By letting go, it just might help to hold close those whom are dearest to you!
Spontaneity— def. “The state or quality of being spontaneous.” Control— def. “The situation of restraint.” Two words that are completely and utterly opposite in nature. I would have to admit that the old mom—the one I was or the one I am trying to shake—was the latter, always and forever the latter. Trying to control every stinkin’ situation that came or could come our way. To me, back then…maybe a teeny tiny bit even now…controlling and anticipating every nuance, nook and cranny meant that I could head off trouble; fights between the boys, accidents, trouble with school work, etc. You name it, I tried to control it. Heck, if I could have controlled the time the sun rose and set, I would have. But looking back, my controlling nature did nothing but make the household tense. Anticipating never really stopped anything from happening. Planning out every scenario never seemed to go the way I had imagined. The boys still fought. Accidents still happened. Things still occurred that hurt or stung or caused trouble in some way. Hindsight tells us then that controlling the outcomes, planning for each and every thing that may possibly happen only makes one weary and most definitely not happy or satisfied.
Then there’s spontaneity—which I have to admit is such a foreign concept to me. Doing something on impulse just hasn’t happened much in this 44 year old’s life. Things as small as a Sunday drive has to be mapped out for me otherwise it just feels like wandering. However, really…what is so wrong with wandering?…
I can’t wait to meet Jean’s daughter, to hold her, to embrace the innocence of a blank slate and to pray that her life will be blessed with health and happiness.
My best friend Jean is eight and a half months pregnant with her first child. I’ve known Jean for almost two decades, since her first week at college when she walked into the office of the student newspaper of which I was editor and said she wanted to be a reporter. Our friendship has ebbed and flowed with life over the years, as some of the best friendships do, but I know I can always count on her and her on me.
So it was with nothing but excitement that my daughter, Noelle, and I attended her baby shower last weekend. Thrown by her mother and sister-in-law, it was a pretty extravagant affair, and Jean was showered with onesies and hooded towels galore. Noelle was having fun running around with Jean’s cousin’s daughter, a year younger than Noelle, a girl with whom she has played many times before at Jean’s family parties. The atmosphere was festive and happy and hopeful.
But I couldn’t help but think back to my last month of pregnancy with Noelle…
Naturalists and Educators to Know About in Western MA
Award-winning musician and author Sarah Pirtle founded Journey Camp twenty years ago. As a peacebuilding camp Journey Camp has impacted the lives of many young people by providing a vision of social change while connecting with the the natural world through the expressive arts.
Support your live, local, free-lance, free-range, grass-fed naturalist!
Some naturalists and educators are funded by a school or a camp. Others hang up their shingle and take the kids into the woods. This post offers a smattering of freelance naturalists in Western MA. They are people who are highly qualified and experienced educators and naturalists who teach children about their local environment, wilderness survival skills, nature science and social skills. I interviewed many of these people in preparing this post, and I regret not being able to capture the joy in their voices when they talked about how much they love what they do!
Sarah Pirtle
Twenty years ago, Sarah Pirtle created Journey Camp, a peace-building camp that helps children develop earth awareness while fostering their creativity. Her goal is for children to have a “deep experience of feeling close to nature.” As a prolific creator, Sarah also writes books, curriculum, and songs that support a world in which humans respect each other and the natural world. She loves to combine ecological awareness and the arts, and recently created an 18 feet humpbacked whale puppet that a dozen kids can get inside and move!
At Journey Camp, the students create characters and stories which help them to understand the connection that people have to the earth. Sarah has two summer programs. One is based out of Woolman Hill in Deerfield, MA. A newer one was launched in the Hilltowns at Taproot Commons Farm in Cummington, MA a few years ago with the help of Hilltown Families founder, Sienna Wildfield.
I got an inkling that running in some organized fashion could be fun for kids when my third grader decided it would be cool to do the run portion of Safe Passage’s Hot Chocolate event. There’s a two-mile walk we’d done numerous times and a 5K run. We ran. Well, we jogged and walked. We loved it.
❥ The Sugarloaf Mountain Athletic Club knew about this kids-like-to-run thing too. I guess that’s why they organized a series of track races for kids and why it’s become a giant social scene. When I took Remy there last Tuesday, otherwise known as the most glorious day of weather in 2013—and I challenge 2013 to do better but c’mon, keep trying pretty please—I felt as if I’d stumbled in upon everyone.
(Photo credit: Sienna Wildfield)
Picture the high school track. Picture swarms of children in t-shirted rainbow array, on the grass or on the track. Picture their parents on bleachers and on the grass. Picture more children, mostly the younger siblings doing whatever it is younger siblings do at events like this (a combination of hanging on their parents, pulling their parents around or cavorting together). There you go.
To quote my ten-year-old that very evening: “Track was so much fun!”
I like being able to leave the reminders of home and the to-do’s behind, but the other end of the spectrum is feeling a little stuck without the predictable tools, comforts, and rhythms of our own space. But while on our trip, opportunity arose for me to find my groove. That’s when I turned towards violets!
You know it’s spring in New England when it snows on Memorial Day weekend, right? As my family made a journey to New Hampshire for this three day weekend, a part of me was sure the odd weather was a blatant sign of the Earth being out of whack… but I was glad there were still spring buds and flowers to enjoy at our vacation destination.
Back home in western Massachusetts, May had already ushered in summer-like foliage and the heat waves to back it, but during our road trip to NH we were on the highway watching rain turn into thick flurries of cosmic snow. It was distracting enough to take my mind off the fact that we would have to get out of the car soon with sleeping children and all our gear to nestle into a different bed.
I like being able to leave the reminders of home and the to-do’s behind, but the other end of the spectrum is feeling a little stuck without the predictable tools, comforts, and rhythms of our own space…
I used to hate summer. You heard me. H.A.T.E. While most educators count down the days until the end of the school year, my dread grows the closer the end of June comes. No, no…I have no aversion to heat, (at least not the kind of heat we get here in upstate NY. Now Florida’s heat…blech!). No, no it isn’t that it is because it is skimpy clothes and bathing suit season. Although, never being svelte and swarthy has always made me keep a cover up on at the beach, and really I have never been one for shorts. However my intense dislike for summer really never was about any of that. It was all about the fact that for two and a half months, I’d be in charge of entertaining my children (All right…instead of judging, could I at least get props that I admit fully to feeling that way?)…
I have always loved silent movies. My dad was a Charlie Chaplin fan and we would often go into the city to see Chaplin’s full length movies on the big screen. When I was a student in graduate school, I worked with stroke groups, many of whom depended on understanding and using gestures to communicate. I heard that other clinicians were training better communication to this population by watching sit-coms with the volume off, but I immediately thought of silent movies and jumped at the chance of using them for therapy.
Later, with better access to films, I discovered silent movies from all over the world. I had always watched comedies, but I now located silent movies that were profound with serious content. The acting was subtle, but conveyed such humanity. They were filled with rich communication. After watching them exclusively for months, I watched a contemporary movie and felt disappointed with the stiff bodies and unending dialogue of the actors (blah, blah, blah). What a loss for the world when silent movies were scrapped for “talkies.”
