​One of my favorite things about Inside Outside School is that our students are seen as whole humans, already capable, already worthy, and already enough. Honoring who they are right now and celebrating the individuals they are today is one of the best ways to honor the people they are growing into.

A key part of honoring a child’s individuality is giving them a voice in their community. At Inside Outside School, this happens through a democratic process woven throughout the week. As an example, in our fourth- and fifth-grade classroom, students add topics to a discussion box as ideas arise, ensuring that important thoughts from Monday are not forgotten by Thursday. On Thursdays, each class holds a morning meeting called Honeycomb, where students bring ideas, concerns, and possible solutions to the group.

If an issue is not class-specific, such as reminding everyone to push in their chairs, it can be added to the school-wide Hive agenda.

Hive meets every Friday morning after our weekly Peace Circle and includes all students and teachers from kindergarten through fifth grade. Topics from classroom Honeycombs are shared with the full community. These might be reminders, ideas, or larger concerns that need deeper discussion. Everyone has a voice, supported by our talking stick.

Democracy, whether with adults or children, can be beautifully messy. When all voices are valued in shaping a community that is safe and good for everyone, compromise and care must coexist. While teachers may hold veto power or a tie-breaking vote, students of all ages have equal say. A fifth grader’s voice does not outweigh that of a five-year-old, and everyone learns something from everyone else. Having a voice builds self-identity, empathy, and the interaction skills needed for a meaningful life.

One topic that frequents our Hive agenda is dress-up days. Our students recognize and celebrate their own uniqueness and that of their peers, and dress-up days offer a joyful way to honor those expressive selves. Over the years, we have seen everything from pirates to favorite-color outfits to “old times” themes from the 1980s.

Our most recent dress-up day happened on the second day back after winter break. Anything Dress-Up Day gave students a chance to shine and share pieces of who they are. Across campus, we saw glittery hair, wings, capes, funky hairstyles, superheroes, and sharp suits.

One of our third graders arrived in a full suit and bow tie. This was met not with laughter or teasing, but with respect for an eight-year-old who showed up fully himself and ready to play in the woods. This photo captures him during our daily community stewardship time, when students take responsibility for caring for the school. That day, he and his partner were on poop-scooper duty. He pulled on his boots and headed into the animal pen without hesitation.

When asked how it went, he proudly replied, “We picked up all the poop, and I did not get any on my suit.”

A true win-win, kind sir.

​This summer, I, a Nature Lover, was spellbound standing in the vast forests in Alaska and Washington.  I was astounded by humpback whales bubble net feeding and then breaching in joy.

​In June we had our second ever school family field trip on South Padre Island. 

Nature Lover     *****     Nature Lover     *****  Nature Lover     *****  ​  

I have been richly blessed to be a nature lover since early childhood when I watched several varieties of whales go back and forth from Baja California and Mexico up to Alaska each year through my living room window. I climbed trees and played in creeks. Even though I was so fortunate to see the pristine beauty of oceans, forests and mountains this summer, I know that all is not well.  This summer of 2025, there are more overt acts of eco sabotage happening in our country for profit.  When the rose garden at the White House was removed and paved over, I felt it was symbolic of a declaration of war being made against Mother Nature, against women. It’s not like we are just (just?) having global warming from our reckless abuse of nature, it is darker.  Regulations that protect forests, species, and survival of life on earth are being rolled way back. Is nothing protected?
​ I felt deeply the sadness of the floods  of July 4th this summer.  You felt it too. It was horrific destruction. We lost a family friend, Jane Ragsdale.  During her lifetime she gave thousands of girls the chance to experience growing up in the summer magic of nature at Heart O' the Hills summer camp for girls. Several generations of  girls in our  IOS Wizard of the Wood's family line, had the opportunity to enter the fierce canoe challenges and ride horses from the time they were little through their teens.  Jane helped raise all the girls whose lives she help to flower. Jane and I shared a common desire to empower children.
From her camp website: We challenge and empower girls to be confident, compassionate, and courageous. This is important work.   We must all be courageous.  It seems impossible to me now, but are women in danger of losing our right to vote?​

As I walk through the woods here at IOS along the creek, I sometimes wonder how long this forest will support trees.  How long will children be able to play in this creek. Will there always be water in the creek? Will these ancient pecan trees survive our climate? 

I turned 70 this year.  It is disconcerting sometimes when I forget where I put my phone down, but I do not ever forget that my work is with children in nature. 
The simple joys of playing in the mud, building shops with branches, using creek water to paint, growing carrots and kale,
As long as I can offer these things, I will.

Our theme this year will be “Rooted in Gratitude.” I am grateful for you, dear reader.  I am grateful for the amazing community of Inside Outside School. 
Today I am getting ready for us to come togetlher again as a community after our summer rest, back into our forest. I do not believe in sharing my eco worries with the children.  I still believe they need to be falling in love with the rich diversity of nature and enjoy a simple childhood. That is the important part, well, one of them. They will be learning to read and write, add, subtract, divide and multiply, measure, document, and implement, self-regulate, resolve conflicts, and make decisions together through the democratic process...but they are not going to receive a whitewashed version of history and have to navigate the weirdness of high stakes testing.  We will walk in beauty as long as there is beauty. 
If you are reading this, plant roses this fall, send your child to a hippie nature school (that’s us) and take your family outside.  Be a Nature Lover with us. We are welcoming 2nd and 4th grade applicants. 

