"What They're Reading at the Kitchen Table"

That's the title of an article written by Mark Oppenheimer in Wall Street Journal (Friday, September 2, 2005). The subtitle is "Home-schoolers of all stripes find common ground in some good, old-fashioned books." The author writes, "According to recent polls, nonreligious families now make up more than 40% of the home-schooling market." He goes on to write about how both religious and secular homeschoolers tend to go to old standbys for books. The works of Laura Ingalls Wilder and G.A. Henty have become "smashingly successful" with both camps.

I like the way he ends the article:

"...what's more interesting is what these two authors--and their
readerships--have in common:

• a preference for long books, often parts of a series, consumed with a leisure that public-school curricula don't allow;
• an emphasis on narratives, which children like, divorced from contemporary politics, which surely can wait; and
• a powerful sense that children are major players in the world, the kind of people, perhaps, who deserve better than large classrooms and who may grow up more likely to write books than to be told which ones to read [bullets mine for emphasis]."

Today's Drawing

Supriya drew this today at Harmony Hill. I like the composition and the energy...

More Math Series

I asked Supriya what comes next in (10, 9, 8). That was easy: "7." Next I asked, "10, 8, 6, ?" It took a few seconds: "4, 2, 0." Then I asked, "12, 9, 6, ?" Another couple of seconds, "3, 0." She is getting really good at this.

Then I wanted to know if she can count by 5, so I asked her what comes after (5, 10, 15). This time she needed more time, but she had the right answers, first 20 and then 25, a few seconds later.

She is doing all this in her head, mind you...

Jigsaw Puzzle

Manisha loves doing jigsaw puzzles. She and Supriya did this puzzle over the last three evenings. Manisha was stuck on the last 15 or so pieces today when Supriya stopped by (on her roller-blades). Within a couple of minutes she put all the remaining pieces together! She just keeps amazing us every day.

We Freecycle

We recently joined the Freecycle movement: "one simple, brilliant idea that's changing the world one gift at a time." The Freecycle Network makes it easy for people to find new homes for things they no longer want. It is organized by town and we have joined the Lowell and Billerica lists. So far we have given away our unused slide-viewer and Manisha's sewing machine, and obtained a full-size platform bed, 5 jig-saw puzzles and a bag full of clothes for Supriya. I am making sure I explain the process to Supriya, as a part of her economics curriculum.

Another Homeschooling Blog

Check out this blog by Daniel Macintyre: "Just a blog on current events with a slant towards libertarianism, open source initiatives and homeschooling."

Geography with the Globe

We bought a globe a few weeks ago and Supriya has become quite familiar with it on her own with help mostly from Manisha. She can locate the US, Boston, Texas, California, Canada, Hawaii, India and Africa.

The other night we were playing with the globe and she said, "I know how day and night happen." So we turned out the room light, and the foyer light clearly showed the demarcation between day and night on the globe. I could tell she really understood the concept. Later Manisha told me that this had come up in the context of making a phone-call to India. Manisha said she needed to make sure the people she was calling were awake, and then explained the day & night cycle. Supriya immediately got it! There is nothing like real-life connection when it comes to learning.

Killing Monsters

I am on Chapter 3 of "Killing Monsters: Why children need fantasy, super heroes, and make-believe violence" by Gerard Jones. It's very well written and makes a lot of sense to me. Here's a paragraph on page 18 that gives the gist of the thesis:

When we consider children in relation to mass media and pop culture, we tend to define them as consumers, watchers, recipients, victims. But they are also users of that media and culture: they are choosers, interpreters, shapers, fellow players, participants, and storytellers. Viewing children as passive recipients of the media's power puts us at odds with the fantasies they've chosen, and thus with the children themselves. Viewing them as active users enables us to work with their entertainment - any entertainment - to help them grow. Shooter games, gangsta rap, Pokemon all become tools for parents and teachers to help young people feel stronger, calm their fears, and learn more about themselves.

The book is very thought-provoking and jibes with everything we have noticed about our kids. Manisha remembers the incident when Supriya used the milk-bottle of her doll as a gun. That was when the only gun Supriya knew about was a squirt-gun. So she'd point it at Manisha, make a shooting motion and ask her, "Did you get wet?" Supriya has recently been fascinated by Pokemon, but we have not seen much violent fantasy-play from either of the kids.

"Is that a Power-shovel or a Bulldozer?"

