Archive for the 'Fun Learning Stuff' Category
March 10, 2010 @ 5:11 pm | Filed under: Connections, Crows, Fun Learning Stuff, Nature Study, Scottish folksongs
“The crow when he sings is nothing short of a clown; he ruffles his feathers, stretches his neck, like a cat with a fish bone in her throat, and with a most tremendous effort delivers a series of hen-like squawks.”
This quote, attributed simply to a “Mr. Mathews” in the Anna Comstock Handbook of Nature Study, elicited a chorus of giggles from my flock this afternoon, when we encountered it during an hour spent educating ourselves about crows. Beanie, the nine-year-old, especially enjoyed it, and I heard her repeating it to herself shortly afterward.
This morning all our plans for the day went up in…not smoke, but mercury. Half the children have fevers and sniffles; some are worse than others. We canceled Shakespeare Club, much to the regret of the teenager and her mother (sob—we were to begin rehearsing scenes from The Scottish Play today), and although the older girls aren’t sick, we thought it best to forego their piano classes as well, lest we pass these unpleasant germs around.
Late in the morning, Rose and I spied a trio of crows quarreling on the phone wires out front. As we watched, it became evident they were fighting for a particularly choice perch on the fixture jutting out from the top of a pole. One bird claimed the spot, and the other two took turns wheeling and diving at him. He wouldn’t budge. They had us in stitches. Rose said it was like Saturday mornings on our sofa, when the children fight over the remote control.
We are often amused by the crows who haunt our yard, so we decided to find out more about them. Comstock was, as usual, more than helpful. (But if ever, ever, ever a book begged to be converted to a digital format, it is that unwieldy three-inch-thick behemoth!)
“The crow is probably the most intelligent of all our native birds,” she writes. “It is quick to learn and clever in action, as many a farmer will testify who has tried to keep it out of corn fields with various devices, the harmless character of which the crow soon understood perfectly….”
The kids enjoyed Comstock’s descriptions of tame crows, especially the story of one bird who “was fond of playing marbles with a little boy of the family. The boy would shoot a marble into a hole and then Billy, the crow, would take a marble in his beak and drop it into the hole. The bird seemed to understand the game and was highly indignant if the boy played out of turn and made shots twice in succession.”
Of course now we all want a crow for a pet.
After Anna Comstock, we had to see what the internet could tell us about crows. There was Robert Frost, of course, feeling cheered (as were we!) by the antics of a crow—
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
And Van Gogh’s Wheat Field with Crows.
Comstock had told us that when a flock of crows (excuse me, a murder of them), descend upon a field, one of them always stands sentinel. Rose thinks the crow in the left foreground is probably this bunch’s sentinel.
A tame crow seems to have caught Picasso’s interest, too—
Woman with a Crow, Pablo Picasso.
When you’re talking about crows, Aesop comes to mind. We recalled the fables of the Crow and the Pitcher, and the one about the Fox and the Crow with the bit of cheese.
This site collects variations of the old rhyme about crows—we knew the rhyme (it’s in the Rosemary Wells Mother Goose book that Rilla and Wonderboy make me read almost daily) but I didn’t know it had to do with counting crows!
Nor had I grasped that the band “Counting Crows” took its name from that rhyme.
Also on that site, a collection of crow haiku.
Crow poetry makes me think of the Scottish ballad, “The Twa Corbies”—rather a grisly tale, but gripping! Here’s a YouTube clip of the poem being read (not sung) aloud in Scots. There’s an English translation below the “more info” link. We also listened to this version sung by The Corries—still grisly, but quite lovely.
We put some peanuts on our patio table and were almost immediately rewarded with a comedy routine performed by three curious crows—the same lads from this morning?—who were terribly intrigued by these Delicious-Smelling Objects left Unattended on the Flat Thing—intrigued but too suspicious to do more than cock their heads and eye them warily from the back of a chair. Then up they’d wheel and careen around the yard, swooping low over the table but never Getting Too Close.
Rose is keeping a count on the peanuts to see if the crows get brave when we aren’t looking.
