What kind of wife am I?

Madison and Ella set up a "jewelry store" in Madison's room yesterday, and snared David as a customer the moment he walked in the door from work.

He admired the display, and remarked that he was shopping for some jewelry for his wife.

"Well," said Madison, crisply and professionally. "What kind of wife is she?"

June 27 Birthday of the Day: Helen Keller

Helen Adams Keller was born June 27, 1880 in Tuscumbia, Alabama to Captain Arthur H. Keller and Kate Adams Keller. When she was 19 months old, she contracted what was probably scarlet fever or meningitis, which left her both deaf and blind.

Keller's Wikipedia entry reports:

In 1886, her mother Kate Keller was inspired by an account in Charles Dickens' American Notes of the successful education of another deaf/blind child, Laura Bridgman, and travelled to a specialist doctor in Baltimore for advice. He put her in touch with local expert Alexander Graham Bell, who was working with deaf children at the time. Bell advised the couple to contact the Perkins Institute for the Blind, the school where Bridgman had been educated, which was then located in South Boston, Boston, Massachusetts. The school delegated teacher and former student, Anne Sullivan, herself visually impaired and then only 20 years old, to become Helen's teacher. It was the beginning of a 49-year-long relationship.

The entry goes on to describe Keller's education at the Perkins School for the Blind and then the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf in New York City. In 1904, Keller graduated from Radcliffe, becoming the first deaf and blind person to graduate from a college.

Keller became a writer and a speaker. (Sadly!) she was a fervent Socialist and became a member of the IWW. Here is a link to her article "Why I Became an IWW" in which she says:

"Then I was appointed on a commission to investigate the conditions among the blind. For the first time I, who had thought blindness a misfortune beyond human control, found that too much of it was traceable to wrong industrial conditions, often caused by the selfishness and greed of employers. And the social evil contributed its share. I found that poverty drove women to the life of shame that ended in blindness."

She was also, interestingly enough, a Swedenborgian.

Ella's poem

FROM DEB:

It's early Monday morning, not quite time to get dressed for ballet camp. Ella just handed me a poem.

SGIS
OR BLOO
AND
LACS
TOO

This translates to:

Skies are blue.
And lakes, too.

The child makes me want to paint!

"Time" is English's most common noun

My friend Peter Saint-Andre's blog provides a link to this article from CNN showing the Oxford English Dictionary's Top 20 nouns in the English language. He points out, and I agree, that this says a lot about life here in the "Anglosphere." Here they are in order:

time, person, year, way, day, thing, man, world, life, hand, part, child, eye, woman, place, work, week, case, point, government, company, number, group, problem, fact.

Green beans!

I neglected to say earlier this week, because I hadn't downloaded the photos from my digital camera yet, that we started picking green beans earlier this week and BOY, are they great. These are fantastic green beans.

The irony of our Great Green Bean Gardening Adventure is this: My kids actually LIKE green beans. But from A CAN. They're crazy. (This is not the first time I have said this about these children.) I got Ella to try one of the nice, fresh-from-the-garden green beans (well, as fresh as it can be after you overcook it to try to replicate that delectable "canned" quality). She tried it. She didn't like it.

Madison loves these green beans. She loved soaking the beans overnight in some water and seeing how they sprouted. She loved planting them in a row at the back of our garden in the Delicious Dirt that I'd purchased especially for the occasion. She loved measuring two bean plants, whom she named Sheen and Gene, to compare their growth. She loved seeing the little purple flowers, and then the baby green beans. She adored picking them that first day. But eating them? No way.

This is not supposed to happen; all of the child rearing experts say that gardening is a great way to get your kids motivated to try new vegetables. Ha.

So it looks like David and I will be eating our fill of fresh green beans, alone.

The CAT for first grade

CAT being "California Achievement Test." Here in Virginia, you need to provide some "proof of progress" to the superintendent's office by Aug 1; one of these options is just to purchase the CAT or some similar test, and have your child take it (the parent proctors). That seemed simplest to me. All in all, it's supposed to take about 3 1/2 hours, although we're going to spend quite a bit less time on it, she's whizzing right through.

The first grade test is quite strange. It seems too hard for the majority of the country's first graders -- requires quite a bit of reading, knowledge of punctuation. One of the questions even required the kids to know the difference between "wonder" and "wander" -- i.e., which word connotes which concept. I can't believe the typical first grader can do this -- I think a lot of the country's eighth graders don't know. Madison knew, but she had to think, and she's not good at spelling yet. We hadn't covered some aspects of the language arts section, such as punctuation and capitalization, and she was upset about that. She had to think it through on the fly, and she didn't like this AT ALL -- she thought she would get every single question correct on the entire test.