That was the profound question Supriya and Manisha were debating yesterday morning. The house across the street from us had a fire last winter, and finally they were tearing it down. The giant truck sat in their yard over the weekend creating delicious anticipation for the destruction to come.


Manisha was sure it was a power-shovel, I thought it was a bulldozer. They ended up bringing out the "Road Builders" book (written by B.G. Hennessy and published by Scholastic). It used to be a great favorite of Supriya; it is time to read it to Aseem now. Turns out Manisha was right.

The power-shovel got to work early Monday morning at 7 am (!). Aseem and Supriya were entralled by the power and the ease with which it tore the building down. We were a little late for Harmony Hill because we had to stop and watch the truck in action. By the time we came back, the building was half gone, and by the evening the demolition was complete. It would take them a couple more days and about 6 loads of the giant dump-truck to clear out the debris. We will be watching for what comes next. This is like a documentary unfolding right before our eyes.

"Showtunes" Poster

I wrote about our "Showtunes" show recently. Today Supriya made a poster for the show. I love the vibrant colors and the motion. I told her, "I love the way you use colors." And she replied, "That's because I have a dad who's a special artist!"

I keep emphasizing using bolder colors and leaving as little white space as possible. She has a good sense of story, motion and composition so I don't mess with that.

Number Patterns

Supriya got (1, 2, 3, ?) and (2, 4, 6, ?) easily. She did them in her head, but she was stumped by (3, 6, 9, ?). I told her to use the abacus. The first line has 3 beads, the second 6, the third 9. The concrete and visual representation made it suddenly clear, "It goes up by 3!" Then we went up to 30 counting by 3. Some times a little bit of connection with real life helps a lot!

Chorus Starts

Actually it started last week. I am one of the founders and one of four co-directors. It's called the All Together Now Family Chorus. This is our third year and everybody keeps coming back, so we must be doing something right! This year we are up to 30 families (96 individuals!). This year's theme is transportation. We will have a couple of shows during the year, and end with a Friends and Family performance some time in June 2006. Supriya sings a fair bit in the chorus. Aseem does not sing at chorus, but he will come back home and then sing.

Harmony Hill Reconvenes

We belong to a once-a-week homeschooling co-op called Harmony Hill. It uses the Enki approach. The fall session started today on a gorgeous, sunny, warm Fall day. Aseem and Supriya were happy to meet their friends and get back into the routine. Here's Supriya with her buddy Duncan.

Pizza is the main course for lunch, and the Aseem's "class" (8 kids ages 4 and 5) kneaded the pizza dough. Then they had circle-time and general guided & unguided playtime. Supriya (in her class of 9 older kids ages 6 to 9) made a drawing with crayons and did finger-knitting. She's really good at finger-knitting and made herself a necklace and a bracelet. In the afternoon playtime the kids took turns gliding down the rope tied between two big trees in the backyard. Supriya wanted to be in the manager role as usual and butted heads with Katherine (who is 8 and is the other "alpha female" in the class). Here's Katherine guiding Supriya down the rope.

All in all a wonderful start for the semester...

Field Trip

We went hiking this past Thursday with some of our homeschooling friends in the Thanksgiving Forest in Chelmsford. It was nice and warm, although it drizzled a little off and on. The adults had a great time talking (discussing weighty things like homeschooling plans and myths), and the kids had a great time playing around. What a luxury to do this on a weekday! Just one more reason to homeschool...

More Nighttime Math with Supriya

Supriya wanted to do math last night, and I decided to give her a "word problem" (a term both Manisha and I find amusing; for us math is just another language to express facts from real life, thus all problems are word problems to us!). I asked her, "How old will you be when Gargi turns 21?" Supriya knows Gargi is 12 and she is 6. Supriya disappeared in the cardboard box she was playing in. After a longish time, "25?" I sort of knew she was on the right track & she meant 15. I decided to simplify the problem, "How old will you be when Gargi turns 13?" "7." "15?" "9." So far so good.

Then I made her come out of the box, brought out her "math-notebook" and gave her a pencil. "Now use the paper and pencil and tell me how old you will be when Gargi turns 21." "15!" On the paper were 9 dots. She made the 9 dots counting from 12 to 21, and added them to her own age. All I did was ask the question and let her figure out the process. She is evidently smart enough to figure out all the parts of the process (e.g. that Gargi and she will grow older at the same rate, a completely non-intuitive fact we take for granted!).

