The Cultivated Home Journal

God loves me so much. Remember my amazing art books I received a few months back from my library’s book sale? This week I had another straight-from-heaven book find. The last few months at the book sale have been a complete wash, so I was starting to think I just got lucky the first time. But this week I walked in and saw this adorable edition of the New York Botanical Garden’s The Trees of North America by Michaux and Redouté. 

I already own the tiny folio of the Audubon’s Birds of America, which I treasure! And I have a set of postcards of the New York Botanical Garden’s roses by Redouté. I wasn’t familiar with The Trees of North America, but as I picked up the book and read about it, I was surprised I hadn’t come across it before, because it’s right down my alley. 

Why? Why do I have this strange obsession with botanical prints? I find it ironic that I go to the library and find books about art, when truly I think of myself more as a lover of literature than art! I have cultivated this art interest in myself, however. I have worked to find the pieces that bring peace and joy into my life.  As I feel it is a practice that is valuable for developing personal taste in both adults and children, I will share my thoughts.

In high school, I was given an English writing assignment. I was to find a piece of art and write a poem about it. I pulled out my family’s Encyclopedia Britannica (which my mother sold copies of for an entire summer to earn credits for our family to receive our own) and looked up ‘art.’ I came across Nighthawks by Edward Hopper. I liked it. I was sharing a room with my sister at the time and we stayed up way too late that night, laughing and facetiously creating a story of a dramatic love triangle. 

As the night deepened, and I began applying myself to the experience, my mood sobered and I began a more serious study of the heartbroken element of the piece. I ended up with a poem my teacher loved and shared with subsequent classes as an example of this type of assignment. More importantly, it was a piece of writing that I loved. As I search my memories for when my study of art appreciation as a discipline began, I think it can be tied to this experience. 

Since then, I have been developing my eye, determining which pieces of art resonate with the ways I want to feel, and surrounding myself as much as I can with those pieces that visually support the peace and harmony I seek intellectually and spiritually. I do this when I attend art museums, design my home, and find books to bring into our home. We also study art as a family.

In our home, we have an art box. It’s a glass, velvet-lined box, large enough for two stacks of postcards, side by side. It contains pieces of art we have used for our family’s art study. We select a piece we like and look at it in silence for a minute for two. Then we share what we like. It’s as simple as that! When my college daughters have taken humanities courses that studied great art pieces, they share that they are already familiar with many of the art pieces studied in class, thanks to family art study.

Writing about these great works, as I did with my English writing assignment, is a great next step. According to Dr. M. David Merrill’s First Principles of Instruction, if we really want to learn something well, we want to find a way to integrate it into our lives. In our families or personal learning ventures, we can provide an opportunity to reflect on, defend, or share what we have learned. This could also be done by creating our own art pieces or telling a friend about what we’ve learned, depending on our goals. 

This is the main purpose for this website: to give our family a chance to reflect on, defend, and share what we’ve learned! So thank you for reading. How are you finding ways to share your learning? I’d love to be your learning buddy. Message me!

This week, my adult daughter was going through the boxes we have stored for her. She will be married in a few weeks, and she was deciding what items she wanted to bring with her into her new home. She came across her boxes of school notebooks. As a homeschooled student, she diligently recorded her daily schedule, her tasks completed, a report on what she’d read and how she’d spent her time. “I practiced the piano for an hour a day when I was twelve!” she said. She completed hour-long practice sessions for many years, but she had forgotten. Looking back on her daily records helped her remember how many years she has spent in diligent study.

We continue to use the notebook as a valuable tool in our family school toolbox. What I ask my children to record each day has evolved over the years, but most of what is in that notebook is left to their discretion. I just ask them to record what they want to tell me about. As a mother of seven, it’s been extremely helpful for children to compile their own records of their daily proceedings because I want to know what each child is doing and thinking. But I also don’t want constant interruptions. When children record their doings and thoughts in their school notebook, I can read through their writing at a time when I can focus on them and give them valuable feedback. Whether we review and discuss their notebook record in a personal interview or I simply read, write comments, and only personally chat about select items, the school notebook is a valuable tool for communication and learning. 