We finished the reading/language section last night and have started on math. And now, Madison is in her element. 7 cents + 1 cent = ____? I don't think she'll have any surprises here, I don't believe even the 2-digit by 2-digit arithmetic involves any carrying or borrowing. Lots of "which bucket made this sandcastle?" kinds of questions. On the other hand, one of the questions in the science section asks: "Which picture shows a method of travel that is best for the earth?" showing someone in a car, on a bicycle, or on a motorcycle. Sigh. Can't escape tbe damned environmentalists even homeschooling.

Also, I keep telling her that the test is meaningless, shouldn't matter to her at all, but she's still mentally competing with all of those other first graders in the country who are taking it. There's no way I'm telling her the score when it comes in.

June 19 Birthday of the Day: Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician who was born June 19, 1623 in Auvergne, France. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father when he showed early proclivity for mathematics and science. In mathematics, he developed probability theory as a result of his taking interest in a friend's gambling, which influenced economists and social scientists. Also, he developed what is known as Pascal's Triangle (check out this Wikipedia entry on it for more information -- it's not difficult and very interesting for those who haven't seen it before) Later, after a mystical experience, he became a philosopher and theologian. His unfinished treatise on Christian apologetics, Pensees, also makes use of his decision theory. One of his most famous arguments is known as Pascal's Wager.

Pascal's wager: Pascal argues that it is more advantageous to believe in God than not to believe in God, because even if the chance that there is a god is extremely small, the consequences are really dire if you're wrong -- as Wikipedia says, in other words, "the expected value to be gained from believing in God is always greater than the expected value resulting from non-belief. Note that this is not an argument for the existence of God, but rather one for the belief in God."

David has an amusing (and informative) response to Pascal's Wager. I'll let him put it in the comments section himself.

I'm convinced it would be Lord of the Flies

FROM DEB:

There are a couple of schools of thought regarding parental involvement in their children's disputes, but they boil down to:

1) Let them alone

and

2) Adjudicate

Man, it's tempting just to let them alone. The squabbles are so petty, and there are so many of them. "Let them work it out," people advise. "How are they going to learn to work it out if you always get in the middle?"

And then things like this morning happen:

Ella and Madison are watching a video. Ella picks up the remote and pauses it. "I need to go potty," she announces.

"Potty!" screeches Madison. She pushes past Ella and races her to the nearest bathroom. Madison reaches it first.

Ella bursts into tears. She is upset that Madison has again used this opportunity to "beat" her to something, when it was something that Ella really needed to use. Now, it's not as though it was a dire emergency for either of them; Madison hadn't noticed until Ella drew her attention to the issue that she had to go, and rather than forget the tears until after she uses the upstairs bathroom, Ella stops, wailing, outside the downstairs bathroom, and uses it after Madison. She's far more upset that Madison has done this to her than that she has to wait another minute to use the bathroom.

If I was of the "let them alone to work it out" persuasion, Madison would always win because she's bigger and stronger and faster, and there would be no negative consequences to her discourtesy because Ella isn't the kind of a person to retaliate...now, that is. The mild bullying would continue. And if Ella had no recourse (i.e., me), then she'd grow up dejected about the kind of world this is, albeit resigned to it.

So we step in to talk with Madison about how this is not an instance of her behaving like the kind of person she wants to be. Madison, of course, feels very strongly -- in the abstract -- that she wants to be a good person. So she overreacts to the pointing out of a wrong act, as usual, and is sent up to her room to think about this.

Sigh.

June 16 Birthday of the Day: Abner Doubleday

Loosely adapted from his Wikipedia entry: Abner Doubleday was born June 26, 1819 in Ballston Spa, NY, near where we Rosses used to live in the Rochester area. A U.S. Army officer and Union general in the American Civil War, he fired the first shot in defense of Fort Sumter, the opening battle of the war. The lore of baseball credits him with inventing the game, supposedly in Elihu Phinney's cow pasture in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839, although he himself did not claim this. He died in New Jersey in 1893 and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

June 14 Birthday of the Day: Harriet Beecher Stowe

The girls aren't old enough to be taught about Harriet Beecher Stowe so we skipped the Birthday of the Day today, but Stowe is definitely worth acknowledging for us older folks! Born June 14, 1811, Stowe grew up mostly in Hartford, Connecticut. Her father moved the entire family to Cincinnati in 1832, where Stowe got a first-hand look at the effects of slavery, and at the Underground Railroad. She became an abolitionist and was the author of 10 books, the most prominent of which was Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1852. Stowe died in 1896.

