There it is again. That wrinkled, hand-drawn Avengers graphic. This is the third time it’s appeared on this blog, which is certainly a record for Wonder Farm recycling. I hope you can excuse the chart for displaying itself again, though, because that funny little sheet of graph paper has generated some excitement around here lately.

Remember that post I wrote a month ago, about how I stumbled upon that fantastic Iliad graphic by visualization designer Santiago Ortiz, and how it reminded me of a few simple graphs T had drawn? And how Ortiz and I had connected via Twitter? Well, suddenly a new comment appeared on that post last week. The Data Artist in Residence from The New York Times, Jer Thorp, showed up just before dinner, to compliment my kid’s work! And for the next few days, hundreds of other folks showed up too, some of Thorp’s 10,000+ followers on Twitter, who arrived after he tweeted about a simple graph drawn by a 10-year-old and proclaimed it “AWESOME”.

Apparently Jer found his way to T’s chart after tweeting: “Of all the things that I have deep-seeded nerd knowledge about, the Avengers is easily top 3.” And Santiago Ortiz responded by tweeting a link to T’s chart and my post.

Beyond exciting. I thought: I should write about it on the blog!  And then I thought: why? Did I just want to show off?  My kid, New York Times artist, la di da!

I decided to think about that a bit.

Santiago Ortiz left another comment, recommending Jer Thorp’s TED talk. I’m glad that he did.

If you have fifteen minutes or so, give it a watch. Sure, it’s a talk about data, which may sound only slightly more interesting than a talk about finance, but allow yourself to be surprised. Jer is endearing; he’s a storyteller. Which is partly the premise of his talk, as you’ll see: there’s something essential in the interaction between data and story. When he gets to the data point showing the moment he met his girlfriend, see if you don’t get goose bumps. I actually teared up a little, but I’m a sap.

And his visualizations? Stunning. Beautiful in a way you never thought computer graphics could be.

Just as my show-off self was simmering down, and deciding not to post about this, Jer emailed this weekend, asking if he could use T’s graphics in a talk he’d be giving.

Could he use T’s graphics? (Snort!) YES. He could. Mr. T said so.

And then yesterday he posted this. His own series of Avengers visualizations. They are gorgeous and fascinating. (To see them in all their glorious, filagreed detail, click on the photo to see it on Flickr, click again to get to Lightbox view, click “view all sizes” on the right, and then click “original.”) Wow.

In that post, Jer gives credit to his inspiration for these visualizations. He mentions a particular ten-year-old.

Admiring his work, I flashed back to something Jer said in his TED talk. It was just an aside, after he showed a handful of his graphics, including the one of people saying good morning on Twitter.

I watched again, to get his words right.

“These are all things that I just do for fun. It might seem weird…I’m building tools for myself. I might share them with a few other people, but they’re for fun. They’re for me.”

That was when I knew I needed to write this post. And it wasn’t about showing off. (Well, not mostly.)

Jer made these incredibly complex, compelling visualizations for fun. For himself. Just as T had, when he spent a mind-boggling amount of time copying a long list of Avengers’ episode titles from Wikipedia to a piece of graph paper. For fun. For himself.

What propels a person to study a comic book series and to try to understand it though graphics? I suppose you’d have to ask Jer Thorp, or Mr. T. But clearly it has something to do with a passion for the topic. That sort of passion is important–yet it doesn’t have a place in traditional school learning. Passion-fueled learning is a powerful thing. We have to allow kids to pursue the fascinations that burn for them, even if they’re fascinations that may not seem particularly worthwhile to us, even if they’re fascinations with comic book characters. We need to give kids time to play with those fascinations, to fiddle with them, to create with them.

In his TED talk, Jer makes the point that we need to put data into a human context. There’s so much information out there; we need to humanize it, let it tell a story. In a similar way, we need to put learning into a human, individual context for our kids. We don’t learn by covering a bunch of information, those infinite bits of data that are out there, expanding exponentially, like all those Avengers on their radial graphs. We learn by engaging with what fascinates us, and seeing what we can do with it.

That’s what Jer Thorp does. When I look at his work, I realize: he still thinks like a kid. He wonders. He plays.

We need to let our kids do that too.

It’s been a long time (like, um, a year), so here’s another writing ideas post. Finally. But first read the disclaimer and simply tuck this idea into your back pocket. It may not tickle your kids.

Mr. T is an info-maniac. His favorite part of his beloved National Geographic Kids Magazine is the “Weird But True” section, which is a collection of surely-that-can’t-be-true facts. Like “There are 294 different ways to make change for a $1 bill” or  ”A cloud can weight more than a million pounds.” Check out some facts yourself by clicking the magazine link above and scrolling through the “Weird But True” section in the right column.

