that you would read in Classical Conversations from kindergarten through 12th grade that we recommend. But I wanted to start with the literature because that’s the most familiar to most people. So getting back to this idea of what is the best, and we have other great literature and I’m a not and nonfiction and other courses that we work with our seminars really quickly. So we don’t have the children read the entire Bible and Classical Conversations because I figure you’re Christian parents and you’re going to do it at home as a family.

Leigh Bortins:    So I’m making a presumption that you guys will read the Bible together so we don’t have it specifically as the long course. We do have some seminars where the Bible was the predominant preeminent book that they read, but not the entire thing. So we look at King David and various heroes and some of our poetry books as well as an intense study of the Psalms. And then we have some books by CS Lewis and Ravi Zacharias and some other people that help us to read the Bible. So I would say that was the number one book that you should be able to read.

Leigh Bortins:    You need to watch out because we have these arguments over what the cannons of the Bible are, right between Catholics and Orthodox and Christians. We are of course of Christmas Protestants, we have slightly different numbers. My bigger fear then even that in that disagreement and now we’re trying to reconcile it or not reconcile it, is how the Canon’s being reduced to three or four or five books of the Bible period. Because so few pastors teach beyond Genesis or John, right? You get, you get a new pastor, he starts over in the new Testament or the old Testament and then few years later he’s gone. And so as a body we tend to be reducing the cannon from the 66 books to down to three or four of them. So watch out for that in your Bible reading, you want to prepare your children to read the whole thing.

Leigh Bortins:    Then we have here some Plato dialogues and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s progress. There’s really great children’s versions of that book. That’s the kind of thing, you can read it up to your four year old. The, the children’s versions a, if you’ve been reading a long time to your kids, maybe your four year old can handle the adult version. Then William Shakespeare, he always makes everybody’s list. And so is it cheating to say all of William Shakespeare, he’s the one of the top 10? Or do you list each book and decide or lists inside which one book you would want to pick? Well, our students read taming the shrewd Julius Caesar Hamlet, much ado about nothing. Henry the fifth and Macbeth. We also have our students read ancient poetry bale Wharf. They will Wolf, sorry, in sir going in the green Knight. We try to read them in their in their poetic forms.

Leigh Bortins:    That’s the version that we sell. That’s the version we train tutors to work with. But you know what, there’s no shame in recognizing what level reader you are. And so if one of our students wants to read a prose version of Baerwolf or sir Gwane in green night, go for it. Now with audio books, it’s helping the students who have dyslexics issues approach higher level reading levels. And of course there’s always movies. Yeah, you probably don’t want to hear it, what I say about movies, but Chris is sitting to my side here. It’s taught me that I should look at a movie totally differently than a book and judge it on the merits of what it is possible to do. Because what you can do with the book is different than what you can do with the movie. So that’s another podcast. But I just let you know that within classical comp stations, sometimes people will say the reading is too hard and we’ll say, well then scale it for your children.

Leigh Bortins:    Don’t let them miss out on these great books. I was with a student one day taking her and a bunch of them have other ones to see. I’m Jane Eyre. And on the way there they were saying what a horrible book that was. Not everybody but a couple of them. And I was like, and so you know, but we’re wanting to see the play. And I said, isn’t that great? You read that book because now you can tell me why it’s a horrible book instead of just hearing it’s a horrible book. You actually read it. So you didn’t have some true knowledge. So what was interesting is they were a couple years away from having read the book and then we saw this play. And the attitude on the way back was the reverse. I did not know what that book was saying. And the play had added some insight to the book.

Leigh Bortins:    So that’s why plays and movies, I’m acting out all that stuff. They help you to know things better and you can go back to the original source document. So what was really interesting was to have these about 1920 year olds be able to reflect that evening and say, I guess when I was 16 or 17, I didn’t have as a fully formed thoughts as I do now. Right? So that’s the whole message of classical education is that we’re always practicing. There’s no end. It’s one of the reasons we don’t like the creditation systems because it makes it feel like you’re done with something and you never are you. There’s always more to learn about anything. And if you read a book, like for me, let’s say I’d read Jane Eyre, I’d probably read that. And when I was in fifth or sixth grade and then I read it again in high school and then I read again out loud to my children when they were middle schoolers.