I decided to test her further and give her a silly-sounding problem, "How old will you be when Aseem (currently almost 4) turns 79?" She gave me a surprised look and then got to work. "82?" She was obviously on the right track, just miscounting by one. I corrected her and went on to do more problems along similar lines. [Later Manisha corrected me that Aseem is 3 (and not quite 4), and Supriya was indeed right when she said 82. So I went and apologized to her for wrongly correcting her.]

It's great to be able to ask her these problems and see the machinery of her mind work. I can see that her concepts are sound, even when her answers are off by a bit -- this has happened to me when I was little also, so it's not a big deal. The teacher in a typical classroom will never have the luxury of spending this amount of time with each student to find out why they gave the answer they did, right or wrong.

The Incredibles

We just got done watching The Incredibles. What a great movie! Highly recommended. There's all the great stuff one has come to expect from the folks at Pixar - the sound effects, the wonderful animation that keeps getting better and better, the subtle humor (the villain's HQ is on the island called Nomanisan!). What struck me the most was the mythic dimension of the movie - that we are all superheroes going about our daily lives hiding our precious gifts just to fit in. Wouldn't it be awesome if we could just be the great, glorious creatures that we are? If we could become all that we can be, to use Nietzsche's phrase? Very inspiring.

Supriya's Marathi

Manisha and I grew up in India speaking Marathi (mur-RAH-tee), although these days we speak mostly English at home with Marathi words (mostly nouns) thrown in, kind of like Spanglish.Supriya used to be fluent in Marathi until she was about 2 1/2. Then - practically overnight - she gave it up and started using exclusively English. But Supriya is familiar with the cadence of the language, and, it turns out, she knows a fair bit of the language too, even though she does not speak it.

This past January we were in India for a month visiting our families in Pune and Nagpur. Being very extroverted and friendly Supriya made a lot of friends on her own, even though she could not speak Marathi. She has high linguistic intelligence and she picked up a lot of Marathi in that stay. Last night we were driving to a friend's house when Manisha pointed to a house and asked me in Marathi, "That's a new house, isn't it?" I replied back in Marathi, "Yes, relatively speaking..." Supriya jumped in with, "Where is the new house?" We did not expect her to follow the conversation and we were pleasantly surprised, and we told her so.

So she threw us a challenge, "Say a word in Marathi and I'll tell you what it means." We went back and forth a number of times (rain, peacock, cat, dog, car, chair, clothes, etc.). I was impressed that she has retained all these words. She can also count up to ten in Marathi.

Another funny incident happened a couple of weeks ago. Manisha was trying to put Aseem to sleep and she wanted to tell Supriya to go do something by herself. Knowing that Aseem's Marathi is very weak, she used it to communicate with Supriya. Supriya was thrilled -- their very own secret code that Aseem could not understand! That was very cool.

Manisha and I are glad Supriya is bilingual, even though we did not plan it that way. We may be speaking more Marathi at home to build on that...

More Math with Supriya

Supriya is after me for some math problems so I ask her how much is 2 times 4. "That's easy - 8." 3 times 4? "Easy - 12." All this is going on in our foyer. Supriya is going back and forth on her skateboard wearing nothing but her undies, and doing these problems in her head!

Then I switch gears, How much is 2 times 3. 6. And 3 times 3? 9. 4 times 3? 12. Her eyes shine. I know exactly what she's thinking. "So 4 times 3 is the same as 3 times 4, isn't it?" "Yeah, just switched around," she agrees. She owns that.

I continue on the times 3 series. 5 times 3? 15. 6 times 3? 18. 7 times 3? 21. I can see it's getting tough for her to keep track of the numbers. Then she flubs it. 8 times 3? 23. I tell her it's 24, and she moves on to playing with Aseem.

I am curious about how she is doing all this math in her head. It turns out she is switching the numbers around (7 times 3 becomes 3 times 7), and adding 7 + 7 + 7 in her head. That's why it becomes harder for her as the numbers grow large. On the other hand if it's done as adding 3 to the previous number (7 times 3 is 6 times 3 PLUS 3) then it does not become more difficult. But that's for another day. For now I will gladly take what she is doing!

Supriya's Generosity

We were on the way to the chorus rehearsal today. I had to drop off the checkbook at Manisha's office so that she could write a check for the Katrina victims and today was the deadline for the company match. So Supriya asked me why mommy needed the checkbook. I said, "There was a big hurricane down in Louisiana and many people lost everything they had, their houses etc. We want to give them money so that they can buy groceries and clothes." Supriya's immediate, unprompted response: "I want to give my allowance too. After all this is more important than the watch I wanted to buy!"