February 1, 2010 @ 8:14 pm | Filed under: Fun Learning Stuff
We have been participating in the Mystery Class hunt for five years now. I think it’s five. Could it be six? Five or six, it’s been a blast every time.
Here’s a post I wrote about it two years ago (full of nuts & bolts info).
Things don’t really get rolling until this Friday, when the first set of clues come out, so you’ve got plenty of time to sign up at the Journey North website. (It’s free.) It’s way fun.
January 25, 2010 @ 1:09 pm | Filed under: Family, Fun Learning Stuff
Since my dad’s fun family-photo coloring pages have garnered such an enthusiastic response (see especially Lori’s comment, which includes a link to a Crayola site that will let you make some of your own), I thought you might enjoy hearing about some of my father’s other grandkid-pleasing innovations.
One Christmas he gave us this set of custom-made placemats. Each laminated mat has a collage of family photos on one side. On the back sides, he made gorgeously colorful collages of other kinds of pictures—an array of his beautiful bird photos, for example (most of them taken in my parents’ backyard or ours). One is a nature collage; one is all kinds of art supplies. I can’t tell you how much my kids love these placemats. My littles use them almost daily underneath their dinner plates or drawing paper.
But I think Wonderboy’s special book takes the prize. My dad really outdid himself with this one. This was a present he gave to my boy a couple of years ago, and it is still one of Wonderboy’s favorite things to look at. Rilla too, actually.
It’s a comb-bound, laminated alphabet book full of pictures of our extended family and objects from around our house. (My photos don’t do it justice.) My dad included both English and ASL fingerspelling letters for each word, which makes it all the more special (and useful) for my hard-of-hearing son.
I love my dad’s choice of words to illustrate—you can tell he understands his grandson’s interests very well.
I know I’m gushing here, but, well, you understand, right?
The back cover is my favorite page.
On another visit, my dad gave Wonderboy a second book, this one focusing on colors and numbers. I especially love this page illustrating the number 4—
—but I would have to say my favorite is the Number 1 page.
Like the wise man said, we can’t help falling in love…with you, Grandpa.
December 18, 2009 @ 9:14 am | Filed under: Fun Learning Stuff
Did you know you can play Settlers of Catan (our favorite board game) on the iPhone or Touch? The app is called Catan. Jane and I have been trying it out.
Pro: no tiles and small pieces for the baby to scatter.
Con: the computer-generated characters do too much trading.
Pro: clean, clear graphics and efficient gameplay.
Con: unattractive cartoonish characters (are we shallow?) and it’s harder to monitor your opponents’ moves and resources.
Pro: just about as much fun as the real game, and we can play it anywhere.
You can play with up to four people, taking turns passing the iPod around. Or you can play alone with computer-generated opponents: Catan solitaire. Jane says, and I heartily concur, that it’s more fun with real people.I can see this app being a great take-along on a road trip.
It’s pretty nifty, and would be a nice virtual stocking stuffer for the iPod Touch owner on your gift list (except I don’t really know how you give an iPhone app as a present, except maybe with an iTunes gift certificate).
***
Melanie alerted me to a supercool what-this-gadget-was-made-for app for birdwatchers: iBird. Awesome. Imagine carrying an entire birding field guide in a device the size of a playing card. Brilliant. The complete iBird guide seems to be about $20. I downloaded the free one which contains only fifteen species. Beautiful graphics and great functionality. One for the wish list. (And, like Melanie, I can see my little ones being entertained by the freebie app. Pretty birds!)
Related post: A Day in the Life of My iPod Touch
app reviews, iPhone apps, iPod Touch
December 12, 2009 @ 9:14 pm | Filed under: Books, Fun Learning Stuff, Social Media
I sleep with my iPod under my pillow. No, not because I love it so much that I can’t stand to be parted from it even while sleeping, but because I am nursing my 11-month-old, and the Touch lets me read in the dark, with one hand, without disturbing the baby or my slumbering husband.
