Fun Learning Stuff — Here in the Bonny Glen

Archive for the 'Fun Learning Stuff' Category

November 17, 2007 @ 8:02 am | Filed under: Advent & Christmas, Art, Best Gifts for Homeschoolers, Books, Comic Books, Fun Learning Stuff, Holidays

Here’s another topic I’ve written many posts on, both here and at Lilting House.

Books We Love, Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five

Signing Time DVDs
More about Signing Time
Yet more about Signing Time

Showcase Presents comic book collections

Settlers of Catan, Wedgits

Books on drawing

Art prints

Family memberships to zoos, museums, etc.

Each of the above link is a longer post on the subject.

November 16, 2007 @ 8:05 pm | Filed under: Fun Learning Stuff, Tidal Homeschooling

Since I’ve posted on what I call “Tidal Learning” or “Tidal Homeschooling” both here and on Lilting House, I thought it might be helpful to compile a list of all those posts.

(My favorite kinds of posts are in the Connections category.)

Tidal Homeschooling

What the Tide Brought In (and Carried Out, and Brought Back In)

Tidal Homeschooling, Part 3

The Tide is Going Out

Tweak Tweak

Accidental vs. On-Purpose Learning

A Low-Tide Day

Lovely, Lovely Low Tide (a follow-up to this post about connections)

Radical Unschooling, Unschooling, Tidal Homeschooling, and the Wearing of Shoes that Fit

Way Leads on to Way

Can you tell I really love low tide? LOL!

This post isn’t about tidal homeschooling per se, but it gives a good picture of the flavor of our high-tide days: All Roads Lead to Rome (Even for Bunnies)

There is also a Tidal Homeschooling yahoogroup and a NearCircle blog ring for Tidal Learning Friends. We’d love to have you join us there!

7 comments

April 7, 2007 @ 10:08 am | Filed under: Blog, Computer stuff, Firefox, Fun Learning Stuff, Geography

I love Firefox. Have I mentioned that I love Firefox? I was browsing the add-ons this morning and found some good, good stuff. 1-Click Weather, for example: a handly little extension that puts current-weather icons in the status bar at the bottom of your screen. Here, I’ll show you:

How handy is that?

I’m also quite pleased with the del.icio.us add-on, which I should have installed a long time ago. It puts two small icons in the top bar of your browser, right next to the window where you type in a URL. The first icon takes you to your del.icio.us bookmarks, and the second one ("tag") allows you to quickly add a new page to your bookmarks. What I especially like is that the tag page pops up in a new window, saving you the trouble of clicking back to the page you were reading. I am using del.icio.us more and more for tagging articles I want to come back to, post about, etc.

But the coolest find of the morning? StumbleUpon, which many of you probably already know about, but I only vaguely recall having heard of before. (Here’s the link to its Firefox add-on page.) StumbleUpon adds another little bar to the top of your browser, under your bookmarks toolbar. At first I didn’t like that at all (since it makes the text area of my browser window just that much smaller), but after playing around with it for a while, I’m totally sold, and here’s why.

When you click on the Stumble icon in that toolbar, you are instantly taken to a random website. When you set up your free StumbleUpon account, you can select categories for these random sites to come from. The sites are recommended by other StumbleUpon users. You can click a thumbs-up icon ("I like this site") or a thumbs-down one ("don’t like it"), or do neither and just go to another page. Okay, thus far, StumbleUpon is just a websurfing tool, right? But what I LOVE about it is the little "Send to" icon in the toolbar. When you click on that, a little pop-up window lets you quickly and easily email the link for the page you’re viewing. No cut-and-pasting. I want to share a site with Scott? Click! It’s on its way.

I LOVE this feature.

It works for any page you’re on, not just sites you have "stumbled upon." Likewise, you can thumbs-up (or down) any website you are visiting. Since the StumbleUpon toolbar is in your browser window all the time (remember, that’s what I didn’t like about it at first?), you can recommend or email any page, any time, very conveniently.

And there’s some pretty interesting stuff to be stumbled upon, I must say. I gave my first (and so far, only) thumbs-up to this awesome site. I have to say awesome like a kid because I am that excited about it. It’s called Earth Album, and it’s the marriage of Google Maps and Flickr. You’re shown a world map, and when you click on any area, a little slide-show bar appears at the top of the screen, with Flickr photos of the region in question. I can’t wait to show this to my children. It’s going to be the perfect compliment to our Journey North project.

What are your favorite Firefox add-ons? What other awesome hacks am I missing?

