Archive for the 'Fun Educational Stuff' Category

November 11, 2009 @ 6:53 am | Filed under: Fun Educational Stuff,Science

The everyday magic of surface tension: “the quality of a liquid that causes the surface layer of that liquid to behave like an elastic sheet.”

HT to my hubby, as usual. He always finds the best stuff.

October 30, 2009 @ 7:16 am | Filed under: Fun Educational Stuff,Nature Study

Here’s something fun: the Cloud Appreciation Society. Float on over to check out some amazing photos, learn about the different types of clouds, and marvel at the Cloud of the Month. I particularly enjoyed the Society’s manifesto:

WE BELIEVE that clouds are unjustly maligned
and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them.

We think that they are Nature’s poetry,
and the most egalitarian of her displays, since
everyone can have a fantastic view of them.

We pledge to fight ‘blue-sky thinking’ wherever we find it.
Life would be dull if we had to look up at
cloudless monotony day after day.

“Fight blue-sky thinking.” Hee. Here’s the rest.

I wonder if the Society knows about the Snoopy “Clouds” song?

The pyramids of Khufu!
You too?
Seven wonders of the world…

October 29, 2009 @ 1:27 pm | Filed under: Art,Books,Fun Educational Stuff

The Parthenon. Photo by Kallistos (Creative Commons license).

“It was built about 2,500 years ago and stands on a white marble hill in Greece. Because it too is made of white marble, it seems to grow out of that hill as though it were a group of great trees standing in a small forest.”

—from Round Buildings, Square Buildings, Buildings that Wiggle Like a Fish by Philip M. Isaacson, a book I wrote about in this post long ago

The Acropolis. Photo by Adam Carr, released to the public domain at Wikimedia Commons.

We’re still reading Plutarch’s Life of Pericles.

That which gave most pleasure and ornament to the city of Athens, and the greatest admiration and even astonishment to all strangers, and that which now is Greece’s only evidence that the power she boasts of and her ancient wealth are no romance or idle story, was [Pericles's] construction of the public and sacred buildings.

The materials were stone, brass, ivory, gold, ebony, and cypress-wood; the artisans that wrought and fashioned them were smiths and carpenters, moulders, founders and braziers, stone-cutters, dyers, goldsmiths, ivory-workers, painters, embroiderers, turners; those again that conveyed them to the town for use, merchants and mariners and ship-masters by sea; and by land, cartwrights, cattle-breeders, wagoners, rope-makers, flax-workers, shoe-makers and leather-dressers, road-makers, miners. And every trade in the same nature, as a captain in an army has his particular company of soldiers under him, had its own hired company of journeymen and laborers belonging to it banded together as in array, to be as it were the instrument and body for the performance of the service of these public works distributed plenty through every age and condition.

“I’m confused,” said Rose, upon hearing (in an earlier passage) how Pericles manipulated to his own advantage a situation involving a political rival and some invading Spartans. “Is he a good guy or not?” This is a question we might ask about many, many leaders of nations throughout history, and one reason I think Plutarch is worth our time is because of the complex and relevant issues he takes on. Understanding Pericles helps us scrutinize our own leaders with sharper eyes.

This week’s Plutarch-ing took place over homemade french bread pizzas, courtesy of Rose. Afterward (yum), we took a look at the different types of Greek columns, and the kids designed their own temples at this interactive British Museum site.

Meanwhile, Athena has outfitted some swift ships and Telemachus is ready to set off in search of Odysseus—or in search of news about him, at least. That is, we finished Book II of The Odyssey. Good stuff in book two. Snarling suitors, Penelope and her loom, and for young Telemachus, a hopeful omen from Zeus:

Then from a mountain peak
far-seeing Zeus replied by sending out two eagles,
flying high up in the sky.  For some time they soared
like gusts of wind, with their wings spread out, side by side.
But when they reached the middle of the crowded meeting,
with quick beats of their wings they wheeled around,
swooping down on everyone, destruction in their eyes.
Then with their talons they attacked each other,
clawing head and neck, and flew off on the right,
past people’s homes, across the city. They were amazed
to see these birds with their own eyes.  In their hearts
they were stirred to think how everything would end.

The Achaians’ hearts weren’t the only ones stirred. Exciting stuff, that.

