Book Group, Revised

We just had a planning meeting for next year's book group. Some things will stay the same -- still a great bunch of kids, still aiming for some meaty discussions. But one big thing is changing and I think it can be an excellent new direction for our discussions. There's nothing wrong with our old way, in fact I think we're only building on that background.

A little history:

The first year we had a book group, the kids were around 7 years old and we used the Junior Great Books program. It's an excellent program, and almost (almost!) "open and go" for the facilitator. The kids had to read short stories with specific questions and themes to look for, and the discussion was structured in such a way as to teach them that nothing in a well-written story is really random, and also that there were many different ways of seeing the same work. The kids' ability to participate in a discussion improved tremendously from the beginning of the year to the end, and their grasp of the subtleties of literature did as well. It was an excellent beginning, and the effects of that starting place are still obvious, three years later.

The second and third years we expanded the group, added more older kids (starting with the older siblings of the original set), split it into two groups by age (8-10 and 10-12, more or less), and moved on to whole, full-length books. A lot of what was good about the Junior Great Books model was applied to the new approach. Those two years are outlined in my other literature post, but the major idea was that every kid read the same book as every other kid in that group, and could discuss the finer points of the writing and use of themes.

This year is different. Instead of specific books, we're planning themes. In some cases that's a fairly specific story as approached by different authors - like our September theme of Troy. (The Iliad, the Aeneid, the Odyssey, and any derivative works). In other cases it's a genre - Victorian Farce - or a major theme - Hard Times. One of the reasons for this change is that we want to see the kids take a more active role in their discussions. As much as the previous years were excellent for the sort of discussion we were looking for, this year we're hoping the kids will be able to share books that their fellow group members haven't read. It's a different sort of sharing than we've done before and requires that the kids take a more active role. This approach also gets into a different kind of discussion. Instead of themes, conflict, beautiful phrasing and imagery (although those will certainly come into it), the discussions can be mostly aimed toward comparing and contrasting the different approaches that authors can take when on common ground.

The thematic approach also adapts well to the range of kids we now have. The two groups of last year are now four. The oldest kids are 11-13, the "middle" kids (including the original group) are mostly 10, and we have two younger groups - one of 8-9 year olds and one of 6-7s. We'd really like some overlap in their experience, but there's no way to pick a book that can challenge 13 year olds and find an audience with six year olds. Themes, however, can be done more broadly, and allowing the kids a choice of books within that theme gives them more flexibility to challenge themselves (but not be overwhelmed) both regarding the length of what they're reading and the content.

So taking the theme of Hard Times as an example (since I'll be facilitating one group for that), Dickens is an obvious choice for the older kids, or many of the books set in the Great Depression. Younger kids could do a shorter Dickens, or maybe find a book about any kind of general hardship - poverty, war, personal or family difficulties. Lots of possibilities there. And really no matter what they choose, comparisons can be made:

• What is "hard" about the hard times? Is everyone suffering or just a few?
• How are the hard times explained? Are they someone's fault? Just the nature of the world? Something to fix? Something to endure?
• How do the characters react to their situation? Do their hardships consume them? do the characters grow/ mature because of their hardships?
• How does the author portray suffering? Is patience a virtue? Or struggling to overcome obstacles?
• Who changes (grows) in the story and what makes them change?

These all get to the general ideas of setting, conflict, character, growth and change, and the plot curve, all of which were major discussion points in our last two years. Introducing the extra complication of more than one book will be something more to juggle, but well-managed I think it will add a great deal to the depth of our discussions.

Our themes for this year:

• Troy (Iliad, Aeneid, Odyssey)
• Biographies
• Hard Times
• Identity/ Self-awareness
• Victorian Comic Plays/ Farce
• Mysteries of History
• Nature

Literature Discussion

This is adapted from an email I sent to the other parents in our kids' book group about how we wanted to handle the kids' discussion meetings. We run this group as a co-op and each parent takes the lead on one book each year. It is a fabulous, fabulous resource and I can't begin to say how much it adds to our homeschooling.

