I have spent far too much time on this now.

Counting to 100, Vowel Boot Camp, and Building Robots

So we're driving in the car and David suddenly announces, "I can count to one hun-dwed now. Want to hear?" I'm somewhat startled. We haven't practiced this or even discussed it, really. And so, sure, I'd like to hear this. Off he goes, and with only a couple of stumbles along the way, sure enough, he chants his way up to 100. Well. And where did you learn how to do that? He replies that he's simply been practicing counting to 100 while he's lying in bed. He does this as a self-imposed exercise before he goes to sleep at night, and he's perfected it enough to feel competent to perform. Oh. Um...great! You're learning new stuff on your own...pretty motivated.

This odd response, by the way, is apparently the newest thinking as far as parenting goes. An article titled The Inverse Power of Praise hinges on the idea that if you tell a kid he's smart when he gets a right answer, he becomes scared of taking any kind of cerebral risk, lest he be suddenly seen as NOT smart. Kids who are praised for their willingness to try, or their tenacity, are being praised for a variable they feel they can control. And more importantly, one they can replicate. So they're far more willing to stretch and reach for a new concept, because it's the reaching and trying and effort itself which is reinforced, rather than the idea that either you have brainpower or you don't. Interesting idea.

Lauren's all about trying. After David's performance, she went on to count reasonably well to 39.

Nobody is quite that motivated when it comes to Phonics. This is David's most hated subject. If he had his wishes, he would only be taught History (tiny smatterings of geography and cultural anthropology), Science and Math. Period. (And Math is getting pretty suspect now, since we've moved from sorting and categorizing to these weird ideas of geometry and fractions.) Language Arts and particularly Phonics can go take a leap as far as he's concerned.

Today, however, he had to identify all the vowels within a given set of magnetic letters on his student whiteboard. He seemed shaky on it, but he did sort of OK...yet something was off. Finally I had it. He was looking past my right arm at the teacher whiteboard, where I had all the letter tiles in order and the vowels are in red. He was copping off the teacher's board! He saw me follow his gaze and I looked at him with a big grin and he sort of wilted...busted!
"You're checking off the teacher's board!" I said.
David said nothing. Slight little nod.
I nodded back.
"Actually, that's a pretty smart idea," I said. "If you're not sure of something, you can use a reference to double-check and make sure you're right."
He brightened and smiled. "Yeah!"
"However," I continued, putting the teacher's board away, "the point here is for you to learn your vowels without looking."

This is when he puts his chin on the workbook and won't look at you. Ah, but he LOVES to learn things from the computer, so it's Between the Lions to the rescue! A glass of milk and a laptop in front of him vastly improve his outlook, and he's not nearly so glum. He gets to watch Vowel Boot Camp, which makes him giggle. I leave him alone for awhile and he reruns the little movie like six times, and here and there he starts to sing along with it. After a bit he says, "OK, I'm done," and he slides off his chair. I put the laptop away again, we go back over the identification exercise, and he passes decently.

He and Lauren go play while mom does some more dishes and then realizes it's almost time for his homeschool class at the Science Center. Today is about robots. What kind? I have NO IDEA. I know the SLSC is one of five places in the country that has a Lego Mindstorms setup, so I have a sneaking suspicion that they're either going to be using it, or something terribly similar. I have to rush them both into shoes and coats and we're off.

Bad omens to begin with...there are six school buses in front of the SLSC. I HATE going to these places when school groups are there. I hate going there when Scout troops are there. The adults are outnumbered and the kids have less than no interest in the topic at hand, and are far too busy whooping and shouting and pushing and being utterly obnoxious. Great.

The next bad omen is the fact that there's someone standing out there directing traffic in the parking lot. Yikes!! I have NEVER seen the place this busy! We have to park in BFE and make a run for it. We're now officially late. We get inside and there's a huge line, we're about 20 people away from the counter. We're registered for the class, but we have to pick up our ticket before we can actually go. I fished out my membership card and suddenly we didn't have to wait in line anymore. Apparently they suck up to people with membership cards, because were were suddenly directed to a little kiosk to the side which was emblazoned with the words "Membership Services," where we were promptly greeted and tickets were printed and we were rushed off downstairs. (Dude! Orange Membership card = 1-Up Mushroom!)

