“The best of life is conversation” (Ralph Waldo Emerson). As the busyness of summer winds down and as school begins, the fall season will soon arrive, and a new chapter will begin with all the activities of school. This new season is a wonderful time to implement the time-honored tradition of families gathering around the dinner table and to encourage fun and lively conversations with each other. Andrew Pudewa and Julie Walker discuss in “Furnishing the Mind – IEW’s vision for 2024” (Episode 406) the importance of furnishing our children’s minds with beautiful and good things to enrich our family conversations.
My fondest memories and greatest conversations began around my grandmother’s dining room table. During the sometimes chaotic life of growing up in a military family, my grandmother’s dining room table became the one constant of great conversations that would influence my thinking for decades. As children we heard conversations about the events of the day, conversations about the folks in the community, or the many conversations that included the often retold family stories. This time allowed my mind to be furnished with things that were good, true, and beautiful and influenced my thinking in the years to come.
In these hurried times, eking out time to share a meal together as a family can be challenging. However, it is possible to set aside time from the many activities our families are involved in throughout the week. There are many benefits to sharing a meal with our loved ones. The time set aside provides a time to furnish the body with great food and a time to furnish the mind with great conversations. It is a great time to feed the mind with conversations that will build children’s thinking through lively, engaging, and thought-provoking conversations to build their written and oral skills to produce competent communicators. We would like to share with you a few ideas on how to implement mealtime conversations so you can create great conversations around a meal with your children to produce lifelong thinkers.
One simple and fun mealtime activity is to take a picnic lunch to your favorite park. You and your children can spend time eating your favorite foods while memorizing a poem together. Our Linguistic Development through Poetry Memorization is a great resource for children of all ages. This program not only can be fun for the whole family and build family continuity but can build your children’s language syntax at the same time. Language syntax furnishes the mind with rich vocabulary and sophisticated linguistic patterns for young minds. You will learn additional benefits to learning poetry with “Poetry Festivals and Language Fairs.” In addition, you can learn more about the benefits of memorization by listening to “The Goodness of Memory” podcast (Episode 349) with Andrew Pudewa and Julie Walker.
Another relaxing and fun mealtime activity is to spend a Saturday morning preparing your favorite breakfast foods and discussing your favorite parts of a book that you have been reading all week. In his talk Fairy Tales and the Moral Imagination, Andrew Pudewa shares the benefits of discussing literature with your children to cultivate their moral imagination. You can shape your children’s imagination toward the things that are true, good, and beautiful and away from those things that are evil and wicked. “Dispelling Darkness One Book at a Time” explains the benefits of reading great books to your children. You can find many great literature choices with the IEW Book Recommendations list.
Dinner time is a long-honored tradition of gathering our family together around the table to share life’s many events with each other. It is a time to have lively conversations and share our thoughts about the events of the day, our community, or our country. As parents we have a wonderful opportunity to furnish our children’s minds with those things that are good, true, and beautiful. At the same time, we can hold those difficult conversations about the more complex happenings in our world today. Discussing great literature is one avenue for talking about difficult topics. IEW offers Teaching the Classics to instruct parents in how to have great literary discussions with their children. Adam Andrews, author of Teaching the Classics, explains the importance of using Socratic questioning in the podcast “Furnishing the Mind with Lit with Adam Andrews” (Episode 413).
Although times have changed, we can still have great conversations around a shared meal with our children. Whether it be a picnic in the park during those crisp fall days, a special Saturday morning breakfast eating a favorite breakfast food, or the classic evening meal to hold lively literary conversations with family, we encourage you to furnish your children’s minds with conversations that will challenge their thinking and produce children who can articulate what is true, good, and beautiful in a world that needs competent communicators and thinkers.
My family, which includes my grandchildren, still gathers around my grandmother’s dining room table since it is now in my dining room. We continue to have great conversations and lively discussions so we can furnish the minds of the next generation to be confident and competent communicators and thinkers. We encourage you to schedule a mealtime with your family to offer your family the best that life has to offer through great conversations.
by Cynthia Lescault