Then I worked with another population that needed to learn to attend and use facial expressions and body language. Since facial expressions and body language are 55% of communication, my children on the autism spectrum needed to be able to read people’s faces and gestures in order to navigate their social worlds. I told them that people can say anything but their faces and bodies are more reliable information. Out came the silent movies…
Every September, just after the leaves start to fall, I go out with Sienna and Hilltown Families citizen scientists to do a Rapid Biotic Assessment (RBA) of the East Branch of the Westfield River downstream from the RT 143 bridge in West Chesterfield, MA. Returning to the same site as the year before, we collect aquatic bugs—including mayfly nymphs—and, based on what we’ve gathered, we can tell how healthy the river is. If a river has a lot of mayflies, it is a healthy river—with lots of big and healthy trout in it (We’ll invite you to help us; so be on the lookout for our invitation!).
Imagine never getting swarmed and bit by mayflies as you revel in the vivacities unleashed by the ubiquitous green fountain of spring. Imagine gardening, or hiking, or simply sitting on a park bench without having to constantly swat and flinch and keep from going mad as the mayflies crawl on your neck and arms and ears, looking for a sweetspot to slice skin and lap blood. Now, imagine your dream of never getting bit again by mayflies comes true, right now as you read this! Because mayflies don’t bite.
Blackflies: they’re the little flying vampires that mob us in spring—not mayflies. Here is a picture of a mayfly. Notice its two long tails (though some have three), and large transparent wings. Most are an inch or longer.
This month I invite you to take all of those lost imaginative ideas and share them by writing with your child! In fact, you could try a writing game where you just put a bunch of ordinary stuff from your house on a table, then challenge each other to write a poem that has all the stuff on the table in it… and, if you like, feel free to post your family’s writing here in the comments. I would love to see what you come up with!
I’ve noticed that often when we try to write, we get stuck because we think we need to write about “big” subjects. So we sit and chew on our pencil and stare into space and decide our lives just aren’t exciting enough for Art with a capital A. It’s really a shame, because lots of interesting, imaginative writing gets lost this way.
The poem I’ve chosen for this month’s column, “Today,” by Frank O’Hara, is a great antidote to this kind of inhibition. O’Hara was immersed in the New York art scene, and his poems reflect the exciting changes that were happening in the visual arts of the 1950’s. They’re colorful, irreverent, noisy, seemingly casual but secretly well-crafted.
But what I appreciate most about this poem (and others by O’Hara) is that it shows us that anything can be in art, and art can be about anything. Just by writing about it, by putting the ordinary stuff of our lives into a poem it becomes changed and celebrated. It becomes interesting.
Mother’s Day has come and gone and I of course have been reflective. Yes. I have been thinking. I have been thinking about those mommies from Newtown. I have been thinking of mommies of those injured or killed in the Boston bombings. I have been thinking of moms who are no longer part of their children’s lives directly, but instead have been replaced by an addiction to drugs or alcohol or gambling. I have been thinking of the moms whose children are drowning in a world of mental illness with no life preserver in sight. I have been thinking of moms whose children are incarcerated, runaways, or just plain lost. I have been thinking about any mom who may be experiencing one or more of the nightmares we all have imagined or prayed wouldn’t happen to our beloved children. All weekend, I thought of them. How do they celebrate their roles as mothers? How do these moms keep moving forward when the worst tragedies have infiltrated the dreams that they had for their children and the futures they had imagined for their families?
Dear readers, we of course can look to our friend, Hindsight, to guide us and them—but not our own Hindsight—not if we are in the thick of it. No—we use the Hindsight of the moms who have gone through it and come out somehow into the light (does that ever completely happen? Perhaps it’s a dim light, but a light no less.) And since it is inevitable (it IS inevitable) that all of us at some point will hurt because our children are hurting, I think it is essential that we learn what to do from some of the masters moms who have learned to cope and even come to appreciate more their titles as mothers even though their children are troubled somehow.
The great Maya Angelou’s mother, Vivian Baxter, was a force to be reckoned with, and a stupendous example of how a mom might cope and continue to mother a child that has hit a bumpy road or even one filled with craters…
The fact that it was my birthday made the day even more ridiculous.
It was Friday, April 26. Instead of going on the surprise getaway to Cape Cod that my husband tried to plan, I had to work. I work for the Girl Scouts, and one of my tasks that day was to deliver a prize to a girl in a troop meeting in Sheffield. Here’s how I had it planned: I would pick my daughter up from school at 3:05, be in Sheffield by 4:15, be out of Sheffield by 4:20 and back in Williamstown by 5:30, when Noelle’s baseball practice was schedule to start. I had the prize ready to go (I purchased a helium balloon earlier in the day to attach to it), I had snacks for Noelle to eat in the car and her baseball clothes ready to go.
A favorite game, Guess Which Hand, can be used to help tell stories, promoting childhood literacy! Choose a tiny object that has a special family memory or something fun to start a story about your day as a parent…
We recently attended literacy night at our school. My little one enjoys any and all extra free time with friends on school grounds. Whatever the activity, she loves to go. She asks to go to PTO meetings. It means time being silly in school running about and connecting with friends from other grades. Literacy night was perfect for her. Many friends from class, a storyteller/musician and to make it perfect—the parents were ushered into another room to hear from a literacy expert. Parent free silly time.
While the kids heard fantastic tales and played instruments in a very interactive experience (we could hear them across the school), the parents were reminded of early literacy basics such as daily reading with our children and practicing language skills at home. The imagination and ideas that result from reading stories together help in so many areas of early learning. We were given a bit of parent homework on literacy at various stages. I’ll add it to my summer reading and research stack. I try to leave events like this with one item to work on. One thing is manageable. More can be too much during the crazy end of school year rush. One extra on top of culture night, science fair and field day. The facilitator’s point that resonated with me this night—the average child only experiences 3 minutes of one on one, eye to eye conversations each day. The reminders to empty backpacks and put dirty clothes in the hamper do not count. She was talking about real one on one conversations about your day, friends or the playground happenings. Time where you both sit and truly listen to each other. I can top 3 minutes.
Citizen Scientists are Studying All Over the World
From ladybugs to sunflowers to birds to babies… there are a number of ways average families can participate as citizen scientists and time of year!
You’ve got to love technology! Never before in the history of time have people from all over the world been so easily able to learn about and participate in true science.
Citizen Scientist projects are research based investigations that involve regular people in actual research experiments. By engaging the general public, professional scientists are able to amass a huge amount of data. The observers and data collectors get to learn more about the scientific process and whatever the scientists are studying.
Often in this column I focus on events that are coming up in Western MA; however, the thought of having a list with all of my favorite citizen science projects in one place proved irresistible.
So, here is a sample list of family friendly, year round, citizen science projects that involve the natural world, and sound intriguing:
I am not one of those “organized activity” parents. I am also not one to push my kids toward music lessons.
Well, that’s because 1) I’m not at all musical, and 2) I’m lazy and I don’t want to force my kids to practice. Actually, to be completely honest, not only do I loathe the idea of forcing my kids to practice an instrument, there are many instruments I would not want to hear being practiced upon if my kids were to actually practice. Let me start the list with violin and continue to trumpet. You can add your own fingernails-on-chalkboard instruments if you’d like.
This is just one of those things about myself I’ve accepted without guilt or remorse. Besides, my middle two guys are not about performing. That’s just the truth, especially the third one. His favorite thing to do with the limelight is hide from it (except, now, it turns out, if the limelight can be a vehicle to showcase yo-yo skills).
