Sparkle Schoolhouse
The Story is Only the Beginning! With the inspiration of each Sparkle Story as a beginning, the corresponding Sparkle Schoolhouse lesson continues the journey with wholesome enrichment, inspired tutorials and a welcoming community for our homeschooling Sparkle Parents, Adults, Teachers and Children.
Sparkle Weekly Wonderings: Conflict Is a Gift, Not a Curse!
Without conflict there is no growth, no learning, no healing, and no revelation. We need the conflict to inspire the joy of resolution. Thus, avoiding conflict is not only a bad idea, it takes you out of the best parts of life!
Exploring the Dry Gables Series - “This is Our Moment”
The stories in this collection, Dry Gables: Good Neighbors, give us insights into how we resolve conflict and strive to get our needs met — and what we do when they are not met.
Storybox Playlist: When Kids Clash - Stories and Suggestions for Conflict Resolution
Conflict exists everywhere — even within households. Since this is natural and normal, the question is not about how to avoid clashes, but how to address conflicts with integrity. Here are some stories that use tactics and hold context for authentic conflict resolution.
Sparkle Weekly Wonderings: Springtime
Spring! Easter! Passover! ‘Tis the season of profound transformation. Along with the return of migrating birds, the blooming of flowers, we experience our own kind of resurrection and liberation.
Sparkle Weekly Wonderings: Magic
In this season of birds and blossoms and so so many spring fairies, may we all pause to notice the thickness in the air, the wonderful tension of magic as it attracts the impossible to your door.
Sparkle Weekly Wonderings: Maple Syrup
This week we have stories of maple syrup: collecting sap, boiling it, and tasting it — but if you listen closely, you’ll hear the other kind of sap running, too. The magic transformation of spring manifests not only in the natural world … but also in our children.
Sparkle Weekly Wondering: Dry Gables - Good Neighbors
Today we launch a third Dry Gables collection: “Good Neighbors.”
Exploring the Dry Gables Series - "Get It Done!"
The Enneagram is a complex and meaningful model of human personality. It offers us a road map in helping us to identify who we are at our best and what blocks us from a place of happiness and greater ease. Here we explore it through one of our own Sparkle Stories collections.
Dry Gables: The Stories and How to Use Them
Dry Gables is a unique series of stories centered around the people who live and work in a Victorian era small town in South Dakota. Each of the nine characters embodies a way of being in the world — with unique behaviors, motivations, and fears.
Sparkle Weekly Wonderings: Support for Parents and Teachers
What makes Sparkle Stories ... Sparkle Stories? What makes us different than, say, children’s podcasts? or audiobooks? or Disney? or Netflix Kids?
Why Storytelling Is Way Better Than Lecturing Your Kids
There is an alternative parenting technique that is hardly new. It has been used since our species could speak, and it is not only effective, it is delightful: storytelling. We are wired for it — literally. The neuroscience is conclusive — we use stories to build our realities and make sense of them.
Sparkle Weekly Wonderings: Strength
In addition to celebrating warrior women, powerful queens, and defiant girls, let us also celebrate the kind of strength that is currently transforming this country and the world: the total strength of the feminine.
Raising Strong Girls: Resource List
I asked the Sparkle Team to share their favorite books and resources for raising strong girls, and together they created a wonderful list! We want to share it with you.
Sparkle Weekly Wonderings: The Nurtured Heart Approach
The Nurtured Heart Approach was built for spirited, intense kiddos. It’s all about relentlessly energizing the positive while declining to engage in the negative. And it’s very, very straightforward and satisfying to use.
The Nurtured Heart Approach (and Georgia Bean's Method for Minding Mice)
In the fall, I came across a parenting tool that deeply inspired me. It's called the Nurtured Heart Approach.
Sparkle Weekly Wonderings: Make Valentine's Day your own
What makes you feel the most lit up, abundant, and love-filled? Whatever that is, do it — because it will spill over into everyone around you.
Sparkle Weekly Wonderings: February Stories
We hope that these introductory stories can serve as an early Valentine to you, offering tenderness, connection, and wishes for an affectionate year ahead!
Sparkle Weekly Wonderings: Whatever the Weather
I like extremes. I’ve loved winters along the Canadian border and I love summers in central Texas. I love it when the inside of my nose freezes and I love it when it’s so hot the air feels like a mattress hitting me in the face.
Sparkle Weekly Wonderings: Grit and Stories to Inspire It
This is a question I often ask people, wondering what primary message they wish to offer the children of the world so that we can create the stories that meet the need. The answers are always inspiring and tender: nature, empathy, community, attachment, role models. The answers are all, of course, correct — and certainly worthy of a Sparkle Story.
FIFTY Study Page: Tennessee — "One of Us"
This story from the FIFTY collection uses historical fiction to explore the history of Country Music and the Grand Ole Opry.