Thoughts about teaching about slavery/race/racism to young children: Madison and Ella attach no additional ideas to skin color other than the scientific fact of melanin concentration and the way kids tend to blend their parents' skin tone. The very idea of race is something that is alien to them, as I wish it were in the rest of society, and I plan to keep it from them as long as possible. The girls have lots of friends who have varying skin tones, and eye colors, and hair colors, and they attach the appropriate amount of importance to this: none. I only recently introduced even the idea of this to Madison, because we were reading Laura Ingalls Wilder and I couldn't escape the red man/white man thing for too much longer. (I could substitute "Europeans" and "Indians" when I was reading to her, but she was reading on her own and I felt she should know that some people used (inaccurate) colors as a shorthand for the different groups of people. I was gratified to see that she hadn't heard this before.

Anyway, this aspect of our nation's past is one of the uglier ones, and one reason I'm glad to be home schooling is that I can gauge the exact right moment to reveal it appropriately. I've already mentioned that most of the slaves were brought over originally from Africa, and suppose I won't be able to avoid it when we discuss the Civil War. But the issue of race in contemporary times is so stupid and ugly and SHOULD be so irrelevant that I'd really prefer not to expose them to it now. I'm assuming I'll present it in the context of other kinds of stupidity, like environmentalism or fundamentalism. But I'm really not looking forward to it. Comments would be more than welcome here, I'd be very interested in others' thoughts.

It's Flag Day

June 13 Birthday of the Day: Red Grange

Red Grange, born Harold Edward Grange in Forksville, Pennsylvania on June 13, 1903, was a famous college and NFL football player. He grew up in Wheaton, Illinois and after lettering in 4 high school sports, went on to play college football for the University of Illinois. His Wikipedia entry says:

He signed with the NFL's Chicago Bears the day after his last college game; player/manager George Halas agreed to a contract for a 19-game barnstorming tour which earned Grange a salary and share of gate receipts that amounted to $100,000, during an era when typical league salaries were less than $100/game. That 67-day tour is credited with legitimizing professional football in the United States,

I taught the girls to remember the name "Red Grange" (yes, the pickins were slim today) by singing it to Peter Gabriel's song "Red Rain." It's appropriate for a football player. Just substitute the word "Grange" for "Rain" and it still makes sense:

Red Grange is falling down...
Red Grange.
Red Grange is falling down,
Falling down all over me.

New computer for Madison

Madison's new computer arrived on Friday, with great fanfare and a flourish by the UPS guy. She was really excited when she saw the UPS guy lugging this big box up the front lawn: This was to replace the computer she'd been using, a Win 98 clunker from the early Axton days that died recently. I had gotten a great deal at Dell, and they delivered it within 4 days.

Saturday morning, I set it up. There's nothing, to a geek like me, like fiddling with all of the wires on a new PC while your husband feeds the kids breakfast. It's just heaven. I even got to go to Circuit City because I'd forgotten to order one of those newfangled printer cables...of course I ended up buying a print server there too, to make it easier, and some new computer games for the kids...

As soon as I got it out of the box, I learned the reasons behind Madison's excitement at seeing it on Friday. It wasn't the computer, of course, it was the BOX. She spent much of Saturday, while I fiddled around getting her stuff set up, playing "Girl-in-the-Box." (It's just like a giant jack-in-the-box but with a 6-year-old instead of Jack in there, and you have to knock instead of crank. The Girl-in-the-Box pops out with different pronouncements depending on how many times you knock.)

At Circuit City, I got Madison a Nancy Drew computer game, and although it's for 10-and-up, she spent Saturday evening and most of Sunday obsessed with it. It's one of those search-for-clues-to-solve-the-mystery games, and darned if there isn't any answer book! Or answers on the internet! It's humbling, I tell you. I'm only slightly better at it than her, and I really want to figure out how to get open the antique box. Her "three special keys" alone don't seem to do it.

Update on the Cul-de-Sac Kids

Madison insisted on reading the second Cul-de-Sac Kids book this weekend, just because she knew I was planning to return it unread to the library. When I asked her how it was, she was unenthusiastic. "There wasn't as much God stuff in it," she said. I'm pretty sure that this was what was making it thrilling for her on the first book, and I suspect that the author just isn't that good at spinning a story. I don't think she'll be asking for another. This is, of course, fine by me.