The basic idea is that we have groups of about ten kids, we meet every second week (or so, with a little scheduling mess around Thanksgiving and Christmas), and generally each book gets two meetings. Then January and February we do Shakespeare (last year Macbeth, this year Twelfth Night) meeting every week and just wallowing in the language and imagery, acting out bits and watching a scene or two on DVD. I'll make a whole new post for that -- it needs its own to really do it justice. And then just before our heads explode we wrap up the Shakespeare project and go back to a book a month until the end of May. We have enough kids in a wide enough age range that we've split into two groups, which did some joint meetings (although it generally went much better to keep it to ten). Last year's books were:

Younger group (8-10 or so)

• The Wheel on the School
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
• A Christmas Carol (with the older group)
• A Wrinkle in Time
• The Once and Future King (only through the Sword in the Stone)

Older group (10-12 or so)

• Hound of the Baskervilles
• Shadow Spinner
• A Christmas Carol (with the younger group)
• Ender's Game
• The Once and Future King

This year (same kids, a year older)

Younger group

• The Little Prince
• Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
• The Hobbit (three meetings instead of two)
• The Pushcart Wars
• From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
• Bud, Not Buddy

Older group

• When My Name Was Keoko
• Red Scarf Girl
• Flatland (just one meeting)
• Animal Farm
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• Tuck Everlasting
• Rocket Boys

So in answer to the "how to lead the discussion" question that came up among the parents this summer:

The way I like to approach book discussions is from the perspective that no matter what aspect of the book you discuss, it will get back to the main themes. So to start with, I generally pick something that resonates with me -- maybe a pattern of satire (my favorite!) or a character or set of characters, or just something that comes up. Last year we had a great discussion of Tom Sawyer that started with the number of animals (and particularly, the number of dead animals) that figure into the plot... which led back to the huge number of superstitions that the children subscribed to, which itself led back to the relative unimportance of the grownups to the story... which is a great big part of what the book is about.

No matter what you start with, you'll eventually come around to the major points whether you mean to or not. We've chosen some truly excellent books, and they just don't have random details -- the writing is purposeful and full of meaning and subtlety, and every little bit of it matters in some way. So accordingly, any little bit of it will make a good starting place that eventually leads back to the theme. It also means that you don't have to go with a starting place that you choose as a discussion leader -- if you're pretty comfortable with the book (and that can be aided beforehand by study guides if you're nervous about missing something), just start off letting the kids share their favorite parts, or parts they had questions about. I like to keep a running list on a whiteboard or flip chart, and once everyone has had a chance to share something you'll likely see groups of things that can be addressed together, and every bit of it important.

The two things that I think I really like the kids to know when they leave a discussion is that a) every little thing in the book is there on purpose and should be savored, and b) each person in the discussion will have a slightly different take on things, and considering other perspectives can add a great deal to your own (and related to that point, that your own perspective may change while still being true to the intent of the author). As long as we require respectful discussion among the kids, the particular content and direction of that discussion can unfold however it will.

Literary elements (the "official" ones) will come up as they apply to the discussion already -- sometimes they're good for clarifying something we all "felt" but couldn't necessarily explain, and sometimes they're just worthwhile vocabulary so we all understand what we're talking about. I don't generally bring up anything that doesn't bring itself up, but sometimes that shared vocabulary and clarification can add a great deal to our understanding. Going back to Tom Sawyer, we drew more plot curves for that one book than I have done in the rest of my life combined. It really had that many subplots, and enumerating them was a worthwhile exercise! Another story might really get into discussions of conflict, or setting, or allegory, or dialogue. I'll be leading the Little Prince next month and there's no way out of that book without bringing up satire. (yay!)

So immerse yourself in the book, let your initial directions to the kids be a little vague, and then be prepared to follow the kids' lead. It always goes somewhere interesting!

One thing I should add to this, too.... The same goes for writing. The way I lead a discussion is the same way I assign an essay. If you pick one favorite thing that matters to you and that really stuck in your head, you can write all about that one thing and bring it back to the major themes. I hate (HATE) the standard book report format of "This book is about ___" and would do anything to avoid it. But if you write about any one aspect of a well-written book, it will bring you right back to what the book is about without your ever having to be explicit about it. And if there's one thing I want to teach through all of this literature and discussion and writing, is that it's not the laying-bare of good points that makes it great. What makes it all great is the subtlety and artistry of making every word count. I would hate to spoil it with a bland and bare book report at the end!

Science Fair

Every year we participate in The Science Fair, and I've never known any one event to inspire such angst among parents. Do you help? A little? A lot? Only with the tedious (expensive, dangerous) parts? Do you get a book of 100 prizewinning science fair projects? Is that only for idiots? Does it make you a bad parent if you just chuck them in a room with a display board and tell them to figure it out themselves or is that a sign that you're giving them an appropriate amount of independence and showing off just how much you didn't do it for them? And once you've figured out what role you play, how do you deal with the other parents and their other choices?

