Try THIS in elementary school and see how far you get

Madison was teaching Ella her spelling this morning and I came upon them working, in THIS position:



It seemed to work. Go figure.

Really cool field trip yesterday

The Red Jacket cider folks mentioned below offered to give us a little private tour of their processing plant, and we went to Geneva, NY yesterday. They plied us with information, food, and delicious drinks -- my idea of a perfect field trip.

I wrote it up for KidsOutAndAbout.com.

So go see the photos go here:
http://rochester.kidsoutandabout.com/city-articles/RedJacket.html

Annika is Seven

Annika is seven, and she is happy.

http://thewaitandwonder.clubmom.com/thewaitandwonder/2007/10/annika-is-seven.html

And I am so lucky, lucky, LUCKY that my girls are healthy.

I almost wish there was someone to thank for this, my heart is so full of gratitude sometimes.

On the flip side, though, I am glad that there is no cruel being who whimsically zapped a sweet little blonde girl in Normal, Illinois with liver disease and a cleft palate and clubbed fingers. No one to blame, no one to fill the mind with hatred.

It's better that way.

Spontaneous Science

I got on the phone, I thought briefly, with a mom whose husband is going to do a free homeschool science class for 8-11-year-olds, only a mile down the street. I had seen the post about it, emailed Jeff to see if it was religious-based science, and he emailed me back asking me to call. It's not religious-based (they're Jews, it turns out, not fundies), and that's all I really needed to know, but his wife Leslie talked and talked and TALKED. In between various subjects, she turned me on to science experiments from Steve Spangler:
http://www.stevespanglerscience.com/experiments/

She said that they had recently done the Ivory soap experiment, so while she was talking at me about something, I brought up that experiment on the computer (yes, I know, Bad Deb), and saw that all it involved was a bar of Ivory soap and a microwave. The girls kept looking at me with those when-are-you-going-to-get-off-the-phone-we're-tired-of-being-patient eyes, and so I went upstairs and got a bar of Ivory soap, summoned the girls, and (with a few "ohs" and "rights" to Leslie, still chattering away) put it in the microwave on High for 2 minutes. Wow, it was really cool.

Here is the experiment: http://www.stevespanglerscience.com/experiment/00000053

If you do it, make sure you watch the whole process, don't leave. We had to turn it off with 30 seconds to go, because I think our microwave is extra-powerful.

When I got off the phone we were able to discuss the history of Ivory soap and how it came to float, then talked about floating in general, then about melting and boiling points, and then it turned into a states of matter discussion.

So, for kicks, we took an ice cube and put it in a cold pot on the stove and watched it melt on high power. We timed how long it took to melt (1:28), and then to boil away completely (2:22). We then tried it again with an ice cube in an already hot pot, and found it melted and vaporized much more quickly. We talked about heat transfer, and why it melts much more quickly in a pot that is already hot. Then I had Ella hold an ice cube in her hand and time how long it took to melt (7:10).

When I asked the girls how long it would take before it boiled in Ella's hand, Madison didn't really think it through and blurted out "About an hour!" but Ella took a few moments more and said "Never. My hand isn't hot enough to make it boil." And then Madison protested that water does evaporate, and we talked about the difference between the process of evaporation and boiling.

"Why must the water cycle be driven by evaporation, and not by boiling?" I asked. For the same reason that Ella's hand could never make it boil -- if it was hot enough on earth to boil water, the earth would be a very different place.

Of course, the child who loves arguments driven by nitpicking objected. "What about in the center of the earth? It's hot enough to boil water in there." We looked up the temperature in the inner core (7000 degrees C) and the temperature in the mantle (879 degrees C). Water would boil in there, yep. "Well how FAST would an ice cube vaporize in the mantle?" A fraction of a second. "It would be even faster in the core, right?" Yes. "How much faster?" I couldn't do any better than a fraction of a fraction of a second, which is of course unsatisfying.

10-minute homeschool

I had an idea I thought I'd try for kicks today, and it turned out to be brilliant.

I devised 10-minute homeschool. Ten minutes per subject, that is. I set the alarm at the beginning of each session, and then they were fascinated to see how much they could get done in 10 minutes. If they were in the middle of something when the beeper went off, it got put away until tomorrow (or, I would have let them pick back up whatever they wanted to at the end of school, but today is a crammed gym-and-swim-then-cooking-then-horseback-riding afternoon and evening). We went from 9:45 to 12:15.

The girls loved it. Loved it, loved it. And they got a lot done, with a lot of cliffhangers that they now want to get done tomorrow. (We're in the middle of the history of ancient Sumer, and I stopped in the middle of a sentence. Whetting the appetite for more tomorrow!) Ella read her book in time to have some time left over at the end of the session. It really focused her -- other days it could take her 15 minutes what it took 8 minutes to do today. And her math, she finished that early, too, and it was PERFECT.

Madison wants to do 15-minute school tomorrow and see how different of an experience that is. Who am I to argue.

First fire

It's suddenly October. I mean actual October, not the funny 80-degree October we've been having. It's sort of rainy and 45 degrees, with that crispness in the air we so associate with autumn in Rochester. So last night we had the first fire with what we could scrounge from our backyard:



And what would the first fire be without a nice glass of Glenlivet?



Then we sent the kids to bed and fell asleep during the 11-inning Red Sox game. Good thing we didn't last until the Indians scored 7 extra runs in the top of the 11th.

So the ALCS is 1-1. Go Sox!

pi-RIT sale

We did the RIT Math Club fundraising sale on Friday. The name of the math club is "Pi-RIT" so the girls dressed up as pirates.

We got cider from Wegmans, made a great chocolate chip cookie recipe from Cooks Illustrated, and some great pumpkin bread that I've made since forever (and which is a terrific way to get both pumpkin and stone ground whole wheat flour into the kids).

I thought it would be neat to get some funky cellophane paper, a ribbon, and some cheap silk flowers that were three-to-a-bunch for 50 cents from Michael's. So for about an extra 35-40 cents, we were able to price the breads at $5 instead of $3.50. Yay, capitalism.



Here they are selling.



Unfortunately, the nice RIT kids, being, well, kids, didn't think about whether we'd have actual traffic, so the receipts didn't quite cover costs. Ah well, that just meant that they didn't have to give any to the math club, and I let them split what they made after giving me back some of the cost.

They also did a cider taste test, which was a big hit. We got cider from three different farm markets around, and had people choose which one they liked best:



They like each other. Really. Despite snarking at each other sometimes.

Clarence Thomas

Yesterday, David gave me the gift of a luxury almost unimaginable these days -- a few hours by myself to read Clarence Thomas's new book, My Grandfather's Son. Actually, he gave me the weekend so that I could catch up on some work that desperately needs catching up on, but I was at the top of the list for this book at the Penfield library and so I took some time for myself and read. (Can't think when I've done that recently, other than in snatches here and there of David Hackett Fischer's Washington's Crossing, through which I am slowly making my way in between all of the important stuff in life.)

I was disappointed with the book.

I thought perhaps Thomas was going to give us some insight into his intellectual journey from early-70s-angry-young-socialism to originalist jurisprudence. Nope. It was a personal journey from birth to Anita Hill, which some people might find inspiring in the sense that it does a pretty good job at laying out how badly white liberal guilt has served blacks, and how noninterference by government is far better than interference. Other than that, it was pretty much strict-upbringing-by-grandfather-blah-blah-blah-Anita-Hill-blah-blah-blah-God.

The book wasn't badly written, but it was not in the least interestingly written. I had hoped that Thomas's laying out of his life story might be wrapped up in penetrating commentary and perspective from his current position in life. Nope. Just pretty much a bare-bones laying out of the facts. And lots of God's will thrown in for kicks.

Ho-hum.

George and Martha

James Marshall's birthday was yesterday.