4 comments

February 24, 2007 @ 2:39 pm | Filed under: Books, Family, Family Adventures, Fun Learning Stuff, Geography

I have an in-box full of email (again), a file full of posts-in-progress, and a head cluttered with a bunch more post ideas. I think I’ll declare today a cyber-decluttering day and just cram everything into one big messy post.

The Lucky Scrotum Matter, Revisited

I liked Monica Edinger’s post on the subject at educating alice. She told her class of fourth-graders about the controversy and read them the "offending" page.

When I reached the dreaded scrotum passage there was no reaction
whatsoever… no confusion, no giggles, no questioning. I kept going to
“….he killed that snake even though it bit him in the place where it
hurts the worst for a male…” (3) where there might have been a smile or
two, but no more. After a few more paragraphs I stopped. Eager hands
went up. “It is about the drinking, right?” Others nodded. Finally, one
said, “It’s about what happened to the dog?” The two who already knew
and I nodded. And the kids all said they didn’t get it. That they see
dogs with scrota every day after all. That it was no big deal.

She links to another Times piece on the book (this time an editorial) and some letters to the editor.

Chocolately Goodness for the Ears

I pulled into the library parking lot yesterday morning and put the minivan into park, only to be met with an aggrieved "Mommy, how COULD you???" from Rose—who was the child who begged me to take everyone to the library in the first place. My crime? Turning off the ignition, therefore cutting off Eric Idle in midsentence.

See, we are listening to Charlie and The Chocolate Factory on CD, and Rose isn’t the only one captivated by Eric Idle’s performance. He makes a deliciously funny book even funnier. The voices, oh, the voices! It’s Monty Python on a serious sugar high. I had to play some for Scott, just to watch him weep. He yelled at me too when I turned it off.

We actually did bail on our library trip yesterday. At the girls’ impassioned request, I just drove around for a while so they could keep on listening to the story. We had about twenty minutes to kill before our next appointment, and it would have been tough to squeeze a library visit into that short span of time anyway.

Speaking of Appointments

Yesterday afternoon, Wonderboy had an appointement with a neurologist. Our new pediatrician wants him to make a new-patient visit to all the subspecialists he was seeing in Virginia. This, on top of his speech therapy and audiology appointments, makes for a dizzying amount of running around. I’m tired of it, and we have barely begun.

At least the children’s hospital (where most of these sub-specialties are located) isn’t too awfully far: it’s about a 20-minute drive on San Diego’s fabulous freeways. I adore the freeways here. Have I mentioned that? There are a million of them, more or less, all over the place, and unless you have the misfortune of needing to travel at rush hour like my poor hubby, driving on these highways is positively zippy. Zip, zip, everywhere. And the road signs say exotic things like "Los Angeles, right lane" or "Mexico, keep left." Zip!

But yesterday, it just so happened that I was running a teensy bit late. Not VERY late, just a little. I suppose I should count my blessings because it’s possible that if I’d been on time, I’d have wound up IN the accident that brought traffic to a standstill on the I-8 just minutes after we zipped onto it. Stand. Still.

I knew I was now going to be late to the neurology appointment. I made a frantic call to Scott to tell him to call the doctor’s office and explain that I was ON MY WAY. He was happy to oblige, except for the tiny complication of his not exactly being in the office at that exact moment. I’d caught him on his lunch break, in line at the grocery store. He promised to hurry back to work and make the call. I’d have done it myself but I didn’t know the number by heart, and digging through my bag for my Wonderboy Medical Records Notebook isn’t something I was in a position to do at that moment. Nor was dialing the phone. I can punch Scott’s speed-dial with my thumb, but more than that I dare not do while driving, even at non-zippy speeds.

I arrived at the neuro’s office 20 minutes late for our appointment. The waiting room was empty and I figured they’d taken the next patient already. No problem, right? Oh so wrong. The receptionist sort of jumped when I gave her Wonderboy’s name.

"You didn’t hear? We canceled your appointment."

"Oh no!" I cried. "My husband called to let you know we were going to be late! Accident on the 8!"

She hadn’t caught the details, just the "going to be late" part. Shrugging apologetically, she informed me that the doctor had already given our slot another patient, and after that he had a meeting, but he could see us at 9 a.m. Monday morning.

I could make this a very long story, but without a nice happy ending, I don’t have the heart. Here’s the nutshell version: the doctor wouldn’t see us. Even though the next patient wasn’t due for another 20 minutes. Even though Dr. Neurologist was sitting alone in his office on the other side of the wall. He needed forty minutes for a new patient app, he insisted, and he’d already moved the 3:40 patient to come in at 3:00 and then he had a meeting at 3:40. My pleas to just squeeze in a quick 20-minute app fell on deaf ears. Well, actually they fell on the receptionist’s fairly sympathetic ears, but I could hear her relaying them to the doctor and HE was certainly not responding in a manner indicative of having heard with compassion or understanding.