Leigh Bortins:    And then I taught challenge four or five times with that book. Do you think I learned something different every time I read it? Of course I did. And C S Lewis, who was one of our favorites of course, said that the Mark of a literate person is someone who will read the same books over and over again. So I really wanna encourage you to give your children that kind of time to read them in the M L here you read ’em out loud to read in themselves, to see it as a movie, as a play. Go to bed, listening to it, whatever the kind of literatures are enjoying, keep at it, help them to be copious listeners as well as copious readers with a copious vocabulary because that’s what’s gonna get us to being able to read the poetry of Beowulf are circling Canterbury tales. And then we have as we dive into some little bits of a writing that’s very popular in the [inaudible] from [inaudible] as well as a lot of Homer, the Iliad and Odyssey.

Leigh Bortins:    And then of course John Milton. Again, I’m not sure, I mean again, I was confusing a moment tale with John Bunyan, but John Milton’s paradise lost and then Virgil the need. So the authors I have listed on the left would be ones that classical lists would argue are the best writers of all time. Now one of the things that we do with reading and writing and discussion within Classical Conversations and just the Lascaux model is we are actually trying to raise adults who don’t just read Homer, but they can write like Homer and in order to write like somebody else, it means spending a lot of time reading their works. So one of the models that we have throughout the curriculum, I’m a delve into writing for just a minute because it doesn’t matter whether it’s copy work with your kindergartener or a paragraph with your middle schooler or an entire essay with your older children.

Leigh Bortins:    The best way to learn to write is through mimicry. It’s the best way to learn everything. So this is why we use AWS a course by Andrew [inaudible] who was one of the speakers at this event. What he has done is he’s put together a system which helps you learn how to take somebody else’s ideas. And you just basically act as the editor of it because it’s a hard task for a young child to be creative while they’re working on clarity. And while they’re working on grammar that continues all through high school. So sometimes people will tell me, this book’s too easy for my child and it’s not a credit the state would want them to have. And I’m sitting there thinking, okay, every good writer there has ever been and reader reads below level and writes below level. They understand that that’s part of the formative so that you can actually put on down on paper really great ideas or have really clear discussions with people about difficult ideas.

Leigh Bortins:    And so I want to ask you one more time, just all through high school, don’t make light of it. When your child has something [inaudible] everything or to read. Everything shouldn’t be hard. Most of it should be easy to read so they can practice thinking, right? Because they are going to spend time with these harder books as they get older and depending on their reading level, some of these easier books are pretty hard for them. And Oh they get to the you know, till they become more mature in their abilities. Okay. See much time I have cause you bet it’s going to be back. All right. I want to talk about some specific books. If you look on your page, it’s got this, I got some circles here on mine, starts with 17, says Melville at the top. I circled a number of books that I want to make sure I talk to you about.

Leigh Bortins:    So when somebody asked me what can I do and I only have a few minutes to become better understand or have the classical model as well as a better reader and the have a better view of just classical education in general. These are the books I recommend and I want to discuss why I recommend them. So three, they’re 35, tug Doug, I mean Frederick Douglass’s narrative of the life. It’s his autobiography. Another one is Booker T, Washington’s up from slavery. And then another one is, let’s see, Booker T is 93 and then another one is book 99. Elizabeth Yates, a you might note this list is alphabetical and her book is Amos fortune Freeman. So I was fortunate. Freeman was a real person. It’s a historical novel for middle schoolers about a gentleman who lived during the revolutionary times. And then Booker T Washington is I’m sorry, Frederick Douglas is right at the civil war where he was still part of slavery and that was a big part of his family.

