Devil's Den Loop

Pictures taken at Devil's Den State Park on the Devil's Den Loop, a 1.5 mile hike.

Heh.

Do You Live in Northwest Arkansas?

Have you been outside lately?

"Unfortunately, most of this is antithetical to the mind-set that now dominates mainstream educational thinking."

To be wise, gifted children need to learn how to make accurate judgments, but many educators want to teach them to be non-judgmental. To be wise, bright children need to be exposed to the best that has come before them, but many educators insist on treating all cultures as equally valuable and avoid discriminating between them. Educators say they want our little darlings to express themselves, but the primary purpose of education should be to give children the tools and the intellectual discipline for expressing themselves as adults.

What I am calling for is a revival of the classical definition of a liberal education, serving its classic purpose: to prepare an elite to do its duty.

Read the rest of it.

It's part of what I was getting at here:

The heart of relativism is a void of tyrannical ignorance. What is worth knowing if everything is, at heart, the same? Liberty is tyranny. Freedom is statism. We throw our greatest minds into that abyss.

Poetry for Kids

My older son, same as any child I've ever met, likes to learn songs. So we learn songs. And if your kid is into learning songs, why not poetry?

We have a few poetry anthologies for children. I've combed through these and written down one poem on each weekly view in my planner. Each week, I say the poem lots of times, and if my son likes it, he starts saying it too. Having the poems written down in the planner keeps them convenient and makes it more likely that I will actually remember to share them.

I also stay flexible about it. If the poem in the planner doesn't catch, but some other poem we read in a book that week does, then I switch over to the catching one.

Here are a few of my son's favorites:

People from Skipping Village by Lois Lenski (excerpt)

Tall people,
short people,
Thin people, fat;
Lady so dainty
wearing a hat.
Straight people,
dumpy people,
Man dressed in brown,
Baby in a buggy-
These make a town.

Rain by Robert Louis Stevenson

The rain is raining all around,
It falls on field and tree,
It rains on the umbrellas here,
And on the ships at sea.

(You will find the first line of "Rain" written differently in different anthologies. Some use the word "raining" while others use "falling." After some quick research, I believe that "raining" is correct.)

The Tiger by William Blake (excerpt)

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Because my son likes to read, I like to print these out, one poem to a page. My son always thinks it's very neat to read something he's often heard said. Put the pages in protectors, gather them into a binder, and your child has his very own poetry anthology. Hopefully I'll get around to doing that myself this weekend.