She's really enjoying the Ballet Shoes book by Noel Streatfield. One of her assignments last week was to read until she'd found 10 words that she doesn't know, to write down and discuss. For some reason, this really embarrassed her. The kid is already into the stage of not wanting me to embarrass her for ANYTHING. Anyway, I can certainly see that there are some things that really are embarrassing that I wouldn't do in front of her friends, but if I let her decide that not knowing something is legitimately embarrassing, I'll never get anywhere with teaching her stuff that she doesn't know! So we worked through the "embarrassment" part of that lesson and she came up with 10 great words. (The book is 1930s British, so it wasn't hard to find them, and she used this, herself, as an "excuse" for not having known them. I told her, "You're SIX! You think you're supposed to know everything NOW? Wait until you see how much more there is you don't know. That's part of the excitement of life.")

June 12 Birthday of the Day: John Roebling

John Roebling was the architect behind the Brooklyn Bridge. With his son Washington, he was the major force behind suspension bridge construction in the 19th century.

Roebling was born in Germany in 1806, and got a degree in civil engineering from the Royal Polytechnic Institute of Berlin at the age of 20. When he was 25, he immigrated to Pennsylvania, mostly to leave the unrest in Germany and Europe. When his farm failed, Roebling became the Pennsylvania state engineer. In this position, he surveyed and supervised the construction of canals, locks, and dams.

In 1841, Roebling invented the twisted wire-rope cable, which was used in all of the suspension bridges he subsequently created. He started building suspension bridges in 1845. Construction on the Brooklyn Bridge began in 1867, during which an accident crushed the toes on Roebling's foot. The toes had to be amputated, and he died of an infection 16 days later. His son, Washington, took over work on the Brooklyn Bridge, which was finished in 1883.

Madison lost her first tooth tonight

FROM DEB:

I guess it's a little on the late side for Madison to be losing her first tooth (she'll be 7 in September), but she did, tonight. She's very proud. She's writing a note to the tooth fairy as I'm typing this; she doesn't want to lose the tooth to get the money, she wants to keep it, so she's writing a note to go in with the envelope under her pillow that says "Bring it back tomorrow night." Of course, as this is the child who deduced the truth about about Santa at the age of 3-and-a-half, she doesn't believe in the tooth fairy, but she loves playing these games with us.



David and I are feeling dreadfully sentimental.

June 9 Birthday of the Day: Donald Duck

June 9, 1934 is officially Donald Duck's birthday, the day his first Disney film, The Wise Little Hen, was released. On the other hand, in The Three Caballeros, his birthday is apparently "Friday the Thirteenth" and in the short Donald's Happy Birthday, it is said to be the 13th of March. His full name is Donald Fauntleroy Duck, and until 1985 his voice was done by voice actor Clarence Nash. See his Wikipedia entry for a lot more information about his history in films.

And here is an online Disney game for the little folks called Donald's Farm.

Observations about Ella's reading

FROM DEB:

Ella is right in the middle of learning to read, and I'm finding it fascinating. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we're mainly using a Phonics books series from Educator's Publishing Service. We're only using the storybooks, not the workbooks or the teacher's guide, and she is getting things just by reading it. We read between 5 and 8 pages per day of a 16-page book. (Actually, by the end of set 3, she could read a whole book in one half-hour setting, but in Set 4 we're starting to get compound words and some irregular stuff, so we scaled back.) She is reading stuff like:

Just then, a man stepped off his porch. He had a pitchfork in his hand.

About a month ago, she started using the context of the story a lot more to figure out what the words are. And now I see her doing it with words like "stepped" -- which she actually got. When it gets to a word like stepped or pitchfork, I usually use a finger to cover up the second part of the word so she could get it bit by bit. Earlier this week, she started doing that herself.

Also, about a month ago, I noticed a real increase in the number of sight words she was using: said, and, for, from, the, you, have, little. Interestingly, she was mixing up "said" and "and" quite a bit, and if you think about it, it makes sense...they are shaped mostly the same, and the top of the s is curvy like the top of the a.  But now that she's using context a lot more, she now only mixes up "said" and "and" rarely.

She has the "th" sound down pat. With "sh" she always sounds out "s" and "h" and then remembers after doing s-h that it's "shhh." With the "ch" sound she still always has to be reminded, except when it comes at the end of a word that she knows from the context, like "much" or "lunch."