When we discovered that Nat Geo has a Weird But True app for kids, I bought it for T and downloaded it to the iPod he inherited from one of his teen siblings. T loves it. Basically, it’s a series of interesting facts displayed on slides. Lots of vivid colors, cool fonts and interesting graphics. Click on the app link and view a few examples.

A few months back, T decided to focus on the Age of Exploration for our homeschooling group’s annual history fair. (For folks who doubt the learning value of video games, T’s interest was entirely fueled by his love of Age of Empires.) Knowing his admiration of what is weird but true, I wondered if T might want to make his own series of slides on the topic of exploration.

He liked that idea. And I think other kids might too. It can work for any topic a kid is into.

The project fell into two parts: finding the facts and making the slides.

Finding the facts:

Whenever T delves into any new topic, I do like any good homeschooling parent and head to the library. I look for good nonfiction–although I leave behind those awful, clearly-written-for-schoolkids-doing-reports books that are such a bore–and check out armloads. I also look for interesting documentaries, films, and websites.

As he started this project, whenever T read, or we read together, I encouraged him to add a sticky tab when he encountered a fact that intrigued him.

Eventually he began compiling a list. This was the slightly tricky part: how do you paraphrase ideas from books in your own words? This is such a thorny subject, for kids and parents alike, and such an important skill for kids to acquire that I’m planning to write about it in more depth in an upcoming post. But briefly, this is what we did: First, I asked T to simply remember as many facts as he could–without consulting the books–and I transcribed his words. It’s easiest, I think, for kids to rephrase someone else’s ideas if they haven’t just looked at the original document. They remember the notion, and not the precise words. For those he couldn’t remember, I looked at his stickies and reminded him with a loose suggestion. Something like: “You wanted to write one about how Captain Cook died.”

For the ones in which he did need to consult the original pages, we read them aloud and he tried to rephrase in his own words. When kids are new to paraphrasing from other sources, working with an adult can be a big help. I typed so T could focus on the phrasing. If his suggestion was too close to the original, I nudged him to say it differently, and more in his own style. Sometimes I played thesaurus and offered alternative words, and he chose which he preferred. Since I was typing, rephrasing became like a game, and I was surprised at how quickly T picked it up.

It may not sound like much, simply collecting interesting facts from a variety of sources, but I beg to differ. It’s a valuable skill. It encourages kids to look at the information they’re taking in–whether from a book, or a film, or a website–and to consider which parts captivate them. It allows kids to connect with other sources on a personal level. This same skill will, eventually, help kids write thoughtful and engaging essays, reports and reviews, if they choose to. It’s a great stepping stone into other nonfiction writing.

Making the slides:

Originally, I pulled up PowerPoint for T to use. He was making a slideshow, and slideshow=PowerPoint, right? Well. PowerPoint certainly wasn’t intuitive for T, and we ran into our first big glitch when he wanted to draw on a slide. I clicked around and tried to figure out how to draw in our particular PowerPoint version. Finally I just decided that it would be easier for T to draw in Kid Pix, a program he’s comfortable with, and then we could import his drawings later.

Silly me. Once we pulled up Kid Pix, I remembered that it’s designed to make slideshows. In a way that’s very intuitive to the kids in the program’s title.

We’ve had a version of Kid Pix around here since my college kid was little. I think we’re on our third. It’s a fun program, and mostly my kids have used it as a plaything, a way of making computer art and just messing around with images and sounds. When T was younger, he liked to make armies of monsters on the screen, and have them stamp each other out. He’d eventually cover the screen with layers and layers of images–and then he’d swirl them up. Crazy fun. I don’t think any of the kids have used it for a project before. But the beauty of that is that after years of playing with the program, T already had lots of experience when it came to making his slides.

(No, I do not receive a kickback from Kid Pix. I just think it’s a fantastic, creative, open-ended piece of software for kids. If you’re interested, you can get a 15-day free trial on their website. Do it!)

Honest truth: the first few slides were a bit of a slog for T. Making slides look and sound like he wanted them to was time-consuming. This is one reason why I love authentic audiences for kids’ explorations, like history fairs–even if it means I have to organize them. T had a deadline, and he wanted to have something exciting for the fair. I encouraged him to keep at it, and eventually he began to see all the slide-making possibilities that Kid Pix offered. Then he got really into designing slides and dug in on his own.

