Nature Deficit Disorder: Is It the New Black?

“What was your favorite thing today at school?” I’d always ask them at 3:30. “Recess!” they’d say. Or “Lunch! ‘Cause after that, there’s recess!”

We all know to take such remarks with a grain of salt. Get enough grains of salt together, though, and you will have a salt shaker.

The Three R’s of Standardized Testing Season: Relentless, Remorseless, Regrettable

Look out, world!

If we don’t sharpen our #2 pencils and gear up for battle this spring, we’ll be in trouble.

Roadschooling: The 5-Month Mark

As our time in Central America draws to a close, we’re reflecting on our choice in 2010 to leave institutional schooling for a less structured, more relaxed life as an unschooling family.

What have been the benefits? What have been the drawbacks?

I find that my answers differ from the boys’ answers.

Keep Out — The International Edition

All over the globe, people have made it their business to keep other people off their land. Out of their yard. Away. We’re learning how this plays out in Costa Rica and Nicaragua as compared to what we’ve come to know in various places in the U.S.

Why We Are Going to Nicaragua

Demonstrating to the kids that rendering aid can take many forms: the shape of a hot pizza, the length of a park’s perimeter by carriage, the heft of a backpack filled with toys.

Good Eats

We were thrilled to get into “the system” here—-that of figuring out who knows whom, who can get access to a fishing boat to get fresh fish, and when (roughly!) the fellows with the seafood truck will be coming through town to sell frozen shrimp (or camarones in Spanish).

Question: What Is Infrastructure?

Over the summer, we witnessed major bridge repairs along an oft-used highway coming out of Portland. “It’s such a drag!” the kids always said, as we lingered in orange-barrel traffic. Well, kids, we’re living differently now in Costa Rica. Paved roads—and safe bridges—would be quite nice.

Northern California as Science and Math Teacher

We talked distance, elevation, heights and widths in our journey from the Lost Coast to the Sierras of Plumas and Lassen Counties. Thrown in a bit of geology, cartography, zoology, botany, and ecology, and you’ve got more than enough material for a month. The review is organic, consistent and constant.

So You Think You Can Homeschool?

I’m yanking my kids.

Yes, after being that parent—you know, the one who helped with the PTA and volunteered in classrooms, the one who made sure her kids were as well adjusted in school as possible, and who read with bated breath every report card comment and district newsletter—something hit me like a 2’x4′.

What was it?

“I Can’t Do It Alone”

Teach my kids full time, all year long. Do it all alone. It’s been said that this is what I’ll be taking on by removing my kids from institutional schooling. Teach the two of them on my own? I fully believe that I can’t.

More importantly, I shouldn’t.

So I won’t.

The Curve of Time by M. Wylie Blanchet

It’s 1927. Newly widowed mother of five Muriel Wylie Blanchet packs her family onto a 25-foot boat in order to explore the coastal waters of British Columbia. It becomes tradition each summer, all summer, for a dozen years. The Curve of Time, Blanchet’s account of their adventures, is well written, delightful, and inspiring.