Adrienne, children's librarian extraordinaire, reminds us in this lovely post.

How could I have forgotten? We celebrated Thelonius Monk's birthday yesterday. I will have to do justice to Marshall next year.

Today's birthday is Henry Heinz, a man who looms equally important in Ella's life, in terms of influence.

Piano!

Here is Ella playing the piano in the ultimate piano-playing outfit:


It's Thelonius Monk's birthday, by the way.

Fall Fun Fotos

Yesterday, we went to Holiday Hollow, the country's only venue of its kind dedicated to celebrating Halloween. They "put the happy back in Happy Halloween," as I wrote in my review of Holiday Hollow a few years ago.

I missed Holiday Hollow when we were in Virginia. (OK, I missed ALL of Rochester.) I'm feeling particularly happy to be back here, because it's fall, which is Rochester's greatest time of year. And, I confess, I dearly love getting free tickets to all of the great places and performances around here (perhaps out of proportion to how much I should like it--maybe it's the Jersey Girl coming out in me). Organizations want the visibility, so they want me to go and review them and write about how much my kids liked the experience. Who am I to refuse?

So here are some photos from yesterday (you can click on them to make them bigger). I'll be updating my review soon, although Holiday Hollow hasn't changed all that much.







Today, it was Columbus Day and all of the local kids had off school. We did school this morning, but then in the afternoon, we went to Gro-Moore Farms which is not far from RIT. It's a typical local farm market that puts in some activities for kids on weekends in the fall. In my opinion, my kids were a little old for it, and I'm glad we didn't pay the $9 pay-one-price fee that would have let them do everything for free. I let them do the big slide and the pumpkin painting, and bought them some doughnuts and a slushie, and then let them do the free stuff. They had a good time, and I got some good photos:





Unusual for Madison, she's photographed very well the last few days. Don't you think?

22 down, 178 to go!

It's Girl Scout Cookie Time!

The girls had their big Cookie Kick-Off party last night for the Penfield Brownies/Girl Scouts. Today at 10am they were officially allowed to go out and sell.

Allowed.

There is a goal of 100 boxes per child. I have two children.

Madison wants to sell 1000 boxes. If we sell 1000 boxes, the prize is a video camera.

We went out this afternoon for an hour. We went around the block. They were happy, smiling, cute little Brownies. Only one house at which people were home refused them. We got nine people at home. 22 boxes.

And I am wiped out.

There is a new idea that Troop 835 will be doing this year, which is to offer to let them add on boxes for soldiers overseas. Boy, did that work -- half of the people decided to buy a box or two for the soldiers, too.

Let's see...we get to keep 55 cents for every box we sell. That's an hour of work I did, and Madison and Ella did, for the $12.10 our troop will get to keep. If we keep it up at 22 boxes per hour, that's only...nine more hours of this before we meet our quota.

When are we, as a culture, going to give up on all of this and just admit that it's a better use of our time to just, say, pay our own way? Heck, I'd even pay the way of other people's little Brownies if I could just opt out. Everyone knows we all hate doing this, but no one will admit it. And the girls love it. At least for the first hour. Then they start arguing about who is going to ring the doorbell and when are we going to go home because they're thirsty. And I, hungry for any excuse, am happy to hightail it home.

But, I should be grateful. David's cousin Connie was the Cookie Mom for her daughter's Brownie troop last year. And their cookie season was January! They tramped around for 30 days in January, and because they were probably the only ones brave enough to go out in the cold and snow, little Jessie sold over 500 boxes.

Anyway, if anyone wants to buy cookies (or, even better, add on one for the troops!), you can check them out at http://www.girlscoutcookies.org/meet_cookies.asp. And then email me at ross(at)axton.com. They're $3.50 per box. I will pay for shipping.

I know, I'm wimping out here.

Maybe someone has a bright entrepreneurial idea for how to sell them in bulk. If so, let me know!

One month into the 2007-2008 year

Well, this education thing seems to be working.