Leigh Bortins:    And then Booker T Washington was just a little bit later where freedom had begun to occur, but it hadn’t quite, you know, gone across the country. Not everyone you know, was ready to, to recognize that they were just as human as the rest of us. And the reason I like these three books is because if teach us how to raise or how to educate a large number of people from a really distressful, difficult time where they didn’t even have buildings or materials like we do now, it’s these three gentlemen, all three books talk about their education and what they did to help educate others with, of course, nobody helping them. It was just what they did in order to make sure that their communities could improve. And all of them, not so much maybe, but in one sense him too. The three of them all did it because they wanted people to be able to read the Bible.

Leigh Bortins:    And that’s something, of course, it’s really lost in our education that the whole point of reading is to read the Bible. Well, don’t we just say it’s one of the best books ever written and it’s a pretty big one. Then besides those, there’s a couple others that are just kind of favorites. The one I circled 81 by Elizabeth George Spears called the bronze bow. And it’s not particularly about classical education. It’s about finding our Lord Jesus as our savior and recognizing that the world’s influences are not going to help you to do that. And of course it’s a pretty easy read as well as a historically accurate read about the life of Christ in his time in Jerusalem.

Leigh Bortins:    And then everybody’s favorite who sticks with classical education and Trevor and the number, it’s lay thumbs. Here we go. Number 60, gene Leigh Letham carry on. Mr Bowditch, if you really want to understand classical Mav education, read that book over and over again and discuss it with your older children. It’s the story of a young man who, through a series of unfortunate events, mostly poverty, was unable to go on to Harvard to go to school. It’s a true story because he had to work like many 12 year olds and we think that’s such a bad thing now. But that was reality back then. And so since he couldn’t go on to school, he was very autodidactic, which means self-teaching. And so the book describes how even though he was woefully sad about not being able to go to an institution where you could hang out with colleagues, which is the point of college [inaudible] urge you the stuff that you want to work with [inaudible] he did on his end.

Leigh Bortins:    He did it through observation and Nope. Books and thinking, finding his own mentors and wrestling. So if you read that book and then you look at some of the books that I’ve written, the core of the question conversation or like the weld train mine or some of the books Andrew poodle or Andrew current have written, what you’re seeing is that all of us talk about finding good original source documents, wrestling with the offers by either reading and rereading or writing down their ideas and then rewriting them, outlining, notating them. Tanya is somebody about them. That’s why it’s called high school conversations that what mr Bowditch did is what we keep describing. And really we’re describing how everybody learned before there was institutional education.

Leigh Bortins:    So the thing that’s interesting about him is I grew up near the Naval Academy. I lived in Annapolis for quite a long time and that’s where his books are still there and they do teach out of the curriculum that he wrote. So that was during the revolutionary time. And so think about this, his navigation tables, that’s what he wrote. His navigation tables are still being used 250 years later. As original source document at one of the finest institutions we have an education. So you can’t go wrong reading any of those books over and over again. My time here. Okay. Five, 12. I’ve got a few more minutes so you bet it’s going to be back here soon. And so I wanted to make sure that I was clear on these four pages of, on a couple of points. One I’ve already said they’re alphabetical order. They’re actually in the challenge curriculum.

Leigh Bortins:    We’re making a separate list of the books that are in the foundation’s curriculum. If there’s an author who you’re not familiar with, if you look through the catalog, look to your far right in the anthology and that might be where you can find the book. If you look at the level that means what challenge level where we read the book in and discuss it and write papers with the type of novel. Okay, look at that. Look at what we’re reading. Short stories, novels, biographies, legal documents, all right. Download or poetry, speeches, dramas, essays, novellas. We read so many different forms of books that there’s something for everybody. And another thing is example, let’s say in a challenge, your child’s being asked to read something that’s just too long or too hard. Maybe you have a baby that week or you went on vacation or who knows what?

