Recent Blog Comments
-
I have gone through much the same process, both in[...]
-
We didn't have a park when I was growing up.[...] -
My son is only 3, so we haven't really faced[...] -
When a group of kids come over to our house[...] -
Mike, that is the best, most heartfelt piece you have[...]
-
Category Archives: Palo Alto / Menlo Park
Halloween in Your Neighborhood or Mine?
My neighborhood is either the Disneyland of Halloween or the Ivy League of Halloween for our area (our streets are called Yale, Princeton, Harvard, etc.!). I strongly prefer the latter. I should explain.
We have a reputation for being so fun on Halloween that lots and lots of trick-or-treaters come by who would never pass by our house the rest of the year. We handed out a few hundred treats last night, and we would have handed out a few hundred more if we hadn’t shut down at 8pm.
You “Halloween Tourists” know who you are. Well, I have a message for you: Continue reading
The Best Neighborhood Summer Camp
Camp Iris Way in Palo Alto, CA, which just completed its second year, is the best neighborhood summer camp in many ways. It’s the biggest and the most organized I know of, by far. Its organizers, Jennifer Antonow and Diana Nemet, read about my camp, Camp Yale, a couple of years ago and decided to give it a try. They’ve totally outdone me! Amazingly, it had 72 kids, including 41 participants (from age 4 to 3rd grade), 11 counselors in … Continue reading
Posted in Neighborhood, Palo Alto / Menlo Park, Solutions
Play Day & Parent Seminar at the Playborhood!
226 Yale Rd., Menlo Park, CA
Saturday, May 1
RSVP to {encode=”mike@playborhood.com” title=”Mike Lanza”} for the Play Day and/or Parent Seminar
Play Day
3pm – 6pm
Bring your kids to play with us in our Playborhood! See how we’ve transformed our front and back yards into venues for everyday play. Fun activities include the following:
- draw on front yard white board
- play with vintage (circa late 1960s) hot wheels track and cars
- build huge structures with Slotwood, which is like life-sized Lincoln Logs
- play in sandbox
- play in fountain (also see this video)
- jump on in-ground trampoline
- do the following with our huge playhouse:
- climb up it (see this and this)
- slide down its slides (front and back of the playhouse)
- draw on its whiteboard walls inside
- hang out on the 2nd floor
- play chase games with our big beach balls in the back yard (see this and this)
- swing on the swing set (see this and this and this)
Parent Seminar
Neighborhood Play, Every Day
4pm – 5pm
Playborhood.com’s Mike Lanza will share his secrets with parents on how to give your kids a life of neighborhood play, everyday. He will show you how to:
- Simplify your kids’ lives
- Move to a play-friendly block
- Make a neighborhood hangout that draws kids to play outside every day
- Embrace technologies that get kids socializing face-to-face and playing outside
- Facilitate Self-Reliance, don’t control your kids
Explorers in Our Own Neighborhood
Yesterday, my son Marco (5), niece Andrea, and I ventured down the San Francisquito creek bed about a mile from our house to Marco’s preschool. I’m sad and excited at the same time to say that it was a wonderful, frontier-like adventure.
I’m sad because we encountered absolutely no one on our hour plus trip down there. In fact, in my many visits to that creek, I’ve hardly ever seen anyone else there. Thus, I feel sad for all the kids who live around here and never get to experience our creek bed as we did.
On the other hand, it was wonderful because the creek bed is so beautiful, and because the desolation down there really made us feel like we were explorers. Continue reading
A Play Day & Parent Seminar in Menlo Park!
226 Yale Rd., Menlo Park, CA
Sunday, September 27
RSVP to Mike Lanza for the Play Day and/or Parent Seminar
Play Day
3pm – 5:30pm
Bring your kids to play with us in our Playborhood! See how we’ve transformed our front and back yards into venues for everyday play. Fun activities include the following:
- draw on front yard white board
- play with vintage (circa late 1960s) hot wheels track and cars
- build huge structures with Slotwood, which is like life-sized Lincoln Logs
- play in sandbox
- play in fountain (also see this video)
- play street hockey
- do the following with our huge playhouse:
- climb up it (see this and this)
- slide down its slides (front and back of the playhouse)
- draw on its whiteboard walls inside
- hang out on the 2nd floor
- play chase games with our big beach balls in the back yard (see this and this)
- swing on the swing set (see this and this and this)
Parent Seminar
Making Your Neighborhood Into a Playborhood
4pm – 5pm
Playborhood.com’s Mike Lanza will share his secrets with parents on how to make your neighborhood into a Playborhood. He will show you how to:
- Move to a play-friendly block
- Make a Place that draws kids to play outside every day
- Embrace digital technologies that get kids socializing and playing outside
- Show Up in your neighborhood to help make it a safe, nurturing, and fun place for your kids
We’ve Changed Our Minds on Kindergarten Redshirting
My article on kindergarten redshirting (i.e. holding a child back a year before entering kindergarten) this past spring elicited heated comments on both sides of the debate. There, I announced that my wife and I had decided not to redshirt my son Marco, born in July of 2004.
