Unschooling: The Movie

I got this from an emailing list I am on: Unschooling: The Movie. Check it out!

Letterboxing

We had our first letterboxing adventure today. Manisha found directions to 3 letterboxes in the Garfield Woods conservation area. It was a wonderful Memorial Day today and the 4 of us went in the afternoon. The hike was wonderful. Even Supriya, who likes to complain about hiking, enjoyed the whole outing. We followed the clues to the first letterbox, but could not find it. Determined not to go home empty-handed, we hunted down the second one and found it. It is called Bunny Dear and the stamp has a cute bunny face. I am glad our first letterboxing was successful. The kids enjoyed looking for clues and we all got a big kick when we actually found the second letterbox.

This is a great area for hiking. There is lots to see, including the Forty Caves area on the Clinton conservation land. There are also many boulders to climb on. I am sure we will go back again and again.

Renaming NCLB Act

Some great names here for the updated NCLB Act. I like "The All American Chidren Are Above Average Act (AACAAAA)".

“Are We Overprotecting Our Kids to Death?”

is the title of this post. Thought-provoking. Several points come to my mind:

1. Kids are seen as serious investments, so they need to be protected to the extent possible.
2. If you don't use it and somebody does get injured, you have no recourse. You also don't want to be the parent who doesn't "care" about your child's safety? Actually I do, because Autonomy is a higher value for me than Absolute Safety.
3. We are an affluent country, and it costs only $2 to add a safety-belt. So why not add it and remove one more potential legal liability for your company?

Introducing "Logan"

This dashingly handsome young man may look like Aseem, but he is actually Logan. Supriya, his Super-agent, gave him this personality. (Don't ask me where "Logan" came from!)

"Talent is Overrated"

Jim Citrin has this provocatively titled piece on Yahoo! Finance. Apparently it's the title of a book that just came out. Here's an excerpt from the article:

Contrary to popular belief, what makes certain people great is not inborn talent. Rather, it is something called "deliberate practice," a sustained, often life-long, period of purposeful effort designed to improve performance in a specific domain. This turns out to be just as true in business as it is in sports, music, medicine, chess, science, and mathematics.

Deliberate practice is characterized by several elements: It is an activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher's help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; and it's highly demanding mentally. It is far different than the general notion of "practice makes perfect." Instead of repeating a task over and over again in your comfort zone, deliberate practice requires that you identify certain sharply defined elements of performance that need to be advanced and then work intently on them.

Sounds very intriguing. I will have to read the book now...

Drawing

Here's a gallery of our recent drawings:

Today Aseem, Supriya and I sat together and drew a dinosaur from the book "The Draw 50 Way" by Lee J. Ames. Aseem started drawing and got frustrated immediately. I told him that we are all learning to draw and it is frustrating in the beginning. I felt that I had to get involved. So we went thru the drawing line by line. I would draw one line, describe it a little (straight/ curved/ connecting this to that etc.) and Aseem & Supriya would copy it. It was fun and satisfying. I am going to offer a course like this next semester at our coop.

Last week Supriya started drawing circles with her new protractor and that inspired her to make them into faces. I thought it made a nice series, variations on a theme.