We’d talked about going to China as a family last summer, before H went off to college. Our friend, Mike–buddy since high school, best man at our wedding–and his wife Erin and their kids have been living in Shanghai for five years now, and we’ve played with the idea of visiting them ever since. So [...]

A few members of the family are off on a little adventure. I’m updating photos to my flickr page each day, if you want to come along!

I know I’ve written a few times about the history fair our homeschool group hosts each spring. (Last year I wrote about Lulu’s One Hundred Years Of Food project.) This year I thought I’d describe in more detail how we structure the event, in case any of you might like to try something similar with [...]

…he might not have needed that forge. This is Mr. T’s costume for our homeschool history fair. (More on the fair coming soon.)  Like any good fan of The Iliad, T wanted his own hoplite armor. Like any good bricoleurs, we figured we could make it. We started talking duct tape, and suddenly I remembered [...]

“Jeff’s friend and colleague Linda Fisher likes to joke that we spend the first few years of a child’s life teaching him how to walk and talk, and the rest of his life telling him to shut up and sit down. This strikes us as the way schools also work. We spend tremendous energy helping [...]

Back in those video games posts (part 1 and part 2), I wrote about how games, and popular culture in general, can engage kids with literacy. Boys, especially, who often don’t find writing compelling. In classrooms, boys are often discouraged from writing about popular culture, especially if their work contains violence. (If you want to [...]