❥ Anyway, there are great resources for kids and music, though, in these parts…
Let’s go back to Fisher Price amusement parks with Weebles that don’t fall down, to plastic farms where a cow moos when you open the barn door and to kick ball out in the middle of the road using the cracks in the street as bases.
“Ok daddy. Let’s go in my tent and you get to kill me.” These were the words uttered by my VERY sheltered three-year-old daughter just last night. I was shocked. Daddy was shocked. He immediately responded, “I will play with you Ila, but I won’t ever play ‘killing’. That just isn’t a nice thing to play.” To distract her, he pretended to see a dragon in the clouds and they went chasing off in that direction determined to introduce themselves. While that seem to be the end of it for Ila, it wasn’t for me. How on Earth did she come up with THAT one?
We take advantage of the bus on weekends sometimes just for fun. With hands off the wheel we can engage more, help more, and communicate without worry of the road. Plus, ask any young child if they’d like to ride the bus and to them it’s an adventure! (Photo credit: Angie Gregory)
My nine year old rides the public transit bus to school, with no adult chaperone. Just with some classmates, typically some war vets, and sometimes a doughnut in hand, this is how she experiences the responsibility of being on time. As well as the reward of it: the once a week ‘doughnut day’ is our incentive for getting out of the house on time (or early rather). It helps the kids move through the morning routine without too much derailing. Sure, there might be some bribing (read incentivizing) going on here, but there’s a lot more to our story.
We made the choice to send our child to a charter school. We garden and grow some of the food we eat, and think a lot about where the rest of our food comes from and what’s in it. We’re in the mindset of being purposeful with our decisions. We think a lot about giving our kids the most ‘optimal’ environment to thrive. It’s our natural inclination as parents. We all have this drive, right? As parents we’ve thought that riding the city bus can provide valuable real world experiences.
But isn’t there some stigma around public transit? We’ve all absorbed the less than stellar conversations between some public transit riders. And now my daughter is among these regulars. She’s been riding this bus route since she was a kindergartener. Didn’t a mom in NYC receive backlash because she sent her similarly aged child onto the subway to commute on his own? Am I in neglect, or putting my child in danger?
I’ve been inspired by my daughter’s un-phased character. She’s not greasing profanities or languishing in any noticeable way. In fact she’s building friendships on the bus, learning about how to get around, recognizing other buses around town (kind of like the car complex we experience when we own a Subaru and we start seeing them everywhere), feeling empowered, and being rewarded with responsibility.
We take advantage of the bus on weekends sometimes just for fun. With hands off the wheel we can engage more, help more, and communicate without worry of the road. Plus, ask any young child if they’d like to ride the bus and to them it’s an adventure. The bus money is a novelty, the driver a chuffer, the steps like floors of a building, the freedom to choose your own seat, big windows….no seatbelts!
We don’t necessarily live right on the bus line. You don’t need to even live in a city in order to ride. We have to get to the stop by car most mornings. However, spring has brought out our bikes again and yesterday we enjoyed a side-by-side ride into town to catch the bus. First her bus arrives, and then mine right after. Life isn’t without coordination and planning and now that these rhythms have become habit we’ve worked through the humps of ‘I have to walk too far after the bus drops us off’ or ‘There was a man on the bus sitting near me that smelled like peppers. And then another man got on the bus, and he smelled like peppers.’
I can’t guarantee there won’t be some kind of altercation or disturbance, but it’s not like the bus is without boundaries. There are other eyes, ears, and helpers (community) on the bus to diffuse and report. That’s the trust I have in us as people and the effort I place in my own heart to do the same. Oh, and did I happen to mention the 45 minutes of driving time it saves us in the mornings…equating to rewards on gas, money, and inevitably our natural resources.
It might not seem like much, but this extra effort to be resourceful has enriched our lives in other unforeseen ways. When we participate in our community we’re building familiarity, safety, and ownership where they didn’t exist before, and raising kids to be engaged in the place they live.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Angie Gregory settled in the Western MA 6 years ago after many years of traveling the country. She lives in Northampton, MA with her husband and three kids and is an avid gardener and studies herbal medicine. She has worked in the community fostering projects like Grow Food Northampton and started Mother Herb Diaper Service out of her home after the birth of her second child. Her business is now a cooperative venture and has relocated to Holyoke, MA under the name of Simple Diaper & Linen.
Have you ever wondered why the words to some songs get stuck in your head? In this episode of Under the Hat, Mister G reveals one of his big secrets; songwriters love to use rhymes.
Using examples from his songs “Pizza for Breakfast” and “Colores,” Mister G explains how good rhymes fit together like puzzle pieces to create catchy, memorable rhythms. We learn how songwriters search for the perfect rhymes to help to tell the story of the song.
As always, Mister G encourages kids to write their own songs whether they choose to use rhyming words or not. Featuring a cameo from Silas the Cat.
Next time in Under the Hat: Mixing it up in the studio. It’s a late night session, so you may have to stay up past bedtime for this episode as Mister G takes us into his studio where he’s recording a new CD. You’ll never listen to music the same way after you learn how songs are recorded and mixed.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mister G (Ben Gundersheimer) is an Amherst College graduate who spent 20 years as a singer/songwriter/producer in the adult music world prior to earning a Masters in Elementary Education at Smith College and transitioning to making music for children.His most recent release, CHOCOLALALA, a collection of original, bilingual (Spanish/English) songs for children, won a Parents’ Choice Gold Award and is on the Grammy ballot for Best Children’s Album of 2012. A leading figure in the kids music world, Mister G’s 2011 bilingual release, BUGS garnered numerous national awards and was dubbed “irresistible” by People magazine. www.mistergsongs.com
Even though for many weeks the thermometer refused to creep up, and many of us (me!) were walking around hunched into jackets we had come to hate, Spring calmly went about its business: the vernal witch-hazel unfurled its yellow tatters in the March wind, maples were open for sap business, red-wing blackbirds buzzed in the marshes, and finally—in what has to be my favorite part of the season—the Spring peepers shook off their long, cold slumber and announced themselves. Hello, peepers! Hello Spring!
To celebrate, here’s a small poem that’s easy for even younger kids to learn. It speaks to that waiting we were all doing, and that moment when the wheel finally turns and all of a sudden, Spring is standing on our doorstep, acting like we were the ones dragging our feet. Plus, it has a good amount of silliness at the end that feels just righting for blowing away those cold March winds.
The winds of March were sleeping.
I hardly felt a thing.
The trees were standing quietly.
It didn’t seem like spring.
Then suddenly the winds awoke
They raced across the sky.
They bumped right into April,
Splashing springtime in my eye.
This is a great one for saying out loud. Say it while you’re kids are on the swings, making sure you catch them or they jump at that last line, or make it into a hand-clapping game—with all the rhymes and its regular beats, it’s a natural.
I found this poem in a collection called, The Sky Is Full of Song. It’s a little book of seasonal poems selected by Lee Bennett Hopkins with lovely woodcut illustrations by Dirk Zimmer. Poets included range from Lucille Clifton to Richard Brautigan, and it’s a good way to introduce kids ages 4-8 or so to a wide range of poets and styles. Sadly, it’s now out of print, but used copies are available. If you can find one, snatch it up!
