Homework? Isn't That Like Bringing Work Home From The Office?

It's summertime and the kids in school are excited that they have a few months of freedom from homework.

My kids don't know what homework, in the traditional sense of the word, is.

What do the kids in school do for seven hours a day, that prevents them from getting all their work done?

Just as I don't think consistently bringing work home from the office is healthy for an individual, nor a family; I don't think bringing work home from school is healthy for an individual, nor a family.

Why is homework an acceptable practice? And what kind of pattern, habits, attitudes, is it teaching our future adults?

The Practical Side of Creativity

Recently I’ve mentioned to a few, my decision to be intentionally creative.

I have been fortunate for most of my formative years including going to a performing and visual arts high school, and being a theatre major in college, to be “allowed” to be creative.

Because I am now homeschooling my children, I've been challenged in a way that I haven't been in a long time. And I realized that, while yes I’m still creative, I’ve allowed myself to get in to a bit of a rut. I’ve allowed the distractions of the world, as well as the “musts” and “shoulds” to hinder my creativity.

Then I came across this talk on a website I recently "discovered" TED.com. After seeing this (entertaining) talk by Sir Ken Robinson I realized just how critically important creativity is.
Not for creativity's own sake, but for how it heavily influences the way we view life, the way we view challenges, and the way we navigate through life and through such challenges. There are practical implications to the creative process.

As I watch my two children play, work, rest, eat, everything really, I am captivated by what they discover, how they discover, and then what they do with that information.

Why are more adults not like this? What happens as we grow older that this ability is lost (or greatly reduced)? And how does this affect the world in which we live?

Here is a link to the talk which engagingly addresses these questions. Ken Robinson on TED.com

In the Beginning...

One of the concerns I had about educating my kids, was teaching subjects which were important, but that I didn't necessarily enjoy myself. I didn't want my lack of enthusiasm for a topic to influence them. So I made a decision to jump in with both feet, when it came to science in general, and astronomy specifically.

How could I make this interesting? How could I make this fun? So the first thing we did was take a trip to the Adler Planetarium. Shockingly, living here all my life, I had never been there.

I didn't want to try to do too much in that trip. Living so close, I knew there would be many more opportunities to visit. My goal was to be inspired, and to inspire the kids. To be awed and to want to know more. Mission accomplished. After seeing the big picture, literally, I got excited about "outer space." Hmm, maybe there was a correlation between my level of interest and my level of knowledge.

After teaching the kids some basic "stuff" like what's astronomy, what's a star, what's a satellite, and what's a planet (don't even get me started on Pluto. Can everyone please update your websites and books? It has been three years, ya know.), we embarked on building a model of the solar system (sans that "dwarf planet").

There were two main points I wanted to teach with our solar system model beyond knowing the names and order of the planets: the size of the planets in relation to each other, and the relative distance of the eight planets to the sun. My experience in school was that all the planets were pretty much the same size and pretty much equidistant from each other.

Why did I think this? Same reason I had no concept of the size of Alaska or Hawaii, nor where they existed on the globe. Gotta fit everything on one page!

Also, I didn't want the sun in the model. If we are going to have the sun, it's gotta be accurate, relatively, in size. And that's just not possible, unless I want Mercury to be microscopic, or move in to a bigger home.


To determine the scale we were going to use, we needed something that could be tiny enough to be Mercury, and large enough to be Jupiter. So we chose to use balloons--water balloons, birthday balloons, and punching balloons.

Here is our model, in this 41-second video: