flynn011

I'm very pleased to introduce Amie Plumley, the blog-owner of  Sewing School , as a guest blogger for today's topic of boys and sewing.  Her details can be found at the end of this article. Amie writes: This semester, we had a record number of boys join our weekly sewing club.  We’ve realized that sewing with boys does require something extra on the teacher’s part.  I’m not sure why, maybe it’s because I’m a girl.  I dunno, but I thought I would share my thoughts on sewing with boys.  I am mindful of boys sewing.  What do they want to sew?  What do they need to sew?  Why will they want to sew? Sewing strengthens fine motor skill s I have come to a few conclusions.  First, from my own experience, kindergarten is the perfect age to introduce boys to sewing; however, I’m sure they can start earlier with some extra one-on-one help.  They get super excited about it and really, really see the possibilities.  They like ...

"Scratch" is a programming language for everyone to enjoy -- free to download and developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at MIT Media Lab. In a downloadable paper by Peppler and Kafai, you can see the argument for that "learning the language of creative coding is essential to expression in a digital medium." In other words, it's not just about viewing or playing the games, but constructing them oneself through coding that make essential connections to art expression. Anyway, why not?  It's cool and it's free.

Are you worried about your child's ability in mathematics, or about which curriculum to use, or -- let's not kid ourselves -- about our own ability in maths and whether or not we can teach anything about the subjects to our kids? Judging from the number of times this subject comes up in the various home-ed forums I belong to, you would definitely not be alone in your maths-angst.  Every week, there will be at least one person who asks questions along these lines.  For that reason, I won't try to answer all the questions about maths in one blog post: it's just too big a subject (in more ways than one!). Instead, I'll answer just one question here: what is the best way to get my child  not just to learn how  to do maths,  but to learn actually how to like it? First of all, let me say that I am not -- repeat NOT -- a specialist in mathematics.  That's why I was so glad when I came across a book that 'splains things to me in such a clear way.  It's calle...