Our November homeschooling activites include Astronomy and the Nanowrimo Young Author’s Program. Using writing prompts from their Elementary level character worksheets, we jumped in this morning. I proudly present Carter’s Great American Novel: What is your character? Time Traveler Where does your main character live? Any time, any place Does he like it there? Not [...]
Nitpicking Jurasic Park
Carter wandered into the kitchen this morning, eager to tell me about his night with Daddy. Carter: Daddy told me the Jurrasic Park story last night but he’s not very good on the dinosaurs. Me: Umm- he didn’t actually write the story, he’s just retelling it. Carter: Well, he wasn’t very good with the dinosaurs [...]
Designing Wiser
In last Saturday’s workshop on early childhood education, the core content present by Bev Bos involved twelve conditions for growing wiser: Belonging, Risk, Passion, Power, Productivity, Presence, Support, Solitude, Humor, Gratification Deference, Mentors and Models, and Re-Seeding. This is also a good scaffolding for design. The user is the learner, in this case, and the interface is both school and teacher.
Play is not a luxury
On Saturday, Amy and I spend the day at St. Mark’s Methodist Church attending a workshop on early childhood education. Along with Tom Hunter and Michael Leeman, Bev Bos sang some songs, told some stories, and evangelized about a better way to engage young children in learning. The two biggest take-home messages of the day: (1) Play is not a luxury, and (2) We don’t change because we’re under a spell.
Questions
We’ve been homeschooling for a couple of weeks now, and we’re still finding our way. Most of our time has been spent trying to decompress from school and homework stress, the rest of the time we’ve been exploring the possibilities. We’re playing around with some cool math history and literature, spending time studying nature, visiting [...]
Starry, Starry Night
Robbie Dingo’s inspiring piece of machinima—set to the emotional Don Maclean song about Vincent van Gogh and his most famous painting—shows the creation of a three-dimensional world in the impressionist style of the original artist. It is genius on several levels. Not only is it a great micro-documentary on the craft of 3D modeling in world, but it illustrates the absolute best of the young medium: making tangible important cultural artifacts and ideas.
School Daze– Part Three
At one point over the weekend, Kevin described our decision to take leave from the public school as a divorce process- full of loss and grief. It has been gut-wrenching, and there are moments of extreme self-doubt. The sad reality is, I don’t see reasonable class sizes, meaningful assessments or even a little time to be a kid in the future of our school. I do see a rich local support group for homeschooling, an optimistic child and parents willing to try something new.