Resources | Lending Library

Once I move offsite, my plan is to have a Lending Library for parents to check out some wonderful resources I’ve accumulated and found inspiring. I figured, why wait until I’m offsite. My current Terra Luz parents are welcome to check them out now. I just ask they be returned in 30 days.
Here are a few. Will get more up soon.

Parenting for a Peaceful World
Robin Grille

Parenting for a Peaceful World is a fascinating look at how child-rearing customs have shaped societies and major world events. It reveals how children adapt to and are influenced by different parenting styles and how safeguarding their emotional development is the key to creating a more peaceful, harmonious, and sustainable world.

Practical advice for raising a well-adjusted child includes tips on:
Supporting your child's developing emotional intelligence
Understanding how your childhood has influenced your own emotional make-up
Helping you achieve your full parenting potential
Parenting for a Peaceful World is for parents, child health professionals, teachers, and adults seeking to heal and grow.

Robin Grille is an internationally renowned author, speaker, educator, psychologist, and psychotherapist specializing in child development, parenting issues, and family relationships.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
Barbara Kingsolver




Michael Pollan is the crack investigator and graceful narrator of the ecology of local food and the toxic logic of industrial agriculture. Now he has a peer. Novelist Kingsolver recounts a year spent eating home-grown food and, if not that, local. Accomplished gardeners, the Kingsolver clan grow a large garden in southern Appalachia and spend summers "putting food by," as the classic kitchen title goes. They make pickles, chutney and mozzarella; they jar tomatoes, braid garlic and stuff turkey sausage. Nine-year-old Lily runs a heritage poultry business, selling eggs and meat. What they don't raise (lamb, beef, apples) comes from local farms. Come winter, they feast on root crops and canned goods, menus slouching toward asparagus. Along the way, the Kingsolver family, having given up industrial meat years before, abandons its vegetarian ways and discovers the pleasures of conscientious carnivory.

This field—local food and sustainable agriculture—is crowded with books in increasingly predictable flavors: the earnest manual, diary of an epicure, the environmental battle cry, the accidental gardener. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is all of these, and much smarter. Kingsolver takes the genre to a new literary level; a well-paced narrative and the apparent ease of the beautiful prose makes the pages fly. Her tale is both classy and disarming, substantive and entertaining, earnest and funny. Kingsolver is a moralist ("the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners"), but more often wry than pious. Another hazard of the genre is snobbery. You won't find it here. Seldom do paeans to heirloom tomatoes (which I grew up selling at farmers' markets) include equal respect for outstanding modern hybrids like Early Girl.Kingsolver has the ear of a journalist and the accuracy of a naturalist. She makes short, neat work of complex topics: what's risky about the vegan diet, why animals belong on ecologically sound farms, why bitterness in lettuce is good. Kingsolver's clue to help greenhorns remember what's in season is the best I've seen. You trace the harvest by botanical development, from buds to fruits to roots. Kingsolver is not the first to note our national "eating disorder" and the injuries industrial agriculture wreaks, yet this practical vision of how we might eat instead is as fresh as just-picked sweet corn. The narrative is peppered with useful sidebars on industrial agriculture and ecology (by husband Steven Hopp) and recipes (by daughter Camille), as if to show that local food—in the growing, buying, cooking, eating and the telling—demands teamwork


Whole Child/Whole Parent
Polly Berrien Berends


For more than two decades, Whole Child/Whole Parent, the first spiritually oriented book on parenthood and the first to address the value of parenthood for the parent as well as for the child, has provided a sound, practical, psychological and spiritual footing for parenthood and family life. This fourth edition includes new material for contemporary parents on anger, children's dreams, maintaining individual and family life, marital as well as parental life, and many new personal anecdotes.

It is the perfect guide "not merely for parents who want to raise their children in the best manner possible, it is for all people, including adults who want to raise themselves." (M. Scott Peck, from the foreword).
Whether exploring love and discipline or bedtime and storybook reading, Berends shows the practical relevance of spiritual insights to the most ordinary parental tasks.

Magical Beginnings, Enchanted Lives
Deepak Chopra



Chopra (Peace Is the Way; The Seven Spiritual Laws of Yoga; etc.) and his colleagues at the Chopra Center for Well Being offer pregnant women, their partners and healthcare providers a practical, thought-provoking framework in which to experience pregnancy and childbirth. Chopra advocates techniques drawn from ayurveda, the centuries-old Indian medical science, combined with daily yoga and meditation practice, to help deepen a woman's connection to herself, her baby and her own intuitive wisdom.

