With the 10th anniversary of 9-11 quickly approaching, I’ve found myself pondering how much to address when talking to my kids about this. Since we are ‘out west’ and given that we don’t have the evening news on, there hasn’t been a whole lot of exposure that my children have naturally had. If my children were any […]
Inspired Learning
Anytime Art…
We love artistic pursuits over here. Not because I’m especially artistically inclined or talented, but because it is soothing and there is something powerful about CREATING something. With the intense summer heat, we’ve spent a good deal of our indoor time watercoloring, using finger paints and of course our favorite standby – colored pencils! But […]
Art vs. Crafts
photo credit: my sister. Since we just finished up a series on Open-Ended Play, I wanted to share some thoughts my sister had on “Art vs. Craft”. In the early years especially, I’ve traditionally been a huge fan of open-ended art. And I still am. But as she points out ‘craft’ has its place too […]
Free to Play!
After writing that post on play, last week, I was reminded of a series I had written almost 3 years ago on open-ended play. Since that blog no longer exists, I thought I would take some time to repost it here. It is a ten part series that unpacks exactly what open-ended play is, the benefits […]
Hatching Chicks – Lessons in Patience
We had a huge lesson in patience when friends gave us eggs to incubate. We counted out the days and proceeded to turn our eggs and watch the temperature and attempt to increase the humidity in our little incubators for the 21 days that we had read it would take to hatch our chicks. It […]
A ‘dge’ kind of day!
Who would have thought that spelling could be so much fun??? About a month ago, we were reviewing the ‘dge 3 letter j’ phonogram in our Spell to Write and Read program (which I just LOVE) when I noticed on the back of the card it offered the cute suggestion of taking some time to go […]