Math-U-See Beta is too slow for Ella. We're speeding it up by doing only 1-2 workbook pages per lesson right now. We're also starting to teach her the multiplication tables. She understands the concept of multiplication; now it's time to start the memorization.

Ella is reading much better than she was one month ago. The slope on the learning curve seems to be getting a little steeper. (And, as posted below from the other day, she's started to make the effort to read on her own.)

She's started to tell time much better. Still needs practice.

Aside from math, Madison is more in the process of learning stuff, rather than learning skills. She's pretty much nailed multi-digit multiplication, it's just a matter of getting a little more accurate (I'd say 80% of the problems she does are totally right, then 20% have arithmetic errors.) We did area/perimeter of rectangles and triangles. She liked that. Now for a review of fractions.

I'd say Madison has come farthest in the past month in music, both theory and in her ability to read notes both for piano and for singing. I thank the very rigorous demands of the Bach Children's Chorus for this, mostly. We have to practice hard, every day...I say "we" because she's still too young to do this all on her own, and it REALLY helps to have me play the piano and help her get the notes and words right, rather than only have her listening to the CD. She has her first concert on Oct 27, and they're singing Ode to Joy (she still needs to get down the German words), Simple Gifts (my favorite, FAVORITE hymn), and All Things Bright and Beautiful. I'm really grateful for this group; the girls will get to sing all of that wonderful sacred music that they would miss in school or in church. She's singing alto.

Also, the girls started piano lessons just last week with their new teacher, and already they're starting to get the sense of reading music. Their last teacher wrote out the note-letters on the page, and we had little stickers on the keyboard that showed the different key names. Now, they're being made to learn the notes, and they're doing just fine.

Ella is displaying the same learning method that Madison did about piano, although actually about six months earlier than Madison:

At first, she played by this method: Look at note. Look at note letter under note. Find note on piano. Strike it. Ignore time value of note. Look at next note. Et cetera.

Now, you can tell that Ella is actually listening to the music that she's creating, and relating the notes on the page *to the melody*, and letting the anticipation of the next note *by ear* play a large role in identifying the next key to strike, checking to see that it corresponds to the note on the page. It's an entirely different approach, and I watched Madison do this at about the time she turned 7.

I'm discovering that Madison has an uncanny ability to memorize. She's had a lot of memorization in the past month: Lots of words for the Chorus, a play for drama, and poetry for school. She's great. It's one of those effortless things for her. Cool. That should serve her well.

It's serving her well as we're writing our book, too. We've picked that back up, on Wednesdays. We're now deep into the research for the nitty gritty of it. A group of home-schooled kids find a treasure chest containing clues in the form of a list of pages and paragraphs from popular children's (mostly) mystery literature up through 1976 (Boxcar Children, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Bobbsey Twins, The Great Brain, Encyclopedia Brown, etc). They have to hunt down the references, which turn out to be a list of Rules for Being Good Detectives. Then, once they have the list compiled, they use the rules to figure out where the treasure chest came from. So, Madison and I are now in the process of going through lots and lots of books to find good places that describe rules for detecting. We're even using My Side of the Mountain and The Swiss Family Robinson, because these guys really have to use their minds to figure out what's going on. (In our book, the kids discuss the books and what the passages mean...my theory being that this unique romp through classic kid lit will inspire contemporary readers to pick up those books.) So Madison is doing a lot of reading, which for her is simply a pleasure (hey! I'm doing this for school), and she's also able to recall specific passages from books with relative ease.

Spelling is better. Ella is good, Madison is getting better. They're liking the WRTR annotation method, it especially seems to anchor spelling in Madison's mind. We only started that this week. I'm looking forward to getting the WRTR book I ordered Sunday.

They're both liking grammar a lot, Madison particularly. They both love logic. I must get new age-appropriate logic workbooks, they're almost at the end of theirs but neither is really ready to move up a level, they just want more.

We do Spanish twice per week, and we should be doing sign language twice per week except it keeps going by the wayside.