And just how much do the kids care anyway? If you say "science fair" to a kid, I bet you'll hear about the demonstration that one of the organizers did three years ago with the liquid nitrogen and the carnations and the hammer... and then about how our homeschool group can't do anything without a potluck and at last year's science fair the snacks were excellent. Project? what project? Oh right... I did a project. About... something.... But there was a kid who built a hovercraft and I got to ride it and that was really cool...

Say "science fair" in front of a parent and you get volumes of stories of the other parents ... the Parents Who Helped. The monsters! I've never actually met one of these parents -- it's always Someone Else -- but apparently they exist. Huge numbers of them. From what I can tell, if a political candidate were to run on the "help your kid with his science fair project" platform he'd be a shoe-in. I mean we wouldn't vote for him ourselves of course because we're busy Not Helping. Well not helping Too Much anyway. I mean except for the parts that it's okay to help with (what we did) - and not all the other parts (what everyone else did).

A good science fair project, done well, teaches a LOT of different things. Things you can't learn if they're done for you.

1. It gives a kid the chance to investigate a question that he's interested in (even one that his textbook and/or teacher couldn't care less about!) -- yay curiosity!


2. It requires some practice in the finding and reading of previous research, so he knows what the possibilities are. Library skills! Or if you're more daring, and your research topic doesn't include any of the various key words that might turn up something, er... *unseemly*.... Google skills!


3. It's a chance for some good hard critical thinking, about what the research tells him about his own question and how to form a hypothesis, and then even better, how to design a reliable procedure to test the hypothesis!


4. There can be plenty of math in deciding what the data says about the hypothesis -- anything from counting to some pretty snazzy statistics.


5. And when it's all done, it has to be communicated to others so they understand what was tried and what was found. Clear writing, good use of visual aids, graphs, charts, photos, and a coherent answer for any question someone might ask.

The things I think you can do for a younger kid are helping with the reading and helping with the writing. There are plenty of opportunities for kids to work on their reading skills and their handwriting -- it doesn't have to be thrown in with science. And there are often parts of experiments that really do require assistance. In fact if you're participating in an ISEF-affiliated fair, you were supposed to have already signed a pledge to supervise and assist where required for safety. Don't give me that "independence" line when there's a six year old with an open flame.

For a kid who has no experience with research, you will probably have to teach them (without doing it for them) how to find books and articles, how a hypothesis is developed, how an experiment is designed, and how data can be collected and organized. I would not interfere at all with choosing a project, choosing a hypothesis, or making the conclusion. And I really prefer, when I'm helping with carrying out the experiment (see "six year old with open flame" above, or less-dramatic, "eight year old can't reach ceiling, even on stepladder"), for him to have given me explicit written instructions to make it abundantly clear that I'm the lovely assistant and not the decision maker.

The first couple years we did projects, there was a fair bit that the darling child still needed to learn and I needed to teach. Each year there's less -- he can make a darn good hypothesis these days without my having to ask him if it's testable. At this point my major interference is in the schedule. This was the first year that he came up with his own timeline of what needed to be done and when, but I'm still the enforcer. It usually goes "You know it's two weeks to the science fair and you still have a blank board and you're three days behind your own schedule. If you don't get cracking you are not going to be done in time!" Yes, time management is one of the lessons one might learn from a science fair project, but on the other hand nagging isn't really the same as assistance...

The hardest part to stay out of, in my opinion, is the writing. There is nothing as difficult as watching a child painfully typing out an 800-word run-on-sentence, unless it's typing it yourself from dictation. Just bite your tongue and do it. Really. Once it's done it's easier to mark up the grammar and spelling and leave the content intact... If you interfere while he's still composing you lose the meat of it all -- what the child actually understands about his own work. What I do suggest to the darling child when communication is an issue, is that he explain it to other people and for Pete's sake pay attention to what they don't understand. Could his best friend replicate his experiment from those instructions? Really?? How about we call him up and give that a try, eh? If you email Grandma and tell her what your conclusion is, is she going to understand it? Can you answer all her questions? Are the graphs clear enough that the cat could figure them out?

All of these lessons are terribly valuable outside of the science fair arena. I mean really -- if you're learning something only for the purpose of winning a student competition, then whatever are you going to do with that skill when you're a real grownup with a real job? I mean, unless you're on the professional science-fair-judging circuit? But being able to formulate, research and test a hypothesis is applicable to so many real situations -- does your car make that funny noise only when you're driving east? or is it when you're going uphill? or only going uphill AND east on a windy day?

