Welcome to Merlin's Kids! This website has been inspired by two students, Bo Erik (grade 6) and Shennendoah Hollsten (grade 9), who, as true Renaissance learners, are traveling the globe in exploration and playfulness.
We live in an amazing and sometimes confusing world. Despite the explosive growth of the Internet and knowledge in recent decades, we are now often confronted by contradictory information. We are making great progress at CERN working with anti-matter and yet we're still (at least some of us) recovering from the devastating blow that Pluto isn't really a planet (it's the second-largest known dwarf planet in our Solar System). Scientists claim that dinosaurs died out about 65 million years ago, while others insist that dinosaurs and human beings lived simultaneously. In Africa, fossilized remains of modern humans, some 160,000 years old, were found, confirming a theory that humans evolved in Africa, while Otzi, the 5300 year old human, discovered in 1991 in the Swiss Alps, boasts the world's oldest-known tattoo (made from double-bonded carbon atoms found in soot with crystals made of silicate) - indicating we not so far removed from our ancient ancestors, who also wore backpacks!
Most people think of knowledge as nothing more than organized common sense and supporting details with little more than vague and untested beliefs. In Merlin's class, we're experimenting endlessly, as did Shakespeare in the 16th century with words, how to adapt, remold, and reshape our thinking to synthesize all we learn and experience into a more cohesive foundation that accompanied with all the resources of our present time, seizes our interest and attention in a way that we fire the imagination, persuade the intellect, and move the emotions to explore the widest range and possibilities of human experience to exclaim: "Play out the play!" (Henry IV, Part I 2.4.402).