Make your own school

Late but interesting: I didn’t see this until today, when it was already too late, from Gever Tulley’s blog:
Just a quick note to say that I’ll be speaking and answering questions on Thursday, May 1st at the Maker Day event before the Maker Faire and then again on Saturday, May 3rd, the first day of [...]

Speaking of hands

Laura at Seabird Chronicles has a post about “Crafts for young children” — activities and projects toddlers can do by themselves — inspired by a toddler/preschool summer camp she’s planning. The camp planning in turn has inspired the idea for a Craft Swap:
You prepare and mail a box of fun craft ideas/supplies to your [...]

Call of the wild

One of my Google Alerts picked up this article, “German Tots Learn to Answer Call of Nature” from The Wall Street Journal earlier in the week. From the article,
Each weekday, come rain or shine, a group of children, ages 3 to 6, walk into a forest outside Frankfurt to sing songs, build fires and roll [...]

Mud pies and bibliobituaries

One of our favorite books, especially for Spring, is Mud Pies and Other Recipes: A Cookbook for Dolls by Marjorie Winslow, illustrated by Erik Blegvad, whose Great Hamster Hunt, also out-of-print, is still on my shelves.
So I was delighted to see it receive a lengthy “salute” from independent bookseller Alison Morris on her blog, Shelftalker. [...]

Dangerous things

The last TedTalk to make a big impression on the home education blogs and groups was Ken Robinson’s, on how schools educate children to become good workers rather than creative thinkers.
The next TedTalk to start making the rounds and already making a splash is Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do by Gever [...]

A manual for childhood

This came across my Google Alerts, and strikes me as worth reprinting. From David Phillips, the publisher of The Spring Grove Herald in Minnesota (additional links are mine, not Mr. Phillips’):
PUBLISHER’S NOTEBOOK: Do children need a manual for childhood?by David Phillips
As the Christmas shopping season kicked off a few weeks ago, I recommended buying [...]

The latest news from deepest darkest Peru

I thought it was bad enough when I heard the other day that my beloved Paddington Bear was going to get the live action treatment (just thinking of poor Stuart Little makes me shake). I went to the, erm, “official website“ and not only was the movie business confirmed but there for all to [...]

All roads lead to home and hard work

“Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.”
German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), quoted in “The Case Against Adolescence” by Robert Epstein
I started Farm School two years ago in part because I blathered on for much too long on the subject of children [...]

Poetry Friday: Go and play till the light fades away

We are all of us, especially the kids, aware of the shortening days (dark comes around nine now, instead of eleven), and that the first day of school is just about one month away. I’m trying to make the most of what’s left of the summer, which is why I haven’t been online much, except [...]

New for dangerous girls and daring boys

New since the beginning of the month is The Dangerous and Daring Blog for Boys and Girls – “inspired by The Dangerous Book for Boys and the upcoming The Daring Book for Girls” but “not connected in any way to the authors or publishers of those books”. Rather, the new blog is brought to you [...]

Gosh all hemlock!

I’m enough of a Luddite that I found it more than a bit disconcerting earlier today, when bringing up the Amazon website to look at a book, to find the main page welcoming me with “Science Picks for Becky”. But disconcertedness turned to intrigue when the first cover’s illustration, and then its title, caught my [...]

You pick

the lesser of two weevils:
Doll Web Sites Drive Girls to Stay Home and Play, as reported by The New York Times yesterday (free registration or use Bug Me Not)
or
The Daring Book for Girls, the not very daring but very manufactured response to The Dangerous Book for Boys, pandering to those who say they are offended [...]

When you riff upon a star

Last weekend a friend who knows me well enough to know that I don’t care much for the Shrek movies sent me a recent Time Magazine article by James Poniewozik, “How Shrek Changed Fairy Tales“. A few days later, in response to another friend, who thinks she might be a “prude” because she objects to [...]

Fun with gunpowder

Last summer I wrote about my brief thoughts on The Dangerous Book for Boys (American website here); I said at the time I thought that for our purposes Daniel Carter Beard’s classic, The American Boy’s Handy Book, was a better book for our purposes.
Now, with the news that my father is sending a copy [...]

Hot to trot tots and their pole-dancing mamas

A couple of months ago, after seeing the Macleans magazine cover story about “dressing our daughters like skanks”, I wrote,
What continues to surprise me is how many mothers around here, and remember, I’m far away from liberal east coast urban types, so your experience may be wide of my mark, are the ones who choose [...]

Made you look

Stocking up on reading material for the weekend at the library, I was rather startled to find the January 1st edition of Maclean’s Magazine (at left) looking out from the shelves at me with the cover headline “Why do we dress our daughters like skanks?” over a girl about Laura’s age dressed like a hooker. [...]

Wait a minute, Mr. Postman…

Particularly in light of this past week’s tragic event in Canada, I was quite interested to read this letter sent to The Daily Telegraph, from children’s author Philip Pullman, UK children’s laureate Jacqueline Wilson, and more than 100 other concerned citizens [all emphases mine, all mine]:
As professionals and academics from a range of backgrounds, we [...]

Filched shamelessly…

from Rebecca’s Gypsy Caravan, where she writes about her family’s recent afternoon at the Cleveland Botanical Garden, including the special Children’s Garden, outside of which is a stone with the following from the great American horticulturist Luther Burbank engraved upon it:
Every child should have mudpies, grasshoppers, water bugs, tadpoles, frogs, mud turtles, elderberries, wild strawberries, [...]

More thoughts on independence and freedom

L. at Schola asked the other day,
Is it possible to live an old fashioned family-centered lifestyle and still encourage independence? Is our idea of independence different from what it was one hundred years ago when families generally stuck together? Does independence only mean being able to choose your own path from limitless possibilities or is [...]