Camp Creek Blog

The best thing I have to share this week (with permission!) was a post in the forum by a mom who worked past her initial misgivings about Minecraft in order to support her son’s deep interest — and had a great outcome:

“I’m new to pbh and still anxious about how it will all work; especially since both my boys love minecraft. The other day during our project time my 10 yr old was simply building on minecraft and I had to continually bite my tongue b/c that little voice in my head was telling me, “this is not education!”. However, I persevered. :)

I grabbed a notebook and just started asking him what he was doing. Lo and behold he was building giant forks, shovels, question marks, dollar bills, etc. I made the observation that there are artists that create actual sculptures just like that. Before I knew it, both boys were looking for images on google, discovered the artist was Claes Oldenberg, and we were talking about what was interesting about the art. That led to a discussion of art in context and I posed the question of what giant sculpture would be appropriate in the context of our house. They came up with several ideas, but decided they would build a life-sized Steve from minecraft. I asked what they needed, we gathered supplies. I jotted down ideas they came up with. They came up with the idea to hide binary code in their statue since steve is created by code. We went to the library and they worked with the librarian to hunt down books on Oldenberg. My oldest also got several books on architecture as well for inspiration for building and has immersed himself in that and has built some awesome buildings and is learning a ton about architecture.

I truly see the value of journaling. It is eye opening how much they learn. The math concept of median was used in the building projects. They were measuring and figuring out scale. They were working together and not fighting. As I write all they are doing I see all the different directions they could take this. It’s very exciting to watch. Thanks for all the encouragement and advice this blog provides.”

I love hearing these stories. If you’re a member of the forum, we share them in the small wins thread — it’s important to take a moment and celebrate your successes as you learn to mentor yourself and your kids to your best lives. Even a small change — like taking a pause and getting out your journal, asking a few questions — can make a huge difference in your learning life.

And have you seen O’s amazing Minecraft project on PBH Kids? If your kids have project work they’d like to share, let me know!

I liked this article on project-based learning (as manifested in schools) mostly for this teacher’s reaction to helping kids direct their own learning:

“‘[E]ngaging kids in project-based, deep-thinking types of learning that I saw in Finland … that’s what we tried to replicate in our state,’ Paine said. And not coincidentally, just the kind of pragmatic, complex, collaborative problem-solving that companies say they need in the 21st century workplace. …

“The first [project-based learning] project I did — after it was done — I said I would never go back to the old way of teaching, because it was that valuable.’”

‘I wanted to cry because I could see how much progress they had made from beginning to end.’

You might want to follow my project-based learning board on Pinterest. I think we can glean some insights and ideas from what traditional education is trying to accomplish with PBL even though we homeschoolers have the freedom to take it so much further. (The board is a mix of PBL at school and at home.)

Last week I wrote a post called The Sliver, or How to stop fighting about screen time. In that post, I suggested using “generous limits” (as opposed to strict limits or no limits at all) to make it possible for your child to go beyond just being an irritable, frustrated, passive consumer and actually be in the flow, learn, and create with media.

In the comments, someone brought up studies on brain development and asked how I could dismiss those. I wrote a lengthy response, but a friend sent me a link to this article, which I think is a great addition:

“Diagnosed with moderate to severe autism at the age of 2, Jacob spent years in the clutches of a special education system that didn’t understand what he needed. His teachers at school would try to dissuade Kristine from hoping to teach Jacob any more than the most basic skills.

…

“For a parent, it’s terrifying to fly against the advice of the professionals,” Kristine writes in her memoir, The Spark: A Mother’s Story of Nurturing Genius. “But I knew in my heart that if Jake stayed in special ed, he would slip away.”

…

‘I operate under a concept called “muchness,”’ Kristine said. ‘Which is surrounding children with the things they love — be it music, or art, whatever they’re drawn to and love.’