About two weeks ago, she started putting consonant clusters together as she was sounding out the words. That is, the word "flat" would always be broken up into the four component sounds: F - L - A - T and then said more quickly until she got the word. Now, she'll see the fl and put that together so that she ends up reading F - L --- FL --   FL - A - T.

June 8 Birthday of the Day: Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright, who is arguably America's most famous architect, was born June 8, 1867 in Richland Center, Wisconsin, an agricultural town. His most famous design style is probably the "prairie style," which is characterized by horizontal lines, flat roofs with broad overhanging eaves, solid construction, craftsmanship, and an open plan, as opposed to the more florid styles of the 19th century. Wright was associated with Louis Sullivan, another of America's most famous architects, early in his career. His most famous private residence is Falling Water, in Bear Run, Pennsylvania. There is a lot more to say about Wright, and Wikipedia says it well here. Wright died in 1959.

The Cul-De-Sac Kids books seemed normal...

In searching the library for new mystery series that Madison might like to read, I got her the first book in the Cul-De-Sac Kids books. MISTAKE! Although there was nothing to so indicate on the front or back cover, the book is fundie religious through-and-through. Madison was reading it tonight, and taking great glee in teasing me by reading me all of the God and Jesus and prayer references. A few choice quotes:

"'Dear Lord,' Abby began. 'We're getting new sisters.'
'They might not know about you,' Carly added.
Abby finished the prayer. 'Please help us show Your love to them. In Jesus' name, Amen.'"

"She flipped on the flashlight and slid the skinny door shut. Finding her Sunday school papers, she read the story. It was about secret sins. Abby felt funny inside. How many secret sins do I have? she wondered. She talked to God about it."

Lordy me, I don't think I'm going to hear the end of this one soon. The kid practically went to sleep giggling about it.

UPDATE: Now that I look a little closer, I see it's from Bethany House publishers and the author is from Colorado Springs. So I guess I should have known better.

I read Madison a chapter of Ballet Shoes, the great 1936 book by Noel Streatfield, which I loved as a kid. She can't wait to read more, so I think I'll successfully be able to return Cul-De-Sac 1 and 2 tomorrow without Madison getting her hands on them again. She'd do it just to spite me! :-)

June 7 Birthday of the Day: Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin was born in France on June 7, 1848 to parents of Spanish descent, and became one of the leading Post-Impressionist painters of his day.



As his Wikipedia entry says: His bold experimentation with coloring led directly to the Synthetist style of modern art while his expression of the inherent meaning of the subjects in his paintings, under the influence of the cloisonnist style, paved the way to Primitivism and the return to the pastoral. Though less well known today, he was also an influential exponent of wood engraving and woodcuts as art forms. He was friends with Pisarro, Cezanne, and Van Gogh. In 1891, Gauguin sailed to the tropics to escape European civilization and "everything that is artificial and conventional." He remained in Tahiti and later in the Marquesas Islands for most of the rest of his life. His works of that period are full of quasi-religious symbolism and an exoticized view of the inhabitants of Polynesia. He died in 1903.

Jurassic Kids & the times tables

Today we put the Jurassic Period on our 115-foot timeline of the world (all 4.6 billion years of it). The Jurassic Period was 208-144 million years ago and featured such dinosaurs as the stegosaurus, allosaurus, brachiosaurus, and diplodocus.

(Click on the photo to see it bigger.) You can imagine that they enjoy this part of their education much better than, say, the times tables or handwriting.

Speaking of the times tables, I am having some hard time getting Madison to memorize them. She knows that once she's through with this boring part of math, it's all mostly interesting stuff that you can do with numbers. While the memorization stuff is the most tedious, it still has to be done so that the rest can come with ease. I've tried everything I can think of to help her automatize them, for the last 4 months. We've written cheat sheet lists, we've written cheat sheet 10x10 charts, we play scatter math, we do it in the pool, in the car, at breakfast. We have written out the numbers and discovered all kinds of interesting patterns, some that David hadn't even realized. This morning I had her take ones she doesn't know and teach Ella the concept of multiplication by laying raisins out in rows to represent the equations. I've stretched my mind to make up stories about them to get her to remember them such as:

There were 10 trees ("threes") all in a row in the forest. The first six were normal. But the seventh tree was a "bendy one" (7 x 3 = 21). The eighth tree was a "bendy four" (8 x 3 = 24). The ninth tree was a "bendy seven" and the tenth tree was just "dirty" (10 x 3 = 30).

With this one, we draw out lines as we recite the little story.