Haven't made too much progress on history or science. Too busy doing other things. History is ancient history (literally). Science WAS the human body for the week before we went on the cruise, now it's just talking about things as they come up in the world. May try to get going on this more.

They have a cooking class on Mondays, and horseback riding on Mondays, too. Every day, they figure out how many more days until the next horseback riding class. (Wah for Columbus Day next week! No class!)

Girl Scout Cookie sales start on Saturday. Anyone who wants a box or three or ten mailed to them should let me know. Click here to meet the cookies.

Cheers for Cheerios

Today, Ella spontaneously picked up and worked her way through reading a book, alone.

It was Things That Are Most In the World by Judi Barrett, and it came as a little paperback pamphlet in our new box of Cheerios that we opened this morning.

It was laborious, but the pictures are great, and they helped. And she did it for PLEASURE. Holy cow.

She came to me with a word:

"Mommy, what does P - O - U - N - D spell?"

"Well, we know from our Writing Road to Reading cards that the OU sound has four sounds. What are they?"

She needed a little prompting, but then once she had the four sounds, she went back and applied them to the word and figured it out. And then kept reading.

I'm trying to be conservative, so maybe it's not time for serious YIPPEES, but I'm thinking this First at least deserves a toast at dinner.

Food

What took me so long to try tacos with my picky eaters?

They're fun to make, and...wonder of wonders...the girls like them. Madison loved the beef, although Ella prefers meatless tacos (tortilla, sauce, and lots of cheese).

Excuse me while I go worship at the altar of the Food Gods.

Chalk math

I have to rest up from the weekend! On Saturday, we went to Conklin's Gully in Naples, NY (at the south end of Canandaigua Lake) and by a slight mistake missed the path that was near where we parked our car; instead we climbed the *actual waterfall* up to the gulch. Good thing we've had no rain this summer, or we wouldn't have been able to do it. As it was, climbing the rocks was very slippery (both Madison and I fell in the creek) and somewhat hazardous, and quite strenuous and nerve-wracking. It started off fine:



Then got a bit harder...


And harder...



But then you found yourself in this magnificent gully where you know few people have been, and which can't be accessed from the actual path, which we didn't know existed until the way back.


It wasn't really dangerous in that if you slipped and fell, you landed about four feet below in the water with some cuts and bumps, rather than actually, say, dying. But the payoff was great, to find yourself in this awesome enclosed area with cliffs all around you. I kept telling the girls, "If you start to fall, CLOSE YOUR MOUTH," especially Madison, who is both more likely to talk on the way down, and has more to lose, in the form of actual adult teeth.

Of course, when I made my own undignified slide down the side of the rock into the water, I ignored my own advice. They promptly informed me that they wouldn't let me forget it. "Hey," I said, "They're your teeth. Do what you think best." (Maybe they can think faster than I on the way down.)

And then, yesterday, I took 2 hours to scrub the kitchen floor. It's a small-stone floor that has a lot of grout. It hides the dirt well in its crevices, but it hides a LOT of dirt well and it's hard to get out. I got fed up with all of our feet getting blacker as time went on. I kept thinking, "I'm meant for better things than to spend this time scrubbing the floor," as I was damning the previous owners. I actually didn't feel the same as I was cleaning out the entire storage room (after all, it's all OUR stuff), put in shelves, and reorganied everything. It looks fantastic, actually. But it took me the whole afternoon. And that's all a very long way of saying that in the storage room, I FOUND THE CHALK. Hence the title of this post.

This morning, we really didn't get going on school until 10:30, and we had to leave by 12:30 to get to gym-and-swim, so we didn't get a lot done. (Don't worry, Laura, we didn't skip WRTR.) I let Madison and Ella do "chalk math" instead of actual rigorous math. Madison taught Ella 6 x 4, 6 x 6, and 6 x 7.

