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Brave Writer

306. Challenge Accepted: An Interview With Chris Balme

Brave Writer

Julie Bogart and Melissa Wiley

Arts, Kids & Family, Education, Books, Education For Kids

4.8 • 927 Ratings

🗓️ 24 September 2025

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

One of the major perks of homeschooling is that the middle-school years can be about adventure instead of awkwardness. In this episode, Melissa chats with author Chris Balme about his book Challenge Accepted: 50 Adventures to Make Middle School Awesome. Balme’s book invites young readers to discover how trust, agency, and meaningful challenges transform “awkward years” into growth years. Join us for a conversation about kid-driven adventures—stealth art, teaching what you know, citizen science, apprenticeships, and building from scratch—plus practical ways to close the gap between social perception and interpretation, repair friendships, and use side-by-side activities to spark conversation. We also share why modeling a beginner’s mind (learning an instrument, sketching, coding) invites kids to try, fail, and try again.

Listen to the full episode to gather specific challenge ideas you can use this week and to reframe these years as the great adventure they are.


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Produced by NOVA

Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:50.0

Hello, friends.

0:51.6

Welcome to the Brave Rider podcast.

0:54.1

I'm Melissa Wiley, and my amazing co-host, Julie Bogart, is away this week. So I am joined today by a very special guest. Chris Balm is the author of a new book called Challenge Accepted, 50 Adventures to Make Middle School Awesome. This is not a book about

1:13.6

middle school curriculum. This is a book four kids at the middle school age, 11, 12, 13 years old,

1:20.8

a guidebook you can hand to kids that is just full of challenges for them to undertake, to go out into the world and do very cool things.

1:30.9

Chris Baum is an educator and a parent.

1:33.9

He has led two innovative middle schools.

1:37.4

He has trained thousands of parents and teachers.

1:41.1

He received the Ashoka Fellowship for his work as a leading global changemaker in education.

1:48.0

Chris is passionate about helping young people discover more of their human potential,

1:53.0

and he has a special appreciation for kids at the middle school age,

1:58.0

understanding how they're often misunderstood or misrepresented,

...

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