DIY Tabletop Biosphere

Tabletop Biosphere Summer Lessons in Biology Looking for a lessons in biology this summer with your kids?  Try making your very one tabletop biosphere! What is a biosphere? Planet earth is a biosphere, an enclosed, self-regulating system with no intervention from outside the sphere.  And while sounding like something out of a science fiction novel, […]

Parenting Possibilities: The Family Dinner Experience

Family Dinners: Joy or Indigestion? The extensive research on the benefits of family dinners has seemed to define eating together as the make it or break it sign to raising healthy, well-adjusted children. I do agree that family meals have potential to be an opportunity to catch up on the day’s events and bond in […]

5 Easy Composting Tips for Your Family Garden

Environmentally sound garden practices for the family garden One of the major keys to a successful garden is the incorporation of organic matter into the soil every year. I remember taking a soil class at UMass 15 or so years back and hearing my professor say, “the answer to almost any question I ask this […]

6 Western MA Naturalists and Educators

Naturalists and Educators to Know About in Western MA Support your live, local, free-lance, free-range, grass-fed naturalist! Some naturalists and educators are funded by a school or a camp. Others hang up their shingle and take the kids into the woods. This post offers a smattering of freelance naturalists in Western MA. They are people […]

Parenting Green: Spring Ephemerals for Spring Ailments

Violets You know it’s spring in New England when it snows on Memorial Day weekend, right? As my family made a journey to New Hampshire for this three day weekend, a part of me was sure the odd weather was a blatant sign of the Earth being out of whack… but I was glad there […]

Hindsight Parenting: Summer Survival Lists

Preparing for Summer I used to hate summer. You heard me. H.A.T.E. While most educators count down the days until the end of the school year, my dread grows the closer the end of June comes. No, no…I have no aversion to heat, (at least not the kind of heat we get here in upstate […]

Language Play: Learning Communication with Silent Films

Silence is Golden I have always loved silent movies. My dad was a Charlie Chaplin fan and we would often go into the city to see Chaplin’s full length movies on the big screen. When I was a student in graduate school, I worked with stroke groups, many of whom depended on understanding and using […]