Here’s a link to his slideshow. (Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the sound to export correctly, so we left it out. Too bad: the sound added a lot, and I’m sorry that you don’t get to hear T’s death groans on the Captain Cook slide.)

Fast Tube by Casper

The show is, how shall we say it, nothing show-stopping; it’s just a kid’s first foray into slideshows. And honestly, the part of his history fair exhibit that got the most attention was the challenge that required visitors to sort fruits and veggies into Old World/New World categories. (Did you know that although tomatoes and potatoes are New World crops, eggplant–from the same plant family–is an Old World crop, from Asia? Can any botanists out there explain?)

Still, T had fun making the show, and he’s amped up about using Kid Pix for other projects. It’s all about mixing his words with design, which is, as I keep mentioning, a skill for the new millennium.

If your kids try something along these lines, please leave a comment and let me know!

On Twitter last night, I came across something fascinating, via Maria at Brainpickings. (Always a source of fascinating bits.) It was an amazing visualization of the interactions of characters in the Iliad, and how they change throughout the book, by Argentinian designer Santiago Ortiz.

Do click here to view the stream in all its interactive glory. And then click on “network” for a different view. Mind-boggling.

I thought immediately of another graphic. A very low-tech graphic, in comparison, but one not entirely different. Remember the chart that Mr. T made last year, during his own fascination with The Iliad? It’s a chart of the various gods in The Iliad and how they interact with one another.

The thinking behind the two charts is quite similar, don’t you think? (You can see a bigger version here.)

Then there was this other chart which I’ve shared with you, about Avengers characters and how their “interestingness” changes over the course of the series. (Bigger, clickable version here.)

What’s compelling to me is that T came up with these ideas on his own. Sure, I’ve shown him lots of graphs and charts and encouraged him to think about sharing his ideas graphically. But he’s considered what he’s taking in (everything from classic literature to a superhero series–not so different in this case) and decided how to interpret it.

Mostly he’s just having fun. But look at how closely his play is connected to Santiago Ortiz’ work! A year ago, I didn’t even know there was such a job as visualization designer. I hadn’t heard the word infographic. But this is the stuff of the future. All the more reason not to dismiss the likes of video games and time spent at the computer. You never know where that might take kids.

More evidence of how the world is changing? As soon as I saw Santiago’s work, I wanted to contact him and share Mr. T’s work. I had a feeling he’d appreciate it.  T, of course, found Santiago’s work fascinating. I contacted Santiago via email, but then we continued our conversation on Twitter. Little tweets flying back and forth between California and Argentina. Now my kid has a visual designer to follow–and a whole new future career to consider.

In her fantastic book Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn, Cathy Davidson writes,

“By one estimate, 65 percent of children entering grade school this year will end up working in careers that haven’t even been invented yet.” (p. 18)

How do we prepare our kids for that? I think all we can do is nurture our kids’ fascinations, watch the world as it changes and look for connections between the two.

At least we don’t have to design a graphic visualization of those connections. But maybe our kids will.

It’s been a long while since I’ve written one of these what’s-got-me-worked-up posts.

Finished knitting projects! Finally! Last year, sometime mid-summer, my knitting mojo got lost. But thankfully we were reunited in late fall, in time for me to dig out the sweater I’d started for my hubby, and to finish it in time for Christmas. I’ve dubbed it the Hoppípolla Pullover, in honor of the Icelandic band Sigur Rós. Ever since he first saw the band’s documentary Heima, in which they play their music in obscenely gorgeous settings in their native land, often wearing similar yoked Lopi sweaters, Chris has asked when I’d be knitting him his own Icelandic sweater. Apparently the response should have been Why, by Christmas 2011, Sweetie! The random shirtless child in the following photo looks like he dropped in from a Sigur Rós video himself; too bad Chris didn’t have his guitar for the photo shoot.

For lack of other photos, I’ll decorate this post with a few other recently finished project shots. Ravelry site is down; links to come.

An article in print. I started this post in show-off mode; may as well keep going! I have an article in the March/April issue of Life Learning Magazine called “How Do Kids REALLY Learn to Write?” Gee, does that sound familiar? Yep, it’s a rewrite of the post I wrote back in January. Wendy Priesnitz, Life Learning’s editor, kindly tweeted to me after reading the post, and asked me to share it in the magazine. What a world we live in now: on any ordinary morning an editor might send you a totally unexpected message in 140 characters or less, and suddenly your day is made! The article is a more thought-out, clarified version of the blog post, influenced in no small degree by your thoughtful feedback in the comments.