By the time he was 11 years old, Jacob was ready for college. He’s now studying condensed matter physics at the Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis.” — Boy Genius Diagnosed with Autism has IQ Higher than Einstein

And a quote from the boy himself, from his TedxTeen talk that appears at the end of the article:

“In order to succeed, you must look at everything with your unique perspective and not settle for accepting the straight facts.” — Jacob Barnett

The talk is great, and your kids might enjoy it, too.

Since we’ve been talking a lot lately about screen time on the blog (posts, comments, and in the forum), I thought this was worth sharing:

“My work with children, teachers and computers over the past thirty years has been focused on increasing opportunity and replacing ‘quick and easy’ with deep and meaningful experiences. When I began working with schools where every student had a laptop in 1990, project-based learning was supercharged and Dewey’s theories were realized in ways he had only imagined. The computer was a radical instrument for school reform, not a way of enforcing the top-down status quo. …

Used well, the computer extends the breadth, depth and complexity of potential projects. This in turn affords kids with the opportunity to, in the words of David Perkins, ‘play the whole game.’ Thanks to the computer, children today have the opportunity to be mathematicians, novelists, engineers, composers, geneticists, composers, filmmakers, etc.… But, only if our vision of computing is sufficiently imaginative.” — Technology Is Not Neutral @ for the love of learning

When Gary says “only if our vision of computing is sufficiently imaginative,” I think he means only if teachers take the time to fully explore how computers can be used by students in school. At home, I would say “only if our vision of computing is sufficiently imaginative” to see what powerful tools computers can be for mastering skills, creating original works of art, building community, and so on. If we demonize tech, we’re taking away so many of the hundred languages children can use to learn and build.

In the inspirational area, this week, I loved what Michael wrote about focusing on what we can do:

“I might dream of Sustainably Creative becoming one of the top 100 most read blogs in the world, being offered a publishing contract worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, and Oprah relaunching her chat show just to interview me. However all of those dreams require actions by other people, lots of other people (and Oprah). I can’t make those people act in the ways I might like.

However I can work on my half of the equation. I can show up and write posts regularly for Sustainably Creative. I can work on book proposals and publish my own ebooks. I can approach agents and publishers. In short I use what energy I have to focus on the work that at least puts me on the right track to fulfill my dreams.” — Achieve (almost) anything you want with a pen, paper, and a pot of tea @ Sustainably Creative

This is what it’s all about — just starting. Doing what we can. It changes your life, even if you don’t end up with what you originally thought you wanted.

Thank you for hanging out with me on PBH and being part of this community!

I have to say that being a PBH mom has helped me tremendously to see that while being there for my kids, I can support my own work and make my dreams a reality. Learning as I go. — PBH forum comment

Thank you for challenging us parents the way you continually do and sticking up for the rights of children. You know why PBH rocks above all other educational methodologies? Because it’s the only methodology I’ve encountered that requires parents to try to become the best possible version of themselves in order to walk the talk. — PBH parent e-mail

Allowing children to learn about what interests them is good, but helping them do it in a meaningful, rigorous way is better. Freedom and choice are good, but a life steeped in thinking, learning, and doing is better. It’s not enough to say, “Go, do whatever you like.” To help children become skilled thinkers and learners, to help them become people who make and do, we need a life centered around those experiences. We need to show them how to accomplish the things they want to do. We need to prepare them to make the life they want. — Project-Based Homeschooling: Mentoring Self-Directed Learners

This week I shared how we use generous limits as a way of dealing with screen time and how that approach reflects an abundance vs. scarcity mindset.

When I owned a small Reggio-inspired school and worked as an educational consultant, I often ran into this type of problem, where emotions are high and adults and children are in opposition. No one is happy and the overarching goals are not being met.

Scarcity situation:

- Conflict arises because of a scarcity situation (or a perceived scarcity situation).

- There is intense focus around the item or experience that is felt to be scarce.

- The adult is frustrated by the child’s intense focus.

