Can your 7-year-old spot faulty reasoning? Should your 9-year-old question assumptions? Absolutely—and it is easier to teach than you think.

In our information-saturated world, critical thinking is not a luxury skill for high schoolers—it is an essential foundation that starts in elementary years. But most parents feel overwhelmed trying to teach abstract concepts like “evaluating sources” or “recognizing bias” to young children.

In this session, you’ll discover:

• Why traditional “critical thinking” approaches fail with young learners (and what works instead)
• How focusing on what you know can be the foundation for deep analytical skills
• Practical ways to distinguish facts from imagination, correlation from causation, and reliable from unreliable sources
• Age-appropriate methods for teaching perspective-taking and bias recognition
• How to integrate critical thinking into daily family life without adding curriculum overwhelm
• Real examples and activities you can start using immediately
• Why Wicked and The Wizard of Oz are powerful tools for teaching perspective and bias (and how to use them!)

Targeted at families with children ages 5-11 (but there will be information that can be used with learners of any age), this approach requires no special materials, advanced degrees, or complicated lesson plans. Just you, your child, and a willingness to ask “What else could this mean?”

Can you really be behind if the road is your own? In many ways, no. There is no single timeline for learning, and one of the gifts of homeschooling is giving kids the space to grow at their own pace. But the reality is that the wider world—college, careers, and even everyday adult life—rewards mastery of certain skills, and falling behind in those can close doors too early.

At some point, almost every homeschooler realizes their child needs to catch up in something. That realization can feel heavy, but it doesn’t mean failure—it simply means your learner needs something different now.

In this uplifting, practical session, Blair Lee, M.S.—educator, scientist, curriculum developer, and SEA Homeschoolers founder—shows how a growth mindset can be the catalyst for catching up without panic or shame. Blair will share how to help kids see struggle as part of learning, how to rebuild confidence after setbacks, and how to create a focused catch-up plan that preserves curiosity and connection.

She will give you actionable tips for catching kids up across grade levels and in every core subject—math, science, reading, writing, and history—while keeping joy and curiosity at the heart of your homeschool. You’ll leave with concrete strategies and a new mindset for guiding your learner forward—one step at a time, one win at a time—until they’re not just caught up, but thriving.

Writing is not just a way to show what students know. It is how they build what they know. The Hochman Method begins with a deceptively simple premise: clear thinking grows from clear sentences. When we teach students to express complete thoughts with precision, we are not just improving their writing; we are strengthening their reasoning, comprehension, and ability to connect ideas across every subject.

In this session, author and educator Blair Lee draws on a year of developing a Hochman-based curriculum to explore what makes this approach so powerful. Through concrete examples, sentence combining, kernel sentence expansion, paragraph planning, Blair reveals how small, deliberate steps lead to significant cognitive growth. You will see why explicit instruction at the sentence level builds the habits of mind that underlie all learning: analysis, synthesis, and logical reasoning.

This is not a session about worksheets or templates. It is about understanding the philosophy behind the method and recognizing what happens when students learn to “think in sentences.” You will walk away with both insight and practice: a deeper understanding of why this work matters, and practical strategies you can apply immediately. After this talk you will have with a clearer sense of how writing instruction can transform not just student writing, but how students think.