Chopra says that the months during which a woman carries a child are a naturally introspective period and provide an ideal opportunity to cultivate awareness of physical, mental, emotional and spiritual states. To facilitate this process, the Chopra Center developed the Magical Beginnings program for parents and training programs for prenatal educators to aid them in integrating ayurvedic therapies (focused on nutrition, sound, sight, touch and aroma), meditation, yoga, visualization and journaling into a holistic approach to pregnancy. According to Chopra, Western images of childbirth can instill unconscious fears, causing undue stress to mother and child. To help women tackle these worries, he offers helpful medical information on the physical aspects of childbirth, ways to process difficult emotions, and suggestions for healthy communication between partners. In addition to pregnant women and their caretakers, readers interested in birthing and raising conscious children will likely be inspired by Chopra's stirring call for mindful parenting from conception through birth and beyond.

The No-Cry Potty Training Solution
Elizabeth Pantley



Potty training your child doesn't have to be a stressful experience. Parenting authority Elizabeth Pantley helps your child get on the road to bathroom independence without frustration, confusion, or tears.

Elizabeth Pantley's easy no-cry solution will help you:

Determine the right time to start potty training
Create a simple and effective potty plan
Increase your child's self-esteem and independence
Motivate a reluctant potty user . . . and more!
Plus, this is the only potty training book with complete bathroom safety checklists and childproofing strategies.

The Hundred Languages of Children
The Reggio Emilia Approach - Advanced Reflections
Edwards, Gandini, Forman

The city-run early childhood program of Reggio Emilia, Italy, has become recognized and acclaimed as one of the best systems of education in the world. Over the past forty years, educators there have evolved a distinctive innovative approach that supports children's well-being and fosters their intellectual development through a systematic focus on symbolic representation.

Young children (from birth to age six) are encouraged to explore their environment and express themselves through many "languages," or modes of expression, including words, movement, drawing, painting, sculpture, shadow play, collage, and music. Leading children to surprising levels of symbolic skill and creativity, the system is not private and elite but rather involves full-day child care open to all, including children with disabilities. This new Second Edition reflects the growing interest and deepening reflection upon the Reggio approach, as well as increasing sophistication in adaptation to the American context. Included are many entirely new chapters and an updated list of resources, along with original chapters revised and extended.

The book represents a dialogue between Italian educators who founded and developed the system and North Americans who have considered its implications for their own settings and issues. The book is a comprehensive introduction covering history and philosophy, the parent perspective, curriculum and methods of teaching, school and system organization, the use of space and physical environments, and adult professional roles including special education. The final section describes implications for American policy and professional development and adaptations in United States primary, preschool, and child care classrooms.

Beyond Discipline, From Compliance to Community
Alfie Kohn



What is most remarkable about the assortment of discipline programs on the market today is the number of fundamental assumptions they seem to share. Some may advocate the use of carrots rather than sticks; some may refer to punishments as "logical consequences." But virtually all take for granted that the teacher must be in control of the classroom, and that what we need are strategies to get students to comply with the adult’s expectations.

Alfie Kohn challenged these widely accepted premises, and with them the very idea of classroom "management," when the original edition of Beyond Discipline was published in 1996. Since then, his path-breaking book has invited hundreds of thousands of educators to question the assumption that problems in the classroom are always the fault of students who don’t do what they’re told; instead, it may be necessary to reconsider what it is that they’ve been told to do--or to learn. Kohn shows how a fundamentally cynical view of children underlies the belief that we must tell them exactly how we expect them to behave and then offer "positive reinforcement" when they obey.

Just as memorizing someone else’s right answers fails to promote students’ intellectual development, so does complying with someone else’s expectations for how to act fail to help students develop socially or morally. Kohn contrasts the idea of discipline, in which things are done to students to control their behavior, with an approach in which we work with students to create caring communities where decisions are made together.
Beyond Discipline has earned the status of an education classic, a vital alternative to all the traditional manuals that consist of techniques for imposing control. For this 10th anniversary edition, Kohn adds a new afterword that expands on the book’s central themes and responds to questions from readers. Packed with stories from real classrooms around the country, seasoned with humor and grounded in a vision as practical as it is optimistic, Beyond Discipline shows how students are most likely to flourish in schools that have moved toward collaborative problem solving--and beyond discipline.

Alfie Kohn is the author of many other books about education and human behavior, including Punished by Rewards, The Schools Our Children Deserve, and Unconditional Parenting.

Don't Move the Muffin Tins
Bev Bos

An oldie, but a goodie!
I LOVE Bev Bos.