Anne Lamott’s new book. It’s just a few weeks away! This one is a follow-up to Operating Instructions called Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son’s First Son. There’s a nice LA Times interview about the book here. I’ll never forget having Anne sign my copy of Operating Instructions at a reading on my very first Mother’s Day, in May 1993. I’d gone into labor with H the day after Mother’s Day the year before and, as I inelegantly tried to explain to Anne as she signed my book, I’d had to be a mother for a whole year before earning my Mother’s Day badge. I figured she’d appreciate the sheer injustice of it all, and after seeming a tad confused by my nervous babbling, she did. More Twitter talk: Anne’s on Twitter now! She manages to be funny and endearing and poetic in 140 characters. Do I scroll ahead when I see her photo show up in my feed? I do.

Another good book. Devotion by Dani Shapiro. A memoir in the form of a spiritual quest. I’m just a short way in, but it seems a fitting read for the Lenten season. (Not that it’s about Christianity; it’s about finding a spiritual center.)

A mesmerizing video. This film of making pesto by hand puts me in a trance. It’s so slow that it almost verges on parody; the, how shall we say it, pestaiola dries those basil leaves like they’re the bare bottoms of a beloved one-year-old. But by the time the gnocchi hits the table–make that by the time the gnocchi is bestowed upon the table like an offering to the gods–I’m ready to pull out my mezzaluna.

Resolutions update. As much as I miss being here with you more often, the decision to post less in an attempt to write more has been a fruitful one. I’ve written that article; I’ve made fine progress on my e-book; I’ve written a few conference proposals and am thigh-deep in a new article. I’ve been writing lots and lots and lots and if I’m atwitter about anything, that’s it.

So, what has you all worked up these days?

Dearest H,

I know, I know, you told me not to put this on my blog. I understand that you’re nineteen and a college student and all, and being written about on your mom’s little blog could be pretty embarrassing.

But really, buddy, who’s gonna know? I don’t use your real name, so anyone googling you isn’t going to wind up here.  And if any of your friends read this, you can ask them why the heck they’re reading your mom’s blog anyway.

How did you expect me not to write about this? I mean, you come home for Thanksgiving telling your dad and me about this big project that you needed help with.  You knew we’d jump on it—we’ve been helping you with your projects since you first encountered play dough at two and didn’t know how to roll a snake.  We’ve helped you make a trebuchet, a model of the Duomo, scale papier-mâché planets, a Lord of the Rings game terrain, endless costumes. To name just a few.

And we’ve always loved helping you on your films. Whether we’re scouting out the farm location you need, or making a costume for a boy-king, or hitting up friends to act, or doing nothing more than fetching burritos for your crew.

And this project was cool. You know how much I love The Royal Tenenbaums. I fell hard for that quirkfest when it first came out ten years ago, when you were just nine and still worked  up over the first Harry Potter movie.

Ten years later you’re filming a scene from the movie for one of your film classes. Specifically the scene with Ritchie and Margot in the tent in the living room. And you needed a tent.

Not just any tent, but a tent that could be hung from the rigging (is that the right term?) That would be tiny and tent-sized at the back, but would widen gradually at the front, to accommodate three cameras. And that you could fold up and bring back to New York in a duffel bag. No problem, right?

Hey, if we could make a model of the Duomo out of foam core with no plans, surely we could make such a tent. So off to the fabric store we went, with your sketched plans. Twenty yards of purchased muslin later, and we were back in the family room, moving furniture, rolling fabric across the floor and trying to decide where to make cuts. I said I’d sew if you pinned. (I hate pinning.) You thought I was nuts for insisting on a French seam for the back of the tent, but that seam showed up in your film, didn’t it?  Mothers know these things.

I loved watching you and your dad trying to figure how and where to hammer the eyelets. Felt like the old days, watching you build duct tape sabers together.

You went back to school, and we were all happy and hopeful that your contraption would work.

Still I wasn’t prepared for how much this texted photo would take my breath away:

It’s a blurry shot, taken with your phone in low light, but look at that thing! You can see the traditional tent lines at the back, but something about that splayed-open front strikes me as glorious. More impressive than I envisioned. Somehow a sea of muslin, some eyelets, rope and the right lighting came together into something grand.

That tent is some kind of metaphor to me. A metaphor for how people can come together and create something big with very little. Sort of like homeschooling: it’s really just a series of days made up of books and ideas and small projects, but somehow, over time, it becomes something more. It creates a mindset that says, I can make that winged tent that I’m imagining. I can dream something up, and I can make it real.