Well, in the past week and a half, we’ve had a change of heart. We scrambled to find a spot in a good “Young 5s” or “Pre-K” program for him, and we found one. We just informed our neighborhood elementary school, Oak Knoll in Menlo Park, that he would not be attending this fall.
So, why did we change our minds? Continue reading
A Happy Hour in the Neighborhood
Seven years ago we moved to our neighborhood and decided that we wanted to know our neighbors.
So, taking matters into our own hands, we launched a regular series of backyard happy hours for our neighbors and friends with the goal of having a casual drop-in/out event in our yard on a regular basis in the summer. Now, seven years later I look back on the impact of this simple event, and it is amazing:
- We know all the people on our block, almost everyone on the neighboring block, and the folks on the sides perpendicular to ours. Some of these people we are now very close with.
- When we walk through our neighborhood, go to the farmer’s market, or eat at local restaurants, we regularly see people that we know.
- I feel like I live in small town America not in a mid-size city like Mountain View.
This article is about helping you create that atmosphere in your neighborhood by sharing some simple instructions on how we run our happy hours so that you can do it too. Continue reading
Home for Sale in my Playborhood
It’s three houses down and across the street from my infamous front yard and our surrounding Playborhood. 3 BR, 2 BA, $1.6m. {encode=”mike@playborhood.com” title=”Contact me”} for more info on the ‘hood. For info on the house, see for yourself. Continue reading
The Kindergarten Decisions: Neighborhood Public School or Not?
This fall, my son Marco will start kindergarten at our neighborhood public elementary school, Oak Knoll. So will our next-door neighbor Jonathan. So will the girl who lives behind us, Bailey. So will the kid around the corner, Eli. So will the kid one block away, Spencer. So will my good friend’s kid, Emma, who lives three blocks away.
Marco will ride his bike to school most days along with many of those kids. I fully anticipate that our kids will have a wonderful time playing outside here every day after riding back from school. All the groundwork we’ve laid in making outdoor play a habit here plus all the attractions we’re adding to our front and back yards (I’ll write more about these in future articles) will help assure that, but there’s no denying that going to the same school and biking to and from there will be great bonding experiences for these kids.
On the other hand, the kid a block down the street, Andrew, will start kindergarten this fall at a private school. I’m guessing he won’t have much of a relationship with any of those Oak Knoll kids. He hardly plays with the neighborhood kids now. Once kindergarten starts, he’ll get busier, so he probably won’t play with them then, either. His friends will be almost exclusively from his school and not from our neighborhood. Continue reading
Home Available in Iris Way Playborhood
[Editor's Note: The author, Wendy Kandasamy, is the listing real estate agent for the property discussed in the article below. She works for Alain Pinel Realtors.]
I lived in a “Playborhood” long before I heard of this word. I live on Iris Way, which is a micro-community within the Green Gables area of Palo Alto. It is more than a beautifully tree-lined street. It really is truly a community! There are seniors, families with children of all ages, and young professional couples who were drawn to this street because of the charming homes, canopy trees, and close to Duveneck Elementary School.
However, it is the neighbors that are truly remarkable. We look after each other. I open my front doors to let my children out and the neighborhood kids in. Swings in the front yard are a standing invitation for children to just come by. You’ll see bikes and trikes on the driveways. There’s the “Duveneck Parade”, the neighborhood term referring to the children walking to their elementary school, on school days. Although there are block parties, we catch up with our neighbors as we walk with our children or dogs. In the summer, part of the street is blocked off regularly to let the children just play in the streets with neighbors all watching out for every child. There’s a beautiful house on the street on the market right now at 241 Iris Way. This is a rare opportunity to live in a “Playborhood”. We’d love to have a wonderful new neighbor who wants to be a part of our close-knit community. Continue reading
→ See all posts in the archives
