April 27, 2006 @ 4:23 pm | Filed under:
Wonderboy Wonderboy.
Stood Up.
All. By. Himself.
If you have not been following Wonderboy’s adventures, you might be wondering what the big deal is about that. He turned two in December, can walk and climb stairs, and enjoys trying to jump. But his particular developmental delays (a combination of several factors including high muscle tone, poor motor planning, hearing loss, and other issues) have caused him to have peculiar gaps in his gross motor skills. He cannot sit up from a lying-down position (neither belly nor back), and until today, he had never managed to stand up without assistance.
But today, during one of their typical roughhouse/practice sessions, Scott put the Boy on his belly, and to our delight and his own jubilation, Wonderboy pushed up onto his knees, and then slowly, with great effort, continued pushing until he was on his feet, hands still touching the floor. He rocked backward a bit, found his balance, shifted his hands one at a time to his knees—and straightened up. And broke into a thousand-watt grin. And cheered and laughed and stomped his feet.
And threw himself for joy into his daddy’s arms.
April 27, 2006 @ 8:51 am | Filed under:
Clippings How to put on a Band-Aid so it stays on all day. (Comprehension of Japanese not required.)
HT: Chris O’Donnell.
Jane comes home from nature studies camp, soot-streaked and beaming.
Me: “Did you have a good time?”
Jane, jubilantly: “We made FIRES!”
I guess that would be a yes.
April 27, 2006 @ 3:30 am | Filed under:
Carnivals Hosted by Education Wonk. I found this piece on a Maryland private school particularly interesting. Fairhaven operates on the Sudbury model, but the blog piece by Matt Johnston doesn’t mention Sudbury or explore the tenets of a Sudbury/unschooling education. Johnston has doubts as to whether Fairhaven’s students are receiving any kind of an education at all:
But the problem with this style of progressive educational model is that it is based on the whims of children, a notoriously shifting footing for a school to operate.
Experience is a wonderful teacher, but without guided reflection, without guided experience, nothing is learned from experience and no one can learn from the experiences of others. Afterall, you can’t keep reinventing the wheel and then expect to build a spaceship.
Unschoolers and Sudbury advocates would argue that “guided reflection” does occur for these students, primarily through informal but efficacious conversation with the adults in their lives.
What amazes me about Fairhaven is that there are that many parents willing to pay $6600 a year for the kind of self-directed education their children could experience at home absolutely for free.