While we also keep journals, the school notebook is a record more for the purpose of record keeping between parent and child. I don’t want to micromanage my children in regards to how they use each minute of their time. The notebook helps guide them towards self management. They can look back on their day and see their effectiveness for themselves. 

Books like My Side of the Mountain, Robinson Crusoe, and Little Women show similar examples of tasks completed intermixed with thoughts. We likewise have included a mix of purposes in our school notebooks. Some of the things we’ve asked our kids to record include: get-ready tasks: pray, make bed, get dressed, brush, clean room, do hair; family chores; school subjects completed; reports on learning, such as a brief report on what they liked from their readings, finances: money earned, money spent, goals.

We often made the selection and purchase of a new notebook a special event. In most cases, records of this kind are strictly a tool. More essential learning is formalized into a journal or paper or book. But when my soon-to-be married daughter looked through her childhood school notebooks, she found that they still brought her joy–each one, even the six notebooks from 2020, and the few that she only filled halfway because she just wanted to buy herself a new notebook. I haven’t been as consistent at insisting on regular notekeeping as I would have liked, but that felt like a win. Learning to find joy in the discipline of daily record keeping can come to all of us as we practice and continue to pursue the habit. As Louisa May Alcotts tells us, “Preserve your memories, keep them well, what you forget you can never retell.”

Looking at the quality of family life, we can break it down into individual elements. A whole-family hierarchy of needs, if you will. Instead of viewing this hierarchy as a pyramid, where you start with the foundation and build your way up, we can view this as a structure that grows or constricts three dimensionally with the ebb and flow of family life. If one must select between the more foundational items and the higher orders, this serves as a guide to help make those decisions. Ideally, however, each of these elements is built up little by little as we build our family’s well-being.  When we contract these, it’s more that we’re concentrating our efforts, keeping our core solid and giving each element more emphasis. It’s an intentional choice rather than a deterioration.

1. Physical & Economic Stability:

Food, shelter, health access, predictable income — foundational.

2. Safety & Predictability in Daily Life:

Stable family routines, secure relationships, low environmental stress.

3. Emotional Connection & Family Functioning:

Warm relationships, clear communication, cohesion — strong predictors of well-being.

4. Social Support & Belonging:

Extended family, friends, community ties — buffer stress and support growth.

5. Developmental Growth & Agency:

Opportunities for learning, competence, self-regulation, and future planning.

6. Meaning & Purpose Across Family Members:

Shared identity, goals, traditions, values that guide long-term flourishing.

Family foreign language learning could be viewed as developmental growth and agency, but it can also be a vehicle for meaning and purpose, emotional connection, part of our family routines, and even a source of social support and belonging or a future promise of such. I am not saying that foreign language is as necessary as other areas in our lives, but I feel that it can be—evenly considered along with several other family sources of recreation.  

We just thought we would take a moment to share this tool that’s been valuable to our family as we make choices about how we prioritize our time, resources, and focus. Thank you for taking this moment to prioritize us in the context of your life. Enjoy your time with your family!

It’s finally here! The post where the rubber meets the road. Here are all of the details about how we do foreign language learning as a family in our home. 

Objective: speak language as a family in the home; learn language learning skills; develop language listening and speaking skills at the conversational level.

Tools:

Sticky notes (we like these)

Notebook

Embark language learning app

Chat GPT or similar AI

Beans or plastic pearls

2 jars

We can begin our language learning studies by selecting a home situation. As members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we like to begin with family prayer, as it sets our minds up correctly to begin. It’s also an environment that eases us into speaking. We often use similar phrases each time we pray as a family. Finally, the Embark app already has this vocabulary. For us, it’s an easy way to ease into the language-learning habit of thinking of words we want to learn, as we start with a base of known phrases and track additional words that come up that help us express the things we want to say in the target language. If a family isn’t in the habit of prayer, mealtimes or other routines would be great places to start. 

