Schools and Education

The Ark Row Center for Enrichment is now open in Tiburon! Owner Robin Briskin has been an educator since 1974 and has opened the center with the whole community in mind, offering a wide variety of classes and programs for children, adults, and seniors.

Programs for children include Two’s Together, a preschool prep class; messy fun with Mush & Gush for ages 2 to 4; yoga for kids of all ages; and Princess Ballet for ages 3 to 5. Classes for parents include pre- and post-natal yoga; Mommies Meeting Mommies, a great get-together for moms and children; and Mama Sings, where pregnant mommies can learn to sing to their unborn children. The center will offer a series of sample classes during its March open houses on Saturday, March 13, 20, and 27 from 10 am to 2 pm. Sample classes include Family Yoga, Dance Jam for Kids, Recycled Art for the Family, and Family Theater.
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Ever wonder if homeschooling is right for you and your children? Marin mom and homeschooling parent Barbara McVeigh writes about her experiences, as well as local resources for homeschoolers, in this guest article.

Last August my daughter’s assigned first grade desk sat empty, and I felt a lump in my throat. Because instead of driving her to our local school, one noted for its academic achievements and containing her kindergarten friends from last year, we decided to take an alternative route. We went fishing that day where we got hooked… with a creative group of homeschoolers, a community growing in Marin. Our homeschooling journey began as we dived into a world filled with boundless schooling choices.
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Mill Valley's Greenwood School has announced the opening of its new preschool for fall 2010. Greenwood School will offer a Waldorf-inspired preschool program for children ages 3–5 where students are provided with a secure, caring, and structured home-like environment to begin their school years. This newly established preschool program will offer an early childhood experience where teachers create a safe and meaningful classroom community in which children hear stories, see puppet shows, sing, bake bread, make soup, learn to make beautiful and useful things, explore nature, build houses and structures out of natural materials, and celebrate seasonal festivals.

Two-, three-, and five-day programs are available as well as afternoon care from 12:30 to 5:30 pm. Applications are now being accepted for September 2010, and children may enroll at any time during the year if space is available. Enrollment is open to all children who are 2 years 9 months to 4 years 6 months by June 1 prior to desired entry.

Marin mom and entrepreneur Marjun Biernath looked back to her native Germany when trying to find a business niche here in the US. She imports unique, handmade, and educational Kumquats puppets from Europe to sell to lucky families in both the Bay Area and throughout the country.

We asked Marjun to answer a few questions about herself, her family, her business, and Kumquats. You can learn more about Marjun and the complete line of Kumquats puppets by visiting www.kumquats-usa.com.

The Marin Music Chest has launched its annual scholarship audition program in its ongoing effort to provide financial support to Marin County students studying classical music. Students studying wind and string instruments, piano and voice are encouraged to appl, and all scholarship applicants must be residents of Marin County for a minimum of two years and have at least two years of music study prior to the audition.

Junior Division instrumentalists must be between 10 and 13 years old and vocalists between 14 and 16. The Junior Division application deadline is February 12, 2010, and auditions will be held March 13, 2010. Senior Division instrumentalists must be between 14 and 19 years of age and vocalists between 17 and 24. The Senior Division application deadline is February 26, 2010 and auditions will be held on March 27, 2010.

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Directly underneath the south end of the Golden Gate Bridge sits one of the Bay Area's most evocative and exciting attractions: Fort Point. Fort Point was constructed on the northern tip of San Francisco in the 1850s to guard the entrance to the Golden Gate. It's the only 19th-century masonry fort located east of the Mississippi, and it's been run by the National Park Service as a National Monument since 1970. It's always well worth an outing, especially if a special event such as this weekend's Civil War Living History Days happens to be taking place.

Familar to fans of the movie Vertigo (it's shown in the scene where Jimmy Stewart fishes Kim Novak out of the Bay), Fort Point is sits right underneath the southern end of the bridge and commands a superlative view of the Golden Gate and San Francisco Bay. Despite the traffic whizzing by overhead, it's not hard to imagine what this place would have been like a century and half ago when it was an active military intallation, and of course this stretch of the imagination is made easier by the living historians on hand at the fort this weekend.

One of the things I take great pride in is our daily habit of settling down at the end of the day and reading for at least a half hour. This is something I've done with both my children since they were old enough to sit up and look like they were paying attention. I think it's partly responsible for the fact that my son is a pretty advanced reader for his age, too. It's also responsible for helping to instill the idea that reading is a fun form of entertainment, as well as a necessary life skill. It also gives my wife a priceless daily moment of "me time" after being around two small kids all day.

These days, our current nightly reading repertoire is dominated by the A to Z Mysteries series of books by Ron Roy. If you've never heard of them, you probably will at some point. The A to Z Mysteries are aimed at about the second- or third-grade level, and, as the name implies, are mysteries that are solved by a team of ordinary third-graders from fictional Green Lawn, Connecticut who just happen to have a natural aptitude for detective work. Each book—there are 26 in all, but you probably figured that out already—has a title tied into a letter of the alphabet, such as The Absent Author, The Jaguar's Jewel, or The Zombie Zone.

“Wow!” my son shouted as we walked in the door and laid eyes on all the LEGO kits and pieces in the room at Play-Well Teknologies in San Anselmo. We have been trying to visit “the LEGO place” (as my son calls it) and try one of their drop-in open-play sessions for a while now, but something always seemed to come up. We finally made it there last week with some friends for a playdate, and we all had a blast.

Play-Well TEKnologies' Marin Engineering Center features a large area dedicated just for the drop-in play. In fact, it's the largest drop-in LEGO center in the country. My son was in awe—they seemed to have every type of LEGO imaginable. Dozens of bins keep the LEGO pieces, reportedly over a million in all, organized by color, size, type, or theme, including wheels, ships, planes, engines, pirates and much, much more.
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