Inspiration

Photo by Dovie Moon Photography

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

Anais Nin (1903-1977)

Blessings and magic, 

Donni

Silent Saturday

Bunny Love

Blessings and magic for a wonderful weekend. 

Donni

Silent Saturday

Our First Plum Harvest

Blessings and magic for a lovely weekend,

Donni

Friday's Nature Table Link-up.

You are most welcome to share this great resource on your own blogs... (save the above Friday's Nature Table button to your desktop and then add it to your blog as a picture gadget linking to this code...

http://themagiconions.blogspot.com/search?q=Friday%27s+Nature+Table)

Welcome, Friends. I want to thank you all for the wonderfully inspiring links you share here on Friday's Nature Table. Kitty and I go through them each week and are often amazed at the super cool things you all do. You all rock!

Friday's Nature table is where we share our inspiration with each other. I can't tell you how many wonderfully fantastic ideas we have found from your links... your blogs, your creativity, your families, your loving... has touched my heart and enriched my life.

Blessings and magic,
Donni

 

Discovering Waldorf - 'The Magic Of Childhood'

(Please feel free to add the above Discovering Waldorf button to your blog. You can do this by saving the above image to your desktop and then adding it to your blog as a Picture Gadget that links to this code:

http://themagiconions.blogspot.com/search/label/Discovering%20Waldorf )

Discovering Waldorf is a weekly series of articles written by 'everyday' Waldorf families. The contributors to this series share their 'real-life' insights and inspirations on all kinds of Waldorf topics. This series is not meant to be Waldorf philosophy in its purest form, but rather a snapshot of how we can all incorporate Waldorf ideas into our lives to help nurture and encourage the magic that is in our children. If you have a topic you wish to learn more about (or want to share) on Discovering Waldorf, send me an email at vined(at)ymail(dot)com.

I found these beautiful photos on Surf With Beserk and thought they so capture the magic that is childhood. This is how our children can see the world.

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With eyes wide open they explore the world around us, showing genuine curiosity and interest in everything that happens around them. This is a good occasion to remind us of the magic of everyday moments that we do not notice.
Have you ever been witness to these things that exist in almost a few seconds, but after a pause, you can see something more perfect? I photograph these moments, or at least try. I can not just pass by and miss this point. Time may be resumed in the photographs.

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Wow!

Here are the other inspiring posts in the Discovering Waldorf series.

Blessings and magic to you!

Donni

Fairy Gardens

Here are some more of the magical fairy gardens in our 2011 Fairy Garden Competition. It's delightful to see so many wonderfully creative ideas and to see the happy faces of those who have played with the fairies...

A wagon Fairy Garden from Forest Dweller.

We LOVE the little stick house in this magical garden from Blueberry Cottage.

All the detail in Caleb's Fairy Gardens is amazing... don't you just love the little swing bridge connecting his two gardens.

This little shell path from Nuturestore is just too delightful.

Ready or Not's garden is a happy rainbow of color...

We adore (and deeply covet) the little fairy goodies in Mommy and Me Academy's garden...

Shabby Beach Nest has a myriad of enchanting fairy gardens... we've spent quite some time pouring over all of them...

For those of you who haven't entered yet, you can find all the info for the Fairy Garden Competition here...

We look forward to seeing your magical creation.
Happy Fairy Gardening!
Blessings and magic,
Donni

Help Needed.

I am considering purchasing a couple of advertising spots for the upcoming holiday season for my Fairyfolk shop. The hardest part is trying to decide on what my advert should look like. I have put 4 together and would love your input on them. YOU are my demographic... which one might get you to click on to see what my shop is all about?

A)

B)

C)

D

Do you have any suggestions to improve them, any insights. Do you think there is a different image from Fairyfolk I should use instead? Should I word it differently? Help, help, help :-)
Honestly, any and all help and insights will be GREATLY appreciated.
Blessings and magic,
Donni

Inspiration

Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning how to dance in the rain. 
                                                                                                                                        Vivian Green


Thank you to Days With Daniel for sharing this gorgeous quote with me.


Do you have a favorite quote for me to share?

Blessings and magic,
Donni

Silent Saturday

Teddy's favorite book of the moment. We read it at least 25 times a day... The Poor Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly.  

Blessings and magic for a wonderful weekend,

Donni

Friday's Nature Table Link-up.