Amy’s the mother of two children who seem to enjoy poetry, for which she’s extremely grateful. Her first book, How I Got Lost So Close To Home, was published by Alice James Books and poems have appeared in a variety of anthologies and journals. She’s a former Associate at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center at Mt. Holyoke College, where she looked at the impact of motherhood on the work of women poets. In addition to her life as a poet, Dryansky works for a land trust, teaches in at Hampshire College, leads workshops in the community and writes about what it’s like to navigate the territory of mother/poet/worker at her blog, Pokey Mama. Her second book, Grass Whistle, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry in 2013.
I’m not an expert on writing skills, but I often find myself working with children who have difficulty getting ideas on paper. I start by reviewing the variety of skills and processes involved in writing. First, a writer must gather ideas, take notes from readings, and make choices about which ideas are important enough to include in the writing. Then they need to organize these ideas into a hierarchy of main ideas and details. Next, each main idea must be formulated into a topic sentence. The details also need to be written as sentences within the same paragraph to support the topic sentence. In order to make choices on how to formulate sentences, the writer needs to be aware of who their audience is and how best to communicate to that audience.
An essay should include an introduction, a body of supporting paragraphs, and a conclusion. So the writer needs to understand what these elements are and what is expected to be included for each of them. How much to explain to the reader (not too much or too little), is also important to consider. And then they need to connect one idea to another idea, or one paragraph to another paragraph, so that the ideas flow. After all that, there’s editing for punctuation, spelling, and clarity of ideas. It’s easy to see that writing is an exercise in multi-tasking. And, of course, many of us are not very good at multi-tasking!
If a child is having trouble getting ideas on paper, it could be because of a breakdown in any of these steps and processes. Often several processes are a problem. I first try to see what is easy for them and what is hard. To figure this out, I always try to help them separate these tasks into discrete steps. In this way, I can discover where the writing process breaks down. For some students, this helps immediately. If students attend to one process at a time, it really simplifies things! Lots of students try to edit while they write, and may get so lost thinking about spelling, that they lose their ideas. I try to discourage multi-tasking. I use checklists, visual organizers, and programs and apps that encourage brainstorming their ideas. This is the creative part of writing!
One program I’ve used for years (now an iPad app) is Inspiration Maps by Inspiration Software, Inc. It helps kids brainstorm ideas first as a visual map, then lets them organize their ideas into a hierarchy of main-idea bubbles and supporting-idea bubbles (by the connection arrows). I always check if they have an introduction bubble and a conclusion bubble. After the map is complete, with a press of a button, it changes into an outline. From the outline, it is easy to see the topics for paragraphs and the supporting details for each topic. You can tweak the order of the outline if you need to. Now to expand the outline into sentences! And voilà! An essay!
Most kids just want to get the assignment done. They need to be taught that writing involves drafts and revisions; it’s usually not a one shot deal. The sooner they understand this, the better. I tell them that the authors never get their book published after only one draft. Good writers need editors to suggest improvements. Eventually, a writer internalizes good editing skills and can read their work aloud to edit it, but it never hurts to find another pair of eyes after they’ve done their own revisions. I often ask students to read their work aloud so they get used to editing their own work. Then they can ask someone to edit.
Some kids can get lost in the minutiae of the editing. That’s why I don’t let them derail into editing till the bitter end. For these kids, it’s essential to separate each process. If they get lost, I ask them general questions such as, “Would a reader understand the writing?”‘ If so, then they are probably done with the draft. If the child repeatedly erases their writing, I may limit the number of times they can erase in order to move the process forward.
I recently found two great apps that teach kids all of this as sequential pre-writing lessons. They teach writing vocabulary and include many quizzes, word puzzles, flash cards, and graphic organizers. Most of all, they show that writing is complex, and that we need all the help we can get to become good writers. Check them out!
I think they are set up to be used as lessons in the classroom. So let your kid’s teachers know about these apps and those Hilltown Families’ events you’ve gone to, in case they want to use this for teaching writing!
Kathy is a private practice speech-language pathologist living in Shelburne, MA and the author of our monthly speech and language column, Time to Talk. Living in Western Massachusetts since 1970, she raised two children here and has two grandsons, ages 15 and 8 years old. She has worked as an SLP with people of all ages for the last 14 years. She runs social thinking skill groups and often works with teens. As a professional artist, she has a unique and creative approach to her practice. She loves technology, neurology, gardening, orchids, and photography. She uses an iPad for therapies. She grows 500 orchids and moderates her own forum for orchid growers (Crazy Orchid Lady). Kathy is dedicated to the families of her private practice, and offers practical, creative ideas to parents. She blogs about communication at kathypuckett.com
Vernal pools contain creatures (amphibians and bugs) that can only breed where there are no hungry fish. Citizen scientists are needed to find and report vernal pools in the Hilltowns. (Photo credit: Sienna Wildfield)
How do spring peepers know when to start singing?
They don’t have weather reports, or the ability to see the buds forming on trees, the snow melting, or teens walking around in shorts and T’s when it’s 40 degrees and climbing.
Certainly, there are scientific reasons that explain how peepers know when to announce the return of the sun and the warmth; but there’s a simpler reason that is worth considering and appreciating. The peepers feel the right moment to sing.
Peepers are a special family of frogs, and frogs have a unique physiology—a evapotranspirative skin that makes them especially sensitive to the slightest changes in temperature, humidity, chemistry and other things we don’t have words for including that feeling that we also get when spring arrives. There is, for example, a new kind of sunlight that appears out of the grey, slush and slog of the late winter months that Emily Dickinson noticed, and maybe you and the peepers notice too.
This summer we are taking a break from the usual planting and growing of beans, pumpkins, squash and salad greens. This year we’re making plans to grow a Popcorn House! (Photo credit: Carrie St. John)
Snow pants, boots and mittens be gone! It’s time for sunny afternoons and mud pies after a spring rain. Outdoor clean up. Digging. Rakes. Water. Hoses. Sticks. Rocks. Shovels. Mud. Now that the younger ones are completely engrossed in dirt play, encourage the older kids to put down their devices and join you for fresh air and sunshine. Their play job this month is to help you design and plant a sunflower house.
The Story of the Sunflower House
Wondering what a sunflower house is? Here is an excerpt from Inspiration from the Garden: Sunflower Houses, a Book for Children and Their Grown-ups by Sharon Lovejoy that shares the story:
In early summer, my mother would wake us up with ‘Get up you sleepyheads, today’s the day!’ and we would get out of bed and pull on our clothes. We didn’t even want to eat breakfast, but she would make us sit down and take our time. It all served to heighten the excitement. We couldn’t wait to get outside. Chores done, watering can and stick in tow, we would head outside and take time choosing the best, flattest, sunniest spot in our garden. Then the work would begin. Mother would use the stick to trace out a large rectangle, usually about 6 by 9 feet, leaving a small opening for a doorway. She would drag the stick along the ground and gouge out a trench a couple of inches deep. My little sister and brother would trail behind and drop in seeds. John would drop in a big, fat sunflower seed; daintily, my sister would tuck in a ‘Heavenly Blue’ morning glory seed. I would trudge along behind them lugging the huge tin watering can. I’d use my foot to knock the earth back over the seeds and then I’d give them a small drink of water. Every day one of us would have the chore of walking that rectangle of land and giving a drink of water to the sleeping seeds. We all hoped to be the one to discover the first awakening green heads that poked through the soil. Once the green of the sunflowers peeked through the earth, we became even more interested in our growing playhouse. Usually, we would each water the plot once a day. Soon flowers were climbing skyward and the ‘Heavenly Blue’ morning glories were wrapping their tendrils around the stalk and heading upward too. I’ll tell you there was nothing like crawling through the door of that playhouse and lying on the ground looking up through the incredible lacework of vines and flowers. I guess you could say I spent the best days of my childhood playing, dreaming and sleeping in that little shelter.