I’m being sappier than Wes Anderson, aren’t I? I’m sure this whole post seems a little ridiculous to you, but here’s why I wrote it (even after you asked me not to): Many of the people who read my blog are newer homeschoolers. And while they seem perfectly willing to come back week after week to read endless stories about your little brother–because he’s the only one who still lets me write about him–what really seems to inspire many of them are stories of what happens to homeschoolers when they grow up. (And dream up tents for films. And make them.)

Your dad and I loved helping you with your project. And now you’ve helped  me with mine.

Thank you for indulging me, sweetie. I can’t wait to see your finished film.

Love, Mama

I went away for a writing retreat with friends this weekend.

For years we’ve gathered at the coast, but this time we found ourselves on the backroads of Northern California. Instead of looking out over beaches, we had buttes. And a most changing landscape–for a landscape that at first seemed unchanging.

We were astonished by snow.

We drank strong coffee and wrote words on the backs of tickets. Then we made poetry. (An activity that’s as fun to do with kids as it is with adults, inspired by Susan Wooldridge’s Poemcrazy.)

We watched a heron and a hawk face off from a distance of ten feet, and stare each other down for hours.

We ate well. These pumpkin steel-cut oats were delicious (and will be making a comeback in my kitchen on Thanksgiving morning) and Heidi Swanson’s surprising salad with kale, coconut and farro, from this cookbook, was worth pulling from the fridge, meal after meal.

We stayed warm with a wood stove.

We wrote postcards to each other, from fictional and somewhat emotionally-unstable characters.

We walked alongside fallow rice fields. Then we went back to the cabin and blasted I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got while making barley risotto.

And we wrote. Which is what we’d set out to do.

Getting away like this, once a year or so, matters more to me than I probably realize. It’s about being with friends and being without responsibilities, yes, but it’s also about feeding my artistic self, and keeping it going for the rest of the year, when the time allowed for it comes in fits and starts rather than days.

It’s important for parents to feed themselves this way, especially homeschooling parents.

If you can’t get away for a weekend, maybe you can do it for a few hours. For about fifteen years now, since Lulu was a baby, I’ve gone out to work on my writing in a cafe once a week. Usually Wednesdays. My evenings out have evolved into first eating at a somewhat dive-y Indian spot, where all I have to do is walk in and smile and they write down my order of chana masala and roti. I eat my dinner over an inspiring read (lately Adam Gopnik’s new The Table Comes First.) And then I walk a few doors down to a cafe and work at my writing.

Wednesdays have become a highlight of my week. No matter how busy life gets, I know I’ll have a few hours to indulge my writerly side, and it fuels me. Like that kindling in the wine barrel, in that photo up there.

Chris also takes a night out, generally to rehearse with his band. I’ve known him since (before!) he was a teenager blasting his ears out in a garage band, and I’m only too happy to help keep that part of him alive. (Seeing him play live always makes me feel like a teenager again, even without the thrift store spike heels and leggings.)

Our weekly evenings out have been, I think, one of the smartest things we’ve done as parents. Sometimes it’s hard: the one left at home does all the dinner-prep and parenting duties for the evening, even more of a task when the kids were younger. And I find myself saying no to other weeknight social opportunities because I don’t want to give up my writing night. Still, it’s worth every trouble. Chris and I are helping each other remain creative people, in the midst of a very full life.

What seems secondary, but must be just as important: we’re showing our kids that our creative selves matter. That a week isn’t a week if you don’t find time for writing or music-playing in between dragging out the garbage and doing the laundry. That indulging your creativity is just something you do, like brushing your teeth and exercising.

How do you feed your creative side, in the midst of a busy life?

(P.S. If you’re here via last weekend’s link at Simple Homeschool, welcome! Please consider jumping in and joining the conversation in the comments. That’s where the action is!)

What do you do when your kid saves his money to buy a month-long subscription to the Lego Universe online game, and wants to talk of nothing else?

You go with it.

You look through some almanacs together (another recent obsession) and talk about graphs and charts and brainstorm how Lego Universe might lend itself to an intriguing graph.

That’s when he decides that a chart of the universe’s Nexus Force would be a most excellent diversion.

So you set him up with a blank Creately project page and watch him go to town.

Mr. T and I discovered Creately a few weeks back, when he wanted to make a digital tree of the cat family. We searched for a drawing tool for making flowcharts and found some good links on two pages I linked to recently: the infographics post at Langwitches and Troy Hicks’ informational writing wiki.

Mr. T and I sat together, setting up the chart and figuring out how Creately worked. Before long he was working on his own, toggling back and forth between his chart and the felidae family page on Wikipedia, copying, pasting, linking boxes and choosing colors.