- The adult wants to “teach a lesson” through scarcity.

- Much time is spent arguing, bargaining, and complaining (the ABCs of scarcity).

Scarcity issues typically arise directly from how the adult has organized the situation. Once conflict occurs, the adult usually maintains the scarcity for a reason: because they want to teach a lesson.

Here’s a reenactment of a mentoring session I did with a preschool whose teachers had visited us. All names and details have been changed.

Sunnyside: We want our kids to be working on projects and collaborating like yours do, but all they do is fight all morning.

Me: What are they fighting about?

Sunnyside: Well, there are a lot of boys in this class and only four kids can use the block center at a time. They fight constantly about who is in the block center, whose turn it is, how long they’ve been in there, and so on. Then, even when they’re in the block center, we have two wooden trucks and they fight over who gets to use those.

Even the girls who weren’t even interested in blocks are demanding to play in the block center and demanding their turn with the trucks, just because they see the boys fighting about it. All we do all morning is referee arguments. No one is working on any projects. All they do is fight about this.

Me: What have you tried so far?

Sunnyside: We want the kids to use all the centers instead of just staying in one place all morning, so every half-hour we have them move from one center to the next one. And we have an egg timer to keep track of whose turn it is with the wooden trucks, but we get busy and sometimes we forget to check it, then they fight even more.

Me: Okay, you need to do two things.

Sunnyside: Tell us!

Me: You need to drop the limit on how many kids can be in the block center and you need to buy more wooden trucks.

Sunnyside: What?! But they won’t all fit into the block center! And giving them what they want seems totally wrong — shouldn’t they be learning how to share?

Me: Just try it, then get back to me in a week.

So here’s what happened:

- When the strict limits were taken away, all the kids did try to crush into the block center at once. There was a lingering residue of “the block center is the desired place to be.” Sixteen kids pressed around one small table and a limited number of blocks didn’t work, and the kids figured that out on their own. It was boring to stand in a crowd with hardly any blocks to play with, so after awhile, some of the kids wandered away. The ones who stayed began to negotiate how they would share the blocks.

- When the new wooden trucks arrived, the kids ceased arguing about them and started playing with them.

A week later:

Me: How’s it going?

Sunnyside: Much better. But we still have more kids who want to play in the block area than the block area will accommodate. They are crushed in there together and they’re doing pretty well, but there isn’t enough room.

Me: Make the block area bigger.

Sunnyside: Wha— [sigh] Okay.

When you have a scarcity situation, the first thing to look at is:

What am I trying to accomplish by using scarcity?

These teachers had good goals for their students:

- They wanted them to use the whole classroom and not just one center.

- They wanted them to collaborate and not argue all the time.

- They wanted them to work on long-term projects.

But their choices had made the exact opposite happen.

Instead of valuing all the areas of the classroom (art studio, library, science area, etc.), the kids were all hyper-focused on what they couldn’t have: the block center.

Instead of collaborating, they were arguing and bargaining and complaining all morning.

Instead of working on long-term projects, they were being rotated through the centers, so that even if they were involved in what they were doing, they were interrupted to move on in the name of variety. Whatever a child was building in the block area, someone else knocked down a half-hour later. Whatever a child was painting in the art studio, he had to drop it and leave — so why ever start anything complex or ambitious? Whatever book two children were looking at together, they had to put back on the shelf and move on — so no deep interests ever sparked.

The teachers were accidentally training the kids NOT to focus, NOT to invest in big ideas, and NOT to work on long-term projects. They were accidentally training them to have the opposite traits than they wanted: developing short attention spans, seeing each other as competitors rather than collaborators, and so on.

The work of figuring out how to share can’t start until children are given the responsibility and freedom to do that work. When you create a scarcity situation, you aren’t teaching them how to share, you’re teaching them how to compete hard for what’s rightfully theirs. When they are given the tools, the opportunity, and the support, they can begin to build those character traits and habits of mind you want for them.