September 2, 2009 @ 12:36 pm | Filed under: Fun Educational Stuff,Funny,General Homeschooling

I shared this story in the comments on Sarah’s lovely blog…it’s so funny I can’t resist telling it here too. Several years ago, when we lived in Virginia and my oldest child was about 8 or 9, I took the kids to a living history museum (the ten-awesome Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton, VA, which you do NOT want to miss if you’re in the area). That was the first of many happy visits, and a glorious spring day it was: new lambs for the holding, amiable cottage cat jumping into our stroller, Jemima Puddleduck and friends pit-pat-paddle-patting their way along the dirt paths. My three oldest girls were in heaven. The costumed interpreters were extremely nice, allowing the girls to try a spinning wheel (I was writing Charlotte and Martha in those days, and all we had at home was a drop spindle, so the wheel was a grand treat for my little home-based critique group) and answering their zillions of questions.

As we left one of the houses—I think it was the Irish cottage, which thrilled us all with its thatched roof and smoky fire, just like the huts in the Martha books—the interpreter murmured an aside to me as the girls skipped down the path.

“Are they homeschooled?” she asked with a friendly smile.

“Yes!” I replied, delighted, basking in the thought that their eager, intelligent conversation had given them away.

“I thought so,” replied the interpreter. “I could tell from the bonnets.”

Um.

This was the year my girls wore their Little House bonnets everywhere—their own doing, I swear! By then I was so used to seeing them that I hardly even noticed them anymore.

Yeah, I guess that would be kind of a giveaway.

January 23, 2009 @ 12:26 pm | Filed under: Fun Educational Stuff,Language Arts

As my husband is wont to say, God bless YouTube. One of the girls was confused about whether or not to drop the silent e in “unfortunately.” I know how I resolved that question at her age, and I went a-googling to see if I could find a certain video clip.

And sure enough, faster than a rolling O, there it was.

Of course you know we spent the next hour watching more Electric Company clips, with the girls cracking up at my terrier-like 70s-child excitement. The lolly song! And that other lollipop song, the creepy one. Hey, you guys! Silent E! The uberfunky TION song, which I now realize may have been the genesis of my environmentalist streak. (Rewatching it, I’m rather shocked by the garmentlessness of the crowd at the end of the song. I guess the Age of Aquarius touched kiddie TV too.)

Look, there’s Morgan Freeman with a broken leg singing “There’s a Hole at the Bottom of the Sea.” Frankly, I always thought the gang was a little hard on the gorilla.

Rose and Bean liked Letterman best, and who can blame them?

Tags: Electric Company

December 30, 2008 @ 2:52 pm | Filed under: ASL,Fun Educational Stuff,Hearing Loss,Kids' Television,Sign Language,Special Needs Children,Speech Delay,Wonderboy

What Rilla’s saying at the end there is “With Alex, Leah, and Hopkins.” Totally unprompted, I swear.

When I watched our Christmas 2005 video the other day, the bit that gave me the biggest pang of nostalgia was watching Wonderboy signing away. He hardly signs at all anymore, now that he talks so much. I’m thrilled with his verbal speech, but I really miss the signing. It’s funny to think back on how much ASL dominated our lives (in a rich and satisfying way) for a couple of years there, and now our use and pursuit of sign language has slipped to the back burner, becoming something of a hobby rather than a daily necessity. Jane still wants to certify as an ASL interpreter someday, and every few months we pull out our materials and learn another chunk of vocabulary and grammar. There are community college courses we might take next year. It’s a beautiful and important language, and I don’t want to let it go, even if our boy doesn’t need rely on it for communication the way he once did.

And of course the Signing Time DVDs remain in great demand with my little people, as the video above attests. With Rilla, we’re seeing all the benefits of sign language we saw with the first three girls—because rudimentary ASL was a part of our baby & toddler life from the get-go, long before we had a Wonderboy or knew he had hearing loss.

Here are some old posts singing the praises of our favorite kiddie DVDs:

It Must Be a Sign

Something Else to Buy Instead of Curriculum: Signing Time

Tags: ASL, Signing Time

August 14, 2008 @ 7:52 pm | Filed under: Books,Family Adventures,Fun Educational Stuff,Fun Learning Stuff,History,Unschooling,homeschooling

Originally published in Februrary 2005.