Click on the graph to see a larger image which you can zoom in on.

I never have been able to keep all of those leopards, cougars and mountain lions straight. I’ve never seen them all laid out in such a visual way. It’s a useful document, this thing my kid made.

(I wish I’d started T on a tool other than Creately. I had no idea how much he would take to the platform. It’s free for the first five graphs you make, but from then on you need to pay a monthly fee to use it, which doesn’t seem practical, given that we’d likely use it only sporadically.)

Back to that Lego Universe chart. This time T wanted to incorporate images, so I showed him how to do a Google image search, and how to save his finds to our desktop, and then import them into his chart. Do kids pick up on this stuff quickly? Only as quickly as they pick up a bottle of maple syrup when faced with a plate of pancakes.

This chart is also clickable.

Mr. T made another graph recently, this time by hand. This one came about during yet another recent fascination: The Avengers animated series, which he’s worked his way through on Netflix. One day, when he wouldn’t stop talking about Hawkeye, I showed him this page on Figment.com, of wacky charts based on the Harry Potter series.

Go look. The charts and graphs made us giggle. I love the notion that kids can take information from something they’re reading (or watching!) and analyze it with a sense of humor.

I asked T if he’d like to make a similar Avengers-themed chart, and he decided that it would be fun to note how much he liked the various characters throughout the episodes (inspired by Potter chart #3.)

(Click it!)

Once again, I was amazed by his tenacity with this project. He researched the name of every episode and transcribed them on his graph. (His idea, not mine.) I appreciate the home-spun, hand-drawn feel of it. He’s still planning to add more Avengers, and to go over all of the episode titles in pen. The graph has led to conversations about T’s likes and dislikes with the series, and the notion of character development. (What’s up with The Wasp anyway, and why does she get so boring as the season goes on?)

So, what has he learned from these projects?

• How to choose a topic that lends itself to a chart or graph.
• How to share information in a visual format, rather than with pure prose.
• How to research information.
• How to structure that information, in a visual that makes sense to the viewer.
• How to work with new platforms, such as Creately.
• How to import various media to his projects, and to toggle between web sources.
• The role of good design in visual projects. (Check out my thoughts on Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind to get a sense of why design is such an important skill for kids to acquire.)

All good stuff. In Mr. T’s mind, though, he was just having fun, exploring some of his current interests in a new way.

Who says you can’t learn from video games and cartoons? Instead of separating popular culture from what kids are learning, I’d argue that we ought to embrace it. I know I’ve said it before, but I’ll keep saying it until I’ve typed off the letters from my keyboard: kids learn best when you start with their interests. Which doesn’t mean that all of their learning has to be based on Thor or Lego space marauders.

But sometimes, it can.

I can never resist a web link about creativity. Clicked on this one recently, about a creativity experiment with undergrads based on thinking like a kid. What interested me more than the experiment was this analysis of it:

From The Frontal Cortex:

Why does age make us less mature? Why accounts for the infamous 4th grade slump in creativity? One possibility is that we trade away the ingenuity of our youth for executive function. As the brain develops, the prefrontal cortex expands in density and volume. As a result, we’re able to exhibit impulse control and focused attention. The unfortunate side-effect of this cortical growth is an increased ability to repress errant thoughts. While many of these thoughts deserve to be suppressed, it turns out that we also censor the imagination. We’re so scared of saying the wrong thing that we end up saying nothing at all.

I had an experience during my teaching days that illuminated that 4th grade slump for me. One year, we had a program in which pairs of teachers visited classes throughout our elementary school, facilitating an activity based on a famous artist. Usually I taught third grade, but for two days I got to teach art in every grade, from kindergarten through sixth.

It was the second grade classrooms that stunned me.

There were two of them in our school, and they were filled with artists. The kids jumped into our Matisse project with glee. They made bold lines, they used lots of color. They didn’t ask questions; they just sprawled across their pages and poured themselves on to them. And then they cried for us teachers to come see what each of them had created.

I couldn’t believe that the kids were just a year younger than my third graders. Already, the third grade kids were doubtful when it came to art. They asked lots of questions. They dawdled. They crumpled papers. They hid them. Most of the kids still seemed to enjoy art once they got going, but they didn’t leap in, with joy and without reservation, as the second graders had. It wasn’t just my third grade class; the other third grade at the school was the same way. (The school’s kindergarten and first graders were avid artists as well. But as a third grade teacher, it was those second graders that captivated me. How could so much creative drive get lost in the course of a year?)