The Story of the Popcorn House
My daughter and I planned a slightly different version for our garden—a Popcorn House. Japanese Hulless Popcorn. This year we are taking a break from the usual beans, pie pumpkins, summer squash and salad greens. We have loofah seedlings, hibiscus tea sprouts, wine cap mushroom spawn in our fridge and various flower seeds waiting for warmer days. So why not plant our own popcorn? We saved a space 10 by 20 feet for the Popcorn House.
The entrance will be slightly hidden by a verbena and sunflower border. Verbena has gorgeous, delicate purple flowers with brilliant, green stems and attracts many varieties of butterflies. A mix of ornamental sunflowers (sun samba), giant sunflowers (sunzilla) and a summer mix of bright yellow, red and orange sunflowers will help create the outer wall with the rows of popcorn.
My daughter requested a secret space in the center where she can dig, collect outdoor things and have tree stump seats. Her inner space will also have a carpet of fresh straw to keep the weeds down. The process involves a lot of patience waiting for everything to grow. Hopefully the excitement of warmer weather, planting and planning will help with the waiting for warm summer days playing in the popcorn house while mom weeds and waters the veggies.
Carrie was born, raised and attended university in Michigan. As a child she rode bikes and explored her rural neighborhood freely with siblings and neighbor kids. Mom and Dad never worried. The kids always made it home after hours wading in the creek and climbing trees in the woods. After college she moved to Kyoto, Japan to study traditional Japanese woodblock printing. In 1995, she began a career at a small Chicago firm designing maps and information graphics. Life brought a move to Northampton in 2001. Carrie completed her MFA at UMass in 2004. Her little love, Sophia, was born in 2005. The two live in downtown Northampton where they constantly make things, look forward to morning walks to school and plan each spring for additions to their plot at the community garden. Carrie continues to do freelance work for clients here and in Chicago.
“There is no way to be a perfect mother, but a million ways to be a good one.” This quote by Jill Churchill has followed me around lately. I have seen it on TV, in print, on Pinterest, posted on Facebook and on Twitter. It has shown up so often lately that I get the distinct feeling that it is speaking right to me and until I relent and agree, it will continue to haunt my senses perhaps even show up say on the back of the box of my favorite cereal (All right, I know I am being dramatic.).
I was raised in a family where perfection was the way you were noticed, the way you felt loved, and therefore I have had my share of trouble personally learning that life is all about imperfection. Like those who raised me, I expected faultlessness in those I loved, in myself, in my friends, in the way my life looked to those on the outside. I expected any endeavor perfectly landed like a gymnast sticking a dismount off the beam. Anything that was not perfection was a sign of abject failure either by another, or by me and both were chastised as such. As you already have figured out, I am my biggest critic and enemy, but my tendency to control those around me so that my idea of “perfection” came true was an even greater foe.
It is the combination of this realization thanks to my friend, Hindsight, and the fact that realizing it doesn’t always convert to total transformation instantaneously, that has made it so that I have felt in many ways like a failure, “muy imperfecto” at my first go round at parenting. Whenever life’s imperfections took a hold of my two sons, my first thought was how could I have prevented this, or what did I do wrong while raising them (How very egocentric of me huh?)?
And while Hindsight has helped me to understand that there is a multitude of factors that go into the molding and shaping of any human being, I still find myself struggling with the idea of “what is right” for my daughter, Ila and “what would be wrong” for her, hence the irritation with Jill’s perky “million ways” quote. Really, Jill? Are there REALLY a million ways to be a good mom? ‘Cause from where I stand there are a million ways to screw it up.
The thing about this whole enlightenment by Hindsight is that although Hindsight tells me what not to do based on decisions made during two decades of parenting, knowing what NOT to do but not what TO do often leaves me feeling like a compass with no needle. No North Star. No tether rope to keep me on the mountain. No flashlight on the way to the campground latrine (Do you get me?). Perhaps one more…. No teeth on my saw… (Okay, I am done. Promise).
My point is that what I did as a parent for years and years and years is really all I knew, I guess just like all other parents. My parenting was modeled after the parenting that I received, and even though I vowed NEVER to be like “them,” those patterns, their ideals that only perfection was worthy of love still showed up and I wasn’t even aware of it. And although that type of parenting wasn’t optimum in anyway shape or form, I at least felt (erroneously) that I knew “what a perfect mom would do.” I do know now that some of the parenting that I choose to use was not even remotely near perfect, but I was buoyed by the “idea” that I knew what I was doing.
Now, without those mistaken ideas of what a “perfect parent” would do, I find myself searching, forever searching for what is right, what is wrong, what would be perfect in this situation or that? And I want that to stop. I want to believe Jill in that there isn’t just one perfect way but MILLIONS of ways to be a good mother. My beloved Dr. Speed Dial is forever reminding me that I won’t always know what is best, worst, perfect or not perfect for my child. She tells me that if a decision is made by a mom who puts the child’s needs front and center, then that is one way moms like us can be good ones. Yup, that’s one way, but according to Jill there are at least 999,999 other ways, and it got me thinking. I can’t be the only one who struggles with this image of being a good and perfect mom. I think that is the whole reason that Jill’s quote keeps showing up. We need to reassure ourselves that although perfection is not an option, we can still do a good job. We can strive to do our best for our children. We can still be a good mother. So, if there truly are a million ways to do that, I’d LOVE to hear from you about what you think should be added to the “good mothering” list. After all, there are 999,999 reasons to go.
Logan has lived in Glens Falls, NY all her life. By day, she is an educator with 20 years experience, a mom to Aidan and Gannan, her two teenage boys, a new mommy to a beautiful daughter, Ila, and wife to the love of her life, Jeffrey. By night, weekends and any spare time she can find, Logan writes. She loves memoir and also adores writing essays about the challenges of parenthood. This year she started a parenting blog called A Muddled Mother, an honest place where mothers aren’t afraid to speak of the complications and difficulties that we all inevitably experience. Logan has been published in various children’s and parenting magazines including Today’s Motherhood, Eye on Education, Faces, and Appleseed. Logan’s previous column for Hilltown Families, Snakes and Snails: Teenage Boys Talesran bi-monthly from June 2010-Feb. 2011, sharing stories of her first time around as a parent of two teenage boys. — Check out Hindsight Parenting: Raising Kids the Second Time Around every first and third Tuesday of the month.
Now that spring seems finally to be here, my thoughts have turned to summer. Summer camp, that is.
This is difficult time of year for us. My daughter, Noelle, was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when she was 4 1/2, about the time parents start thinking about organized summer activities for their children. The first summer, before she entered kindergarten, wasn’t too bad. We allowed her to go to half-day camps at her nearby preschool for a couple weeks and not much else, and that worked out okay.
