Conference Speakers
Andrew Pudewa
Institute for Excellence in Writing (IEW)
Andrew Pudewa is the founder and director of the Institute for Excellence in Writing. Traveling and speaking around the world, he addresses issues related to teaching, writing, thinking, spelling, and music with clarity, insight, practical experience, and humor. His seminars for parents and students have helped transform many reluctant writers and have equipped parent-educators with powerful tools to dramatically improve students’ skills. He is a graduate of the Talent Education Institute in Japan and holds a Certificate of Child Brain Development. He and his heroic wife, Robin, have homeschooled their seven children and are now proud grandparents of fifteen, and make their home in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Speaker Sessions
Reading Strategies for the Struggling or Non-reader
(Homeschool How-To’s)
As schools have made reading their new god, believing that producing good readers will solve all their academic problems, many children — the dyslexic, the easily distracted, the auditorily challenged — are truly left behind in the rush to improve test scores. What schools don’t know (but what many parents discover) is that reading is not simply being able to rapidly decode symbols with the eyes. With humor and insight, Andrew Pudewa will share stories and strategies for helping students who need to engage the cognitive processes of reading, but who are more likely to excel through a wider variety of practical, creative, and imaginative approaches.
Conquering Corrupt Culture by Raising Christian Communicators
(Family Discipleship
Today, many of us have an intuitive sense that major changes are coming, that soon our world may be very different in ways not necessarily convenient or comfortable. But at the same time, we must wake up each day and live as though things will continue on pretty much as they are. Resolving this cognitive dissonance requires that we carefully contemplate our circumstances because we truly are in a cultural war, fighting the “non-gospel” of aesthetic and moral relativism on three fronts — personal, familial, and social. What should our priorities be, and how can we prepare our children to be “culture warriors?” Andrew Pudewa answers these questions and more!
Freedomship and Entrepreneurial Education
(Homeschool How-To’s)
Many of us realize that we value home education not only because it often results in better academics, superior social environments, and enriched family life, but because it builds a better community and country. The result of true liberal education — a freedomship education — will be not only young men and women who know how to think and communicate but who think evangelically and entrepreneurially. To revive a culture of self-sufficiency and freedom requires more people with the owner/entrepreneur mind-set and fewer with the employee mind-set. Join Andrew Pudewa for a discussion of how to cultivate an entrepreneurial, or “georgic”, aptitude in our children. The future of freedom may depend on it.
Paper and Pen: What the Research Says
(Homeschool How-To’s)
Recent years have seen an enormous increase in the use of technology in education for even the youngest students. But is technology really the cure — all that many believe it to be? While traditional skills, such as cursive penmanship, are seen as unnecessary in the modern world, the actual research tells a different story. Learn the compelling reasons to choose paper books instead of electronic devices for reading, to handwrite instead of type when note-taking, to teach cursive instead of printing for penmanship, and to grab a pen instead of pencil for composition. With presenter Andrew Pudewa, discover how to unleash creativity that goes beyond technology.
Nurturing Competent Communicators — The Power of Linguistic Patterns
(Homeschool How-To’s)
Many parents think that good readers will naturally become good writers. Others think that writing talent is just that — a natural ability — some have it; others don’t. Both are myths. History and modern research show very clearly how good writers have developed. What are the two most critical things you can do as a parent to develop a high level of aptitude, from a young age and into high school? With humor and insight, Andrew Pudewa will share the two easy, but unbelievably powerful, things you can do to build language patterns and nurture competent communicators in your family.