It’s been a rough morning. Our wagon tipped over while fording a river, and we lost fifty pounds of salt pork and our only shotgun. Then Rose took sick—cholera, we think—and died before we could do anything about it.

My girls are undaunted by this stunning double tragedy. They push on across the prairie, estimating the number of miles to the next fort. Maybe we can trade our mule for a new gun.

“At least we still have the fishing pole,” says Rose. She seems to have accepted her own death gracefully.

“I don’t like wattlesnakes,” announces Beanie.

Jane cracks up. “Who does? Remember when I got bit, back before we crossed the Platte?”

We found ourselves on the Oregon Trail by way of a great read-aloud, one that vaulted unexpectedly to the top of our Family Favorites list: By the Great Horn Spoon by Sid Fleischman. I began reading this hilarious novel to the girls on a cold winter afternoon, but after Scott got caught up in the story during a coffee break, it became a family dinnertime read-aloud. At times, the kids laughed so hard I feared they would choke. We sailed with young Jack and his unflappable butler, Praiseworthy, from Boston Harbor all the way around Cape Horn and up to San Francisco. Along the way we visited Rio de Janeiro and a village in Peru. We panned for gold in California and made friends with half a dozen scruffy, optimistic miners. We found ourselves caring deeply about such oddities as rotting potatoes, dusty hair clippings, and the lining of a coat.

Our westward journey has occurred at a fairly brisk speed. After Great Horn Spoon deposited us in the thick of the California Gold Rush, there was much conversation about the many reasons and ways in which people migrated west. Our trail led to other books: Moccasin Trail, Seven Alone, By the Great Horn Spoon!, and now Old Yeller. We discovered the absorbing Oregon Trail computer game and have outfitted a dozen or more separate wagons for various westward journeys. Rose got hooked on the food-gathering part of the game. I can’t tell you how many baskets of dandelions and wild onion she collected. Jane seems most interested in the game’s diary function. She clicked her way through the journal of the young pioneer girl who appears in the animated sequences at certain points along the trail, and then she began to write a trail journal of her own. The sad death of our sweet Rose, the disastrous river-crossing, and Beanie’s encounter with the rattlesnake are now chronicled for posterity.

I don’t know what lies around the next bend in the trail. I’ve stopped trying to pave the road ahead of time. The best adventures, it seems, are to be found in the bumps and detours. We’re well outfitted for the journey with books and maps and eyes and ears and that burning appetite for knowledge that can make a hearty meal out of buffalo grass and brambles.

—Excerpted from an article appearing in the Virginia Homeschoolers newsletter.

August 11, 2008 @ 6:25 am | Filed under: Family Adventures,Fun Educational Stuff,Fun Learning Stuff,Games,Language Arts

Originally published in November, 2005 as “The Purple Cow Hula-Hooped Boisterously.”

This is a game we played in the car yesterday, all the way to town and back. I assigned each of the girls a part of speech: noun, verb, adjective, adverb (one girl had to take two parts in each round). From there it went something like this:

Me: Miss Noun, what is it?

Beanie: A giraffe!

Me: Miss Adjective, what kind of giraffe?

Jane: A hungry giraffe.

Me: Miss Verb, what did the hungry giraffe do?

Rose: It bounced!

Me: Miss Adverb, how did the hungry giraffe bounce?

Jane: Enthusiastically!

All together: THE HUNGRY GIRAFFE BOUNCED ENTHUSIASTICALLY!

Wonderboy: Huh?

Tags: Games, grammar, parts of speech

August 6, 2008 @ 7:32 am | Filed under: Curriculum,Fun Educational Stuff,Fun Learning Stuff,Unschooling,homeschooling

Excerpted from a Lilting House post I wrote in July 2006.

(Updated with suggestions for wee ones in the comments.)

Here is a list of Some Particularly Cool Stuff My Kids and I Have Learned a Ton From or Just Plain Had a Good Time With:

Settlers of Catan, the board game. Jane got this for Christmas last year. We’ve been obsessed ever since. Except when our friends hijack it and keep it for weeks because it is that great a game.

Signing Time DVDs. Catchy songs, immensely useful vocabulary in American Sign Language. I trumpet these wherever I go. We talk about Rachel like she’s one of the family.