The work of figuring out how to self-regulate can’t happen until children have enough elbow room to make some of their own choices. You aren’t teaching kids how to restrict their own screen time when you restrict it for them. There is literally not enough white space for them to give them any control or decision-making, so they aren’t building any skills. They’re just reacting emotionally to a situation that you control. How can they learn to make good choices if they don’t get the opportunity to make bad ones?

With generous limits, children find that they have to make decisions — Do I finish drawing this comic, or play Minecraft? Now they’re beginning to make choices and deal with consequences. They may make what you think are wrong choices, but mistakes are the pathway to understanding and eventual success. If they don’t have room to make mistakes, they don’t have room to learn.

Let’s check in with Sunnyside one more time:

We doubled the size of the block area and suddenly the boys started working together on a large construction. It was like magic. They started building a city, and they used all the trucks to build a garage. Once their project got going, the girls became interested and began to make suggestions and work on it as well. They are making signs in the writing center and they are using the art studio to make people and animals. Some girls are painting a backdrop for the wall; they all sat down together and talked about what it should include. They are even using the materials in the science center to make trees and bushes. We’ve put books about cities and garages in the library and they are using them for reference.

We finally have a project going, and the kids are doing the work we wanted them to do instead of fighting all the time. And we are helping them work on their ideas instead of being referees. It is wonderful. Thank you.

By the way, we had to throw away another rule. Before, they had to clean up the block area at the end of the day. The day we took that rule away, they started to build their city.

As a parent, you need to think about what you really want. Then you need to look at your choices and see if they are getting you the results you wanted or if they’re getting you something else entirely.

What parents want when they set strict screen limits (or strict limits on comic books or anything else) is for their kids to play outside, read, build things, develop intellectual hobbies, play, enjoy their family, collaborate, do more worthy activities. They want screens to be a small part of the children’s lives.

What they get is often a child who is hyper-focused on the exact thing they wanted to be least important. Suddenly the limited thing looms large and taints every other hour of the day. It’s all the kids talk about and all they think about. Arguing, bargaining, and complaining ensue.

When you employ generous limits (focusing on abundance — there is enough time for everything), focus can shift away from arguing and bargaining to what the child wants to accomplish. The focus can leave the screens. There’s no need to argue and fight, because there is enough time.

Note: “Generous limits” does not mean “no limits.” Generous limits take the pressure off and eliminate anxiety and bargaining. No limits can actually increase arguing, bargaining, and anxiety because every single thing you want to do during the day is opposed to screen time. Do you want to go to the park? No, it’s park vs. screens and screens win. Do you want to make a cardboard robot? No, it’s robot vs. screens and screens win. No limits can actually be a more fraught situation. Generous limits make time in the day for everything: outdoor play, art studio, library, reading aloud, cooking together, playing, etc. These things are not directly opposed to screens; screens have their own generous part of the day. And generous limits mean that even during the time when screens are allowed as a choice, there is enough time to choose other things as well. Note: choose other things, not have them chosen for you.

Now, I’m anticipating that someone will say, “Oh, you’re just giving in to the kids! You’re giving them what they want!”

If you are arguing with your child for no reason other than to control what they do, does that really fit with your overarching values and goals? If you get stuck in an oppositional pattern, are you helping them learn how to articulate their goals, negotiate fairly, collaborate as a team, and make their own decisions?

When you approach a situation with the mindset that there has to be a winner and a loser and as the parent you should always win, you are going to experience a lot of conflict and a lot of unhappiness. You are creating scarcity: scarcity of power, scarcity of freedom, scarcity of autonomy, scarcity of choice. You are putting your attention and your whole family’s focus on something unpleasant.

If you approach a situation with the mindset that you want to live your values, focus on your priorities, and consider your child’s goals along with your own, you can find solutions that are win-win. But you have to be willing to experiment, gather data, and revise. You have to be willing to examine your own prejudices. You have to be willing to let your child have both freedom and responsibility. They go hand in hand.