6:20 a.m. It’s still dark when I wake. In a few minutes I will try to slip out of bed without rousing the baby—Scott is already up with Wonderboy, our earlybird—but right now, in this peaceful hush before the rest of the gang arises, I stretch my legs against the cool sheets and reach for the iPod. I wage a brief war against the temptation to check my email first, and thumb iBreviary, a 99 cent app containing the Divine Office, the daily prayers of the Catholic Church. I try to pray the Invitatory and the Office of Readings first thing in the morning.
Then a quick email check. I loathe typing on the iPod’s touch screen, so I tend to read a lot more mail than I answer. Guilt!
6:45 a.m. Time to get up. But first, a 30-second dip into the SignSmith app, where I’m trying to learn at least one new ASL sign a day. Today’s word: exaggerate. And finally, a quick visit to the Louvre via the museum’s free app. Free! How terrific is that? Today I land on Vermeer’s The Lacemaker. The image is zoomed in close on the woman’s face and hands. I admire her careful concentration, her butter-colored gown. My baby is stirring. I’m up, I’m up.
10 a.m. The morning bustle is behind us and my older kids and I have taken to our books. We are reading The Odyssey aloud together: I from the battered paperback I brought home from college, and Beanie from the Classics app on my Touch. They are different translations; my hard copy is Albert Cook’s verse translation, and Beanie’s is a prose version. Sometimes we’ll read a passage twice, hers and mine, to hear the contrast. It’s working really well for us; I’m enjoying the girls’ enthusiasm for Homer. Not everything I attempt with the kids runs smoothly, but The Odyssey is a big hit.
10:45 a.m. Bean and Rose take turns playing with the MathTables app, which is basically math facts drill turned into a game. I noticed that even Scott got sucked into that one the other day. Then Beanie wants to explore some of the very cool mental-arithmetic tricks in the Mathemagics app I bought for Jane.
11:15 a.m. I’m nursing the baby and there’s a bit of a lull. From my rocking chair, I use the iPod’s Remote app to access iTunes on my laptop, which is sitting on a counter across the room. I scroll through the possibilities…a little Mahalia perhaps? Once the music is playing, I check my email again and then I have time to squeeze in a two-minute game of Scramble, which is sort of like Boggle. Wonderboy asks if he can play a game. He’s fond of DoodleJump, and much better at it than I am. But his favorite app is Scribble Lite, a free drawing/painting program; it has entertained him in many a hospital exam room.
4:09 p.m. I’m at the YMCA. Rose is downstairs in her gymnastics class, and I’ve dropped at my three youngest kids at the playroom. I dig out my earphones and decide what to listen to while I’m on the exercise bike. The latest News from Lake Wobegon podcast? This American Life? Or maybe an audiobook? Ooh, I just remembered that free download of Cory Doctorow’s Eastern Standard Tribe; that’s what I’ll try today.
4:42. The bike wore me out and now I’m sitting in the hall with the other gymnastics parents. I am momentarily irritated to realize I left my book at home. I’ll catch up on my article-reading instead; before I left home I downloaded a number of posts and articles to read offline via the Instapaper app, which is a favorite utility of mine. The iPod Touch requires a WiFi connection for internet access (unlike the iPhone), and there’s no WiFi at our YMCA. It’s the Y, not the Wi. The Instapaper app lets me save any web page or post I come across for downloading onto the iPod. I have an Instapaper button in my laptop’s Firefox toolbar, and when Mental Multivitamin links to a promising piece, or when I want to save a nice long Betty Duffy post for later reading, I click the Insta-button and am assured the post has been Saved. All I have to do is remember to open the app on my iPod before I leave home and click the refresh button. That downloads the latest string of articles to the iPod, and now I can read them anytime, without need of a WiFi connection.
11:06 p.m. Bedtime. Scott is closing up the house and I’m snuggled in the dark next to the baby, who is making creaking sounds like a rocking chair. I click on my Lexulous app to see if my friend Anne Marie, who lives in Virginia, has played her next move in our ongoing Scrabble game. She is beating me, as usual. I’m a decent Scrabble player, but Anne Marie is killer. Then it’s back to iBreviary for Night Prayer. And then, if I’m still awake, I open my beloved Stanza app, my favorite of the e-readers I’ve tried. Right now I’m reading The Cricket on the Hearth, because I always crave a little Dickens in December. I really do. I’m not sure I’ve ever finished a Dickens book in December—who has time?—but I figure Cricket is short enough I might actually pull it off. And it cracks me up when Mrs. Peerybingle doesn’t lose her temper—she only mislays it for a while. Ha. Yes. I can relate.