Being able to read original research and interpret data will get you through the evening news without undue panic. Does broccoli really prevent cancer? Or does it cause cancer? or maybe it prevents one kind and causes another? But only if you're a nun? And learning to communicate all of that information and detail in reasonably readable prose puts you head and shoulders above most of the rest of us who can't even pen a blog without run-on sentences but who refuse to change because we've heard that people whose writing is overly complicated don't get Alzheimers. It was on the evening news, so it has to be true.

The abacus

In my other rant about math enrichment I think I mentioned that there isn't a whole awful lot to enrich at the arithmetic level. For the most part I say arithmetic is a matter of learning the mechanics and practicing them until you can use them for the fun stuff later. Enrichment is something more like sneak peeks at what's to come, with one great big exception. The abacus.

Woohoo!! abacuses! Or abaci. I'll go with abacuses although in real life I just avoid referring to them in the plural... which is difficult when you have such a collection....

This one is just a counting frame, ten beads per rod. I made it out of foamcore board (check the art supply store and make sure your xacto knife is good and sharp!) and if I could find the picture of it half-made, you could see that the wires serving as rods are wound around popsicle sticks inside two layers of foamcore. The sticks are jammed into carved-out hollows in the foamcore and then all taped together. It's definitely of the "jerry-rigged" school of arts and crafts, but at the time I had a little one who was this close to grasping place value and why a one in the tens place was different from a one in the ones place and I used what I had.

This abacus is perfect for that one lesson (and fine for several others I'm sure, but just exactly right for this one!) Start with a number, say seven, and slide over seven beads on one rod. Then count up... eight, nine, ten as you slide over each bead to match. When you get to ten, you have one rod full, and no spare beads. That's 10 -- the one and the zero. You can count up to fifty and point it out all the way up, and then you can work with adding and subtracting across a full ten -- like 8 plus 6, 11 minus 3, 5 plus 6, etc. Try counting up if it's confusing for the kid, but then try asking "how many beads do you need to make a full ten? and how many more than that are you adding? (or subtracting?) So 8 plus 6 can be thought of as 8 plus 2, plus 4. And 11 minus 3 is 11 minus 1, minus 2. Play with it, give each other problems to solve, and try thinking in terms of getting to ten, backwards and forwards.

Next! This one was just for fun... We were studying Ancient Egypt and their counting system, and just couldn't resist. This one we had a little more time on, and help, since the aforementioned child was not in desperate need of any mathematical illustrations and was old enough to be a bit handy. We used a cheap picture frame from the craft store, flexible beading wire from the bead store (everyone has a bead store, don't they? Well try the internet - the type of wire is really not terribly important, but I like the flexible stuff, and with crimping beads it holds up to use rather well.) The beads are made of Sculpey clay. This part was my job -- he may have been handy, but sixty identical blocks of clay was still a bit over his head, not to mention the risk to little fingers trying to make bamboo-skewer holes. I made the blocks, we baked them as directed on the Sculpey package, and then drew the various hieroglyphic symbols for the numbers -- 1, 10, 100, 1000, 10000 and 100000. When you get to a million the number symbol is a scribe throwing his hands in the air. I'm not making this up! We accidentally strung the beads upside down, so you read it from the bottom, so in this picture it's showing 103,264. If I were to do it again, I'd only make nine beads per rod, since you never really need the tenth.

This one is my favorite, and the one we actually use on a regular basis. It's our grocery store abacus. This abacus is modeled on the Japanese soroban, which is different from the counting frame in that the beads don't all have the same values. Below the reckoning bar (in this case a pipe cleaner...) the beads are 1s in whatever place they are (1s, 10s, 100s, etc.) Above the reckoning bar they're 5s (5s, 50s, 500s, etc.) For the grocery store, we use the darker bead rods (those two on the right) for "cents" -- that is, ten cents and one cents. Then the lighter bead rods (three rods on the left) are dollars (100s, 10s and 1s, reading from left to right) So if you were to write an amount, say $142.68, it would read exactly the same way on the abacus. This is true of the regular soroban too, but the type of soroban one usually buys is not made with pipe cleaners. Of coures the type of soroban one usually buys is made with a nice flat non-moving desk in mind. Not a grocery cart. The pipe cleaners keep the beads from clearing every time you turn a corner, and are therefore much less frustrating if you're a kid in a grocery cart, assigned to add up the bill for your mom. Why the hundreds place? Well we used to have a membership at Costco...

