An experienced therapist offers groundbreaking and compassionate techniques for helping chronically inflexible children, who suffer from excessively immoderate tempers, showing how brain-based deficits contribute to these problems and offering positive and constructive ways to calm things down.

    As teacher and writer Jessica Lahey explains, even though these parents see themselves as being highly responsive to their children’s well-being, they aren’t giving them the chance to experience failure—or the opportunity to learn to solve their own problems.Overparenting has the potential to ruin a child’s confidence and undermine their education, Lahey reminds us. Teachers don’t just teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. They teach responsibility, organization, manners, restraint, and foresight—important life skills children carry with them long after they leave the classroom. Providing a path toward solutions, Lahey lays out a blueprint with targeted advice for handling homework, report cards, social dynamics, and sports. Most importantly, she sets forth a plan to help parents learn to step back and embrace their children’s failures. Hard-hitting yet warm and wise, The Gift of Failure is essential reading for parents, educators, and psychologists nationwide who want to help their children succeed.

    It is different from homeschooling in that children are not forced to follow curriculum lessons and tests. Radical Unschooling philosophy focuses on trust of a child's innate ability to learn without coercion and invites children to explore their passions. The parent's role is to facilitate their interests and curiosity. The book focuses also on the evolutionary aspect of parenting and human consciousness. We are parenting and educating our children today to succeed in a joyful, productive life by following their passions, not someone else's agenda.

    then, by golly, stick a tiara on your head and go teach something!" Do you wish that you had the chance to sit down with a seasoned homeschooling veteran over a cup of tea and ask every question that comes to mind? Mother of seven and twelve year homeschooling veteran Rebecca Frech is the common-sense voice of experience and reassurance that you've been hoping to find. Teaching in Your Tiara is a soup-to-nuts homeschooling book that walks you through the first years - deciding that home education is right for your family, choosing the right curriculum, understanding learning styles, not raising socially awkward kids, maintaining your own identity, and more. Whether you're the parent who's already committed to homeschooling or you're just dipping your toe into the pool of consideration, this book is for you! Rebecca's logic, honesty, and humor will leave you both amused and well-informed about the realities of homeschooling and what it could mean for your family.

    The six-volume set includes over 2,400 pages of the finest material ever written on education, child training and parenting. Recognized as the pioneer in home education and major school reforms, Charlotte Mason's practical methods are as revolutionary today as when they were first written.

    Never before in history have children been so plugged in—and so out of touch with the natural world. In this groundbreaking new work, child advocacy expert Richard Louv directly links the lack of nature in the lives of today's wired generation—he calls it nature deficit—to some of the most disturbing childhood trends, such as rises in obesity, Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), and depression. Some startling facts: By the 1990s the radius around the home where children were allowed to roam on their own had shrunk to a ninth of what it had been in 1970. Today, average eight-year-olds are better able to identify cartoon characters than native species, such as beetles and oak trees, in their own community. The rate at which doctors prescribe antidepressants to children has doubled in the last five years, and recent studies show that too much computer use spells trouble for the developing mind. Nature-deficit disorder is not a medical condition; it is a description of the human costs of alienation from nature. This alienation damages children and shapes adults, families, and communities. There are solutions, though, and they're right in our own backyards. Last child in the Woods is the first book to bring together cutting-edge research showing that direct exposure to nature is essential for healthy childhood development—physical, emotional, and spiritual. What's more, nature is a potent therapy for depression, obesity, and ADD. Environment-based education dramatically improves standardized test scores and grade point averages and develops skills in problem solving, critical thinking, and decision making. Even creativity is stimulated by childhood experiences in nature. Yet sending kids outside to play is increasingly difficult. Computers, television, and video games compete for their time, of course, but it's also our fears of traffic, strangers, even virus-carrying mosquitoes—fears the media exploit—that keep children indoors. Meanwhile, schools assign more and more homework, and there is less and less access to natural areas. Parents have the power to ensure that their daughter or son will not be the "last child in the woods," and this book is the first step toward that nature-child reunion.