Flip to an abundancy model and flood your life with your priorities, your values, and your goals. Make room for your children to stop thinking about the rules and infrastructure and start creating, building, thinking, playing, making, and doing. Envision a life where everyone in the family gets to have their own interests, their own meaningful work, and each other’s support.

What is the end goal of extremely limiting a child’s screen time? Presumably it’s a young adult who knows how to live a balanced life, who has various interests, and who isn’t addicted to screens. What is the outcome of extremely limiting a child’s screen time? Sometimes it’s a child who is absolutely riveted on what they can’t have, who can’t enjoy their screen time because they’re tense and watching the clock and who can’t enjoy their non-screen time because they wish they could play Minecraft instead. When they’re a young adult, what’s going to happen? When they finally get freedom and control, what are they likely to do with it?

Employing generous limits helps a child live a balanced life now, a life that is much closer to how they might live as adults. (My sixteen-year-old son pointed this out to me — credit to him.) Employing generous limits allows a child to begin learning today how to make good choices, how to manage his own time, and how to prioritize his goals. If he falters, you are there to help him get back on the rails. If he makes poor choices and suffers for it, you’re there to help him figure out how to fix it.

Whatever it is that you are tightly controlling, it’s an emotionally loaded issue for you, and you may be making it an emotionally loaded issue for your child. Wherever you are causing scarcity, you are probably feeling scarcity. You feel your child’s outdoor time, project time, or reading time is scarce, so you clamp down on screens. Instead of dealing with a feeling of lack by tightly controlling something else, try abundance instead. Fill that lack with all the things you’re missing. Consider that the situation is not oppositional after all, and there is room for all the good things.

A day holds much more time and potential than you might think. But you have to hold it gently.

There really is enough time. Focus your attention on what you want to grow. Focusing it on the thing you don’t like is not going to get you what you want. Forget about that, take some deep breaths, and then focus on what you want to see more of. Let it bask in your attention and love. Try it, and see what happens.

See also:

Why I Don’t Worry About My Kids’ Screen Time, Part 1

Why I Don’t Worry About My Kids’ Screen Time, Part 2

The Sliver, or How to stop fighting about screen time

Parenting with abundance and simplicity

Abundance and sharing: How children learn to be generous

Sub-subtitle for this post: Why you need to move from a scarcity to an abundance model.

One of the most frequent things I’m asked is how to deal with the struggle between parents and kids over limits on screen time.

Parents want something better for their kids than TV, movies, and video games — they want their lives to be full of better-quality activities, like playing outdoors, reading, playing, and building.

Many parents approach the subject of screen time — or other kid activities they don’t like, like reading comic books — by placing a strong limit on it. They say to their child, “We want our lives to be lovely and full of all the good things, so we are cramming all the stuff you love that we don’t like into this sliver.”

The child hears, “Blah blah blah, you love the sliver.”

Then the parents get to experience the ever-burgeoning frustration of having their child riveted on that sliver of time. The kids want to talk about it. They want to bargain for more of it. They want to argue about whether they got their fair share of it. Why? Because the sliver is where all the good stuff is.

What we need to do is flip it around. Instead of making the sliver the garbage chute on Star Wars that everyone dives into for blessed escape, we need to allot the sliver to ourselves instead.

We say, “We want our lives to be lovely and full of all the good things, so we are going to allot a portion of our day to the stuff that really matters — the stuff we think is important.”

Now put it all in there. Make time every day to read, to play outside, to play a board game together, to build with LEGO or blocks, to spend time together in the art studio. Work on your projects together, side by side. Go for a hike, fly a kite, sit on the steps and eat an ice cream cone. Read aloud to one another.