I saw David off to the class and then Lauren and I went wandering. I wasn't about to try and take her to the Discovery Room, as we had JUST done that. (She suggested Science Goes Splat numerous times, but it just wasn't happening yet.) We wandered through the display on rock formations and volcanoes, on earthquakes, on pre-dinosaur era bugs. We went to the gift shop and found a pencil with a plastic Triceratops stuck to it. We got to do a chromatography experiment using filter paper, wicks, and water. (You draw on the filter, wick up the water, and it splits the ink from the pen into the distinct colors that made it up. Dark blue turns into electric blue and purple.) Finally we headed back to pick up "Bebo." We stood and waited a bit and then suddenly there he was. "Look, Mommy!" he chirps happily, holding aloft a small bit of whirring machinery. "I made a robot!" It's a Popsicle stick. On one end is a AA battery, stuck to the stick with clear packing tape. On the other end is a small motor. Wires lead from the motor to either end of the battery. One end (-) is taped onto the battery, while the the other (+) is left free so that the child can complete the circuit anytime they want to. A round cog is stuck to the motor pin, so when the circuit is closed, the cog spins round and round. A robot. David is delighted with his class, and announces that they watched a movie and got to play with a robot and then built their own.

After that we're off to swimming class (I thought homeschoolers were supposed to suffer socially and not have contact with other kids?), then back home for a very short time and then back out with Dad to go to dinner. Since it's Tuesday again, it's Fazoli's night again. On the way there David starts singing in the backseat, "A, E, I, O, U, sometimes Y is a vowel, too. Sound off, A, E....sound off....I, O, U...."

We finally got both kids stuffed into bed (David is painted up like Flash again and Lauren has a big, pink butterfly spanning her face). Tomorrow we don't have anything planned, per se, but the next day is another social homeschool thing in the morning, and then on Friday his buddy Clayton is coming over for a few hours while his parents try to sneak off for a dinner out.

Pi Day

I'm fairly sure that by now, everyone is well aware that today is Pi Day. Not only that, but it's Albert Einstein's birthday, which I find cosmically amusing.

To commemorate this momentous occasion, I ferried the kids over to the Science Center, where they were holding their own celebration of “Pi Day.” We spent a good five hours there, and I think I got my main point across…obviously most of this mathematical stuff is above David’s head, but what I wanted to get cemented in his brain was the word “Pi,” that it meant a number, the number is 3.14, and it has to do with circles, curves and spirals. And because we’re (re)newly-minted members, I had some free OmniMax tickets to use, so we saw one of those, too.

The Science Center had obviously had their minions go all around the building and put up little signs saying “Pi is Here.” It was the guest’s job to figure out *why* Pi was there. The first one was the curved ramp leading up to the Imax theater. The next was placed on a big “hamster wheel” they have hooked up to the Energizer machine. There were a whole cache of them stuck to the pillars supporting the building itself. I asked David why Pi was there and he looked up and down the column and then saw the base of it and said, “Because! It’s a circle there, and…and…” and he was motioning with his hands, following the curvature of the pillar up to the top. He didn’t have the words, but he sure had the idea.

Most of the Pi Day stuff was happening at the Math Cart (well…duh!), where we:

• Added links to a paper chain where each link represented a single digit of Pi.
• Thought up as many words that start with “Pi” as possible, counted the number of letters in the word, and stuck a Pi sticker onto a graph showing the cumulative results. (We came up with “pinch” and “picnic.” After we left and it was actually quiet, I could come up with several more. Sigh.)
• Made and colored Pi headbands.

