Where and why, gradually gathered

Some families travel. Some stay in one place, and come to know that place well. Consider your resources, histories, friends, relatives and where they live, and why. All those stories, images and artifacts, gradually gathered, will expand your child's view of his own personal world.

Where are you?
photo by Bea Mantovani
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Like the air

Given a rich environment, learning becomes like the air—it's in and around us.



Photo by Sandra Dodd
The quote is the last line of this interview: SandraDodd.com/interview

Basketful of ideas

Used Easter baskets will be on sale everywhere in the Spring for nearly nothing. We have used ours for birdfeeders, storing doll clothes, storing kindling (eventually just burn the basket), rinsing toy dishes outside (water runs out), for hanging plants, or storing socks, caps or hair scrunchies on tops of dressers. While you have those baskets, see if you can look at where they're from, how they're made, and of what material. When weaving pictures or examples of basketry come by, point that out to your children (or just appreciate them yourself).

SandraDodd.com/supplies
Photo by Sandra Dodd (click to enlarge)
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Webs, nets, connections

The terms "web" and "net" have both been commandeered by the internet. The idea of a grid or web or matrix to represent the connections involved in learning and memory is a good one, though—of many "dots" connected in all directions.

The photo here is of the two-dimensional web—very flat—of a garden spider, outside my house this week. Black widow spiders make a web that's three-dimensional, but has no pattern. We have those in our yard, too.

The webs on which our own mental models of the universe are based are more complex—with past and future, emotion and theory, alternative stories and secondary theories. We have sounds and songs, scents and tastes to remember, and can sort things by temperature or texture, in our minds and imaginations.

Rejoice in the random!

SandraDodd.com/random
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Doing Nothing, and finding balance

Halfway between the past we can't change and the future we can only imagine, we find ourselves in the present. Not just the present year, but the present day; not just the present day, but the present moment.

From Balancing in the Middle Ground:

[Some families] had stopped doing school, and then stopped making their kids do anything, and now their kids were doing NOTHING.

Aside from the idea of the rich potential of their "nothing," the parents had gone from making their kids do everything, to "making them do nothing." And interestingly, it did make them "do nothing," at first. Or at least the parents couldn't see the new things they were doing.

Rather than moving from one edge of a dichotomy to the other, the goal is to move to a whole new previously unknown middle place.

Holly Dodd, and the false sea onion

The path behind

"Looking back, we can often see the path pretty clearly. But we can't look ahead and know what the path is going to be."

—Pam Sorooshian

SandraDodd.com/flitting
photo by Wolfgang Marquardt
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Seems like...

This photo was the background image on the first cellphone I ever had. Holly took the picture, when she was fifteen. I didn't recognize what it was when I first saw it, though it was taken in our back yard.

It looks like a dramatic view over the parapets of a castle. It was Holly's view of a sunset through the gap where one cinderblock was missing from the top row of our back wall. What could seem to be pennons and pikes in the background are power poles and streetlights and such across the vacant lot. The sky is a feature of New Mexico's high, dry climate.

If we look for beauty, everyday things might be seen as art.

SandraDodd.com/art
photo by Holly Dodd