Leigh Bortins:    Well, they still can just read part of the book. Or they might find a short story from that author. Or they might be able to find an article written by that author. Just make sure that they don’t give up, that they don’t say, Oh, I can’t get this done. They can get something done that’s appropriate for the time that they have and the reading level that they are that they’re at. Okay. So I also wanted to say something about Charlotte Mason. People have asked me number of times, house, you know, Charlotte Mason different from Classical Conversations or classical education and I’ve read her books, I’ve used her method, her model, whatever you want to call it. And what I firmly believe is that if she had continued writing pedagogical books for children passed eighth grade, right, that was her, she addressed children that were through about 13 years old because they were going to be apprenticed or do something else that she would have finished her thoughts to be the same as the great classical this did that.

Leigh Bortins:    She was doing what was necessary to get children to the place where they were literate and think about what a great contribution she was to our, to our just whole conversation. And that she was probably the first person after the printing press when Western literature started to address middle-school style writing, children’s literature, easy writing for people that were new to reading. She was really great at showing us some of the good pedagogy so that we could help a non-reader become a reader. When I read my book, when I read aloud to my children, I pretty much read exactly how she would have described it. I just do more with my children than that because I know that they’re going to go into some sort of quadrivium or highly academic program as they get older. Now, if I had a child who wasn’t that way, I might’ve done things differently, but every single one of my children were, were born able to reach high levels of education.

Leigh Bortins:    And so that’s what we were preparing for. But that doesn’t mean that in the morning when we all woke up and reading these books, there was any stress to it. Or in the evening when we were going to bed reading these books, there was a, I mean, you know, read another chapter, turn the page, mom, don’t stop. Now. That’s the kind of thing that we were hearing when we were reading books. So I’d like to really promote Sarah McKenzie, who’s another speaker I believe in this conference. She has the read aloud revival. Go to her blog and listen to a podcast on talking about just good books and how to teach children how to read. I just really appreciate her efforts as well as I mentioned earlier, Andrew Kern and what he has to say about Christian pedagogy as well as a Doug Wilson and his books for parenting and how to help with them.

Leigh Bortins:    Just education overall. And then another resource that we sell at Classical Conversations is called teaching the classics by Adam Andrews. And it’s a list of a hundred plus questions that you can just ask yourself while your child’s reading a book to think ahead to you know, how to engage in conversation with the books. Since so few parents have been read to in the last generation a lot more parents than it used to be. You’re coming to me and saying, my mom never read to me or nobody in school ever asked me to read a book. I don’t even know how to discuss books with my children. Right? So teaching the classics and the IDW LTW, there’s all give you ideas. I call those books grandma’s books. Even when I was in a grandma, I called them grandma books because by studying those as well as the writing road to reading, which is a book on phonics, they give you such a broad overview of not only the grammatical dynamics of reading and writing, but also the love of learning and the recognition that children have different styles and learning and that it’s all for God’s glory.

Leigh Bortins:    That if you would read books like that and teach yourself through writing rich reading IWS books lost tools or writing, teaching the classics, you would find that you can start to also read more difficult books than you thought that you would be able to. When I was 24, I read the writing road to reading for the first time and I told you I was a voracious reader and I did a lot of the right things except my vocabulary was limited because the books I’ve been asked to read weren’t very difficult through high school. And so when I stumbled on the writing road to reading a girlfriend who was homeschooling was actually putting together a class and we went to a university professor and he taught 10 or 12 of us homeschooling moms how to use that book. That’s how dedicated we were. We would pay a lot of money to go, we have a professional help us because we had to figure these things out.

Leigh Bortins:    We didn’t have conferences at that time or curriculum. And so as I’m reading this thing on phonics, which I’d heard of and I must’ve used, cause I was reading so well, what I discovered is my reading level began to escalate as an adult because I didn’t struggle with some of the bigger words that were maybe Latin based or German or Russian, right? There’s, if you read a lot of extensive books, you’re going to get a lot of languages mixed. The phonics actually helped me to decode better than I could before, so I don’t think much of homeschooling had anything to do with my children. I think it all had to do with me and the Lord sanctifying me and wanting me to be able to know him better and share him with a broader range of people and to be interested in what all folks are interested in and to be asking questions so that they too can be wooed to Christ.