There were more things to do, but they involved calculating the number of full cans of soda which had been poured into a larger cylinder, and figuring out which was really more…two small pizzas or one large one. There was also a cute little uber-nerd manning the table. Looked like he was in high school, and I was forcibly reminded of my spouse. His job was to guide the littler kids through the required Pi math to solve the problems. The Math Cart is where new engineers are groomed and where old ones retire. When we came back later on the table was staffed by a tall gentleman with a grey beard, wearing a Pi headband and a tie-dyed shirt. (I often see older men manning the Math Cart, trying to get kids to stop a tennis ball from rolling downhill using six straws and two rubber bands, or encouraging them to “think of another way you could add this four times.” They really DO care deeply, you can just tell.)

The next joy was a presentation of “Science Goes Splat,” which also involved Pi Minute. They have a large open area where an audience sits and where they’ve placed a target. They have a nice, long, 60-foot drop from the fourth floor all the way down to the lower level, which they utilize to show off their gravity. (Sure, “their” gravity. Special, unique, Science Center gravity. Didn’t you know?) So Lauren sat on my lap and my little redhead geeklet sat to the right of me, Pi headband securely in place. He wasn’t sure what they were going to do, but once they started to drop things out of the window, he perked right up. They dropped a rope with incremental measurements (intro to the Metric system) down to the presenter, and once we had the distance established, they dropped an apple (in honor of Newton, of course) 60 feet down into a plastic wading pool (dramatic intro to gravity, not to mention force and time). They dropped several balls from the windows…basketballs, a super high-bounce ball, a golf ball….asking which one would bounce the highest. They dropped balls of different sizes and the same weight, and balls of the same size and different weights. They poured water out of a pitcher while the presenter tried to “catch” it in a glass. They dropped arrows into an archery target (yes, real arrows. Sharp ones.), they dropped a baseball with a speed sensor in it, they asked for volunteers to catch things and dropped a fistful of knotted scarves (for the little kids), a squishy ball to be caught in a laundry basket (for the 10 year-olds or so) and, for the fool-hearty teenagers….well, they got to don a rain poncho and catch a water balloon. (“It splatted all over the place!” says Lauren.) At 1:59 p.m., they sounded an alarm, as this was Pi Minute, (technically, if Pi is rounded out to seven decimal places, it becomes 3.1415926, making it March 14 at 1:59:26 p.m.) and they dropped the “Pi Ball.” (A big, red exercise ball with 3.1415926 written on it) The little Math Cart Nerd joined in for this one, and they did the Pi Dance, which really can’t be described, only experienced. As the Math Nerd said, “Yeah, it’s a little geeky, but that’s what we do around here.” I knew there was a reason I liked geeks.

We also went to the Discovery Room and saw a Madagascar Hissing Cockroach (think of a winged cockroach just slightly shorter than the entire back of your hand) shed its exoskeleton. Not all moms are willing to think this is cool. “I think I’d die if one so much as touched me,” said a nearby parent. Both David and Lauren were willing to pet one. And since they don’t bite (the roaches, not the kids), I was willing to let them.

Park park

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So I'm sitting at the park at 6:30 a.m. on a Saturday. In a nutshell, I have a ton of work to do, but I really would prefer to do it at the coffee shop with a large infusion of caffeine. They don't open until 7:30 a.m, however, so I have to wait. I figured the park would be a nice place to spend my time...I don't get nearly enough contact with nature these days. So far this morning, the lake is pretty much owned by two incredibly loud geese, and two ducks (one male and one female...hmmm, is it spring yet?) who keep yelling at the geese. It also looks like the big willow tree has actually broken off at the base of its trunk, and fallen into the lake. How sad! We once released a turtle under that tree. (He showed up in our driveway one day, and we thought that a big park with a lake sounded like a better turtle habitat than a subdivision. So we took him out here and I put him in the grass. With an air of great determination, he stomped his way straight to the waterfront and launched himself in. The last I saw of him was his little turtle head poking up out of the water.)

David is very nearly through his first Phonics book, which has been quite an undertaking. It's probably about 300 pages. He has two more tests to take in it and then we get to move to the next book. He started this one in September, and at that time he couldn't read at all, or write any of his letters. Now he can write (it's messy and a bit shaky, but he can write) and he's reading things like, "Where did the mud come from?" His tests are also requiring him to spell tiny words, like "hat," "six," "bit," and "cot." That's a lot of improvement in six months.