    This data-from neurologists, child development specialists, anthropologists, educators, historians and business innovators-turns many current assumptions about school-based education upside down.The books factual approach is balanced by quotes and stories from over 100 homeschoolers from the U.S., Canada, Germany, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, Mexico, India and Singapore. These parents and kids are the true authorities on alternative learning. Free Range Learning demonstrates:that children and teens can best be nurtured outside of restrictive educational systems that we can restore what is heart-centered and meaningful back to a central place in education how networking with others enriches the learning experience for our kids how homeschooling has become a force of positive social change-making the community a better place for everyone.The simple choice to homeschool is much more significant than a homespun method of education. Laura Weldon asks us to consider this choice as participation in a cultural shift toward redefining success and as a form of collective intelligence with major implications for the future of education. Laura Grace Weldon writes for national publications about learning, sustainability and spirituality. She is a long-time columnist with Home Education Magazine, and an award-winning poet. Laura lives on a small farm with her husband and their four homeschooled children. Her background includes teaching conflict resolution and developing community enrichment workshops.

    What could be more perfect for an author/illustrator who has continually stripped away the mystique of architectural structures that have long fascinated modern man? With typical zest and wry sense of humor punctuating his drawings, David Macaulay traces the step-by-step planning and construction of both castle and town.

    In this book, she shares the secrets for supporting young writers, from the smallest of scribblers to middle-schoolers mastering script. You play an important role in nurturing your child's writing development. You are your child's first writing teacher, and their most important writing role model. From teaching your child how to hold a pencil and form the letters of the alphabet, to creating writing spaces and meaningful writing rituals at home, this book gives you all of the information and inspiration you need to raise a confident writer. Fifty-two playful activities are presented as ways to invite your child to write. Each activity offers specific suggestions to meet the needs of Scribblers (pre-writers), Spellers (emerging writers), Storytellers (beginner writers), and Scholars (more experienced young writers)—providing the just-right combination of fun and functional skill development. The Write Start is a treasure trove of irresistible ideas that will help you introduce your child to the wonderful world of writing, now, and for years to come.

    She offers deeply-held thoughts and convictions, formed out of a life of books and reading in the Clarkson household, about the mind- and soul-shaping influence of good books, reading, and the power of story on children. She writes as a twenty-six-year-old woman looking back on the many books she read growing up as the first wholehearted child in the Clarkson home and how they have shaped her life, mind, and spirit. She reviews hundreds of whole and living books for children 4-14, and includes additional lists of books to help parents choose the best literary food for their growing children's hearts and minds.

    A short, illustrated guide to the use of the Montessori classroom materials, it shows how to set up a “children’s house”—an environment for learning where children can be their own masters, free to learn at their own pace. Frames for lacing and buttoning, geometrical wooden inserts, sound cylinders, sandpapers letters, colored numerical rods: these are familiar features of any Montesorri classroom, whether in the pioneering days or today. Dr. Montesorri explains how to use these materials with preschool children to stimulate their powers of observation, recognition, judgment, and classification. These self-correcting learning tools are the original “teaching machines” for young children. Inherently logical and aesthetically pleasing, they were designed to hone the child’s visual, auditory, and tactile perceptions. Dr. Montesorri stresses that each child approaches the apparatus differently. The role of the adult, whether teacher or parent, is to let the child experiment, perceive his own mistakes, and run his own risks in learning. (With black-and white illustrations throughout.)

    No matter what your location—from a small patch of green in the city to the wide-open meadows of the country—each activity is meant to promote exploration, stimulate imagination, and heighten a child's sense of wonder. To learn more about the author, Jennifer Ward, visit her website at jenniferwardbooks.com and to learn more about the illustrator, Susie Ghahremani, visit her website at boygirlparty.com.

    It's okay to dance by yourself. It's okay to wear glasses. It's okay to have a pet worm.... It's okay to be different!

    If you were the moon, what would you do? You'd spin like a twilight ballerina and play dodgeball with space rocks! And more.

    Yet recent research indicates that experiences in nature are essential for healthy growth. Regular exposure to nature can help relieve stress, depression, and attention deficits. It can reduce bullying, combat illness, and boost academic scores. Most critical of all, abundant time in nature seems to yield long-term benefits in kids’ cognitive, emotional, and social development. Yet teachers, parents, and other caregivers lack a basic understanding of how to engender a meaningful, lasting connection between children and the natural world. How to Raise a Wild Child offers a timely and engaging antidote, showing how kids’ connection to nature changes as they mature. Distilling the latest research in multiple disciplines, Sampson reveals how adults can help kids fall in love with nature—enlisting technology as an ally, taking advantage of urban nature, and instilling a sense of place along the way.