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Aidan has been venturing further into the performing arts as of late. He loves the act of creation in the moment, the act of performance–from music, to theater, to song, to dance. In the four video clips of this post, you can see a little of everything. My personal favorite is his tap dance rendition. He seems to have some raw talent there, but I suppose I am biased. (Note that this post has multiple pages with one video per page, so be sure to click the links at the bottom to move through all four pages.)

First we have Aidan with grandma’s guitar. He is drawn to strings and enjoys strumming but resists any thing that might resemble instruction (which is typical for him). He likes to place his fingers about the frets and strum–listening for variations in tone and vibration. Here we see him demonstrating his unique method of experimentation; a rare musical performance, as he is not nearly as comfortable with this form of expression as he is with other forms.

Click the links below for more of Aidan, acting, singing, and dancing.

See Aidan the puppeteer –>

Tags:   art · performance · video2 Comments

We had a our first Earth Scouts meeting Monday. What is Earth Scouts you ask? Well, I had no clue about it up until a few months ago. I never thought I would want Aidan in a scouting program (I guess   Earth Scouts inaugural meetingI just kept thinking of the paramilitary and homophobic scouting programs out there). But when someone from our homeschooling group introduced us to Earth Scouts I have to admit I was curious. I started reading more about it and I liked what I initially read–it seemed in line with topics that we believe are important to instill in Aidan. Then, after reading through the 300+ page facilitator’s handbook on the information and suggested activities I was excited to start. So, I became a co-facilitator of an Earth Scouts group.

Earth Scouts works to empower kids by having them work together and try to make differences in their communities and in the world. It focuses on five broad topics/principles (respecting nature,   The Earth boardpeace & nonviolence, economic justice, human rights, and participatory democracy). The idea behind it is that you provide different activities for the kids to introduce topics and to help inspire them, to provide greater understanding on these topics, to allow for them to demonstrate what they have learned, and then to provide opportunities for them to put the principles into practice.

I have to admit I was a little nervous about our first meeting and how well it would go. Not nervous so much in what we wanted to do but more with the size of our group. We have 21 kids participating in our Earth Scouts group. The facilitator’s handbook recommends no more than 10! In addition to having double the suggested number I was a little worried about how everything would play out since some of our regular homeschool meetings have seemed, in my mind, a little chaotic and noisy. But, everything   Aidan and mini-Aidanwent well. It probably helped that a few of the younger kids who typically come to the regular meetings were not at Earth Scouts, and also that a number of the parents who typically sit off at the tables talking during our regular meetings were more engaged with their kids and our activities. The activities all seemed to flow nicely and the kids really seemed engaged and excited to be part of this. For this first meeting one of the main activities was that all the kids made a “person” to represent themselves which they will place around our earth board at each meeting. The final result of this was pretty cool!

Tags:   earth scouts · photos · service-learning2 Comments

9/7/2008
Chris picked this book up the other day. As usual, I’ll post when I’ve gotten into it (or finished it) and when I have some time. For now though, this quote of Holt’s from the editor’s foreword caught my eye.

Learning, to me, means making more sense of the world around us, and being able to do more things in it. Success in school means remembering the answers to teachers’ questions they will ask, getting clever about guessing what questions they will ask, and about how to fool them when you don’t know the answers.

Update: 10/27/2008
Ok, I finished this little book and found it both useful and inspiring. Holt offers specific strategies for working with kids in areas of reading, writing, math, science, and music; however, what I found most compelling was his refrain throughout the book that children learn best when they are not being taught. Actually, no, he goes further than this with his assertion. He says that active teaching of children (even by the best intentioned) can impede learning. This may sound like an overstatement, but I witnessed it myself as I was reading the book and working with my son Aidan.

One morning, I took it upon myself to begin working with some beads at the kitchen table–moving them around in different stacks to see how 10 beads could be represented physically in a variety of different ways (a set of three and a set of seven, two sets of five, five sets of two, and so on). I was playing with the nature of numbers using these manipulatives–the beads–to see how many different ways I could mix and match the same set of ten. I was working independently while Aidan was doing something else–until he noticed me and asked what I was up to. I explained that I was just figuring some stuff out. He became intrigued and wanted to see and hear more of what I was doing. So, I showed him. It was going swimmingly for a good 15 minutes until I began to ask him questions about the arrangements of beads and different possibilities. This is when he stopped. He looked at me suspiciously across the kitchen table, paused, and then stormed out of the room in huff yelling, “Mom, Dad’s trying to teach me something!” He was angry, and, according to John Holt, for reasons that make perfect sense.

Learning is as natural as breathing. But if you think about breathing too much, you may find yourself short of breath.

Holt writes about the perils of uninvited teaching, saying that when we seize the moment to “teach” kids (or anyone really) something, we convey a double message. The first message, according to Holt, is “I am teaching you something important, but you’re not smart enough to see how important it is. Unless I teach it to you, you’d probably never bother to find out” (129). The second message is not much better. It goes something like this: “What I’m teaching you is so difficult that, if I didn’t teach it to you, you couldn’t learn it” (129). These are messages of both distrust and contempt and they are very clearly understood by children (129). I witnessed this first hand with Aidan, and since coming to think of it in these terms, I see it all the time. I know immediately when I cross the line with Aidan, and as I see myself doing it, I regret my misstep. I also see evidence of the long-term effects of this double message of teaching in the college students that I work with. By and large, there is a systemic resentment of teachers and an institutional process that sends messages of contempt and distrust for 12 plus years of their young lives. I really am starting to get this now.

Given the perils of heavy-handed teaching (which all “teaching” is in its traditional incarnation), what can we do not to teach but to help our kids learn? Holt offers suggestions that make good sense if you have faith in the idea that learning is as natural as breathing. He reminds us, “Real learning is a process of discovery, and if we want it to happen, we must create the kinds of conditions in which discoveries are made. We know what these are. They include time, leisure, freedom, and lack of pressure” (100). The best we can to help our children with their learning is to provide them with “access: to people, places, experiences, the places where we work, other places we go–cities, countries, streets, buildings. We can also make available tools, books, records, toys, and other resources” (127). We can answer the questions our kids ask us, but must resist the temptation to seize every question as a teachable moment–in which to lecture at length. If children want to know more, they will ask. It’s the most natural thing for them to do, as long as it is invited and encouraged.

Self-directed learning is the deepest learning. The best learning is rooted in reality. The college students I teach (and many students I have known in my life) reference this thing called “the real world” all the time. “When are we going to need this in the real world,” we say. I am starting to see the wisdom of such a statement that has previously seemed like the complaint of a lazy mind. Children want nothing more than to make sense of the real world (and not the artificial and abstracted world of school). Holt states this well.

To make an abstraction out of some part of reality we must take some meaning out of it…. Children resist this continual abstracting because their chief business in life is finding and making meaning, putting meaning into a world that must at first seem wholly meaningless to them. It is not a weakness on their part but a strength. (104)

So, on our regular long drives to our real world adventures about town, I will find some comfort in Aidan’s incessant questioning about literally everything, his ongoing chatter, his moments of silence as he thinks to himself (and ignores us), his assumptions that we are right there with him as he connects stray details from literally months prior with something he just now observed. All of this, I understand, is his making sense of the world around him in a way that is very real, deep and lasting, and in a way that demonstrates he is, indeed, learning all the time.

Tags:   books · learning · parenting · rationale · schooling · teaching2 Comments