This is not the first time we have seen her generosity. Manisha was at Parlee Farms with the kids. Supriya bought some food for the animals there out of her allowance and then shared it with a couple of kids there. She told Manisha, "They wanted to feed the animals too and I did not see their mother coming by with a quarter. So I gave them some of the food."

She has always shared her candy with Aseem without any prompting or coercion from either of us - even when she buys it from her own allowance.

This kind of generosity does not come naturally to either Manisha or me. Supriya owns it and it is one of her Signature Strengths, as Martin Seligman calls them:

Kindness [generosity, nurturance, care, compassion, altruistic love, "niceness"]: Doing favors and good deeds for others; helping them; taking care of them

Aseem's Cats

These are the cats Aseem made on the fridge yesterday. Later in the evening Supriya added more pieces on the tops of all three and gave them fancy headgear. Today Aseem took one look at her additions and decided he did not like them. So now the cats are back to their original hats they had yesterday. Notice how each hat is different. Evidently he has something specific in mind that he is not verbalizing.

Are Homeschooling Parents Lazy?

Linda Dobson asks this provocative - and of course rhetorical - question in her book, "What the Rset of Us Can Learn from Homeschooling". She goes on to answer the question and gives a succinct outline of the basic principle of unschooling:

... there is another reason why the outside world may think that homeschooling parents are lazy -- some of them want their children to begin educating themselves as soon as possible. They achieve this most thoroughly and rapidly by cultivating their children's intrinsic motivation, the motivation that comes from within the child instead of from external factors.

It isn't that these homeschooling parents are really lazy. Rather they see their role in the learning lifestyle less as "teacher as dispenser of knowledge" and more as "creator of an environment that supports intrinsic motivation."...

That describes our philosophy to a T.

Headsprout Completed!

Supriya finished the last episode (#40) of Headsprout today. They claim that (at the completion of the program) "she has a potential reading vocabulary of over 500 words". Manisha and I have no strong feelings about Headsprout either way, good or bad. Was it worth the $90 (over the whole year that Supriya used it off and on)? Perhaps. There is no way for us to separate the effects of purely organic growth in Supriya's abilities over the past year from the effects of Headsprout. So we are in the "thumb firmly sideways" camp.

"Showtunes"

It was late morning and I was in the mood to sing at the piano. Supriya got inspired and wanted to do a show. She was searching for a good title for the show and I suggested "Showtunes", just like "Looney Tunes", our current favorite DVD from Netflix. She liked it and we ended up singing a number of songs:

• Another opening, another show


• There's no business like show business


• Edelweiss


• Wouldn't it be loverly?


• How do you solve a problem like Supriya? (that was rather obvious, don't you think?)


• Who wants to be a millionaire?


• Luck be a lady tonight


• Get me to the church on time


• From this moment on (We have Lena Horne's version on our Cole Porter CD and both kids just love it)


• My favorite things

Impressive repertoire for a six-year old, no?

SPAM'd!

I was really excited to see "2 comments" to my previous post. Alas, they are just spam.

Not-Back-to-School Picnic

We were at the Not-Back-to-School picnic held by the Merrimack Valley HomeLearners today at Great Brook Farm State Park. I have not seen so many people (I overheard somebody say over 150!) at these picnics in the years past. Supriya and Aseem spent the whole time playing with friends, old and new. Supriya played various games with older boys again. Aseem ran around with his friends Noah, Ray and others.

Two recurring themes with Supriya: She spent a lot of time making "cement" with many of her friends, which involved mixing dirt with water brought up from the pond. Reminded me of the Waterfall Theme Park. By the time she was done she was all covered with mud.

Then there was the icecream served by MVHL, and the kids were in line first. I was sitting at a bench talking with a couple of new friends when Supriya came up to me and said, "I think you should go and get some icecream for Aseem." She is a born manager and always ends up delegating tasks. Today it was my turn I guess.

We were at another playground a few weeks ago and the kids were sending trucks down a spiral slide and watching them crash. Supriya played traffic-cop the whole time, managing the flow of the trucks and making sure no one was in the way of trucks.

This has happened enough times that I know it's one of her character-strengths. She has all the marks of a budding businessperson.

