Vol VII, No 2 - February 18, 2025

If you survived January, congratulations! You all get a medal. Whew, what a month! Maybe we should collectively decide to hibernate next January.

Temps may be very cold for some of us and sniffles and stomach bugs are running rampant, but there is beauty to be found in the winter season. Two of my kids are still heading to forest school, bundled up for snow exploration in the woods, and also spending some time warming up indoors as they prepare their first crankie* show (read below for a description and homeschooling project idea).

This is an exciting Journey issue for me because I have wanted to showcase students' writing ever since I started working with this newsletter. This month is our very time to run a feature piece written by a homeschool student. Please enjoy the article below written by Ira Niroop, age 7. Ira is passionate about protecting our environment and hopeful that we will learn to work together to save the earth. After all, Ira tells us, "it's up to us!" We are grateful that Ira and her family are part of the GHF community.

We are also very grateful to Dr. Lin Lim for her years of service to the GHF Board of Directors. Kasi Peters' message of thanks to Lin is below. Thank you, Lin!

Stay warm,

Marna

*A crankie is a storytelling art form that has its origins in ancient scroll art from China and Japan. In the 19th century, this art form became very popular, featuring a painted scroll that artists cranked as a narrator described the scenes. It was called a moving panorama (an early ancestor of modern cinema.) There was a revival of the art form in the 1960s in the U.S. and the term crankie was born. To make a crankie, artists decorate a scroll with illustrations of scenes and stories and wind it around two spools in a box on either side of a viewing window. As the storytellers crank the scroll by hand, the pictures on the scroll move through the viewing window and the narrators tell or sing the story to accompany the illustrations. The viewing window may be lit from behind to create a shadow puppet effect. If any homeschool parents are looking for a project that combines writing/storytelling, illustrating, building, and performing, this could be a great winter project and a fun history lesson on the evolution of the modern movie.

Marna Walthall Wohlfeld is a mom of four, a former non-profit director and journalist, and now a doctoral student at Bridges Graduate School of Cognitive Diversity in Education. She has deschooled, unschooled, and homeschooled various kids at various stages. She loves learning about and championing kids' unique brains and learning styles. She hopes to use her graduate degree to support parents and caregivers of twice-exceptional children as they move through the journey of parenting their wonderfully complex kids. She also hopes to advocate for 2e students by creating greater understanding about the need for strength-based approaches and support for vulnerable nervous systems in education and life. Marna is a trained SENG facilitator and has completed training Levels 1 and 2 for PDA North America. She has presented at NAGC and WCGTC and has written for 2e News.

GHF Board President, Kasi Peters, thanks Dr. Lin Lim for her service to GHF

I have the great privilege of working with an amazing group of people on the GHF Board of Directors. We each bring our own strengths to the organization and are willing to step in to support each other at a moment’s notice. While we all have our specific projects and committees, there is crossover and cooperation across the board and I feel so fortunate to be a part of it all.

Today I would like to express a special thank you to Dr. Lin Lim who has served on our board of directors since 2022. While her board term has come to an end, her gifts to our organization are long-lasting. Lin was instrumental in helping us build a healthy, collaborative board through her strong communication skills. Lin has worked tirelessly to form connections across the many organizations that support gifted and 2e families and professionals, which has been a wonderful contribution to the field. Lin is also a GHF author and conference presenter. We look forward to an ongoing relationship with this valuable member of our GHF family.

On behalf of the GHF Board of Directors and our members, I want to thank Lin for her support and hard work and wish her well on her next projects! Thank you, Lin!

Protect Our Environment

by Ira Niroop (Age 7)

Did you know that now you can see trash piled up from space? What caused this? Let me explain. Well, it is because of humans that this happens. We overconsume. Companies want us to buy more and more and they do this by creating online shopping which makes it easier to shop, putting up strong advertisements telling people to buy more things, and making products that cannot be repaired.

This behavior of ours is causing air, water, and soil pollution. Air pollution is mainly caused by factories. They burn fossil fuels which releases gas and smoke. That gas or smoke can cause air pollution. There are other ways that can cause air pollution, too, like mining to get stuff like gold. If you mine, then you would be cutting down trees which would be bad because nothing would take the carbon dioxide and turn it into oxygen for us to breathe. Water pollution is caused by humans throwing plastic in the oceans. When trucks come to take recycling, some trucks accidentally drop some near drains. When it rains, that plastic eventually goes in the drains and the plastic eventually goes into the sea. If fish eat these plastics and we eat the fish, we have the plastic inside us which is very bad. Some people in poor places like Thailand don’t have enough money for fresh water so they have to drink water that is not filtered and this might have harmful chemicals. Soil pollution is also caused by mining. When you mine, you have to use chemicals that hurt the soil and may destroy the soil. Also putting chemical fertilizers in the soil would also hurt the soil and destroy it.

What would help is to reduce, reuse, and recycle but this won’t always help. A lot of labels say things can be recycled, but they actually cannot be recycled. Reducing buying always helps because it forces companies to stop making a lot of new things. If companies stop making new things, it would be less tempting to buy things. Reusing always helps since you are not buying a lot so it will lead to the same end as reducing.

In conclusion, we are causing this problem and the big thing is to understand what we are doing so that we can think of solutions like being kinder to the Earth or reducing, reusing, and recycling. Our biggest problem is working together. By learning about the Earth, everyone can make better choices. We all have to work together and do our parts to make our world a better place. So it's up to us to save the Earth and if we don’t save the Earth, in our future we will live in a rusty, old, non-clean Earth. So think about how you want your future to be. The end.

My name is Ira Niroop. I am 7 years old. I live in California with my mom and dad. I like reading,

playing and going on trips with my family. I play the piano and sing and play basketball- this

makes me happy. I want the world to adopt clean energy and live peacefully with other animals

and human beings.

GHF Press Featured Title

Parents today lead busy lives and it’s difficult to “get it all done.” Gayle and Lin have created a guide encouraging parents to strengthen their connection with their youngsters using shared reading time. This book provides a selection of carefully curated picture books that can be used by parents to address important issues with their children, such as worry, perfectionism, and managing “big feelings.” Gayle and Lin also provide expert advice to gently guide parent-child conversations using simple, science-backed methods, including ways to help your child develop empathy, self-regulation, and self-acceptance. All of this is artfully accomplished as the authors share both research-based strategies and their own parenting experiences to bring out the very best in children using a strength-based approach.

Purchase Using Picture Books to Help Little Ones Learn About Themselves here.