Books for little geeks

Or rather, books from geeks, GeekDads to be specific.
Today Michael Harrison at GeekDad has a post about Laura’s new b00kn3rd.com blog [it took me a while to figure out that "book nerd" is in there, but then I'm still woozy from my breakfast of waffles, whipped cream, and strawberries] and her post on rare children’s [...]

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 [...]

Speaking of hands

Laura at Seabird Chronicles has a post about “Crafts for young children” — activities and projects toddlers can do by themselves — inspired by a toddler/preschool summer camp she’s planning. The camp planning in turn has inspired the idea for a Craft Swap:
You prepare and mail a box of fun craft ideas/supplies to your [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Oh no Canada

Canadian teenagers, from bad to worse. Much, much worse.
A Good Samaritan became a victim of crime himself as he went to save a woman from a mugging at a downtown [Edmonton] LRT station Wednesday.Jonas Servage’s duffle bag was allegedly stolen by three bystanders [ages 18, 17, and 15] as he attempted to catch the [...]

Dangerous things

The last TedTalk to make a big impression on the home education blogs and groups was Ken Robinson’s, on how schools educate children to become good workers rather than creative thinkers.
The next TedTalk to start making the rounds and already making a splash is Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do by Gever [...]

Film Club interview

from The Canadian Press. Here’s an excerpt (emphases mine):
What [the book] details is a father’s struggle to connect with a beloved son who is totally disinterested in homework and who, at six-foot-four, is a man-sized adolescent frequently skipping out of high school to wander about the big city at will.
“All we ever talked about [...]

An alternative education

First up on this morning’s CBC Radio “Sunday Edition” show, my favorite weekend listening, was host Michael Enright’s interview with film critic and writer David Gilmour, author of the just-published The Film Club: A True Story of a Father and a Son. Film Club is Mr. Gilmour’s account of his decision, several years ago, [...]

Poetry Friday: A bit of Browning and a huge delight

A poem for back-to-school season for all parents who teach, guide, educate, explain, discuss, and develop.
Most of the great English poet Robert Browning’s education took place at home, centering around his father’s library of some 6,000 volumes in English, as well as French, ancient Greek, and Latin. He began composing rhymes even before he learned [...]

Further thoughts on self-esteem and self-confidence

In one of my own comments to my post the other week on children, responsibility, and hard work, I mentioned “the whole self-esteem vs. self-confidence business (I consider the former nonsense, the latter vital)”, and my good friend hornblower at HMS Indefatigable replied,
One other thing though - in your comments Becky, where you talk about [...]

All roads lead to home and hard work

“Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.”
German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), quoted in “The Case Against Adolescence” by Robert Epstein
I started Farm School two years ago in part because I blathered on for much too long on the subject of children [...]

Hot to trot tots and their pole-dancing mamas

A couple of months ago, after seeing the Macleans magazine cover story about “dressing our daughters like skanks”, I wrote,
What continues to surprise me is how many mothers around here, and remember, I’m far away from liberal east coast urban types, so your experience may be wide of my mark, are the ones who choose [...]

Made you look

Stocking up on reading material for the weekend at the library, I was rather startled to find the January 1st edition of Maclean’s Magazine (at left) looking out from the shelves at me with the cover headline “Why do we dress our daughters like skanks?” over a girl about Laura’s age dressed like a hooker. [...]

Poetry Friday: The golden August edition

Augustby Celia Thaxter (1835-1894)
Buttercup nodded and said good-by,Clover and daisy went off together,But the fragrant water lilies lieYet moored in the golden August weather.
The swallows chatter about their flight,The cricket chirps like a rare good fellow,The asters twinkle in clusters bright,While the corn grows ripe and the apples mellow.
Read more about and see Celia Thaxter’s [...]

Poetry Friday

Inspired by the recent birthday candles, new (well, new to us) tea sets, and a summer full of vases of garden flowers on the kitchen table, I offer
Setting the Tableby Dorothy Aldis (1896-1966)
EveningsWhen the house is quietI delightTo spread the whiteSmooth cloth and put the flowers on the table.
I place the knives and forks aroundWithout [...]

Poetry Friday: Look up

When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomerby Walt Whitman
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,How soon unaccountable I became tired [...]

Filched shamelessly…

from Rebecca’s Gypsy Caravan, where she writes about her family’s recent afternoon at the Cleveland Botanical Garden, including the special Children’s Garden, outside of which is a stone with the following from the great American horticulturist Luther Burbank engraved upon it:
Every child should have mudpies, grasshoppers, water bugs, tadpoles, frogs, mud turtles, elderberries, wild strawberries, [...]

Poetry Friday: The rain in Spain edition

Very thoughtful Grandpapa (aka Old Curmudgeon) sent us a parcel the other day. It’s always a wonderful surprise albeit a bit confusing to get a box from Amazon I haven’t ordered. But before we even left the post office Laura suggested, “I think it’s probably from Grandpapa.” And it was, too: two rhyming dictionaries — [...]

Poetry Friday

For my footsore boys and girl enjoying long summer evenings…
No Bedby Walter de la Mare
No bed! No bed! we shouted,And wheeled our eyes from homeTo where the green and golden woodsCried, Come!
Wild sang the evening birds,The sun-clouds shone in our eyes,A silver snippet of moon hung lowIn the skies.
We ran, we leapt, we sang,We [...]