testing for just add light (so delete, or leave it)

In Santa Fe, New Mexico, there is a chapel. It once belonged to a Catholic girls' school. It was built as a half model of another chapel in France, but after it was being built, they realized a half-sized stairway wouldn't work. Mystery and adventure ensued.

There is much history, physics, artistry and varied purposes in such things.

Toy soldiers were quite the rage in England at one time. That led to kids who knew military tactics as well as some kids know their favorite video games now. That led to lead, though—lead based paints on lead figurines, and there's some biochemistry involved that they didn't know about yet in those days. (Some were tin, and now they're other metals, or plastic.)

Follow those trails, and things you didn't know were even out there will connect to things that are already in your own knowledge and experience. Connections
photo by Sandra Dodd, of a detailed miniature carousel

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If you click the image above, you can see my other photos from my visit to Hollycombe Steam Collection, on their music box day, in 2013. There were collectors of music boxes, and of miniature fair rides.

This is a first run of a trick Vlad Gurdiga has arranged for my site to do—a tool for using folders as slide shows. Vlad's pretty great. For me, the photos loaded quickly on my MacBook, semi-quickly on an iPad, and a subset of them loaded, after a while, on my iPhone.

The first photos are pub lunch in Liphook, animals on the property near the car park, some of Hollycombe's collection of wagons that travelling-fair workers used to live in, and various things inside the park.

Holly is with the Daniels tonight

A couple of hours ago, anyway, they were in the same place.

More photographic proof is here: http://wheelbarrowthings.blogspot.com

James, Julie and Adam are visiting with Janine Davies' family where Holly's staying in Molesley, not too far from where they live. They successfully completed their journey across the west, flew above the Grand Canyon in a helicopter, saw Las Vegas a bit, Yosemite more, and San Francisco quite a bit, spending their last evening at Heather Booth's house in Oakland, eating pizza (Heather came to the last two Albuquerque Always Learning Live events.)

How Unschooling can Fail

Hello, and I hope everyone is safely home from the symposium (or for the European residents, safely on to your next sight-seeing experience; the Daniels are in Arizona).

Amy Childs, an unschooling mom in Pennsylvania, is building a podcast library and I'm in most of her 15-minute presentations. The new one is pretty good! I know the other two voices there, too, so that was fun for me.

http://unschoolingsupport.com/failure/
Amy wrote:

Sometimes people say “Unschooling isn’t working for my child” or they say, “We tried unschooling but it didn’t work.”

I asked Sandra Dodd, Nina Haley and Sue Patterson: When, why and how does unschooling fail?

Listening to some of those other podcasts (listed on the lefthand side) now, you'll hear other people you've recently met, too!

Learning to read (links)

Links for a question from Sunday:


Learning without Reading (advantages of later reading)
http://sandradodd.com/r/hollydodd

Account of four children learning to read, one not until teens (the preemie-of-twins story I told):
http://sandradodd.com/r/carol
That boy grew up to be a Marine, and is back from Afghanistan. When he was a teen, he could ride a bicycle up the back side of the Sandias. He's very athletic.

The Deepest, Best Reason for Learning to Read Themselves
The Deeper Effect of a Child Learning to Read: Confidence
http://sandradodd.com/r/deeper

The Nature of Real Reading
http://sandradodd.com/r/real

Those have other links at the bottom, and the accounts of my own children learning to read are in a couple of places, one from 2002:
http://sandradodd.com/r/sandra
(I guess it WAS Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret because there's a photo of it there. :-) )
and from 2005
http://sandradodd.com/r/threereaders

The video about kid-perceptions of allergies

My favorite is "Salesman." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsRk0TXYXuA
Holly's is "Lunch": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXHt7GHNQ3c

Schedule in brief

Sunday

9am: Morning rangoli
9:30am: Sandra Dodd - Top of the Mountain
10:30am: Jill Parmer and Luke Davidson

1:30pm Julie, James and Adam Daniel
3:00pm Sandra Dodd on good advice, bad advice, and personal knowledge

Dinner break

7:00 Rangoli intro (review for those who missed the night before)
Board games, table games, chit-chat, until 10:00 or so

Monday

9:30 Sandra Dodd on connections and play
10:30 Gather to leave for Sandia Crest trip
1:30 Hema Bharadwaj: My family's experience of unschooling in India and the USA
2:30 Knotwork with Keith Dodd, a handout, some paper to try it out on, while you listen to...
3:30 Sandra, with topics that have come up and could use expansion or clarification—questions to and from the audience, perhaps
Monday night, Knotwork review for those who missed the earlier session or are confused, and board games, table games

Tuesday

9:30 One last rangoli and knotwork review for those who really want it (individual help)
10:00 Panel of speakers willing to sit and answer questions (easy questions, hard questions, maybe personal questions)

11:00 or later, Sandra says something clever if we're all lucky, which will inspire you for a year or some part of a year

(Thank you Scott Tucker!)

The mountains from Corrales

The Sandia Mountains, in the distance, from the cemetery across from the old San Ysidro church in Corrales this afternoon.



Somehow my camera got set to take only small photos. Bummer about the background, but I'm too sleepy to fix it now... it will pass.