“A place for everything, and everything in its place.” What a wonderful dream. When I was six years old, my toys would fit in one drawer of my dresser. Jacks and balls, jump rope, coloring books, crayons, checkers and a deck of cards. A shelf in the closet held all the toys for five children; […]
Category Archive:
Children’s basic needs
Increasing Your Child’s Active Working Memory
“Is there something wrong with Henry?” Dee inquired about her four-and-a-half-year-old son. “Henry can only accomplish one task at a time. When I ask him to brush his teeth and put on his pajamas, he can do one or the other, but not both.” Dee was describing Henry’s “active working memory.” Henry was having difficulty […]
The Best Gift for Our Children
It was Parents’ Weekend during our daughter’s freshman year at college. The ladies cross-country team had arranged a dinner for the parents. As we dined on ravioli at a local restaurant, it dawned on me that I was sitting in the middle of a statistical anomaly. Every team member had a parent there, and of […]
Taking Responsibility for Our Children’s Success
Our new education needs to be exponential education to meet the exponential change on our planet. We need every person on our Earth to have opportunities to realize their potential through self-directed meaningful activity in specially designed learning environments that passionately engage children and adults. As our children develop mastery they will, in turn, create […]
Educating the Whole Person
As we look towards the new education, we see that our constant testing for facts and measuring academic skills have robbed our children of rich and meaningful learning experiences. For deep learning, we need to involve the whole person–mind, body, heart, and spirit. Human potential cannot be quantified. As we study history and explore human […]
Towards the New Education
Exponential Education: Releasing Human Potential Remember that moment playing tic-tac-toe when you discovered if you were the first one to mark a square, you could beat your opponent? If you always won, what was the fun of that? It was on to bigger and better games. In the movie, War Games, a computer designed to […]
When Nuthin’ Goes Right for Nobody
Ever have those frazzled times with the kids? And spouse? Where everyone seems irritable? Where each family member appears to be a nemesis to each other’s happiness? Ever have a day, a week or more when nuthin’ went right for nobody? Sometimes when our family is in a tizzy and a funk, a solution seems […]
Know Your Children By Their Likes and Dislikes
What’s your child’s favorite food? Color? Outfit? What does your child dislike? Preferences give important insights into our personalities. For the child who is agreeable in most situations, we have smooth sailing. The child who expresses strong preferences, though, can push us to the limits of our patience. How long can we listen to…I don’t […]
The Happy Song
”I don’t feeeel good,” was the daily lament from one of my four-year-old students. Whatever ways we tried to distract Zoe and get her mind off her problems and into some fun learning, Zoe chose to sit and complain about vague physical ailments. Verifying with her parents that Zoe didn’t have any pathological reasons for […]
Experiencing the Moment
My friend, Anita, recently wrote me about her adventures of accompanying her five-year-old granddaughter and daughter-in-law to private school enrollment interviews and classroom visits. Eliana came out of one school interview jumping and twirling around and exclaimed, ”That was so much fun!” A week later at another interview session Eliana was the last to leave […]