Leigh Bortins:    And so I really wanna encourage you to not give up on homeschooling. If you just feel like you’re not doing a great job with your children, you probably aren’t. You’re probably right. Who cares? Just keep at it. There seems to be this like disconnect between people who want things to be practical and efficient. And so if I’m hiring an employee to do a job, yes, I want them to get the job done for the shortest amount of time with the most productive output because there’s dollars attached to it. But when I’m with the child and I’m developing a soul, right? Our goal is that souls for our children. I want them to struggle. I want them to wrestle. I want them to cry, to be mad at me. I want to know for a small amount of time every day that they are doing the hard work of thinking about the next thing because I know when they’d have a Sabbath rest from it, the light bulb will turn on and then we can work on something else that’s just a little bit harder and causes problems for us.

Leigh Bortins:    Okay. So your vet, you said you were going to be listening. I’m bout to wrap up. I’m like, hi. Hey. I just want to say one more time. Go to cause someone’s commented. Go to class. Will conversations.com forward slash homegrown. If you want to register for the prize drawing somebody else, then okay. And I missed that and so I stepped out for a little while. What’s the price drawing? Oh, if you go to our site that I just mentioned, we’re giving away $100 in swag. That’s when y’all joined, right? Was to get the cups in the mugs, the book list. Nice. Okay, great. So home 

Yvette Hampton:           So Classical Conversations.com/homegrown. Yeah, forward slash show. Cool. Very promoting you. You’ve been doing such a great job. Oh, thank you. Well, you guys have done such a fantastic job of helping us to get the word out about this event and just the support that you have brought to school house rock. And I just want to say thank you. You’re welcome. You from the beginning Classical Conversations has been an incredible encouragement and support to us. And, and I, I want to say the thing that has actually encouraged us and supported us the most. You, you’ve sponsored the movie, but what has been the most exciting thing is that we will call one of your team members and we’ll be talking business stuff and they’ll say, okay, that’s great, but how can we pray for you guys? How can we pray for your family?

Yvette Hampton:           And it’s just been kind of a known thing that you, you guys are a team who is dedicated to praying and to lifting all things up to the Lord. And so we as a family have appreciated that more than you can even imagine. And just to know that your team is there praying for us through this whole process of getting this movie done. So thank you so much for how you have have supported us. In doing this, we, we certainly can’t do it alone and yeah, yeah, yeah. You’ve had lots of supporters. Yeah. Something the audience probably doesn’t know is that we have what’s called 11 at 11 and 11 o’clock every day, every Workday, everyone’s allowed to quit work and read for 11 minutes because studies have shown that if you read the Bible 11 minutes a day, you’ll be done in the course of a year.

Yvette Hampton:           And so we, our entire staff, even the non Christians that are here know that 11 o’clock, everybody’s reading their Bible. So we’re trying our best to know him within our business mission too. So thanks for noticing. Yeah, that’s awesome. Thank you. And you have a great staff there. We love you guys. So here are a couple of questions that I’ve seen pop up and if you guys have more questions, please pop those in now. Make sure you put question in front of your questions. So that we know what it is. And, and several of these are actually about Classical Conversations. But are we the first one just says if we are not as CC family, can we purchase the American documents collection for high school? That you were mentioning? Yes. Anybody can buy anything that’s on our website. Okay. So there’s, that’s just easy to find.

Yvette Hampton:           Is it called the American documents? It’s called words, aptly spoken American documents. And we have another one they might be interested in called wards after spoken short stories. Okay, great. Perfect. this one is from Sherry. She says we have four kids ranging from fifth through age three. I like the idea of CC, but when I talked to people about it and they tell me everything they do, it gives me anxiety. It seems like a really heavy load. Am I wrong on this? I, I’m sorry. I don’t want our book work to take all day to do it. And it seems like my friends that do this at such a longer day. Yeah. You know, that’s the call of the parent. I can promise you, except for in the high school years, in certain situations, my kids never did more than three hours of book work in a day.