As if by magic, the stuff you care about is now part of your everyday life. Magically, your kids are no longer riveted by the tiny sliver of time when they get to do what they want — therefore, they are free to enjoy all the good things instead of bitterly resenting them. Magically, you have just negotiated a life that respects both what is important to you *and* what is important to your child.

When you set up a scarcity situation, you are always going to whip people into a frenzy to get whatever it is that’s hard to come by, whether it’s a dancing Elmo, a Beanie Baby, or a half-hour playing Minecraft. That’s just human psychology. Make it rare and people want it desperately. And when you limit what your child wants to do and push them toward something else, saying THIS is better than THAT, you create conflict where there doesn’t need to be conflict. They should be able to love books *and* TV, computer games *and* playing outside. But because you have put these things in competition with one another, they have to choose — so they end up rejecting the very things you want them to embrace.

When you force your child’s interests into the sliver, you are denying them the opportunity to get good at what they care about. You are denying them the chance to relax and enjoy themselves. And you are saying, flat out, “I don’t care about this thing you like. I don’t like it.” That’s a path toward having them not talk to you about it anymore. You are forcing them away from you just when you should be pulling them close.

If they love Minecraft or playing a video or computer game, they can’t accomplish anything in a tiny slice of time. The way these games work, it usually takes a lot of time just to learn how to play and then it takes a lot of time to slowly progress to mastery. The games make you put in the time; they don’t let you jump straight to the fun part. And the kids are willing to do the work — but if they don’t have enough time, they can’t do the work.

It takes a lot of time to understand, grasp new concepts, figure out rules, learn, practice, and master. Kids whose screen time is limited are living in constant frustration because they can’t build their skills, they can’t watch the YouTube tutorials another kid made, they can’t learn what they want to learn, and they can never relax while doing the thing they enjoy most because they always have one nervous eye on the clock. They can’t experiment, they can’t explore, and they can’t practice — and those are the key steps of learning that you want them to experience, even when it’s doing something you yourself aren’t interested in.

Some parents say they’re really frustrated because their child seems to spend all of their available screen time watching *other* kids play — and they’re tempted to reduce the amount of computer time even more. But watching others is a crucial step in learning. What’s the fastest way to learn to ride a bike — reading a booklet about it or watching someone else ride? Plus, watching tutorials and watching friends play are community aspects; that observation helps them learn how to teach and mentor, how to collaborate and socialize. If you only get X minutes a day and you really want to learn, you are going to forgo playing yourself in order to try to cram in more learning time — and learning requires observing. So cutting back on their computer time actually forces them to do less hands-on experimentation. Learning by doing takes a lot of time, and they just don’t have that luxury.

One of our higher goals as parents should be to help our children become independent — not just physically, but intellectually. If we reject their interests because they seem stupid or because we don’t understand them or enjoy them ourselves, we are rejecting our kids themselves. Do you remember what you liked when you were 11? I’m pretty sure that’s the summer I played Monopoly nine hours a day, six days a week. On the one hand, it was very sedentary. On the other hand, I do own some real estate now. I haven’t built a hotel yet, but don’t count me out. I also watched a lot of “Love Boat” that year. Yet I still managed to start a company, open a school, and write a book. If “Love Boat” can’t kill your intellect, believe me, nothing can.

In our home, we limited screens naturally when our children were little by having a routine that just didn’t include them. When they got older, we employed generous limits. We didn’t use screens for entertainment (our family word for this is actually “sloth time”) until 3:00, which made their morning and early afternoon the focus of project work and play. As they got even older, we shifted that time to 2:00, but we also allowed computer use for project-related work because the boys were now researching independently, making films, writing books, and so on.

During the day, we worked on projects, played outside, read, played LEGO, took photographs, made art, and all the other good things. The kids never watched the clock; they never dropped a book or a squirt gun to dash to a computer or a TV set. They experienced balance and they enjoyed everything they did. There was no competition between computers and nature or between books and TV. Screens were fun, but the kids never riveted on them because there was no need to. If they wanted to get to level 47 of some game, they had plenty of time to do that. Employing generous limits means you have plenty of time. You don’t worry — there’s no urgency. You aren’t hyper-focused on it, and your mind is free to focus on and enjoy other things. And we made sure they had plenty of other things to focus on.