One of the homeschool lists that I sub to had a deal for something called "GeeGuides." Never heard of them, but they had a sample online. This one happened to be about art, which David really couldn't care less about. (Dad's fault. Apparently it's genetic.) Still, they did a pretty good job. This particular sample was about paint itself, and the advent of putting paint in tubes and what that meant to the artsists of the day. Before that time, if you were an artist, you mixed all your own paint. This meant you had to find a pigment, which isn't nearly as simple as it sounds. Clay was dried out, crushed, washed and burnt to make orange and brown pigments. Bones were burnt and crushed to make black. White pigment was especially fun...they discovered (and I want to know WHO decided to try this one first) that if you packed a chunk of lead in manure and bathed it in vinegar, a white crust would form over the lead. They broke this off and crushed it to make white, with the mild side effect that the paint was actually poisonous. (There's speculation that this kind of lead poisoning is what caused Goya to go deaf, especially since he often applied paint to the canvas with this bare hands.) Deep, rich purple was apparently very hard to get...the secretions from a particular snail rendered the best purples, and you needed something obscene like several thousand squished, ground snails to make a few brushfuls of purple. It was insanely hard and ridiculously expensive...and one of the reasons why purple became a color associated with royalty...mainly it was only the royals who could afford to have their portraits painted with purple. Ditto for aquamarine blue. The blue came from a crushed gemstone, and an ounce of the gemstone cost more than an ounce of gold. Thus only the most revered religious figures were painted with aquamarine blue. Like the virgin Mary. (Ever notice how often Mary is depicted in a bright blue head covering? Do you suppose this was influenced by the economics of paint-making during the renaissance?)

Artists would then take the pigments and mix them with a binder...anything sticky that would hold the color onto the canvas...which included anything from spit to egg yolks to oil.

Since you were busy mixing and boiling and crushing (mercury was also used for a few colors), you were pretty much confined to your studio. You couldn't let your paint dry out, and were judicious with every stroke. But the real revolution came when metal paint tubes were introduced, and suddenly two major things happened....(1) artists could get their hands on paint reasonably easily and (2) they could paint ANYWHERE THEY WANTED TO. Hence why so many impressionist paintings were landscapes and outdoor scenes. Suddenly the artists were free to take along a portable studio, which had never happened before. You could also see a lot of the individual brush strokes in the paint. (Go look at a Picasso sometime.) This was no accident, it represented a luxurious, almost wanton use of paint which just hadn't been economical before. These guys were pretty much just reveling in their new freedom.

I bet you were just itching to know that.

I took the kids swimming yesterday and tried quite hard to drown them both. They'll tell you it's true. David's old and tall enough to pretty much leave to his own devices in the shallow water, but Lauren has to be watched like a hawk. She has no fear of anything, so she went walking off in the pool and suddenly found herself literally in over her head, thrashing and bobbing around and gasping. Sigh. After I'd fished her out she was scared, but only for about 2.3 seconds. Then she wanted to run off and do more stuff. :-/ We stayed for about two hours, then went home to make blueberry pancakes for dinner. (You've gotta love Lent!)

Apparently Doug's getting a Blackberry phone from his work, so we're supposed to go off today and look at the T-Mobile selection of Blackberry phones. I think he should skip the Blackberry and go straight for the direct brain implant. It would save him loads of time, and perhaps he could upgrade his memory while he's at it. Heck, he'd even have a reason for not listening to me. "Sorry, dear, I was reading my email." That's OK, I'm still lusting after the iPhone.

Oh, and speaking of which, it looks like CS3 is ready to launch any old time now, with the universal binary. (Pant, drool.) I still oh-so-very-much want my Mac, but my work account still doesn't have enough cash for such a thing. (Sob!)

Hmmm. Speaking of that type of thing, I think I'll go pay some bills.