We currently focus on a phrase or two a day that includes three to five new words.  I record the phrase on a sticky note, along with the translation, and post the sticky note on the wall. I include about five phrases on each sticky note. After a few weeks, I transfer the sticky notes to our language study book that we use for review once a week. 

Embark: The Embark language learning app is an app designed for Latter-day Saint missionaries to learn the language they will be serving in, but it’s not limited to just them. It’s free for anyone who wants to use it. It does require a churchofjesuschrist.org sign in, but this is also open to everyone and can be created on the churchofjesuschrist.org website. If you are not a member, you just indicate that and are not required to enter a member number. The Embark app has a lot of activities. We specifically use it for its excellent audio. The ideal app would have a native language speaker recording each phrase, but then you would be limited to just the phrases recorded. We used other native audio apps and found them limited. They also included mistakes. Embark is a workaround, and we have yet to find mistakes in inflection or pronunciation. After we learn the prayer phrases we wanted that were already included in the app, we add the additional phrases we are learning. We don’t use the words list, even if we are learning individual words, to keep everything in a single unit. After we learn prayer, we create our own list to incorporate the next situation we are learning words about. When I add a new phrase, I number it, as Embark alphabetizes each phrase, and I just like to keep things in the order we learned them in at first. There are practice reviews built into the app that can be used to review phrases, but I just select phrases on my own based on the ones I feel like we’re forgetting. After we’ve fleshed out a situation pretty well, we move on to a new situation and create a new phrase list on our app. 

Chat GPT: I was very cautious when I first began using AI. But then I considered how much language is already on the internet and what a gift it is to have something able to access that wealth for me. I have access to all of the norms recorded in my target language, not just things designed specifically for foreign language learners. My query looks something like this: “How would native-German-speaking children, when asking their mother after having finished a meal, say, “May I be excused?” After I give Chat GPT a few queries making it clear the level of casual/formal and family dynamics, all I need to do is put the phrase I want and it gives me all of the context I need. I label this thread with a flag emoji so it’s easy for me to find.

Bean or pearls and jars: In “playing German,” the fun only lasts for so long, so we implement the bean jar technique. Every time a child says a phrase in German, I drop a pearl from the “out” jar to the “in” jar (we use different shaped/sized jars so we don’t mix them up). As children start overusing phrases, I let them know they need to say several phrases like that to get a pearl. I don’t always say something, just hold the pearl up in anticipation, tempting them to say more. This is a way of reverse scaffolding, where we gradually reduce assistance or rewards as the skill becomes more natural. I am extremely generous with the use of pearls. We select a collective reward for when we’ve filled the jar. It’s often ice cream, but sometimes the kids want to do something that needs a larger jar, like a special outing. 

Ideal prep needed: Words to learn recorded on the sticky notes and typed into the Embark app.

Daily practice sessions look like this: We take a few minutes reviewing recently learned phrases.  If we don’t say the phrase correctly, we don’t correct mistakes, we just listen to the Embark audio again and repeat the phrase. Then we learn the new phrase of the day. I play the Embark audio for the new phrase. We all repeat it a few times. I put a pearl into the in-jar. We act out a scenario where we would use the new phrase, generously doling out pearls for each act of participation. That’s it! We take ten to fifteen minutes. The rest of the day we give pearls each time the target language is used. As we have learned a few languages this way, I continue to give pearls for all of the languages we’ve learned, but prioritize more pearls for the more recent vocabulary. 

Friday review: On Fridays, we review all of our recently learned phrases. Then, instead of learning new words, we pull out our language learning book and review old words at random. You could select the first of each phrase of 5 on the sticky one week, then move to the second phrase the next week and so on, but I just pick the word I personally remember the least, as my kids are likely to have a similar recall. 

This process is the core of our language learning. This can be built upon in many ways, but this is our minimal daily routine to keep up family language learning in our home. Please email us ways you’ve incorporated language learning in your home. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions on the process. We’d love to talk about it with you!