Prismacolor colored pencils. Indispensable. I was amused to see that Jane mentioned them in the first line of her “I Am From” poem. She’s right; they have helped color the picture of her life.

Uncle Josh’s Outline Map CD-Rom. Because maps are cool, and maps you can color (with Prismacolor pencils, hey!) are even cooler. The kids are constantly asking me to print out a map of somewhere or other. You can find other outline maps available online (for free), but I like Josh’s for clarity. And once when I had a problem opening a particular map (it’s a PDF file), I called the help number and it was Uncle Josh himself, a most amiable gentleman, who quickly solved my problem.

The Global Puzzle. Big! Very big! Will take over your dinner table! (So clear off that laundry.)

Set. It may annoy you that your eight-year-old will be quicker at spotting the patterns in this card game than you will. There’s a free daily online version as well.

Quiddler. Like Scrabble, only with cards. This, too, can be played online.

Babble. Like Boggle, only online and free.

Chronology, the game. Like Trivial Pursuit, only with history.

Speaking of online games: the BBC History Game site is awfully fun.

And Jane was fairly addicted to Absurd Math for a while there. Need more free math puzzles? Nick’s got a bunch.

A Case of Red Herrings and Mind Benders. Logic and problem-solving puzzles: a fun way to pass the time on long car trips or in waiting rooms.

Zoombinis Logical Journey computer game. Stretch your brain trying to get the little Zoombinis to a village where they can bounce in peace.

Oregon Trail. The game that launched a massive wagon trail rabbit trail for my kids a couple of years ago—and they still aren’t tired of the game.

Roots, Shoots, Buckets & Boots : Gardening Together with Children. Plant a sunflower house! Up-end a Giant Bucket of Potatoes and dig through the dirt for your rewards! Grow lettuce in rainboots! Boots! With lettuce growing in them!

Wild Goose Science Kits. Fun experiments with a low mess factor. Best prices at Timberdoodle. Note to self: remember the Wild Goose Crime Kit come Christmastime.

A microscope. Sonlight sells a nifty set of prepared slides with paramecium and other fun stuff for the kids to peer at.

If the scope sparks an interest in dissection, there’s a way to do it online with no actual innards involved: Froguts! The site has a couple of free demos to occupy you while you save up for the full version. (Which I haven’t seen yet, but it does look cool.) HT: Karen Edmisten.

Klutz kits. Over the years, we’ve explored: knitting, embroidery, origami, magic, Sculpey, paper collage, paper dolls, beadlings, and foam shapes. Look under any piece of furniture in my house and you will find remnants of all of the above.

Which reminds me: Sculpey clay. Is it possible to get through a day without some? My children think not.

Usborne’s calligraphy book and markers.

But while I’m on Usborne, my kids also love and use at least weekly: Usborne Science Experiments Volumes 1, 2, and 3.

Muse magazine. The highlight of Jane’s month. From the publishers of Cricket.

Classical Kids CDs. Beanie’s favorite is the Vivaldi. Alice’s daughter Theresa does a fabulous Queen of the Night impersonation from the Mozart.

Refrigerator poetry magnets. I gave Scott the Shakespearean set a couple of Christmases ago. Note to self: You are not as brilliant as you think! You were an English major, for Pete’s sake, with a minor in drama. Thou knowest full well old William was a bawdy fellow. If you don’t want your little ones writing poems about codpieces, stick to the basic version. But oh how I enjoy the messages Scott leaves for me to find and then pretends he doesn’t know who wrote them:

I am
so
in love
with my
delicate
wench.

And of course of course of course, Jim Weiss story CDs. I rave about these every chance I get because they have added such riches to my children’s imaginations. For years, they have listened to Jim’s stories after lights-out. Greek myths, Sherlock Holmes, Shakespeare, folk and fairy tales, the Arabian Nights, the Jungle Book: of such stuff are dreams woven.

A good source for much of the above (and lots more): FUN Books.

Tags: homeschooling, homeschool, unschooling, curriculum, education, educational games

January 30, 2008 @ 7:31 am | Filed under: Fun Educational Stuff,Fun Learning Stuff,Geography

In yesterday’s links I mentioned with some jubilation that the Journey North Mystery Class is starting this week. Tami asked,

Melissa,
do you know if it’s too late to join the Journey North class? In a
nutshell, can you explain it, and how much time it takes? Thanks!