You are most welcome to share this great resource    on      your     own          blogs...       (save the above Friday's     Nature     Table   button   to   your        desktop and   then      add    it to  your    blog as a     picture   gadget   linking      to  this    code...

http://themagiconions.blogspot.com/search?q=Friday%27s+Nature+Table)

Welcome, Friends.     I want to thank you all for the wonderfully inspiring links you  share    here on Friday's Nature Table. Kitty and I go through them each  week   and  are often amazed at the super cool things you all do. You  all  rock!

Friday's Nature table is where we share our  inspiration      with      each        other.  I        can't  tell you  how many      wonderfully      fantastic   ideas   we    have   found     from    your       links... your      blogs, your     creativity,     your   families,       your       loving...  has     touched my      heart and  enriched    my       life.



Be sure to enter our Fairy Garden Competiton... click on this button to find out how you can enter.

Blessings and magic,
Donni


 

Discovering Waldorf - 'Why Preschool Shouldn't Be Like School'

(Please feel free to add the above Discovering Waldorf button to your blog. You can do this by saving the above image to your desktop and then adding it to your blog as a Picture Gadget that links to this code:

http://themagiconions.blogspot.com/search/label/Discovering%20Waldorf )

Discovering Waldorf is a weekly series of articles written by 'everyday' Waldorf families. The contributors to this series share their 'real-life' insights and inspirations on all kinds of Waldorf topics. This series is not meant to be Waldorf philosophy in its purest form, but rather a snapshot of how we can all incorporate Waldorf ideas into our lives to help nurture and encourage the magic that is in our children. If you have a topic you wish to learn more about (or want to share) on Discovering Waldorf, send me an email at vined(at)ymail(dot)com.

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New research shows that teaching kids more and more, at ever-younger ages, may backfire.

By Alison GopnikPosted Wednesday, March 16, 2011, at 2:15 PM ETOurs is an age of pedagogy. Anxious parents instruct their children more and more, at younger and younger ages, until they're reading books to babies in the womb. They pressure teachers to make kindergartens and nurseries more like schools. So does the law—the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act explicitly urged more direct instruction in federally funded preschools.

There are skeptics, of course, including some parents, many preschool teachers, and even a few policy-makers. Shouldn't very young children be allowed to explore, inquire, play, and discover, they ask? Perhaps direct instruction can help children learn specific facts and skills, but what about curiosity and creativity—abilities that are even more important for learning in the long run? Two forthcoming studies in the journal Cognition—one from a lab at MIT and one from my lab at UC-Berkeley—suggest that the doubters are on to something. While learning from a teacher may help children get to a specific answer more quickly, it also makes them less likely to discover new information about a problem and to create a new and unexpected solution.

What do we already know about how teaching affects learning? Not as much as we would like, unfortunately, because it is a very difficult thing to study. You might try to compare different kinds of schools. But the children and the teachers at a Marin County preschool that encourages exploration will be very different from the children and teachers in a direct instruction program in South Side Chicago. And almost any new program with enthusiastic teachers will have good effects, at least to begin with, regardless of content. So comparisons are difficult. Besides, how do you measure learning, anyway? Almost by definition, directed teaching will make children do better on standardized tests, which the government uses to evaluate school performance. Curiosity and creativity are harder to measure.

Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments. We might start by saying: Suppose we gave a group of 4-year-olds exactly the same problems and only varied on whether we taught them directly or encouraged them to figure it out for themselves? Would they learn different things and develop different solutions? The two new studies in Cognition are the first to systematically show that they would.

In the first study, MIT professor Laura Schulz, her graduate student Elizabeth Bonawitz, and their colleagues looked at how 4-year-olds learned about a new toy with four tubes. Each tube could do something interesting: If you pulled on one tube it squeaked, if you looked inside another tube you found a hidden mirror, and so on. For one group of children, the experimenter said: "I just found this toy!" As she brought out the toy, she pulled the first tube, as if by accident, and it squeaked. She acted surprised ("Huh! Did you see that? Let me try to do that!") and pulled the tube again to make it squeak a second time. With the other children, the experimenter acted more like a teacher. She said, "I'm going to show you how my toy works. Watch this!" and deliberately made the tube squeak. Then she left both groups of children alone to play with the toy.