Last summer, the summer between kindergarten and first grade, was much more difficult. She kept hearing of all the cool camps out there for kids, plus I had begun working for the Girl Scouts, and camp is a big thing for the Girl Scouts. Luckily we were able to enroll her in two half-day camps at her karate studio and a half-day camp at her dance studio, she participated in a children’s theater production for one week and the creme de la creme: one week of full-day Girl Scout camp that she was allowed to attend because I was allowed to work there for the week. Between that and season passes to Six Flags, she kept pretty busy.
Why is this so hard, you might be wondering. Like everything else with diabetes, camp presents huge challenges. While many camps have nurses on staff, some do not. Summer camps are more likely to have looser schedules than school. And many camps rely on teenage and college-aged supervision.
Without a nurse, how is Noelle going to make sure her blood sugar is regulated, her pump site remains intact through swimming and sweating and whatnot? She’s only 7; she still needs adult assistance on all of that. With a looser schedule, how is she going to make sure that she eats when she needs to, that she has access to sugar if she needs it? With young adult supervision, how are they going to recognize the signs of a diabetes-related problem? That’s a lot of pressure to put on a young adult.
So we’ve resigned ourselves, for now, to allow Noelle only to go to part-day camps that do not involve lunch, that are close by and that are supervised by adults. (And, of course, we equip her with a cell phone, which I wrote about in this column last summer to many comments from readers!)
This does not make Noelle happy.
We rejected the pottery camp Noelle want to go to, because it is a 45-minute drive away and includes lunch and swimming – at a facility with no nurse, no less. And we had to reject Girl Scout camp, even though she loved it last summer and many of her friends are going this year, making it even harder on her. But after a lot of soul-searching, conversations with family and the camp director, my husband and decided that because this year I can’t work from camp like last year, Noelle will not be able to go. It broke my heart to tell her of the decision, and it broke my heart again to hear her tell the camp director herself last week that “I can’t go because of my diabetes.” I hate hearing her say that, but the truth of the matter is, I can’t send her away for nine hours a day to a facility an hour’s drive away where, as caring as the staff may be, they are just not equipped to handle the gravity of her medical situation. That kind of experience is going to have to wait until Noelle is older and can take care of her diabetes more independently.
It truly does stink. But I handle her care 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and even I miss the signs sometimes. Last week Noelle had a very bad sugar low that I did not recognize. I even thought she was just being difficult because I had just told her it was time to leave her grandmother’s house. She wasn’t “just being difficult”; her blood glucose was 44. (Normal blood glucose, as I may have mentioned before, is between 80 and 100; anything much lower than 40 can cause seizures and blackouts – and death.)
How can I place that burden on someone else, especially young adults or even older adults who are essentially strangers who are in charge of a large group of children? Someday I am going to have to place that burden on Noelle herself. That’s frightening enough.
But as with other times, Noelle’s spirit continues to amaze me. After telling the camp director that she can’t go to Girl Scout camp this summer, she immediately jumped into the activity she was doing, with a big smile on her face, even as I stood wanting to cry.
I have no doubt we will find fun things for her to do this summer, and we will focus on what she can do, not what she can’t do. We will get by.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rebecca Dravis
Pittsfield native Rebecca Dravis is a former journalist who lives in north Berkshire County with her husband and daughter in Williamstown, MA. In Just My Type Rebecca shares her experiences as a parent raising a child with type one diabetes. – Check out Just My Type on the third Monday of every month.
Red Gate Farm is located in Buckland, MA, and provides opportunities for school groups to visit and engage in the daily life of a working farm. School groups can visit for three days, during which they take care of the farm animals, buildings and people. There is more information available at www.redgatefarm.org. (Photo credit: Sienna Wildfield)
There is no better place to learn than your neighborhood farm and no better time than the spring and summer!
Whether you are looking for a place to go with your family on the weekend, your home-schooling group during the weekdays, or a summer camp for your kids, the following list of farm based learning opportunities are great places to check out. Many of them even have programs just for adults! No need for the kids to have all of the fun.
Winterberry Farm in Leverett, MA, is a small, family teaching farm. They have farm and fiber programs throughout the year. One of their most interesting programs is Sheep Week for kids during April vacation week. Each child is assigned a ewe and her lambs to care for during the week. The kids weigh, feed, and get to participate in all aspects of the care of their own sheep family. They even get to watch the video of their home-birth! There are also courses for adults. There are private fiber and soap making classes, as well as custom made workshops for scout groups or homeschool groups. They host camps on vacation weeks as well as Summer Camp. Learn more at www.winterberryfarm.org.
Berkshire Botanical Gardens in Stockbridge, MA offers programs for both children and adults. They run a Farm in the Garden Camp, which is a full-day summer camp for children ages 5 to 10. For adults, the choices are impressive. They offer courses on fruit production, growing with perennials, and building dry stone walls, among other things. You can learn more at berkshirebotanical.org.
Crimson and Clover Farm in Florence, MA hosts courses and summer camps through the Farm Education Collaborative. There are home-school programs, parent child gardening programs, an after school farm club and workshops for adults. There is more information available at www.thefarmeducationcollaborative.org.
Farm School in Athol, MA helps people connect with the land. Visiting schools can spend three days fully immersed in the work and life of the farm. Adults who want to learn about animal husbandry, vegetable production and homesteading skills can participate in the Practical Farm Training Program. There is even a one-room school house for middle school students. It offer a rigorous education in a joyful, beautiful setting. You can learn more about their programs at www.farmschool.org.
Farm and Garden Camp in Amherst, MA is a program through the Farm Education Collaborative based at Hampshire College that has an intentional focus on growing and harvesting the food we eat and fibers we use. It offers weekly summer day camp programs to young people from 4-14 years old during the months of July and August. Learn more about the program at www.farmandgardencamp.org.
Hartsbrook School in Hadley, MA offers a Waldorf inspired camp during vacation weeks and Farm Camp during the summer. Children ages 4-15 enjoy caring for a variety of farm animals, participating in agricultural crafts and preparing their harvests in the kitchen.You can learn about it at www.hartsbrook.org.
Open View Farm in Conway, MA was founded in 2005 with the goal of creating a welcoming environment in which people of all ages and backgrounds could connect with nature. They have events throughout the year, including sheep shearing, work projects, and social gatherings. Open View has created an especially welcoming farm for the families of people in the LGBQT families. They have a program called CampOUT which is for children from LGBQT families to get to experience farm life and companionship. Open View farm also offers fellowships for private and public school teachers who need a retreat to create curriculum that supports Peace and Justice or Sustainable and Responsible living. You can learn more about Open View Farm at www.openviewfarm.org.
The soil is warming up for you and your children. Go and make something grow.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Theresa Heary-Selah — Theresa is a teacher and a freelance writer, making her home in Greenfield, MA and Wright, NY with her family. She teaches at S.H.I.N.E. (Students at Home in New England), a social and academic support program for middle school students in the Pioneer Valley, and writes about home-schooling and technology. Theresa’s interests include home-schooling, gardening, cooking, hiking, and dancing.
I am not the only person to be sad about Northampton’s Mountain Goat closing.