Small personal success

It's not exactly bragging, is it, to post a comment I got from a parent who reads my KOA newsletter:

Thanks so much for publishing the link to the Randy Pausch lecture. I watched it and it really affected me. I even had a dream about it last night, complete with brick walls. My October 1 Resolution: To live a good life!

I am still getting your newsletter, even though I moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, at the end of July. I keep subscribing because you include nuggets of wisdom and links like this one each week. They mean a lot to me. Thank you so much!

This is exactly the kind of effect I was hoping to have.

WRTR Day 2

Can you imagine my happiness (that's happ-short-i-ness) when I walked into the bedroom this afternoon and discovered Madison holding up the WRTR flash cards in her left hand, and the fingers of her right hand, and quizzing Ella about the pronunciations? And they were both having fun.

Area/perimeter of triangles

Madison was so enthused about learning about the area of triangles that she asked after lunch if she could spend the rest of the day writing a report/speech about the area of triangles. Who am I to say no? She's doing that now.

I loved the "click" moment she experienced today. It was when I gave her a triangle of base=3 height=3 and asked her the area ("Oh! It's 4-and-a-half"!). After that, a triangle with base 9 and height 7 was no problem. And everything else was easy.

Before I did triangles, I reviewed rectangle perimeter/area. (After she got that, I split one of the rectangles in half, into two triangles, and asked her what the area of the triangle must be.) Anyway, she was very pleased to figure out (with only me doing examples as guidance) that a 4 x 4 square was "the boundary" (her words) between when perimeter is bigger than area, and when area is bigger than perimeter.

Randy Pausch

Publishing KidsOutAndAbout.com is part of my personal mission to spread reason among parents. My strategy is to say things in such a way that they seem to be uncontroversial, and to say it warmly and cheerfully so that it's easy for them to believe that they *already* believe what I'm writing, and I'm just bringing their attention to it. I'm pleased to say that my Friday morning e-newsletter goes out to 6000 readers right now. This is from this morning's newsletter:

Have you heard of professor Randy Pausch, at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh? Carnegie Mellon asks their great professors to think deeply about the important things in life, and to present hypothetical "Last Lectures." Pausch's Last Lecture had a profundity that some of the others hadn't, because Pausch has terminal pancreatic cancer. Pausch, who is a computer science professor and developer of virtual reality technology, has three children, ages 5, 2, and 1. His Last Lecture, entitled "How to Live Your Childhood Dreams," became a sensation around the world in the past week and a half, and thousands of people have already contacted him to tell him what a difference his talk made in their lives.

Jeffrey Zaslow reported on his talk in last Thursday's Wall Street Journal. Zazlow's article (which really got me thinking last week) can be found here:
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB119024238402033039.html

I found a link to the video presentation of Pausch's talk here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=362421849901825950&hl=en

Randy Pausch's web site says it will have an online link to the typed article soon.

Why was the talk so affecting? Professor Pausch only has a few months left of life, but he is happy with how he is using it. His Last Lecture reminds us how easy it is to put aside what is really important in life for "later"--which rarely comes. Pausch says that he has made sure to fulfill all of his childhood dreams, which in his case include winning giant stuffed animals at carnivals, walking in zero gravity, designing Disney rides, and writing a World Book entry.

He reminds us that even though it's so easy to say no to things our children want to do that are slightly inconvenient, he was profoundly affected by his parents' permission to decorate the walls of his bedroom any way he wanted; in his case, it was with etchings of mathematical equations.

Reading about Professor Pausch helped me reorient my own priorities as a parent: If (God forbid) my own child were dying of cancer in 40 years, what would I want *her* to say about her childhood in her Last Lecture? And how does that affect my day-to-day decisions and actions with the girls? It occurred to me that every action that we take, at root, is either good for us or bad for us: Even if only in a small way, it is either life-sustaining, or life-destroying. Professor Pausch reminds us that in even the smallest actions, we should choose life, for ourselves and our children. I have been finding it an interesting, and useful, filter with which to view the world this week. Think about it.