From our desk: A bimonthly newsletter exploring community, parenting and play

From our desk: A bimonthly newsletter exploring community, parenting and play

Newsletter

Welcome to the Bi-Monthly Newsletter from Parents' Nook. Our goal is to create care-spaces for families based on the local parenting community's needs, thus fostering a thriving local economy. We encourage you to participate and provide feedback on our community experimentation, as it will guide us in developing complex adaptive systems for parenting communities that meet the needs of all involved.
Our dream: We reimagine a world where Nooks collaborating with neighborhood public spaces may become a futuristic public good scenario, and support and regenerate the community care-economy in the process.

“Simplicity is a prerequisite for reliability.”  Edsger W. Dijkstra

We wish you a happy, healthy, and creative new year ahead. In this edition, we have a few updates to share with you. We have redesigned our website and introduced new concepts to make participating in Nooks easier for anyone, anywhere.

Introduction to Resource Packages (Carefully curated by a few of us):

We have created Resource Packages, which are carefully curated by our Play team and Admin team, for anyone interested in facilitating Nooks, hosting a Nook, or in our ongoing research. These packages are free for subscribed members and will help orient you to Nooks and related concepts. We are also working on ways to make the business sustainable.

Note: The resource packages are free and anyone subscribed might be able to go through it, we believe education in internet should be accessible to anyone interested in learning. We are figuring out other ways to make the business sustainable. We do see a new socio-economic model emerging, if you want to learn more, we would request you to go through  our research links. If you want to contribute/give feedback please reach out to us.

Parents’ Nook
We are re imagining neighborhood parenting community. We believe that children are amazing and open-ended Play is magic. And we are connecting the dots.


Introduction to Nook as a Service:
To support those interested in hosting Nooks for their own family/micro-community we are introducing a paid service that includes one-on-one conversations with members of our Play team, help with setup, a list of materials, assistance finding a space to host a Nook and working with the host to create a micro-community for them. The fees go directly to the Play Expert and our Play Director. More details will be announced by the end of the month. Stay tuned for more details in this space.
Tip: We are inspired by a self evolving and dissolving socio-economic model in a platform.Stay tuned as we dive deeper into technical details here.

Introducing write ups from Early Childhood Experts from the community (Co-Author an Article with us) :

"Play is joy, when we play we are fully integrated into ourselves and we feel at one with the world. This is the wisdom of childhood. It does not have to be taught and yet, in order to bear fruit later in life, it needs to be sustained and appreciated."
We have always been interested in exploring how we can tap into the collective wisdom and guidance of early childhood experts within our community to benefit parents. After extensive research, we are pleased to introduce a curated section where early childhood experts from around the community share their insights and engage in authentic discussions. These conversations will take place in circles within our forum, to ensure that the discussion remains focused and relevant to those who are interested.

Co-Author an Article
We are re imagining neighborhood parenting community. We believe that children are amazing and open-ended Play is magic. And we are connecting the dots.
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Think of it as a curated, community-driven source of information, where you can access the knowledge and support you need without the noise of external sources. We firmly believe in the power of our community and the positive impact of working together to provide support for our children as they navigate and understand the world around them.


This week, we would like to share an article written by Ana Carolina Zambelli, an early childhood expert based in the Bay Area with 8 years of experience working with families. She specializes in Positive Parenting. We hope you find it thought-provoking and insightful.


Inviting you to join our Conversation Forum:

In light of new discoveries by psychologists, economists, and neuroscientists, we are focusing on the cooperative side of human nature and building a community for parents based on their unique parenting needs.  We believe that working together is the key to ensuring our children receive the support they need while they explore and understand the world around them.


To that end, the first steps we are taking is creating a discussion forum based on certain curated topic by our guest writers. We will expand on the feature step by step.  We invite you to join our live forum where you can share your experiences, ask questions, and participate in discussions with our extended team of experts. We ask that you provide necessary details to ensure authenticity and safety for all involved. The topics for now would be mainly the topics gues writers have selected to work on.

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We also invite vouched members (for now we will reach out or you know who all of you are) of our network to create their own Nook workshops, equestrian classes, music classes, carpentry workshops, etc., based on the philosophy of open-ended play and Nooks. We simply ask that you provide a space for parents to work, take a call, read a book, or simply sit. This is also a benefit for local homeschooling communities and brings everything together.If you're interested in contributing in any way, please fill out the form to host a workshop.Our team will review submissions and let you know if it aligns with our philosophy. We want to keep the experience curated for the people subscribed to our distributed network.

We are currently developing the technology for a vouching system and invite you to participate in our monthly online calls to further discuss. More details
Thank you for your support and participation.

Introducing Author’s Circle

The circles  created by parenting experts from around the community gives you an opportunity to dive deeper on the topic chosen by them to share with our community.We request you only join the group if you are passionate about the topic and will be able to contribute meaningfully in some ways. These circles are different than discussion forums on the topics the guest authors have chosen. Below are a few of the use cases which we can think of right now, this space is a work in progress.

1)You have done previous research on a related scenario/same scenario,
2)you are teaching on the topic,
3)you have written a book on a similar topic,
4)You want to share your research paper
5)you want to collaborate with the author in her next writeup/endeavor,
6)want to join in future discussions by the author.

This space would also contain details about future endeavors  etc. by the guest writer. It can be an online forum, AMA hosted in the space, the work they are doing. We would like the space to be of mutual enlightening and a learning space for both the author and their audience. In other words this circle is the  group that  wants to know more about the author’s work and help in creating a learning society around it. Let's imagine something better to satisfy our intellectual curiosity.

Conversations@Parents’Nook
Neighborhood parenting community
Join Ana's Circle here 

Introducing Comments

We are excited to announce the introduction of commenting for subscribed members on all posts and pages. We encourage meaningful questions, discussions and welcome diverse perspectives. We believe that engaging with different view points can help us learn, grow and change our thought patterns. However, we ask that all comments be respectful and adhere to our community guidelines. Any behavior that is deemed disrespectful or in violation of these guidelines will be subject to investigation, and the admin team reserves the right to revoke membership if necessary.

Finally we will share some pictures from Nooks @Oakland Museum last summer.


Finally We will be ending the newsletter with a thought provoking quote. Let's be curious together and ask the hard questions ourselves.

Are we giving the children enough time to think and explore?

Who are we: We are a network of parents, educators, play advocates, space collaborators, technologists, researchers, community organizers, and artists trying to create the world we believe in. We believe these care spaces are essential to the survival and well being of parents and children.

If our work and research work interests you we would love to hear from you. Any feedback/suggestions are very much appreciated as we build together. Reach out to us play@parents-nook.com

Until our next newsletter, stay curious and healthy.

Warmly

Parents' Nook Editorial Team.