I turned down the Monday-at-nine appointment, much to their surprise; I told them I had no more openings in my schedule until April.

"Really?" blinked the receptionist.

"Yup," I said, loudly, assuming that if I could hear the doctor through the wall, he could hear me. I explained that my son sees a number of other subspecialists and has consults stacked up through the end of April. There’s always the possibility the doctor will realize he missed out on the chance to pick up an unusual case, and next time maybe he’ll be a little more open to making creative adjustments for unavoidable delays. Slim possibility, but I’m an optimist.

(Hmm, look at that, I did make it a long story anyway.)

A Much Pleasanter Subject

Wednesday’s mail brought a serendipitous conjunction of treasures: a pile of nice fat letters from our dear friend Keri, who is in the middle of a year-long wandering in the Far East, and a copy of Richard Halliburton’s The Royal Road to Romance. The latter is Halliburton’s engaging account of his own Far-East travels. We savored Keri’s letters over breakfast Thursday morning—they are gems, and I am sharing them over at Lilting House—delighting in the soft, petal-strewn, handpressed paper and the colorful descriptions of Thailand penned in Keri’s friendly handwriting. And then of course we had to dive right into the Halliburton book, skipping directly to his Bangkok chapter and comparing his route to Keri’s on the globe. We’ll go back and start at the beginning when I figure out how to make time for one more book in our daily-reading pile.

I’m in My Junior Year of Blogging Now

GottaBook’s Gregory K., inventor of the poetry form known as the Fib, shares a fib in honor of his blog’s one-year anniversary. This reminded me that I missed my own two-year blog anniversary in January. Here’s what I started with:

"You really have your hands full."

This is what I’m always hearing from people, variations on the
theme. Either I have too many balls in the air or too much food on my
plate, or maybe it’s PLATES I’m supposed to be juggling instead of
balls, and I guess in that case any amount of food would be too much.
And it’s true, I’ve had plenty of days when it seems like the
metaphorical spaghetti is raining down upon my head. Especially this
past year, since the baby was born.

But I’m of the mind that a little pasta in the hair can be a good thing, metaphorically speaking.

Full hands are a blessing. Juggling can be exciting. A plate heaped
with food is generally considered something to be thankful for.

And oh boy am I thankful. Sometimes I’m dizzy with thanks. Other
times I’m just dizzy—life whirls by so quickly. What’s on the spinning
plates is a blur. So I thought I’d write about what’s on each dish, the
whole savory smorgasbord.

Happy to say nothing has changed (despite everything having changed this year). I’m still dizzy, and thankful, and savoring the feast.

5 comments

June 27, 2006 @ 6:11 am | Filed under: Fun Learning Stuff

Jane heard from a friend that dollar bills were going to be printed in orange from now on. I didn’t think that sounded correct, so I suggested we look it u—

“Look it up?” snorted Scott. Jane guffawed. Oh, sure, they mock me, but they love me.

Well, we did look it up (so there) and here’s what we found. As I thought, there are no plans in the works for orange smackeroos, but the U. S. Treasury’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing website offers a nifty interactive tour of the new and improved tens, twenties, and fifties.

4 comments

June 22, 2006 @ 7:09 am | Filed under: Fun Learning Stuff

I have a big post up at The Lilting House today about our favorite games, puzzles, websites, and other fun educational stuff. Suggestions are welcome—help me add to the list!

No comments

March 21, 2006 @ 11:46 am | Filed under: Fun Learning Stuff

The other day, Angela (Mother Crone) asked for books and resources about Scotland to go along with my Martha books. I’m working on that post, Angela, and will put it up as soon as I get all the links ready. Didn’t want you to think I’d missed the request! I have a long list of titles and I’m delighted to share it. Thanks for your interest!

No comments

March 20, 2006 @ 2:50 am | Filed under: Fun Learning Stuff

Via Boing Boing: a free online Boggle-style game called Babble. New puzzle every day. How many points can you score?

1 comment

March 16, 2006 @ 3:13 am | Filed under: Fun Learning Stuff, Geography, Science

In late January I posted an announcement about the Journey North Mystery Class project that was about to start. This has been our first year participating in the project, and I have to tell you, we are having the best time. Can’t believe we haven’t done this before!

We’re about halfway through the project, and it gets more exciting by the week. Here’s Journey North’s description:

The Mystery Class investigation is an 11-week hunt in which students try to find 10 secret “Mystery Classes” hiding around the globe. The changing amount of sunlight at each site is the central clue. Students take an inspiring journey from knowing only sunrise and sunset times, to discovering exact locations of the 10 Mystery Classes. Mystery Class begins January 30 and ends May 5, 2006.

