One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can. William Wordsworth makes this assertion in his 1798 poem “The Tables Turned”. In the poem he is continuing a dialogue with a fictional friend who has urged him to study more, read more and spend less time…
With all the Jim Collins talk of the ‘hedgehog concept”* I thought an image of an actual hedgehog was in order. This particular young hedgehog was minding it’s own business , by a hedge, in the garden of The Three Swallows, in the Glaven Valley, Norfolk, UK. (*See his website for the genesis of the metaphor and his use of…
When the night winds whistle through the trees and blow the crisp brown leaves a-crackling down, When the autumn moon is big and yellow-orange and round, When old Jack Frost is sparkling on the ground, It’s Thanksgiving Time! – from Thanksgiving Time by Langston Hughes I hope your holiday is wonderful.
The morning glories and lilies are in bloom in the courtyard garden. The thistles bloom at the edge of the woods where the blackberries are ripening. The soccer pitch is silent and no-one is cheering from the bench. The flag droops in the heat and the car park behind Kenyon is empty. It is summer at school. But the owl…
Educators are fond of commenting that children are natural scientists. Children, they say, are born investigators. Discovery, speculation, questioning, trying things out, testing their senses, trial and error, and exploration – that’s what small children do all day. It’s how they learn and how they play. Curious then that these natural scientists are so often turned off by science as…