If I’d just watched a single second grader work, and a single third grader, I wouldn’t have realized the magnitude of the difference. It was the palpable change in creative energy between the second grade and the third grade classrooms that was impossible not to notice.

And the fourth graders? That was the end of it all. Many of those kids had pretty much given up on art, and simply made half-hearted scrawls on the page. There were still a handful of artists in the room, but it wasn’t a roomful of artists. It was a little heartbreaking.

All of this got me thinking about one of my theories about taking dictation from kids. If you’re newer to this blog, you may have missed my posts about dictation. I’m not talking about dictation in the Charlotte Mason sense, but dictation in the secretarial sense. In other words, writing down what kids want to say. You can read much more in my series of posts, The Dictation Project. Or here it is in a nutshell: Dictation is a fantastic, underused tool for helping kids learn to write. By simply transcribing  for them for a few years, you can help them develop their writing voices while they simultaneously learn the mechanics of writing–slowly, organically and painlessly.

Dictation is especially effective, I think, because it helps kids express themselves on paper while they’re still young and, well, expressive. The creative energy that bubbled in those kindergarten, first and second grade classrooms isn’t limited to art. The kids speak with the same unbounded joy and imagination. All we adults have to do is transcribe those words to see the vivid, original writer already living within the child appear on the page.

Here’s the sad irony: if we wait for kids to become proficient writers to translate their unique voices to the page, it might be too late. Because guess how long it takes to develop from being a beginning writer to becoming a fluent one? One who doesn’t have to think much about letter formation, spelling and grammar, who can focus on the thoughts at hand? I don’t have a scientific, proven answer, but experience tells me that it tends to take three or four years. Might happen faster for homeschoolers who start later, and surely it happens faster and slower for different individuals, but I’d say that three or four years is a pretty good average.

Calculate that. If kids start writing at five or six, when will they become fluent writers who can fairly easily transcribe what they want to say? That’s right. Their writing skills will come together right in time for the 4th grade slump. Right when, quite possibly, their prefrontal cortexes are becoming distracted with new functions, and beginning to censor the imagination.

If you don’t think this is an issue, pick up any book for adults who want to write. There will nearly always be a chapter on voice. A chapter trying to show adult writers how to find their own unique styles. How to put their personalities on the page. Such a chapter is almost always there because voice is so important in writing. It’s a big part of what engages a reader. Yet many of us make it to adulthood without any sense of our voices as writers. It isn’t something cultivated in traditional English classes.

But young kids already have voices! Quirky, expressive voices—each and every one of them! They just don’t yet have the skills to put those words to the page at any length. Dictation helps young writers discover their voices and develop them, long before the 4^th grade slump hits. Which makes it much easier to hold on those voices as their brains move on to new skills.

My youngest is nine. If he went to school, he’d be a fourth grader this fall. Which gives me pause. This kid has an endless imagination; the notion that his prefrontal cortex might start getting sidetracked by “impulse control and focused attention” gives me pangs. I’d always thought that dwindling creativity had more to do with peer pressure than anything else, and that homeschooling might help prevent it. I still believe that, to a degree. But I suppose I can no more stop T’s brain from changing than I can stop the sea from sending in waves.

At least his writing voice is intact. The kid is a storyteller, and no future crank of a teacher with a red pen will ever drive that out of him. Phew.

I’ve been meaning to report back on how Mr. T’s ultimate guide turned out.

Rather than writing The Ultimate Guide to the Trojan War as he’d planned, he titled his opus The Ultimate Guide to the Ancient World. Why just cover one little war when you can take on the entire ancient world? His plan is to add more sections as he pursues more ancient history.

He had a good time making that cover.

We talked about what he might want put on the front of his book, and looked through a stack of books on the Greeks. We admired photos of Greek pottery engraved with characters from their myths. I thought a scratch art technique might give a similar look, and found instructions here.

T took a goofy pleasure in covering that cardboard in pastel–first the terra cotta color, and then the black. His hands became satisfyingly blackened.

The fun part about scratching the art is that if you make a mistake, you simply reapply more of your upper color and try again.

The effect really did resemble ancient Greek pottery.

T had become fascinated with the Greek alphabet–we listened this song a gajillion times–and decided to write his title in Greek letters.

I had to spray the cover with a stinky, undoubtably toxic acrylic spray so that readers of T’s book wouldn’t wind up with hands like his.

Many of T’s ideas from our initial brainstorming session wound up in his book. There were several writing-intensive pages with interviews, history and such. But there was also some graphic fun. Such as character cards:

Any work of T’s wouldn’t be complete without a Pokemon-esque analysis:

And because this was T’s book and not his mama’s, there needed to be weapons.