Yvette Hampton:           It’s finding that balance and eliminate this. I wouldn’t include the reading cause to me reading was just life. That’s what we did. But I mean, any times just at their seat doing math or Latin or the things like that. We did a lot of car school and I think homeschoolers are successful. Start to discover that they’re trapped. So I’ll let anybody have any of your buds go over your Latin then or go over ’em. Yeah, discuss the book you read the night before. But we, we just wove education into our life and I mean they all plan to homeschool their kids so they don’t work. And, and I’ll actually chime in on this personally because we I said at the beginning of this session, our family did CC for three years when we were back in California and we had a fantastic community.

Yvette Hampton:           Our director was amazing. I mean, our whole community was great. And and so for us, my girls were younger at the time. I think, let’s see, when we, when we stopped doing CC because we started traveling for the movie. We, my oldest was in fifth grade actually, I guess. And and we took a very simple approach to it. We, you know, and, and maybe, maybe Leigh, you can talk about the stick in the sand approach cause some may not understand that whole thing. But when I first started it, I took that approach of like, Oh my goodness, we have to do so much because we think we have to do so much. And after the first year I realized, Oh wait, we don’t have to actually do that much stuff. We can really kind of do life schooling and incorporate this CC memory work and the other things into what we were doing.

Yvette Hampton:           And it was a lot of, you know just fun, rote memorization and things like that. But, but we would make it fun. We would listen to songs in the car and, and we just found ways to incorporate it into our school. But it was definitely not a heavy load. I mean you can make it a heavy load, but it’s not necessary, especially with the ages of your kids and it’s for your four kids from three years old to fifth grade. That’s a great age range where you can actually do school with them together. And you know, do your morning time like Pam talked about this morning and, and CC can be part of that or you can make CC kind of separate from that if you wanted to. But it’s a great way to incorporate school with all of your kids together. Thanks Yvette. Yeah, and one thing that people don’t recognize is like, I’m an eclectic a homeschoolers you can find.

Yvette Hampton:           And that’s why we only meet 24 weeks a year with our little guys. I don’t want someone telling me all year long what to do. I on the other hand, I’m a sinner who fall short of the glory of God. If I don’t have friends helping me do rigorous academics, we start to blow it off and not do it at all. So for me, even in the high school years, when we meet for 30 weeks a year, it’s not 52, it’s 30 weeks. And we work really hard during this 30 weeks. And then there’s other 22 that’s when we really attend our own family needs and delight learning. And there’s plenty of time to do that

Leigh Bortins:    Too. So figuring out, there’s not just the balance of the day, but there’s also the balance of the season of your ages, of your kids and the balance of the year itself. And I think that’s why it works. It’s like, you know, like mock trials really hard for the challenge B students. And at the end of every challenge be I would say to the kids, do you want to stop doing it? Should I not make your siblings? And they were like, no, because you notice that light in your eye when you did something you didn’t think you could do. And so finding those things that challenge your children while also doing the things with them that they just enjoy it. That’s what education is. It’s a balance. It’s not all one or the other.

Yvette Hampton:           Yeah, absolutely. And I would say visit a community for sure. You know, not every curriculum and program is perfect for every family. And so, you know, go, that’s why they have days where you can go visit an open house at a local community. So I would highly recommend that. And really quickly, I know you mentioned this, but can you very quickly just kind of describe the stick in the sand approach?

Leigh Bortins:    Oh yeah. So I didn’t fish at that. Okay. Yeah. So I’ve always had this prayer for this. Chris, for this Christian Indian woman who I’ve never met and I imagine she has nine children and her husband’s dead. Some mining accident killed him and she has no money. She lives in a dung hut. I’ve been there, I’ve seen these kind of houses and I believe the Lord’s equipped her with all the resources she needs to raise Christian children who love the word and the world and know it so they can make him known. And so when I make decisions and this with my own family, we try to just say, all right, it’s like a stick in the sand. If all you had was a stick and some sand, how would you teach this? Because that’s what the majority of mothers across this world have. So the parents who tend to wig out and do so much more than they need to do with CCS because they’re looking at the credits, they’re looking at the books, they’re not looking at their children and how to raise them as sons and daughters and brothers and sisters in Christ.