But there are still many she just hasn't gotten and it IS mostly for lack of interest and focus. Can't blame the child, plus she isn't even 7 yet and the CAT achievement test we have to have her take each year doesn't even address multiplication until the 3rd grade (I'm told that in the 2nd grade test there is one question to see whether they recognize the X as a multiplication sign!). But of course I don't hold my kids to that standard, I hold them to their own standard, and it's hard struggling with her when I know that she can do it if she puts her mind to it. The one strategy that seems to have worked is that I started whispering one problem to her as the last thing she hears before she goes to sleep, and she really does know it when she wakes up. I know that Montessori basically teaches this by skip counting -- maybe I should try that. Any input from anyone? Laura?

Lepidopterist

As my friend Peter points out, I guess I can now consider myself a lepidopterist.

Madison and logic puzzles

In a way, of course, we have been working on logic with the girls from the time they could talk. But a few months ago I got a nice Mind Benders book from CriticalThinking.com that provides nice early logic puzzles. Here are a few typical examples from the beginning of the book:

Mary and James each work. One is a bricklayer. One is a gardener. The man is not a bricklayer. Who does what?

Mandy believes that everyone should go to a dentist at least twice a year. Mandy knows her brother has been to a dentist only once in the last two years. What must Mandy believe about her brother?

The more complicated ones at the back of the book use traditional logic puzzle charts to solve. They're still pretty easy, and I was working through them with Madison starting last week. She can do some of them in her head, but when I showed her how to do the charts to make it easy, she LOVED it. The kid is on fire with them. I had to search the internet for more. I found some on this page at DiscoverySchool.com.


Also, I ordered a book called Super Sleuth: 12 Solve-it-Yourself Mysteries, which came yesterday. There are twelve short detective stories; each uses a logic chart to solve the mystery. She loves these. She read and solved nine of them, and couldn't believe her good luck when I told her that indeed it counted as Mommy School.

June 6 Birthday of the Day: Nathan Hale

Nathan Hale was born June 6, 1755 in Coventry, Connecticut. He attended Yale at the age of 14. Hale was a colonel in the American Revolution, and served as a spy for the Americans. He was captured on the same day as the Great New York Fire of 1776. As his Wikipedia entry says:

Hale was allowed to give a speech from the gallows, part of which, according to tradition, included the words "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country."

He was only 21 years old.

Ella - spontaneous handwriting

Today while I was reading The Story of Science to Madison, Ella, listening only minimally while playing with the Math-U-See blocks got the idea *on her own* to write out the text of the first page of her Phonics reading book (The Lost Horse) on the white board. All of a sudden, I looked up and there was:

Norman did his chores and went into the barn, but he forgot to latch the gate.

I love these Phonics books; they're from Educator's Publishing Service and have worked great.

Joy Hakim's The Story of Science

I have been reading to Madison a terrific book that is occasionally a little bit over her head, but which she is nevertheless finding very interesting. It's called The Story of Science, by Joy Hakim, whose History of Us books are used in middle-school classes throughout the U.S. Published in 2004, this is the first book in a six-book series to explain science; the second book is out and the third is in process. It is one of those books for "everyone" -- written primarily for middle-school readers, but accessible by younger kids (proved by Madison's engagement with the material) and educational for us old folks too! We were not very far into the first book when I felt compelled to write to Ms. Hakim to thank her for her engaging style and clarity. I got a nice note back from her, which pleased me. In any case, if you're interested in sharing a fascinating educational story of science, I enthusiastically recommend The Story of Science.

UPDATE: Madison just asked me, "I was thinking as you were reading the science book: Do you think that if I grow up to be a scientist, will Lydia kill me?" Lydia is a good friend of hers who is religious, and a lot of what the beginning of The Story of Science reinforces is the difference between those who use myths as a method of knowledge versus those who use science as a method of knowledge, and how scientists throughout the ages have been persecuted by religious leaders. We talked about how most contemporary religious folk in this country are not opposed to science because most religious leaders in our culture claim to reconcile the two.

Today's Birthday: Richard Scarry, 1919

Today's Birthday of the Day is Richard Scarry, who was born in Boston, MA in 1919. This children's book author has published more than 300 books; dominant among them are the Busytown books featuring characters like Lowly Worm and Huckle Cat, Mr. Fixit, and Sergeant Murphy. His Wikipedia entry is at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Scarry. Richard Scarry died in 1994.

Welcome - Start of Blog

Welcome to our blog! I will always try to post the Birthday of the Day on the weekdays during the summer, even though we won't be actively home schooling on the days the kids are in camp.