A Thomas Jefferson Education

After hearing about it for the second time, I decided to read A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the Twenty-first Century by Oliver Van DeMille. I don't feel like summarizing, but I'll just say that I agree with several of his ideas-- especially that children need to learn "how" to think and that classics and mentors (good teachers) need to be an important part of a child's (and adult's education). I feel inspired to again work through a lot of the "classics" sitting on our bookshelf and to encourage and help my kids to do so too. I don't feel inspired to follow DeMille's ideas to a tee (or assume that all his "phases of learning" or "seven keys of great teaching" are gospel). There's also a bit of a haughty, over-idealistic tone in the book that I didn't like. Overall though, this was a wonderful book with opinions on education that really opened my mind.

American Playgrounds

I've been thinking about buying or building a playground for our backyard. I've heard from many parents who've purchased fancy backyard equipment that their kids enjoy it for a few days and then don't play on it much. So... I decided to read a little bit about playgrounds/playground design/playground history. I found this great blog: http://playgrounddesigns.blogspot.com/ (and got wonderfully distracted from the goal of getting a backyard playground). It has tons of photos and information about playgrounds as well as book recommendations. I recently read one of these books: American Playgrounds: Revitalizing Community Space by Susan G. Solomon. It talks about playgrounds at the turn of the century (big fenced areas with a "play leader" to facilitate games), postwar WWII steel slides/swings/seesaw playgrounds, a creative period of playground design in the 1960s, and the current trend of very "safe" boring equipment. A good chunk at the end of the book talks about several well-done individual playgrounds. This part I didn't read completely and sometimes read out of order. I wanted more photos to more easily visualize the different playground features. All in all a wonderful read though!