Like so many parents in the Valley, I can’t count the number of pairs of Merrell shoes I bought for my children there nor how many pairs of winter-grade mittens. The Mountain Goat sealed my love for Patagonia’s warm winter jackets and Smartwool socks. That’s to say I realized New England is no joke if you walk every day or ski or want your kids to enjoy recess. And when I realized that the Goat helped me to accommodate the actual weather in ways that made the outdoors more easily accessible.
Because this is a mash note, I’ll add that I appreciated the warm service and the innate smiles of everyone who worked there (in my experience, friendliness abounded) as much as the fact that when something essential—those mittens, oh those many, many mittens—I could dash in and find the necessary replacement.
It’s so much work for small businesses to stay in business. When you live in an area comprised of small towns, you realize that each business that sells necessities counts a little extra. Sometimes, you wish you didn’t have to pay a premium for that. Like the Joni Mitchell line, “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone,” though, you realize that premium was worth it all along for your lost mitten replacement needs or your chance to try things on or the good advice you get along with the shoe purchase about a hike or bike ride or ski trail. Whenever the punch card filled up and you got that bonus infusion of product, you felt the mini thrill of good luck earned and justified all that little bit more you spent as counterbalanced (the more you spend the more you save).
❥ Rather than dwell in melancholy, though, I want to thank the Goat folks for dependability and good cheer and to remind myself (and you, reader) how much Main Street matters in a community comprised of small towns.
Sarah is a writer, who lives in Northampton with her husband and four children. She contributes to Preview Massachusetts Magazine, as well as other publications and writes a parenting blog Standing in the Shadows at the Valley Advocate. She moved to the Valley to attend Hampshire College—and found the Valley such a nice place, she stayed!
I wake up in the morning thinking of the billowing steam from maple sap boiling. I love going to sugar houses to see the dramatic plumes of steam rising, to smell the sweet maple aroma, to taste the first of the season’s delicate, delicious syrup…to experience the promise of spring again. My seasonal rhythms are tied to sugarin’; it marks the final gasps of winter and the arrival of daffodils and forsythia and fruit tree blossoms and spring greens and warmth and sunshine.
But this year winter isn’t quite letting go. So when I think of what’s for supper, my desires still lean toward hearty, winter foods. Tonight we’ll have Mushroom Barley Soup. We still have some oyster mushrooms from the grow-your-own kit that we got at the Creamery! I’ll bake a loaf of rye bread, roast some delicata squash, and cook some of our frozen shell beans with our garlic and fresh rosemary from our indoor plant. Amy will make a salad from just-picked fresh and crisp mixed greens from a friend’s hoop house (thanks, Penny!), with the last of our stored carrots and Jerusalem artichokes and red cabbage, and we’ll be reminded that we’ll soon be eating more and more nourishing local foods.
Alice has been co-owner of The Old Creamery since 2000. She and her partner and spouse, Amy, have lived in Cummington since they built their home in 1986. Alice and Amy are very deeply connected to their land; they grow a lot of their own food, eat well (especially during the growing season), feed many friends and loved ones and preserve as much food as possible. Rarely a day goes by that they don’t say “Aren’t we blessed to live here?” Feeding people feels like a calling to Alice. She was brought up with her Italian Gram and her Dad putting something wonderful to eat in her mouth and saying “Here, eat this.” Nothing brings her greater joy than feeding people that she cares about or people that are in need of kindness and nurturing.
I once had a teen client who had the most amazing ideas and insights. He was one of those kids who really cared about people and thought about things deeply. I always considered it a gift to work with him. So why did he need speech and language services? Unfortunately, he had a very small repertoire of vocabulary words and he couldn’t access the very reading material that he would have loved to think about. What we did in each session was read poetry together. He had to identify and ask for definitions of the words he didn’t know, look them up, and tell me what the poem meant. For most kids, the meaning of a poem would be the most difficult, but this young man immediately understood the significance of the poem once he understood the words that blocked him from the ideas. My goal was to get him to a point of independence where he routinely looked up the words he didn’t know. I’m not sure if he is doing that in his adult life, but I do know that he owns that poetry book, a present from his mother, which he treasured and carried in his backpack throughout his senior year. He also took a poetry class and started to write poems that year.
Now that I have an iPad, I wish I could go back and show him how to integrate several apps. There’s a poetry app called Poetry by the Poetry Foundation, there’s a Dictionary.com app for definitions, and there’s an app for creating vocabulary flash cards for extra repetition and practice called Quizard by GabySoft. This flashcard program not only allows you to make your own flashcards but also includes lots of shared vocabulary lists for different ages, including Dolch lists, Latin roots and prefixes, and standardized tests such as Advanced Placement tests, College Admissions tests, and Drivers Tests.
Maybe we should start way back in Pre-K and kindergarten. Kids need to learn vocabulary for time (days, minutes, hours, morning, night, today, yesterday, tomorrow), weather words, animal names, vehicles, clothing, food, colors, days of the week, counting and numbers, the alphabet, verbs, etc. There are apps for all of these categories if you search the App Store. I believe I mentioned in a past article that it’s a good idea to make labels for objects in the house even before kids are readers. Kids learn vocabulary first through routines and personal experiences. Exposure is the key. One of my favorite kindergarten teachers believes in teaching kids advanced vocabulary and concepts during her reading lessons. All the kids of her class can answer the question, “What is the recurring motif in this Eric Carle book?”
Back to learning through family routines. I remember how that idea gelled for me when my toddler grandson saw a bird fly into one of our rosebushes to its nest and I told him the bird was going to sit on eggs in its nest. The next time he came over, he pulled my arm and said, “Nest, grandma.” Or the time I was playing cards with my grandson and he delighted me by repeated an expression I’d been using , ”I’m on a roll, grandma!” So next time you’re at an event you found out about here on Hilltown Families, be conscious of teaching vocabulary when you explain things to your children. You’ll be enriching their vocabulary skills while you have fun!
Kathy is a private practice speech-language pathologist living in Shelburne, MA and the author of our monthly speech and language column, Time to Talk. Living in Western Massachusetts since 1970, she raised two children here and has two grandsons, ages 15 and 8 years old. She has worked as an SLP with people of all ages for the last 14 years. She runs social thinking skill groups and often works with teens. As a professional artist, she has a unique and creative approach to her practice. She loves technology, neurology, gardening, orchids, and photography. She uses an iPad for therapies. She grows 500 orchids and moderates her own forum for orchid growers (Crazy Orchid Lady). Kathy is dedicated to the families of her private practice, and offers practical, creative ideas to parents. She blogs about communication at kathypuckett.com
Spring has a leap of the leprechaun in it; who can deny that?—but spring’s called spring not because of its leapiness. Spring’s called spring because of the upwelling waters that appear as the frozen earth thaws.
Right now is the best time to hunt for springs. We had a great ice winter, a record snow and some flood-causing rains, so the conditions are approaching perfect for finding the little springs that make Spring spring.
Why would parent and child hunt springs? Well—we’re pasty from sitting indoors for five months and, no matter the age, cobwebbed and crotchety. A good hard bushwack, a mucky hill scramble is therapeutic. When the sun pours through the grey tree limbs, you can almost feel them swell like you swell, soaking the glow, craning for warmth, more heat, more nourishing radiation.
The trick to hunting springs is: you can only hunt springs that you don’t yet know about. If you know about them, it not possible to hunt them.
