Crafts and First Day School

We are doing lots of crafts at First Day School - making candles in December, then decorating the Meeting house with origami.

What's next? Finger paints? My cousin, who is an art teacher, suggested to me that clay is always good.

What is the spiritual message with clay? One obvious angle is that God made us from clay, which the way I learned it is supposed to make us humble. But you can make great stuff from clay!

Not quite the New Year!

As a New Year's resolution, I will keep this blog up! My kids tell me I'm not supposed to do any of my resolutions before the actual new year, so I'm cheating a bit with this post.

Nonviolence and video games

A new Harper's magazine has a conversation about videogames. It's mostly about
teaching writing using videogames. Do games like Animal Crossing teach nonviolence? Do
videogames teach nonviolence by not *being* violent? The world of videogames that I see represented in the game magazines are mostly about war or crime. But then I wonder how the time kids spend on videogames compares to the time they spend on MySpace.

The game Go can be seen as a war game, or a game about negotiation.