I've gotten my two kids, especially S, age 9, hooked on Voyagers! If you have no idea what I'm talking about, Voyagers! was a prime time time-travel tv show from the very early 80s. Only one season, only 20 episodes, gloriously cheesy action, excellently simplified history, still smarter than plenty of other TV shows. And Jeffrey's default ( Read more... )

My younger daughter M, age 5.5, who will enter kindergarten this fall, last night read Green Eggs and Ham to me, with occasional help on certain words. She read 98% of it to me without help. For the record, I did not demand she read anything; she decided that she would read it to me at bedtime ( Read more... )

The Escapist

I wish I had seen this person/organization's effort at Origins 2008, the "Ludic Amusement Convocation."

And they say they will be back for 2009, maybe even with a LARP! (Note to therck, you and your husband might want to check them out and/or help??)

Yesterday I washed the kids' snow gear to put it away for the season. Today it is snowing. Of course.

"...[I]f you're not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original. And, by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies this way; we stigmatize mistakes. [my notes: Not just mistakes, but results the ceo didn't like, no matter whether ( Read more... )

via geekparents, Full Article Here.
Here's my favorite excerpt:

Pushing a teen into rebellion by having too many rules was a sort of statistical myth. “That actually doesn’t happen,” remarks Darling. She found that most rules-heavy parents don’t actually enforce them. “It’s too much work,” says Darling. “It’s a lot harder to enforce three rules than to set ( Read more... )

Think today's kids live in the equivalent of a plastic bubble? Me too.

Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do
(Well, actually six)

There's one I would add: let kids get lost. I used to purposefully get lost, both in my neighborhood or nearby neighborhoods, and in the woods when we went camping. You can't find yourself if you don't ( Read more... )

Why We Banned Legos, an account from a daycare/before- and after-school-care facility in an affluent Seattle neighborhood about an interesting conundrum of limited resources that arose from their school-age children building a 'Legotown ( Read more... )

My older daughter recently participated in a program through her classroom called "Place out of Time," which goes by the somewhat amusing and unfortunate acronym PooT. Middle and high school students research and take on the persona of a historical figure, then participate in discussions about something in current events from that historical ( Read more... )

http://www.exceptionalmarriages.com/weblog/BlogDetail.asp?ID=37029Read more... )