With the caveat that I am incapable of writing the ‘nutshell’ version of anything (hee!), I’d love to take a stab at answering this. We (Jane and I—the younger kids have not yet been interested) have participated in the Mystery Class the past two years, and it has been delightful.

It is definitely not too late to join. Things are just getting rolling. Here’s how it works: Journey North has selected ten classes of schoolchildren in cities all around the world. Their locations are kept secret until the big reveal in May. These are the ten "mystery classes," and the game is to figure out where in the world they are.

You begin by figuring out their latitudes. Each week you compare your own local photoperiod (the amount of time between sunrise and sunset) to the photoperiods of the ten mystery classes. You graph this data on a chart. In just a few weeks’ time you’ll begin to see patterns and get a feel for where some of the mystery classes might be.

(It’s very exciting.)

Sometime in March, Journey North will release "longitude clues." By performing some calculations, you’ll be able to determine the longitude of the Mystery Classes. Now you’re really starting to have an idea where these classes might be!

Next come the cultural clues. Each week, as you continue to chart the photoperiod data, you’ll be given a set of clues about the culture and terrain of the ten mystery locations. This is when the fun kicks into high gear. You’ll be able to zero in on the specific towns in which the mystery classes are hiding.

In late April, you submit your guesses to Journey North. The following week, the answers are posted on the website and you can see how close you came. You may participate alone or as part of a group. All you have to do is register at the Journey North website (no cost, no strings). All the instructions and clues are there, along with a download of the chart.

The past two years, I led a group of online friends in the activity. We divided up the Mystery Classes so that each family was only responsible for calculating the data for one or two locations. (This is totally permissible and is in fact encouraged. Most participants are classes of schoolchildren who are usually divided into partner groups, each with its assigned mystery class.)

This year, I’m hosting a group of local friends. The kids in Jane’s peer group have been coming over every other week to read Shakespeare together (such a blast), and we’re going to set the Bard aside for a while to do the Mystery Class project together. We’ll be meeting weekly, more or less, to keep up with the data-sharing.

If your family was working solo and found the eleven sets of calculations to be too much to keep up with (ten mystery classes plus your hometown), you could easily drop some of the mystery classes and just work on a few. The registration with Journey North is largely a formality; there is no real interaction on the website except for submitting your answers at the end (which you don’t have to do if you don’t want). Of course, the JN folks love feedback, and they post lots of letters and ideas from participants.

It is amazing how much learning is packed into this activity: we have learned so much about geography, latitude, longitude, other cultures, math, etc etc etc. I cannot say enough good things about the project. I’ve been positively giddy about getting started this year. Jane too. Last year she worked side by side with the one local friend who was part of our online group, and those two eleven-year-olds had a wonderful time, let me tell you. So did their mothers. Right, Erica?

The project is just beginning this week, so it is by no means too late to get started. You calculate your local photoperiod every Monday—that is, you use each Monday’s sunrise and sunset times for the calculation. Here’s a website where you can look up the sunrise and sunset times for any date. Journey North releases the week’s new clues on Fridays, but the info is always up on the website for whenever you are ready to work with it. We’ll be doing all our work on Wednesdays, for example.

Working with online friends was great fun, these past two years. With hometowns spread all over the world, simply comparing our local photoperiods was fascinating. And I have to say, charting the increase in daylight time week after week really helped combat the late winter blues. (The first year, I mean, when we still lived in Virginia. Here in San Diego, last winter was a marvel of sunny days. This year has been quite a bit chillier.)

Tami asked about the time commitment. As you get started, it doesn’t take very long: a math problem on Monday to get your local photoperiod; and then however long it takes you to figure out and chart the photoperiods for the ten mystery classes—or however many you are responsible for. A half hour, perhaps? If you’re doing all ten? Maybe an hour for a younger child? I would say an hour a week is probably realistic, for the first six or seven weeks. The longitude day will take longer, but it’s fun, exciting work.

Later you’ll spend lots of time on Google and elsewhere, reading up on the tidbits revealed in the cultural clues. That’s fun time, detective time, and it flies by.

I told you it wouldn’t fit into a nutshell! Not even a Brazil nut.

Earlier posts on Journey North Mystery Class:
this one has a picture of our graph
this one was from last year

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