Poetry Friday: Mushrooms

It’s still Friday around here, for another two hours and 50 minutes, so technically I’m not late. It’s been a busy week, with swim club starting (requiring us to be in town four afternoons a week), an art lesson (we had just about forgotten what the art teacher looked like), and a make-up singing [...]

Make your own school

Late but interesting: I didn’t see this until today, when it was already too late, from Gever Tulley’s blog:
Just a quick note to say that I’ll be speaking and answering questions on Thursday, May 1st at the Maker Day event before the Maker Faire and then again on Saturday, May 3rd, the first day of [...]

Do it Yourself Science

Via Boing Boing and Pharyngula, word of a new, subversive (that’s PZ’s term) chemistry book, just out this week from the Make Magazine folks:

Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture by Robert Bruce Thompson, part of O’Reilly Media’s DIY Science series.
Thompson is also the author, along with his wife Barbara Fritchman [...]

Poetry Friday: A little trust and encouragement

An anonymous but appropriate and still fairly well-known bit of American doggerel, near as I can figure from the 1940s or thereabouts. From our small, battered copy of the Arrow Book of Funny Poems, collected by Eleanor Clymer and published in 1961 by Scholastic:
The wind riz
And then it blew,
The rain friz
And then it snew.
Spring [...]

Suburban Green

Canadian home educating blogger Billi-Jean, who writes at My Bountiful Life… announced a new project for Earth Day yesterday (our own earth is white and frozen, so there wasn’t much celebrating in our little corner yesterday):
Suburban Green Is People
In her first post, Billi-Jean writes,
So here we are, a family of four, in the suburbs in [...]

Hands

One of my favorite writers, science professor and naturalist Chet Raymo, wrote a recent post “Hand to Mind” at his blog Science Musings* about The New York Times review of Richard Sennett’s new book, The Craftsman; I highlighted some excerpts of the Times review here.
Prof. Raymo hasn’t read the new book yet, but has some [...]

The educational minimum

We have come so far down the trail of thinking that people go to school in order to become foot-soldiers in the economic battle, as if paid employment were the sole meaning of life, that we scarcely understand what Aristotle meant by saying “we educate ourselves so that we can make a noble use of [...]

Call of the wild

One of my Google Alerts picked up this article, “German Tots Learn to Answer Call of Nature” from The Wall Street Journal earlier in the week. From the article,
Each weekday, come rain or shine, a group of children, ages 3 to 6, walk into a forest outside Frankfurt to sing songs, build fires and roll [...]

Poetry Friday: From the tower, for children

I was delighted yesterday to find online Alison Lurie’s New York Review of Books May 1st Rapunzel reviews and essay, “The Girl in the Tower“. Which brought to mind the delightful poem below by the late Liverpudlian painter and poet, Adrian Henri, from our copy of The Macmillan Treasury of Poetry for Children, with a [...]

Links

We’ve been busy here, recovering from the Festival and celebrating the kids’ successes (including Laura’s big wrap-up prize for most outstanding student performing in three disciplines and going on to provincials for poetry/public speaking and musical theater), doing some more Spring cleaning (I still have a few walls to wash and all of the windows [...]

New from Jay Hosler

Via P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula, news that biologist and cartoonist (and Farm School favorite) Jay Hosler has a new book out, Optical Allusions.
I’ve written before, here and in comments at other blogs, about Dr. Hosler’s earlier titles, The Sandwalk Adventures: An Adventure in Evolution Told in Five Chapters and Clan Apis).  He writes about the [...]

Home from the hill

Well, home from three days at the peforming arts festival (piano, voice, and speech arts), which was a hill of its own.
We returned to find that it’s finally, really Spring here in our corner of the prairies. I’ve had pussy willows in a vase for a few weeks, the geese have been flying overhead [...]

Craftsmanship

In yesterday’s New York Times Sunday Book Review, Lewis Hyde reviewed the new title The Craftsman by Richard Sennett (Yale University Press, March 2008). From the review:
… Sennett’s book gathers case after case in which we see how the work of the hand can inform the work of the mind. Moreover, it is through [...]

A daily gift for National Poetry Month

Sherry at Semicolon is offering a post a day for National Poetry Month.  Here’s the initial post, and you can find the others by searching the blog (under the “Picture Book Preschool” block on the right) for the term “NPM”.  From Sherry’s first post,
April is National Poetry Month, and I intend to give you a [...]

Our newest little April fool

Laura’s 4H heifer finally had her calf the other day. We arrived at Bunny’s pen to find her in labor. If you look carefully, you can see the calf’s front hooves poised to make an exit.

Laura the midwife with her beloved Bunny.

Here’s one of the first glimpses of Giacomo Benny (Benny for short), [...]

Poetry Friday: Remembering Dr. King

who was assassinated 40 years ago today.
Lift Every Voice and Sing
by James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938)
Lift ev’ry voice and sing,
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the list’ning skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing [...]

Light and sporadic blogging ahead

Not only do we have the big music/speech arts festival coming next week, with lots of last-minute rehearsing, fine tuning, and costume assembling, but this morning at 11 my husband gave me a whopping 20 minutes’ notice that the bedroom remodel was about to commence. This after our 40 roosters had been dspatched to [...]

The Archimedes Project

From the article, “The Ancient Mechanics and How They Thought” by Guy Gugliotta, in today’s New York Times, combining several of our favorite subjects:
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Consider the galley slave, clad in rags, chained to a hardwood bench and clinging to an oar as long as a three-story flagpole. A burly man with a whip [...]

A monthlong celebration of delight and glory and oddity and light

April is National Poetry Month,

brought to you for the 13th year by the Academy of American Poets.
Why poetry? Because, as Dylan Thomas wrote in
Notes on the Art of Poetry
I could never have dreamt that there were such goings-on
in the world between the covers of books,
such sandstorms and ice blasts of words,
such staggering peace, such [...]

A man and his wolf

There’s a new BBC2 documentary, part of the “Natural World” series, about Ernest Thompson Seton (1860-1946) and his wolf Lobo, one of the subjects of Seton’s Wild Animals I Have Known. The new documentary isn’t to be confused with the 1962 Disney live action movie, “The Legend of Lobo”.
In The Telegraph, Steve Gooder, director [...]