Leigh Bortins:    That that’s why our mission is to know God and make them known and the stick in the sand is our motto for good pedagogy. Yup. Okay.

Yvette Hampton:           Here’s a question she says, did you say you read, you read aloud for one to two hours, sorry. How did your children handle that? Curious. Because I have two boys and there are, her boys are age 11 and seven and I’m not sure that they can handle that. Even with busy hands.

Leigh Bortins:    Well, I started right when they were infants, like my husband would read. Would hold them as they fell asLeighp, reading instruction manuals and that’s work to them. Oh, just a reading family. And so I, you know, I look at it that whenever children don’t seem to be able to sit still and read, it’s probably cause you didn’t start quite early enough, but there’s hope. There’s hope. Just do 10 minutes a day and one day it will become 15 and then it will become 20 and just go slow. Yup. So

Yvette Hampton:           You know, Sarah McKinsey talks about that. If you, you start with 10 minutes a day, if you do 10 minutes, 10 minutes a day for six days a week, it seems like nothing, but that’s a whole hour of reading in a week. So if you’re a family who’s not used to reading aloud to your kids, start small and then just go longer and longer and longer and read books that are interesting to your kids. That’s the other thing. It’s very unlikely that if you’re reading a book that really captures their attention, that they’re going to whine and fuss and complain about it. Especially in, like you said, it says even with busy hands, it sounds like you’re giving them things to do and, and allowing them to occupy their hands, which is great. And definitely you should let them do that, especially at their ages. But if you’re doing that in reading a good book that they’re really engaged in you know, I talked about this early on one of the sessions that said, you know, oftentimes I’ll be reading a book to my girls and I’ll say, okay, we’ve got to move on with our day, or it’s time to go to bed or whatever.

Yvette Hampton:           And if we’ve left a chapter with a cliff hanger always, I mean there’s

Leigh Bortins:    No, don’t, don’t, don’t. Yeah.

Yvette Hampton:           Well if I want to hear the rest of it, and so we’ll keep reading and reading. And so, you know, if you’re reading a book, here’s another thing. If you’re reading a book that they’re not enjoying, it’s okay to put it down. And I mean, not always, sometimes we have to push through them. Yeah.

Leigh Bortins:    But that shouldn’t be that, that should be the rare thing then. And it’s really because you really are discipling at that moment and you’re trying to teach something specific. And it might not be the content of the book, it might just be the habit of listening or sitting still. So one thing with classical education, why are we talking about the arts? Is the contents not super important? It’s the art of studying Britons and that’s why it’s so scalable and can take up two minutes or you know, pre, you know, the whole day. And my echo book, I talk about, you know, it’s milking the cow, it’s loving your children enough to do a little bit every single day that over a lifetime it’s cumulative. And then also being wise enough, like you said, make sure they have some Legos in their hands. There’s nothing wrong with, I mean, at least in my house, there’s nothing wrong with bringing the bicycle inside and reading inside on a rainy day while they rode bikes. Right. That big house. Well, they’re little at that point, you know, little like their little big Wilson’s. Right, right. So, yeah. So just being flexible and you know, living life with them. Yep. We could think about that. Our founding mothers, you know, before TV, that’s one of the problems is now people don’t know what it was like before TV. What did you do? Right. You either played games or read books when you’re with your kids because there was nothing, nothing else to turn on. Yeah. So Rob, this

Yvette Hampton:           I dream of going back to those days, sometimes it would be so amazing. Okay, so here’s another question. She says, well the foundation’s reading list to be available somewhere.

