Oh, look, a new project!

I didn’t blog yesterday because there was nothing to blog about. There was nothing in my head that needed to get out.

I was extremely frustrated and a little depressed by this. After all, as a world-renowned creativity guru, shouldn’t I always have something pithy or at least encouraging to say?

Apparently not.

Then, yesterday evening, I got a text message from a burner friend, a brilliant artist, who is home schooling her 3rd grader for a variety of reasons. She had posted some frustration on Facebook and I, as a retired elementary media specialist and instructional designer (I HAVE A DEGREE IN IT, YOU GUYS), volunteered to work with her to develop appropriate lessons.

Her issue was with the social studies curriculum from the home schooling website they’ve been using. It was, she thought, disjointed and mostly language arts drill rather than actual social studies. She was not wrong. Whereas her state has a reasonably coherent approach to geography and early American history, this home schooling site was all over the place: Ancient Rome, Thanksgiving, Indigenous Peoples, and World Religions. Ugh.

My text conversation with her lit up my brain in a way that has been — shall we say — elusive during this Our Captivity. Creating a structure which provokes learning in a student? Throw me in the deep end, boys.

Now I have an 11-page printout of her state’s 3rd grade social studies curriculum, and since it tracks pretty well with Georgia’s I feel very much at home. (Third grade, you will recall, is when I did weekly information skills lessons with every class, and all of it was based on their social studies curriculum.)

Today, while I wait for new strings to be installed on my cello, I will begin making notes on projects/research/etc to engage a home schooled 3rd grader. TASK AVOIDANCE with a purpose!

It keeps me off the streets.