All of the children pulled the first tube to make it squeak. The question was whether they would also learn about the other things the toy could do. The children from the first group played with the toy longer and discovered more of its "hidden" features than those in the second group. In other words, direct instruction made the children less curious and less likely to discover new information.
Does direct teaching also make children less likely to draw new conclusions—or, put another way, does it make them less creative? To answer this question, Daphna Buchsbaum, Tom Griffiths, Patrick Shafto, and I gave another group of 4-year-old children a new toy. This time, though, we demonstrated sequences of three actions on the toy, some of which caused the toy to play music, some of which did not. For example, Daphna might start by squishing the toy, then pressing a pad on its top, then pulling a ring on its side, at which point the toy would play music. Then she might try a different series of three actions, and it would play music again. Not every sequence she demonstrated worked, however: Only the ones that ended with the same two actions made the music play. After showing the children five successful sequences interspersed with four unsuccessful ones, she gave them the toy and told them to "make it go."

Daphna ran through the same nine sequences with all the children, but with one group, she acted as if she were clueless about the toy. ("Wow, look at this toy. I wonder how it works? Let's try this," she said.) With the other group, she acted like a teacher. ("Here's how my toy works.") When she acted clueless, many of the children figured out the most intelligent way of getting the toy to play music (performing just the two key actions, something Daphna had not demonstrated). But when Daphna acted like a teacher, the children imitated her exactly, rather than discovering the more intelligent and more novel two-action solution.

As so often happens in science, two studies from different labs, using different techniques, have simultaneously produced strikingly similar results. They provide scientific support for the intuitions many teachers have had all along: Direct instruction really can limit young children's learning. Teaching is a very effective way to get children to learn something specific—this tube squeaks, say, or a squish then a press then a pull causes the music to play. But it also makes children less likely to discover unexpected information and to draw unexpected conclusions.

Why might children behave this way? Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental. It's this kind of learning, in fact, that allows kids to learn from teachers in the first place. Patrick Shafto, a machine-learning specialist at the University of Louisville and a co-author of both these studies; Noah Goodman at Stanford; and their colleagues have explored how we could design computers that learn about the world as effectively as young children do. It's this work that inspired these experiments.

These experts in machine learning argue that learning from teachers first requires you to learn about teachers. For example, if you know how teachers work, you tend to assume that they are trying to be informative. When the teacher in the tube-toy experiment doesn't go looking for hidden features inside the tubes, the learner unconsciously thinks: "She's a teacher. If there were something interesting in there, she would have showed it to me." These assumptions lead children to narrow in, and to consider just the specific information a teacher provides. Without a teacher present, children look for a much wider range of information and consider a greater range of options.
Knowing what to expect from a teacher is a really good thing, of course: It lets you get the right answers more quickly than you would otherwise. Indeed, these studies show that 4-year-olds understand how teaching works and can learn from teachers. But there is an intrinsic trade-off between that kind of learning and the more wide-ranging learning that is so natural for young children. Knowing this, it's more important than ever to give children's remarkable, spontaneous learning abilities free rein. That means a rich, stable, and safe world, with affectionate and supportive grown-ups, and lots of opportunities for exploration and play. Not school for babies.

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Here are the other inspiring posts in the Discovering Waldorf series.

Be sure to come and join the fun with our Fairy Garden Competition...

Blessings and magic to you!

Donni

New Additions to our Fairy Garden

There have been so many hours spent playing in our Fairy Gardens this week. Hours of beautiful imaginative play, hours of fresh air, hours of ideas, of wishes, of sibling friendship, of creativity... it is enough to make a mom's heart sing.

We have been inspired by what we have seen in your own Fairy Gardens... a fire pit, a tire swing, a fairy kitchen... such magic, such magic!


Here are a few photos of the new additions to our Fairy Gardens...

Tire Swing over the pond

fire ring

Ready to boil some water from the stream over the fire.

What's for dinner?

Herb stew anyone?

Ready to cook.

Mini Golf.

Hole in One!

A few of you have asked how I take the photos of our Fairy Gardens. Well, I get really, really, close. I find that the best light for moss and little bright things is early in the morning, before the sun is hot and bright. It helps to get down to an interesting level and angle... as if you were the fairy taking a photo of his own special place. I like my camera being on a low F stop... 4 - 7 as I love the object of the photo being crisp but the background magically blurry. It's fun to play... have at it  :-)

If you are as in love as we are with the magic of fairy gardens, be sure to enter our 2011 Fairy Garden Competition... click on this button for more info -

Happy Fairy Gardening!
Blessings and Magic,
Donni