athelas

I have been trying to think through my blogging plans for this year and since this is my spot for thinking things through, I decided to give it a try. Daniel Siegel says in the book The Developing Mind that the left brain is responsible for making sense out of things — making experience flow [...]

Someone on a list that I am on linked to Alfie Kohn’s “Five Reasons to Stop Saying, “Good Job.” It is an interesting read. There is a book I read called “When Slow is Fast Enough” that describes very convincingly the way that praise and positive talk is used to manipulate and control small children. [...]

If there are any speech-language pathologists who read this blog, please know I am by no means attacking the profession. I just am mentioning this because I always seem to be writing negatively in this area. Aidan’s speech therapist is conscientious and seems to know her field well. I think probably Aidan is a particularly [...]

I liked this gestalt homeschooling post that Patience at Knitting the Wind shared from her old blog. Especially this part: Rose has in her mind all the bits of information, but in a way that makes one great story. She is also being trained at a very gentle, almost unconscious, level to see everything as [...]

I did one of these personality tests a while back at my other blog but Cindy at Apple Stars had a Multiple Intelligence graph on hers so here is my complete one : ). Interesting! On my other blog I mentioned that on some tests I come out with the Feeling side higher than the [...]

This is the last section of the notes I took for the Right Brained Learners in a Left Brained World book. I don’t remember, to be honest, why it is called “troubleshooting”, but it looks like the notes are to do with tutoring or helping a right brained child at home. It looks like some [...]

Here are the ground rules for raising a right brained child, according to this great book, Right Brained Children in a Left Brained World — it was geared towards ADD kids and my kids don’t tend to be classically ADD but they do fit into the RBL category in several ways. These are drafts from [...]

I took these notes a year or so ago when I was learning about Right Brained Learners. As one myself, I think the most helpful tips for me have been the speed-reading to get the big picture, and the idea of visualizing as I read. As to minimizing distractions, I am one of the subset [...]

Kevin, my husband, has gotten into model railroad building. Because the landscape he’s building takes up a floor space of 6 by 9, the enthusiasm has definitely put its footprint on our family life. Add in plenty of reading aloud from hobby magazines, DVD “how to”s, fascinating little boxes the UPS brings, and slow but [...]

At the Real Learning board, a mom with young children asked what older homeschooling moms would do differently if they could it over again. Really, I have few categorical regrets about what I did or did not do. Yes, I made plenty of mistakes — but mistakes can be fruitful. I learned something from every [...]