I am asleep. The iPod is back under my pillow.
This post probably makes it sound like I am glued to the thing all day long. I’m not! Many hours pass between bursts of iPod activity. Also, I deliberately picked a YMCA day because that’s the only time I use the Touch to listen to things on audio. I don’t think I have ever used my earphones outside the gym!
People often ask how I manage to read so much (and I know I don’t read nearly as much as a lot of folks, but I suppose I do pretty well for a mom of six), and the convenience of the iPod Touch is a big part of how I’m able to squeeze literature, art, music, nonfiction, and other pursuits into the corners of my busy day. For me, it works a treat.
Related post: Two More Nifty Apps
app reviews, iPhone apps, iPod Touch, Social Media
December 11, 2009 @ 11:32 am | Filed under: Books, Fun Learning Stuff, Games
Reprinting this post from a couple of years ago.
Here’s another topic I’ve written many posts on, both here and at Lilting House.
Books We Love, Part One
Part Two
Part Four
Part Five
Signing Time DVDs
More about Signing Time
Yet more about Signing Time
Showcase Presents comic book collections
Family memberships to zoos, museums, etc.
Each of the above link is a longer post on the subject.
Other people tackling this topic:
Alicia at Love2Learn
Jennifer at As Cozy as Spring
Danielle Bean
(List lifted from Karen Edmisten—thanks, K!)
Note: these are old posts and may contain Amazon Affiliate links.
September 12, 2009 @ 6:41 am | Filed under: Books, Fun Learning Stuff
I didn’t include Morse code in my list of places our chapter of Winter Holiday took us because it wasn’t mentioned in the passage I quoted. But it was mentioned in the chapter, most enticingly. The book opens with the two children, Dick and Dorothea, beginning to explore the farm they’ve come to visit. There’s a big lake, and they see a boat with six children doing intriguing things around a large island in the middle of the lake. Readers of Swallows and Amazons know at once who these children are…oh, it’s so exciting. Dick and Dorothea long to make contact with them but aren’t sure how, until night falls and they figure out that the light in a distant window belongs to some of those nautical children. They signal with a flashlight, flash flash flash, until oh! The window light flashes three times in response. Contact! (With Mars, thinks astronomer Dick.) It’s terribly exciting.
And then the window light begins flashing in Morse code, but Dick and Dorothea can’t read it. Neither can we. This site is helpful, though we spent considerably more than the “minute” it boasts is necessary, and I can’t say we’re anywhere near mastery. Heh. More useful is the trick Jane remembered from Cheaper by the Dozen: words whose stresses match the dot-dash pattern for each letter of the alphabet, like “a-BOUT” for A (dot dash), “BOIS-ter-ous-ly” for B (dash dot dot dot), “CARE-less CHILD-ren” for C (dash dot dash dot), and “DAN-ger-ous” for D (dash dot dot). We began thinking up words for the rest of the alphabet—GARGOYLish for G, luGUbrious for L, and so on. I can now tap out “bad lad” in Morse code. Or “glad cad.” I’m sure this will come in useful someday.
Arthur Ransome, morse code, Swallows and Amazons, Winter Holiday
September 10, 2009 @ 8:34 pm | Filed under: Books, Connections, Fun Learning Stuff, Poetry, Tidal Homeschooling
What we read today (an excerpt; “the astronomer” is a boy named Dick, who is stargazing with his sister, Dorothea):
“Got it,” he said. “Just over the top of the hill. Come and see it.”
Dorothea joined him. He pointed out the bright Aldebaran and the other stars of Taurus, and offered her the telescope.
“I can see a lot better without,” said Dorothea.
“How many of the Pleiades can you see?”
“Six,” said Dorothea.