Leigh Bortins:    Do you know if there’s already something posted on the website? I don’t know where it is. You could text customer service@cc.com and they can find them for you. But probably by fall I’ll have that list put together. Okay. Okay, great. So I’m revamping it. We’ve had it segments. So you knew what

Yvette Hampton:           You read. Like for cycle one, cycle two, six, three, and now we’re putting them all in like big lists. Okay. Single page. Okay, fantastic. Okay. And then this is someone else asking for the link to the giveaway. I can’t seem to get it to work. So the giveaway site’s not working well. She’s saying it’s working. Okay. It’s working. Okay, well we’ll try to repost that just so Oh, it looks like someone else posted it underneath. Oh, it looks like a few people posted it. There we go. So, okay. All right. Well Leigh, thank you so much for your time and, and books are not something that, that I grew up doing a lot. I mean, I would read sometimes, but I wasn’t really into reading and I, it hasn’t been until my adult years and now I love reading with my girls.

Yvette Hampton:           As a matter of fact, you want to hear a really cool story? Brooklyn. Can you go find that book real quick? I’ll see if she can go grab it really quickly. So when I was a little girl, I had this favorite book and it was called Me and My Sister Clara, I believe. And I used to read it all the time and I’m sure my parents read it to me and it was one of those books that I kind of remembered through the years and it was like whatever happened to that book. Well, somewhere along the line my mom got rid of this book and let me say yeah, come in with me. So you found it, come, come eat. Well, here’s a great story. So yes, for life, this is Brooklyn. And so I had remembered this book, but I didn’t remember what it was called or who the author was or anything.

Yvette Hampton:           I just, it was like one of my childhood memories. And so about maybe seven or eight years ago, we went to our local library and every year they would do these, Oh, a couple of times a year they would do these big book sales and you could get kids books. They were like 25 cents and I found this book. This was the book signing thing. I found the book. And would you believe it was actually the book that was mine signed it. My mom had this is the same town or different town, but no kidding. Probably, I don’t know. It had probably been 30 years literally since I had seen this book. So I only can imagine that my mom had sold it at a yard sale at some point or donate it to something and somehow it resurfaced. And I found my actual book at the library book sale.

Yvette Hampton:           I could not. It was funny cause I saw it and I was like, that’s the book. I love that book. I had that when I was a kid and I remembered it and I opened it up and I was like, no way. That’s my actual book. So which is so sweet and it says to my little girl, Merry Christmas, love mommy and daddy are 1981. Isn’t that cool? That’s great. I will never, ever, ever depart that book from my home. So when I was growing up, my mom got rid of the books and my aunt was really into reading and so she said, don’t get rid of them. And so when I started having children, I started getting all my books back from my aunt. She had saved them. It’s really great. Yeah, that’s awesome. You know they have meaning because part of it is, and when you read to your kids, you build up that relationship with them, but you’re also building memories with them.

Yvette Hampton:           You don’t. My memory of Little House on the Prairie, reading this series, I read it to Brooklyn when she was younger and then we listened to the entire audio version of it as a family, as we were traveling around the country filming for schoolhouse rock. And so now when I think about little house, I have such warm memories of it because it was something that we did together as a family. And even Garritt enjoyed a little house on the Prairie. It was, it’s such an awesome series. So yeah, I know. I know Laura Ingalls Wilder. She says, yeah, well maybe next year if you do this again, we can do the children’s books. Yeah, that would be fun. It would be fun. So well thank you again Leigh so much. You are such a blessing to me, to so many. And you guys, we are going to be back in about 20-ish minutes or so for our last round table session of the day and that when you guys are going to be really encouraged by that as well, it’s going to be Trish Corlew who are the hip homeschool moms and two other homeschool moms who are super hip as well.

Yvette Hampton:           Are Pam Barnhill and Aby Rinella. Aby will be moderating that round table panel again tonight and you guys bring in your questions. I know they’ve already had several questions submitted for that round table. But please bring your questions in. Just come for another time of great encouragement and and then we will see you. I will see you back here tomorrow morning, so have a fantastic rest of your afternoon. We’ll see you guys back in a little bit. Bye bye everyone.

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