Here’s how it works. Every Monday we visit this website to find out our local sunrise and sunset times for that day. The amount of daylight between sunset and sunrise is called the photoperiod. Week by week, we have recorded each Monday’s photoperiod on a graph, watching our hometown photoperiod get longer and longer every week. The gray days of February were made a little less gray by the knowledge that we had some twenty minutes more sunshine every week.

Every Friday, Journey North sends out sunrise and sunset data for the ten Mystery Classes. Using this information, we calculate the ten Mystery Class photoperiods and add this data to our graph. (We are working as part of a group with other families from the 4RealLearning message boards; each family calculates the data for one Mystery Class, and we pool our results.)

Here’s what our graph looks like so far. (Click to enlarge.) You can see how almost all the lines are on their way to converging at a central point: that’s the 12-hour photoperiod line, which is where everyone will be next Monday, March 20th, on the vernal equinox.

Almost everyone, that is! Mystery Class #6 has been enjoying 24 hours of daylight since the project began. This means they’re somewhere in Antarctica…You can (faintly) see their line at the top of our chart.

The photoperiod data is helping us narrow down the latitude of each Mystery Class. By comparing each Class’s photoperiods to our hometown photoperiod, we are able to make guesses about how far north or south of the equator these hidden classes might be.

This week was a big week: Journey North released the longitude clues. To help us calculate each Mystery Class’s longitude, we were given their March 20th sunrise times in Greenwich Mean Time. By calculating the number of minutes between Greenwich’s sunrise and each Mystery Class’s sunrise and dividing by four (because the earth spins one degree longitude every four minutes), we have been able to determine each Class’s longitude, including whether they are east or west of Greenwich.

So now we’re really narrowing it down! Jane and I are beginning to make our guesses about where the Mystery Classes are located. In the weeks to come, Journey North will give us additional clues about culture and terrain. In late April, our group and others all over the world will submit our guesses, and the following week Journey North will post the answers.

Already we have learned so much during this project. Never again will I have trouble remembering which is latitude and which is longitude. There has been a lot of math and a lot of globe-spinning. (Mr. Putty has been getting a workout!)

If you’re kicking yourself for not having joined in the fun this year, it’s not too late. It would take some serious work to bring your graph up to date, but the data is all still available and it could certainly be done. Or you could just drop in to 4RealLearning and eavesdrop on our group’s speculations. Click on the “Great Outdoors” forum and look for topic threads labeled “Mystery Class.” We’re still collecting longitude data from our group members, and we’ve agreed not to start guessing out loud about locations just yet—we want to give every family a chance to do the guessing on its own first.

And if this isn’t your year to join in the fun, there’s always next year. Regular readers of this blog know that I frequently post links to Journey North—for example, I love the Monarch watch that begins every spring, as we follow the butterflies’ progress from their wintering grounds in Mexico to our own backyards. All of Journey North’s activities are free and tons of fun.

Interesting related links posted by our group members:

Antarctica Journal
World Daylight Map
Daylight Savings Time Map (This site gave us a clue a couple of weeks ago when the sunrise/sunset times for one of the Classes suddenly shifted by an hour.)
NationalAtlas.gov
On the Same Day in March: A Tour of the World’s Weather (A picture book by Marilyn Singer.)

Tags: homeschooling, homeschool, home education, unschooling, unschool

2 comments

March 6, 2006 @ 3:00 am | Filed under: Art, Fun Learning Stuff, History

For this month’s picture study, we’re doing something a bit different. I thought it might be fun to take a close look at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s famous Unicorn Tapestries. These spectacular late-fifteenth-century tapestries are on view at The Cloisters, the Met’s uptown collection of medieval European artwork. Designed in Paris and woven in Brussels and the Netherlands, the seven large wall hangings vividly depict the hunting of a white unicorn in a richly flowered wood. The gorgeous weavings are rich in symbolism and drama—there are at least three layers of meaning to explore here. In addition to the excitement of the hunt, complete with lanky greyhounds, odd-looking lions, and a smiling stag, there are the symbolic interpretations of the story:

“They can also be explained as a tale of courtly love, presenting the search and eventual capture of the lover-bridegroom by his adored lady. And there is the Christian interpretation as well, the symbolic retelling of Christ’s suffering, Crucifixion, and Resurrection.”

The Met’s Unicorn Tapestries website is loaded with information and pictures. If, like my family, you can’t venture to NYC to view these incredible weavings in person, a long exploration of the website will be the next best thing.