So, you have to enter a place, a terrain, a topography that is a mystery, and that draws you to it. It can be your backyard, or a town park, or wherever there isn’t too much pavement to occlude the upwelling waters. The best places are the ones where few things have been constructed—the deep woods, the sides of mountains, the banks of rivers. I suggest, though, that you start by trying to find a spring w/in a five or ten walk from your front door. Read the rest of this entry »
For a few years I was experimenting with effective drawing projects and trying to spread a love and excitement for art with college freshman. I asked each new group of students why they came to art school and why they thought friends stopped drawing and making things. Some had never thought about it. It was just what they did. They assumed others felt the same way whether they majored in art or biology or English. It just happened. Once or twice a semester there would be an 18 year old that honestly sought out art. They lived it. They grew up surrounded by art. They went to museums with their families. They read art theory books. They could not imagine life without it in some way. Those were the challenging ones. I had to be ready for them each class. They were beyond the basics of learning perspective and balance. I had to amaze and inspire them. These few were also the most thoughtful about the path that brought them to art school. They remembered a moment or time from childhood that making things became a part of their everyday. Usually at a young age—by third or fourth grade, adults or peers went out of the way to praise their drawing efforts. The book Drawing With Children also mentions this and goes deeper into the how and why. The children without that encouragement stopped and focused on other pursuits. This saddens me that the childhood love of making can easily disappear without peer approval. I am a true believer that anyone can learn to draw with practice. Not everyone will have a solo show in NYC but you can learn to observe and draw a tree in your yard or love to create just for the sake of creating.
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This month I challenge you to keep the childhood love of drawing alive at your house. Get big paper. Tape it down to that end of the table where the papers of life and random toys usually stack up by the end of the week. Clean those off first. Leave the paper there for at least a week. Put out a box of pencils and markers. Make a mark or two if the kids at your house need a jump start. Draw anything. Paste down a photo of grandma’s head and draw her a new crazy body. Give her a lion’s tail or bunny ears. Watch to see what happens. Eliminate judgements on others’ creations. Don’t go crazy with praise or comparisons. Make drawing something you just do at your house—a part of every day. Hopefully with a tiny bit of effort on your part the kids will make it past the third grade wall where many stop the making.
March Collections
Big sheets of paper (at least 30×40 inches). Check your local art supply for the good quality heavier weights or pick up a roll of kid easel paper.
pencils, crayons, markers, & color pencils.
A big, flat surface to leave work out on, such as a spot on the floor or the dining room table.
The following children’s books by Peter H. Reynolds are some of our favorites. They will bring a new light to your idea of what drawing and painting are about.
Carrie was born, raised and attended university in Michigan. As a child she rode bikes and explored her rural neighborhood freely with siblings and neighbor kids. Mom and Dad never worried. The kids always made it home after hours wading in the creek and climbing trees in the woods. After college she moved to Kyoto, Japan to study traditional Japanese woodblock printing. In 1995, she began a career at a small Chicago firm designing maps and information graphics. Life brought a move to Northampton in 2001. Carrie completed her MFA at UMass in 2004. Her little love, Sophia, was born in 2005. The two live in downtown Northampton where they constantly make things, look forward to morning walks to school and plan each spring for additions to their plot at the community garden. Carrie continues to do freelance work for clients here and in Chicago.
Having a marital spat in the middle of a chain department store is not my idea of fun. Yet there my husband and I were, 7-year-old Noelle in tow, marching through the store, hissing at each other in a not-so-very-nice fashion. – It’s just one more way that diabetes brings out the worst in us.
You see, it wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill dispute. No, this fight was about a fundamental difference of opinion regarding the care of our daughter’s type 1 diabetes.
How can two relatively intelligent people who both love and cherish their daughter be so far apart? It’s truly mind-boggling. When Noelle was first diagnosed in 2010, a friend whose child has autism warned me what issues like that can do to a marriage. He was right. Nothing has been run-of-the-mill since. Read the rest of this entry »
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The exhibit will be on display at the Forbes Library in Northampton for the month of February 2013, and at the City Hall Gallery in Easthampton from Sept 13-Dec 11, 2013. - We're currently booking shows for the Spring/Summer of 2013 and for 2014. Each exhibit is a unique showcase of images that correspond with the season and venue. Contact us to inquire about hosting this fundraising exhibit for Hilltown Families in your town/venue.
I used to hate summer. You heard me. H.A.T.E. While most educators count down the days until the end of the school year, my dread grows the closer the end of June comes. No, no…I have no aversion to heat, (at least not the kind of heat we get here in upstate NY. Now Florida’s heat…blech!). No, no it isn’t that it is because it is skimpy clothes and bathing suit season. Although, never being svelte and swarthy has always made me keep a cover up on at the beach, and really I have never been one for shorts. However my intense dislike for summer really never was about any of that. It was all about the fact that for two and a half months, I’d be in charge of entertaining my children (All right…instead of judging, could I at least get props that I admit fully to feeling that way?)…
, I discovered silent movies from all over the world. I had always watched comedies, but I now located silent movies that were profound with serious content. The acting was subtle, but conveyed such humanity. They were filled with rich communication. After watching them exclusively for months, I watched a contemporary movie and felt disappointed with the stiff bodies and unending dialogue of the actors (blah, blah, blah). What a loss for the world when silent movies were scrapped for “talkies.”
Angie Gregory settled in the Western MA 6 years ago after many years of traveling the country. She lives in Northampton, MA with her husband and three kids and is an avid gardener and studies herbal medicine. She has worked in the community fostering projects like Grow Food Northampton and started Mother Herb Diaper Service out of her home after the birth of her second child. Her business is now a cooperative venture
and has relocated to Holyoke, MA under the name of 
Mister G (Ben Gundersheimer) is an Amherst College graduate who spent 20 years as a singer/songwriter/producer in the adult music world prior to earning a Masters in Elementary Education at Smith College and transitioning to making music for children.
I know, you thought it would never get here.
. It’s a little book of seasonal poems selected by Lee Bennett Hopkins with lovely woodcut illustrations by Dirk Zimmer. Poets included range from Lucille Clifton to Richard Brautigan, and it’s a good way to introduce kids ages 4-8 or so to a wide range of poets and styles. Sadly, it’s now out of print, but used copies are available. If you can find one, snatch it up!
I’m not an expert on writing skills, but I often find myself working with children who have difficulty getting ideas on paper. I start by reviewing the variety of skills and processes involved in writing. First, a writer must gather ideas, take notes from readings, and make choices about which ideas are important enough to include in the writing. Then they need to organize these ideas into a hierarchy of main ideas and details. Next, each main idea must be formulated into a topic sentence. The details also need to be written as sentences within the same paragraph to support the topic sentence. In order to make choices on how to formulate sentences, the writer needs to be aware of who their audience is and how best to communicate to that audience.
by Sharon Lovejoy
by Staci Tornio
Logan Fisher
Rebecca Dravis
I wake up in the morning thinking of the billowing steam from maple sap boiling. I love going to sugar houses to see the dramatic plumes of steam rising, to smell the sweet maple aroma, to taste the first of the season’s delicate, delicious syrup…to experience the promise of spring again. My seasonal rhythms are tied to sugarin’; it marks the final gasps of winter and the arrival of daffodils and forsythia and fruit tree blossoms and spring greens and warmth and sunshine.
Alice Cozzolino
by Mona Brookes