This is my favorite page. Both the concept and design were entirely T’s.

It’s a chart of the Iliad’s gods and who they favored. T did lots of re-reading of a kids’ version of The Iliad to get this right. The alliances are mind-numbing. I’m glad I have a chart to help me out.

We decided to “bind” the book using Circa discs from Levenger. What’s neat about this method of bookmaking is that you can add and move around pages at will, which allowed T to insert pages as he finished them. It’s a rather expensive way to make a book, but I’d already gathered many of the supplies for my own Circa notebook.

(Check out that notebook, two years later. This is where I’m organizing ideas for my book. It’s a good two inches thick already, and that’s just notes! The book-writing is happening on my computer.)

Mr. T enjoyed writing his guide, and was proud to show it at our history fair. (Although, as we’ve learned in the past, a book isn’t always the most eye-catching display at a fair. There’s so much to see that you really have to captivate visitors with big and showy! Next year.) These days we’re having a fine time learning about the Aztec, Inca and Maya. I asked T if he might want to incorporate this into a new section of his guide, since it is The Ultimate Guide to the Ancient World, after all.

“Nah,” he said. “I want to do something different. But I don’t know what yet.”

Bright idea to come, surely.

A few things that have me worked up these days:

eggs! They’re wet and just-hunted for in this photo–you may even spy a tiny slug on one or two of them. (Which is what comes of them spending a few pre-dawn hours hidden in the backyard.) We used natural dyes on all of them but those green ones. I do love the pop of that phony green. Looks like it’s egg salad sandwiches for dinner tonight. I’m trying a new recipe, which uses yogurt instead of mayo, and comes from…

super natural every day. I’m loving this cookbook. I have Heidi’s first cookbook, which I’ve enjoyed as well, but this one may be even better. For Easter breakfast we made the Baked Oatmeal with blueberries. Yum. We’ve also prepared and lapped up the Farro Soup and the Harissa Ravioli. I took a big chance on Pan-Fried Mung Beans with Tempeh, knowing that it sounded like something from a 70s commune, but was unexpectedly directed by the resident teenager to please make this again! At Heidi’s signing at my local bookstore, I told her that as a longtime vegetarian, I have my gourmet cookbooks and my hippie cookbooks–and am very grateful to now have her cookbooks, which elegantly combine the two. Heidi knew just what I meant. She was absolutely lovely and gracious.

teenage style. Easter afternoon. Love their independence.

more teenager appreciation. In the form of a note, left on my desk.

ollalieberries and honey in my future. My girls are so busy these days. This one’s working our ollalieberry bushes. I have one strong colony (the swarm I so comically captured last year) and am hoping to catch another.

a simple, tasty recipe for said honey. This one comes from the classic The Cheese Course, by Janet Fletcher. It’s basically honey and walnuts on little Cabecou goat cheeses, but there’s one special, somewhat time-consuming trick, which removes the tannins from the walnuts. You pour boiling water over the walnuts and let them sit for half an hour. Then you put them on a triple-thick paper-towel-lined pan, and bake at 300 degrees for 30 minutes, and for an additional twenty minutes at 250 degrees, until the nuts are dry throughout. You toss them with the honey and drizzle over the goat cheese. I’ve also done the same over gorgonzola; both got raves at parties. Let me just say that when the cheese was gone, fingers were seen swiping plates.

collaborating brothers. My boys have a long history of working together on H’s film projects. I figured those days had ended for the time being, given that H is at school clear across the country. But never underestimate the power of Skype. Last week, Mr. T did some voice work for an audio story for H’s sound class. We loaded up Skype and H sent the script as a Skype transcript. He gave T direction via headphones and I recorded it on Garage Band. It was sweet to see them working together again–and fun to see how H’s direction class has influenced his abilities to get what he wants from an actor. And he’s always baffled at how T manages to nail what he asks for–yet the two of us can’t convince the kid to try acting for others. Someone’s missing his calling.

an alphabet glue winner! The giveaway issue goes to Wendy, who answered my request for a favorite shared book with, “How could i forget one of my all time favorites – barn dance – by bill martin jr. and john archambault. it is like singing a song!” I’ll send your email address on to Annie, Wendy, and she’ll send along your e-magazine. Congratulations! For those of you who missed out on the giveaway, I hope you’ll still check out Alphabet Glue. You can read more on the website, or in my last post. It’s good, book-loving stuff!

So, what has you all atwitter?