It is the day after Thanksgiving.  I've been walking through the woods this week during the break, visiting the "shops."  This is one of my favorites. It is much cooler in person. The  shops change a lot over the course of a semester.  Sometimes the shopkeepers move their store across the woods, sometimes mother nature washes the scenery.  This semester, stumps and horse apples have been prize acquisitions as well as Texas Toenails, which seem oddly to be in abundance after all these years.  Time in the woods each afternoon is still called Nature Lit.  This year is a bumper year for pecans.  The children have made a stone on stone nutcracker...fingers must be careful! 
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Wondering what else I might share this week, I wandered down memory lane in my photos and picked out other shops and forts from over the years. I hope you enjoy.

And finally, I had to add a couple more photos...our goats, Daisy and Elizabeth and our silkie family, Mr. Feather and the ladies.

We established our apiary this year in the spring.  Our mentor, Sarah Denman AKA beekeeper@bee-salty.com sent us this information about beeks...
JUST SOME EXTRA FUN BEE STUFF FOR THE NEW BEEK (that's you!): 
DEFINITION OF A BEEK: Beekeeper + Geek = BEEK (that’s you now!) 
Signs you might be a beek include: thinking over sized heavy white clothing is stylish, giving home made beeswax lip balm to all your friends, noticing all the flowers and thinking how the bees must be loving them, dreaming about bees, all of a sudden having concern about BEE NUCS (not nukes), PLUS telling everyone who wants to know (and even those who don't) about how cool your new bees are! 

Our bees are so cool!  Look what they can do...

This is called "festooning."  Sarah told me this is the way bees measure the space as they are constructing the comb. Math is everywhere! This building phase is an indication of a good nectar flow.  That is encouraging!  Bees collaborate, which is one of the many important things they can teach us.  It is such a gift to be able to open up a hive for an inspection and see so much progress, so much abundance as they prepare their stores for winter. We are fortunate to have such a wonderful mentor.  Here she is giving us our beek orientation on day 1.

We are starting with 2 hives, Apiary A and Beehive B.  I am hoping our students can collaborate to help us come up with names that are a little more awesome sauce.  My intention for linking this to our place based learning is to begin planting year-round food for the bees, building each year on what will thrive in our new hot and cold world.  I am excited to think about planting hedgerows; it makes me feel like I'm living in a Beatrice Potter book.  

I knew it had been awhile since I wrote a blog, but November 2020 was a bit of a surprise.  We are still here!  We are looking forward to getting bees in April.  Above is our new mural, a project done by a mural elective class led by a very gifted parent.  We are still recovering from the ice storm, but a team of enthusiastic parents with chainsaws got us up and running pretty quickly. Our little goat friends had to take refuge in the duck coop when a tree came down in the farmyard.
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Our goats, Elizabeth and Daisy came to us in December.  They are the sweetest goats we have ever had at IOS. 

We've also been adopted by a very friendly cat whom we have named Mrs. Mittens.  

We held our annual Woodland Faire in November.  It gets better each year.  This year it was all about Ursa Major and giant mushrooms.  We have raised over $800 for our "Plentiful Plant," fundraiser.  We will be adding pollinator plants to our gardens, because...We are getting beehives!!!

I love looking out my classroom open window.  I feel a lightness of being even though things are crazy right now...outside of our magical world.  Fall leaves blow through the windows and we do a good bit of sweeping at the end of the day.  Every week that provides us the blessisng of meeting in person is a thing of wonder.  It is a treasure box to unpack.  We have a classroom pet named Delbert.  It is a damselfly.           

Monday was Monday Math Trail Morning.  They are estimating and measuring  girth in Peace Circle Woods

This one was 100", but the biggest tree at the Palace of the Pecan King had a girth of 180".  It took 4 people to hold the measuring tapes.  We had our first music class...drumsticks, 5 gallon buckets and rhythm (one of our spelling words. with silent h.)  
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And now the latest update from today...landscaping.  The sweet smell of cedar mulch welcomes you to the lunchroom.  Plants are set in groups where they will go into the soil.  So many people to thank for all this...Henry and Jamie, Willie, Brian, Mike, Peter, Suzanne, Ruchi, Manish, Donna, Sonia, Van, Ian and Gillian, Brent, Alphonso...I know there are many more.  Thank you all.  For Katie, Sonia and Brian and all the cast of "The Case of the Missing Dragon Kittens," another radical recognition, if I may...it was more than magical...it was so real!  The whole experience spotlighted our community's Human Greatness in action.  