“There are lots more than that,” said Dick. “But it’s awfully hard to see them when the telescope won’t keep still. How far away does it say the Pleiades are?”
Dorothea went back to the fire and found the place in the book.
“The light from the group known as the Pleiades (referred to by Tennyson in ‘Locksley Hall’)…”
“Oh, hang Tennyson!”
“The light from the group known as the Pleiades reaches our planet in rather more than three hundred years after it leaves them.”
“Light goes at one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second,” said the voice of the astronomer in the darkness.
But Dorothea was also doing some calculations.
“Shakespeare died 1616.”
“What?”
“Well, if the light takes more than three hundred years to get here, it may have started while Shakespeare was alive, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, perhaps. Sir Walter Raleigh may have seen it start…”
“But of course he didn’t,” said the astronomer indignantly. “the light of the stars he saw had started three hundred years before that…”
“Battle of Bannockburn, 1314. Bows and arrows.” Dorothea was off again.
But Dick was no longer listening. One hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second. Sixty times as far as that in a minute. Sixty times sixty times as far as that in an hour. Twenty-four hours in a day. Three hundred and sixty-five days in a year. Not counting leap years. And then three hundred years of it. Those little stars that seemed to speckles a not too dreadfully distant blue ceiling were farther away than he could make himself think, try as he might. Those little stars must be enormous. The whole earth must be a tiny pebble in comparison. A spinning pebble, and he, on it, the astronomer, looking at flaming gigantic worlds so far away that they seemed no more than sparkling grains of dust. He felt for a moment less than nothing, and then, suddenly, size did not seem to matter. Distant and huge the stars might be, but he, standing here with chattering teeth on the dark hill-side, could see them and name them and even foretell what next they were going to do. “The January Sky.” And there they were, Taurus, Aldebaran, the Pleiades, obedient as slaves…He felt an odd wish to shout at them in triumph, but remembered in time that this would not be scientific.
—from Winter Holiday by Arthur Ransome,
one of the Swallows & Amazons books
Where it took us:
* We read the opening of “Locksley Hall,” a long and complex poem which I enjoyed thinking my way through later in the day. With the kids, I read and discussed the first several stanzas, all of us lingering especially over:
Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,
Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.
Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro’ the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.
* Of course after that we had to see the Pleiades. Discovered Google Sky. Oh. My. Goodness. Truly, we live in an amazing age.
* Spent a long time playing with Google Sky, looking up many constellations including all those mentioned in the Winter Holiday chapter. Rose told me the story of Orion being chased by the serpent, and we read the legend of the Pleiades, those seven sisters, daughters of Atlas. Beanie fetched D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths because both she and Rose wanted to read me several relevant passages.
* Hunted up our copy of Rey’s Find the Constellations and read about the different magnitudes of stars, among other things.
* Rose found Sirius, the Dog Star, her favorite star, says she, because she loves Diana Wynne Jones’s fantasy novel, Dogsbody, so.
“Here about the beach I wandered,” Tennyson’s poem continues, “nourishing a youth sublime / With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time…”
I don’t know about “sublime,” and we’d have to substitute “internet” for “beach,” I suppose, but yeah, it was a pretty nourishing morning.
Want more poetry? This week’s Poetry Friday roundup is at Wild Rose Reader.
Arthur Ransome, poetry friday, rabbit trails, Swallows & Amazons, Tennyson, Winter Holiday
May 13, 2009 @ 8:04 pm | Filed under: Books, Clippings, Fun Learning Stuff, Links, Nature Study
As you know, I’ve had bees on my mind for weeks. I keep talking about Fruitless Fall, the book about bee colony collapse written by my former grad-school classmate, Rowan Jacobsen.
How much have you read about bee colony collapse?
I knew the honeybee’s numbers were declining. I remember hearing the wacky cell phone theory several years back, and that was laughed out of the news, and since then I’ve just heard ominous mutterings now and then about the bees disappearing and nobody knows why.
But I didn’t know the half of it.
I didn’t know, for example, that nowadays U.S. beekeepers earn most of their income—far more than they earn selling honey—trucking their hives around the country to pollinate crops. Somehow this gobsmacks me. We are dependent on migrant worker bees for the produce we grow in this country.