Bullying at the Playground

A couple of days ago We were at our usual playground on Middlesex street when Supriya's first brush with bullying took place. She was dressed in jeans and camouflage t-shirt. This girl -- about 10 -- started laying into Supriya about the "boy shirt." Both were wearing jeans, so evidently that item of clothing was not a problem. She asked Supriya, "Are you a boy or a girl?" Supriya replied she was a girl. So this girl said, "Then stop wearing boy-clothes." She even told me to "stop dressing her in boy clothes"! I told her to mind her own business in no uncertain terms, and the episode ended there.

I shudder at the thought of what this would have led to in a school setting. Supriya would not have me to take her side, and she would be shamed into dressing like all the other girls. I am so glad we are homeschooling and also that our circle of friends does not have these kinds of hang-ups.

I SPY Fantasy

Last week I got the I SPY Fantasy computer-game (published by Scholastic, Inc.) for Supriya from the library. Today she spent about 2 hours on it and she is almost done with it. She has played another I SPY computer-game before (I SPY Haunted House), so the format of the game is familiar to her. She is very good at finding out all the cleverly hidden clues and figures, but she needed a little help from me today. I SPY Fantasy is rated Ages 6 to 10, which looks about right, as it was stretching Supriya's abilities a bit. These are very well-designed and thought out games. Highly recommended.

Late Night Math

It's 10 o'clock on Saturday night and Supriya is having trouble falling asleep. So what do Manisha and Supriya do to amuse themselves? Math of course!

First Supriya did counting by 2s. She has a good handle on this and she wrote down numbers all the way up to 104. Then she did counting by 3s. Instead of starting with 3 (as I would have done), she started with 1, and so wrote down the series as 1, 4, 7, 10, up to 43.

Last night (after 9 o'clock of course) I wanted to build on that. I had her count by 2s and write the numbers up to 10. So she had 2, 4, 6, 8, 10. On another sheet of paper I made two columns, one called "Parting" numbers and the other "No Parting." That terminology, by the way, was her own invention for even and odd numbers -- even numbers can be "parted" into 2 and odd can not be. We let her keep those terms because she owned them and the concepts (which is much more important).

I started with 1. Supriya said non-parting. 2, parting. 3, non-parting. 4, parting. Something clicked inside her head and her eyes shone with understanding. She could see that the numbers alternate. We went up to 11. So now I had in the even column: 2, 4, 6, 8, 10. I pointed to that earlier sheet of paper with counting by 2s. Voila! It was the same numbers again. She was thrilled at the magic of it.

Adding 3 Numbers

Westford Public Schools put out their curriculum benchmarks by grade-levels. For Grade Level 1, one entry for Math reads "Add up to 3 single-digit addends". Supriya has a very good handle on adding two numbers, so I decided to go for three. It took her about 2 seconds to do "7 + 5 + 3" in her head. "8 + 8 + 8" took a little longer. First she came up with 16. I told her she had done the first part. She went back, used pieces of foam lying on the floor as tokens and came up with the right answer. Her basics are clearly sound and she owns the concepts.

Supriya's Singing

Supriya has always been a very good singer; she just does not like to stand still and sing. When she does, she is just dynamite. Tonight I was "playing" the piano (banging out chords basically) and singing, and she decided to join me. She sang "Wouldn't it be loverly" and it was wonderful -- going beyond just notes & words, nice tone production and all. We had not worked on that song before, but she knew all the words and the notes.

Next we sang Cole Porter's "Who want so be a millionaire" from High Society (a very good movie that we all enjoy watching). I had to correct her notes a couple of times (for example the second notes of the first two "I don't"s are not the same), and this time she got and retained the corrections (which she could not at earlier times). Supriya made me go through the song ten times until she was satisfied!

We also sang Irving Berlin's "Play a simple melody" with her singing the slow part & I the fast part. She has that one under her belt and knows exactly when to come in and at what pitch.

Another song of that type is "Inchworm" by Frank Loesser from Hans Christian Anderson. It's on that wonderful CD by John Lithgow. The lead sings the words to the song, while the children sing "2 and 2 are 4, 4 and 4 are 8, 8 and 8 are 16, 16 and 16 are 32" in harmony. The orchestration is simple and superb (mainly a soulful cello), and it never fails to give me the goosebumps. Supriya and I have been singing it off and on, me on the lead and Supriya doing the "arithmetic". It's coming along nicely too.

In the last few months, about the time she turned 6, I have noticed a big jump in her musicianship. The big thing for me was when she started holding her own against my harmony. The first song we did together was George M. Cohan's "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy". We had rented Yankee Doodle Boy, the biopic about George M. Supriya kept watching it over and over again. We loved the songs of course and loved watching Jimmy Cagney perform (for which he got the Oscar).