We need to shift from a scarcity model (there’s very little time for you to do those things you love to do) to an abundance model (there’s plenty of time for us to do all the good things, including that stuff you love to do).

You can’t really fix the sliver problem by, say, making the sliver a little bigger. It really takes a complete flip-flop. You have to stop curtailing what your child loves and instead focus on building a routine and a family culture around the things you believe are most important. Get those things in there — do them every day. But if you want your child to see them, appreciate them, and relax enough to enjoy them, think about getting rid of the sliver.

See also:

Why I Don’t Worry About My Kids’ Screen Time, Part 1

Why I Don’t Worry About My Kids’ Screen Time, Part 2

Parenting with abundance vs. scarcity

This week on Facebook, we returned to the passion vs. mastery argument:

“Think about all the things you have been passionate about in your life. Think about all those passions that you considered making a career out of or building a company around. How many were/are there? Why did you bounce from one to another? Why were you not able to make a career or business out of any of those passions? Or if you have been able to have some success, what was the key to the success? Was it the passion or the effort you put in to your job or company ?

If you really want to know where you destiny lies, look at where you apply your time.” — Don’t Follow Your Passion, Follow Your Effort @ Blog Maverick

There were some strong reactions on Facebook voting in favor of passion. I wrote a post about this, if you recall:

To really learn something, you need both knowledge and skills. You have to gather the knowledge and then you have to work with it. To discard passion (or authentic interest) is to drain the life force from the learner and therefore from the work. Am I going to bring my best efforts to something that holds no interest for me? Am I going to achieve flow? Am I going to strive to challenge myself? — Why Skills Don’t Trump Passion

The thing is, in my opinion it shouldn’t be “passion over everything” — it should be “passion *plus* mastery.”

Skills don’t trump passion. Skills are what you know how to do. Passion is where you start finding out who you are, what you’re good at, and what the world needs. — Why Skills Don’t Trump Passion

I do think you should look at where you apply your time and your effort. Because if you think you have a passion but you aren’t willing to put in the time and the hard work to build up your skills, then what you have is a pipe dream. Real passion calls to something deep inside you that demands effort, sharing, and contributing. If you aren’t moved to do those things, then you need to consider whether it’s really a passion at all.

This week’s Facebook posts focused on self-examination, so let’s continue! Your passion may not really be much of a passion if you aren’t willing to do the work — and inspiration isn’t worth anything if it doesn’t lead to real doing.

“The inspiration is not the receiving of information. The inspiration is applying what you’ve received. People think that if they keep reading articles, browsing books, listening to talks, or meeting people, that they’re going to suddenly get inspired. But constantly seeking inspiration is anti-inspiring.

 

You have to pause the input, and focus on your output. For every bit of inspiration, use it and amplify it by applying it to your work. Then you’ll finally feel the inspiration you’ve been looking for.” — Seeking Inspiration? Stop Looking and Start Doing @ LifeHacker

I hope you all have been checking out the new PBH Kids tumblr blog — I’ll slowly be adding more and more self-directed projects by kids of all ages, and we are going to have some kid-written reviews of project resources as well. If you want to share some kid-directed work, send me an e-mail through the contact form on this blog!

And finally, a great quote from the PBH forum:

I also loved what Ian told me yesterday — He said, “All of our projects connect! Because I am learning about the ocean, and Micah is learning about machines, and they use machines to explore the ocean, and Max is learning about dinosaurs and he is really wanting to know about fossils, and Lena is learning about people skeletons, and…” He’s right, they are all connecting, sometimes in startling ways.

Everything is connected.

On that note, hope everyone has a wonderful weekend!