The pale light that peeked through the dormant trees was quickly dissipating as we walked out the door into the bone-gnawing wet of late-February New Hampshire. The road was covered in graying slush from a week of snow and a day of rain. I clutched a ball of cooking string in my right-hand pocket as I told the man I had met a month before that I was penniless, collecting compost for chump change, but that I loved his daughter, so would he grant her hand in marriage? Two hours...

Lower School Teacher Elias Naegele offers a few helpful suggestions for how to keep the spirit of adventure alive through all four seasons in and out of home.

We've all been there. A boy in your care looks earnestly into your eyes, rabid with excitement; he's found a critter and he wants to catch it. What do you do?

In certain school systems, it is perhaps more common to find students dissecting samples and diagraming abstractions. The boys in the Lower School at The Heights, however, begin their scientific formation not in a lab, among dead specimens, but in nature, among living creatures. Their text book is not full of paper, but of paper’s source, trees; for their primary text is the book of nature itself.  In this week’s episode, Eric Heil takes us outdoors–so to speak–for a discussion of natural history. With over fourteen years of experience teaching...

In our most recent webinar, How to Keep a Nature Journal, Eric Heil and Peter Vitz expose the importance of journaling. They talked specifically about why and how nature journaling, the act of recording observations of the natural world in a notebook, can be of benefit to children and adults. A recording of this webinar (as well as past webinars) is available for free on The Heights Academy Webinars Archive. During the webinar, Eric and Peter list some reading recommendations for parents and teachers for studying, reference, or lesson-planning. That list is...

Like a siren, the sounds of summer are beckoning the boys to the lazy delights of vacation mingled with trips to the beach, the mountains, and for the lucky ones, expeditions across the sea. Dreams of sleeping in, no homework, and unlimited “free-time” dance in their heads, while parents begin to worry that soon enough there will be bored boys on-hand pinching younger sisters and instigating fights over the last fistful of Fruit Loops. But fear not! Below I share a highly idealized eight-step action plan that will hopefully assist...

Reading under the sun is not as easy as it sounds. In this article, Tom talks about some strategies to master the art of reading outside.