Making learning fun

If you’re expecting the same old, same old (a basket filled with dress-up clothes, say, or some beat-up Legos and a small train table or two), you’re in for a huge surprise when you step inside the Virginia Discovery Museum on the Downtown Mall.  The first thing you see is Amazing Airways, a tangle of […]

Rock-a-bye parents

Once you’ve settled your kids in the children’s section at the Crozet Library, park yourself a few feet away in one of the rocking chairs with a view. You know the ones (and if you don’t, hotfoot it over there ASAP): beautiful, comfy wooden wonders that face a wall of windows and mountain scenery in […]

Fine-tuned

When Laura Mulligan Thomas arrived at Charlottesville High School in 1982, she had her work cut out for her. The recent James Madison University grad and newly hired orchestra director was greeted by just eight young musicians. “We had a serious identity problem,” Mulligan Thomas recalled during a TEDx talk she gave a few years […]