I definitely didn’t know that in the winter of 2006/2007, huge numbers of these hives began to die, and no one is sure exactly why. There are theories, which is a lot of what Rowan’s book is about: an in-depth and thoughtful exploration of what could possibly be causing the collapse of our bee colonies.
As I said above, when I heard about “the disappearance of the honeybee” I thought it meant declining numbers. Pesticides, I assumed (and indeed that seems to be a major factor). What I didn’t get was that bees literally disappeared. The hives died because the forager bees flew out and didn’t fly back home. There are diseases and pests that kill bees, and you find dead bees in and around the hive. (That’s happening too, in horrifying numbers.) But in other cases, the bees just up and disappeared. One possible explanation, Rowan learned, is a kind of disorientation and memory loss known to be a symptom of neurological damage caused by certain pesticides. It’s possible the bees are suffering from something like bee Alzheimer’s due to exposure to toxins meant to kill other insects. They fly off to work and can’t find their way back home. And in other hives, there are bees carrying every bee disease, fungus, and pest known to afflict the honeybee world—all at once. It’s as if their immune systems have been decimated (possible cause: the catastrophic wave of varroa mite infestation that arrived in this country a few years back and is a terrible scourge in many parts of the world right now), leaving them susceptible to other illnesses.
And it isn’t just the honeybees: we know a lot about the decline in their numbers because they are domesticated bees, owned by devoted beekeepers who know exactly how many hives they have lost to varroa and bee colony collapse. No one has good numbers on all the other pollinating insects out there, except it seems clear honeybees aren’t the only pollinators in decline. Did you know vanilla beans are hand-pollinated by humans? The insect pollinator has been wiped out.
Obviously Fruitless Fall made a big impact on me. Shook me up; Jane too. The funny thing is, at the very same time that it was scaring the pants off me (a world short on pollinators is a scary, scary concept), it was filling me with wonder and delight. I know that sounds impossible. It’s the way Rowan looks so closely, with humor, warmth, and affection, at this ordinary (extraordinary!) creature, the honeybee. It reminded me of the John Stilgoe book I kept raving about last year, Outside Lies Magic. Remember that one? What Stilgoe did for me with power lines and telephone poles, Rowan Jacobsen did for me with bees and honey and even figs. The early chapters describing life in a beehive and the life cycle of the bee were so engaging that I read them aloud to 8-year-old Beanie, who was captivated. Jane (almost 14) has read the book at least three times now. She begged me to order Rowan’s book on chocolate—along with our very own copy of Fruitless Fall. Which is a good thing, because I find myself wanting to thrust the book at everyone I talk to. It’s that kind of book.
bee colony collapse, bees, Fruitless Fall, honeybees
September 5, 2008 @ 6:34 am | Filed under: Fun Learning Stuff, Games
This quiet blog must make it obvious I’m still taking it slow and easy after last week’s excitement. We’ve kept mostly to home, except for piano lessons. Our old high-tide mood is upon us, has been for a couple of weeks, so there are lots of read-alouds and lively discussions going on (this I can do from the sofa!), and Jane is in love with a giant tome on chemistry, and Beanie and Rose are elbowing each other for FlashMath turns on my iPod Touch, unaware that this game is nothing but math drills. I guess if it’s on the Touch, it’s automatically fun?
Yesterday Beanie asked for a turn on the computer to play “the typing game,” which means the Mavis Beacon typing tutorial CD-rom. Jane hunted it up for her. But I think she might enjoy this new discovery even more: the BBC’s online Dance Mat Typing site. I found the link at Educating Emme. Personally, I’m a little mixed on these lessons—the whole rock-and-roller goat thing wears thin very quickly. I mean, he’s a goat. On the other hand, I love his Scottish accent. On his tongue, banal phrases like “use either of your thumbs on the space bar” become delightful dialogue.
On the other hand, he’s a goat.
(And his cartoon hands—a goat with hands?—in the keyboard demos: shudder.)
But I guarantee Beanie’s gonna love it.