Some day soon I will have a few mp3s on this blog.

Laura Ingalls Wilder

Manisha just started reading "Farmer Boy" to Supriya, and Supriya is completely lost! Manisha read her the first two books ("Little House in the Big Woods" and "Little House on the Prairie") recently, and Supriya really enjoyed them. "Farmer Boy" runs on a separate track which joins up with the original track later when the protagonist marries Laura. But for now Supriya cannot make that connection. Manisha tells me the descriptions about the school for the boys are pretty bad, caning and all. Manisha does not want to read it any further, but Supriya is insistent that she do, now that she has started it.

John Holt on Unschooling

"Birds fly, fish swim, man thinks and learns. Therefore, we do not need to motivate children into learning by wheedling, bribing or bullying. We do not need to keep picking away at their minds to make sure they are learning. What we need to do, and all we need to do, is bring as much of the world as we can into the school and classroom (in our case, into their lives); give children as much help and guidance as they ask for; listen respectfully when they feel like talking; and then get out of the way. We can trust them to do the rest." ~ John Holt, How Children Learn

Manisha and I consider John to be our mentor, even though we never met him in person. His books opened our eyes to the reality of schools. He had a wonderful style of writing that made his books very accessible and readable. We have most of his books and still pick them up to mine gems every now and then.

For more information about unschooling visit the Unschooling.com website.

Cool Quotes

Here are a few good ones that jibe with our philosophy of life.

“In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential that we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted.”- Carl Jung

“Musicians must make music, artists must paint, poets must write if they are to be ultimately at peace with themselves. What human beings can be, they must be. They must be true to their own nature. This need we may call self-actualization.”- Abraham Maslow

"The pleasant life is wrapped up in the successful pursuit of the positive feelings, supplemented by the skills of amplifying these emotions. The good life, in contrast, is not about maximizing positive emotion, but is a life wrapped up in successfully using using signature strengths to obtain aubndant and authentic gratification.

I do not believe that you should devote overly much effort to correcting your weaknesses. Rather, I believe that the highest success in living and the deepest emotional satisfaction comes from building and using your signature strengths."- Martin Seligman

"Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who are alive."- Gil Bailie

Headsprout

We signed Supriya up for Headsprout (Phonics-based Online Reading Lessons) exactly one year ago, hoping she would get inspired to read. The animation, cartoon characters and great sound effects were a big draw in the beginning, and she did an episode a day for a several weeks. Then the novelty wore off, the repetitive nature of the exercises got boring and she dropped it. She has picked it up again recently, and today she completed Episode 38 (of 40). I watched her zoom through the back half of it. If you were there watching her, you would have said she can read well. After all, if a six-year old can read "I wish I could see a tree," you'd call her a competent reader. The funny thing is, if you asked Supriya to read "WISH" out of that context, she is stumped! A lot of what goes on in the episodes seems to go in her short-term memory and so she does fine during that session. I suppose it's building up slowly and steadily in her brain...

Supriya and I also played the Reading Go-Fish game last couple of days, and her sight-reading is definitely improving.

She has all the tools she needs to read. Now it's a just matter of time before she decides to own her reading and do it all the time.

Happy and Rich

I get Early to Rise -- which bills itself as The Internet's Most Popular Wealth, Health and Wisdom EZine -- in my email-box every day. Frequently there are nuggets in there that make it worth my while to subscribe. Today there is one from the internationally renowned speaker and best-selling author Brian Tracy: "You were put on this earth with a special combination of talents and abilities that make you different from anyone who has ever lived. Whatever you're doing today, it's nowhere near what you're really capable of doing. The key to a happy and prosperous life is for you to regularly evaluate your strengths and weaknesses, to become very good in the areas you most enjoy, and then to throw your whole heart into what you're doing [emphasis added]."

This is a recurring thread in most of modern success-literature: happiness and wealth come from the same basic source: using your character-strengths. Martin Seligman of "Authentic Happiness" tells us that lasting happiness comes from exercising our Signature Strengths in our daily lives. Marcus Buckingham of Gallup, Inc. tells us that developing your strengths is the key to professional fulfillment (and thence to wealth).

This ties in very well with our philosophy of unschooling -- let the kids play a lot, for it is through self-directed play that you discover your strengths, talents and passions. Happiness and wealth happen once these basics are in place.