Due to Covid-19 we were online having Zoom school for the first 8 weeks of this 20-21 school year.  We have been constructing 2 outside classrooms for our return, and we are back.  For now we have alternating half school pod groups meeting on campus.  Since the outside classrooms are downhill, we are getting a lot of exercise to make up for sitting in front of screens for weeks.  This is our first week back, so we are working out the finer details of how to run campus chores, like who will be feeding the chickens.  We have a new rooster, Fluffers.  Fluffers likes to crow.  Fluffers lives near the back porch where the Purple math group meets.  Math is interesting.  Fluffers sounds like he is begging in desperation for help.  This morning there was a deer running through the woods.  I've never seen a deer on the campus in our 9 years here.  Turtles have moved into an area of the creek that has some downed trees.  As soon as they hear humans they dive in, but if you are really quiet you can spot them sunning.  They are big!  
As I write, the 5th graders are sweeping the back porch and wiping down tables with their colorful masks on.  It is a strange world we live in.  It is November 4th.  We are in limbo today, not having final election results yet.  Everyone seemed very chill about that. It is good to have important work to do.   4 years ago it was a different world the day after the election.  It's an interesting life.  

This weekend is our Woodland Faire, "The Case of the Missing Dragon Kittens."  We have enjoyed some wonderful faires together, but I don't know if I was ever quite so excited about the faire.  We have the magic!  I hope you have some magic, too!   

Our grandson, now 20, is a photographer.  The bullet hit his right arm.  He required emergency surgery to save his arm.  He has a huge scar which runs down the center of his Texas tattoo.  He was holding a camera, not a gun. 

He is a peaceful man.  He eats a vegan diet so that he may do no harm.  I adore my grandchildren  They matter to me deeply and personally.  Our grandson recently shared with us how difficult it has been for him, growing up black.  I heard his pain, the things he has faced that our other grandchildren will never have to face because they are white.  I do want them to know what happened to their cousin.  I know it is a scary thing, but knowing about this is important.  We cannot let them grow up thinking that the color of your skin doesn't matter.  It makes all the difference if  your skin color isn't white.  I knelt in the grass last Sunday at Huston-Tillotson College listening to the  heartbreaking words of Brenda Ramos, whose son, Mark, was killed by police in Austin 6 weeks ago.  Mark was unarmed and had his hands up in the air.   There has been no justice, no arrest.  My heart is hurting for her and for all mothers and grandmothers whose children are people of color.  
One of the reasons we don't teach our students at IOS about de-forestation and climate change is that these big problems can paralyze children into a fear that they can only shut down around.  I feel this paralyzing fear about our world right now.  Are we facing civil war?  Are people trying to stir up such an unimaginable evil in the year 2020?  I cannot remain frozen in fear.  I have to use my voice to speak out against racism.  It was not my idea, and if you are reading this it was not yours either.  We do not support it, but are we fighting it?
My grandfather introduced racism into our home when I was in kindergarten or first grade.  He said the N word at the dinner table in reference to his co-workers at the Post Office.  My mother bravely ripped her father in law a new one in front of his granddaughters.  It made an indelible impression on me.  I thank God that my mother shaped my belief system, not my grandfather.  When we saw the race riots on the television, she did not send me out of the room.  I saw.  I see.  I cannot look the other way.  
Our next module in our Wit and Wisdom curriculum is "Civil Rights".  We will open  up with this integrated theme in our pandemic world classroom, whatever that looks like.  I will help shape the belief systems of my students.  I will continue to teach them the Three Respect Agreements of our school, Respect yourself, Respect others, Respect the environment.  I will continue to teach them about a growth mindset and about the Dimensions of Human Greatness.  But, when we talk about interaction, I want them to actually have interactions with people of color.  I don't want it to all be book learning. 
My semester reports are all written, and now I am trying to plan for a world where students can't be closer than 6 feet from each other, where I may be teaching with a mask over my mouth and nose in triple digit Texas heat. But just as importantly, I also am imagining how to plan a world where the student population at our school reflects the diversity of our wider community.   I can stand against racism by not being satisfied with my white privilege.  I can ask for the means to serve more intentionally in creating a more just and loving world.  I can reach into the greater field of life where this school originated and find the next upgrade.  Through our shared intention, let us see that manifesting.  Please join me. Namaste. 

                               Spring Forward
We had already begun our Parakeet class second semester theme of metamorphosis before spring break, but we were together in the classroom then.  We sat, knee to knee on our kaleidoscope magic learning carpet, reading about complete and incomplete metamorphosis.  It was nothing like Zoom.  ​
This week I am zooming through the speeding days from the school library each morning.   I change the science shelves behind me in some way every day.  I wonder who will be the first to notice.  I always try to share a sample of what is blooming here at school, and to create an inquiry link between  concrete objects and some component of our theme, helping us remember things in a new way. ​

Last week for Earth day I showed the students a photo of the fig tree we planted together on Earth Day a few years back.  This Earth Day is number 50.  I was in high school 50 years ago.  I wore a green armband to school that day and we had a sit in on campus.  It was a good time in history to be a teenager.  I had no idea then that one day I would magically understand my purpose was to dream an Earth Day kind of school into being.  This fig tree has GROWN!