One thing you figure out with a soroban-type abacus (by the way, if you want to make one for the grocery store, the frame in this case is a piece of mat board. If you don't have a mat cutter, you can get them done at a framing shop, or maybe even pick one up cheap from their mistakes bin) is that now you've moved up from "how do you get to ten" when you add and subtract, to "how do you get to five?" Subtle difference, but one of the things I really adore about this type of abacus. It's efficient in its use of beads, matches rather well with our own monetary system (pennies and nickels, $1 bills and $5 bills, dimes and... okay we don't use a fifty cent piece much anymore but the idea is still good!), matches even better with the Roman numerals that you learned in elementary school and still don't know why they matter... but wait! there's more! Look at your hands! Four fingers and a thumb? Ringing any bells here?

Your fingers are the ones and your thumbs are the fives. So each hand is like a rod of an abacus, and you can count up to 99 before you run out of fingers to count on. Check out Fingermath by Edwin Lieberthal for details, or google "Chisenbop" which is apparently a Korean word meaning "finger counting."

Got a couple more here.... This one isn't an abacus in the traditional sense, but it bears some similarity. It's actually a string of 1000 beads. What's it for? Counting to 1000. Is this a trick question? Okay we made it when DS was just catching on to the whole pattern of numbers, where 20-29 is followed by 30-39 and 40-49... and where after 100 you just start back with (a hundred and) 1 and go back through the whole sequence again... Once you've figured that out you can pretty much count to anything! So he did. It takes a long time to count to 1000, so we had those cards -- they're actually someone's discarded business cards -- on which he wrote the number he left off at, so he could pick up again later and finish. You'll note that it took five sittings to finish... The string is elastic bead cord and the beads are cheap plastic faceted things (if you need 1000 of something you're not likely to be going for the $5-each art glass... or at least I'm not.) I bought two boxes of multicolored beads and one box of red, and I only used reds for every 10th bead, so it was easy to keep track. I figured there couldn't be anything more depressing than counting to 999 and realizing that one had been off by one bead somewhere back there. This was what, five years ago? I still find extra red beads around the house. You've been warned.

Oh look! It's the rest of the red beads! You know they come in a box of like 700, and if I got two boxes of multicolored and one of red, I could only really have used 100 red beads in that whole 1000-bead project, which means 600 beads left over! So this was just a little thing we did. It's really as far from "abacus" as I can get without making a new post... but here's the deal: these are base ten rods. Each wire holds ten beads (to show the very-important "set of ten") and then there are some spare ones to use for the ones place. This is great for a couple things... first off, place value (which we used the first abacus all the way up there for) -- same general idea. Second, adding with carrying and subtracting with borrowing.. you can set up a number -- like what's shown in the picture is 38 (3 rods, 8 units) and add 24 (2 rods, 4 units) and show that now you have more than 10 units for your ones place -- you have something like "fifty-twelve". Ten unit beads from that twelve can be traded in for a nice neat rod, to make your fifty-twelve into sixty-two. And for subtracting, take your 62 and subtract 8. How do you get eight units out? trade the nice neat rod for ten individual unit beads (fifty-twelve again!) and then take out the eight.

If you're beyond the adding and subtracting stage, the other thing I absolutely couldn't have taught without these is long division. But that's more complicated... so I'll give it its own post instead of hijacking my own abacus soapbox for the purpose.

Mmmmmm.... Radioactivity

Alright everyone, get out your geiger counter.... You do have a geiger counter, don't you??? What? No? Okay nevermind that part. Get a big bag of mini marshmallows -- the freaked out pastel colored kind. You can't beat a science lesson that calls for a whole bag of mini marshmallows and who can resist a science project that only takes one trip to the grocery store?

This is what you're making. It's the nucleus of a Uranium-235 atom with a loose neutron lurking in the wings, just waiting to blow it all to smithereens. How do I know it's Uranium? 92 protons. In our model they're green... I would have liked them to be pink -- something about Pink Protons just appeals to the ear, but there was a misjudgement in someone's estimate of how many mini marshmallows might be eaten before we started counting out the ones needed for the model, and well... we were stuck. That or we'd have to go back to the grocery store and I already mentioned how much I appreciated that this project only took one trip! So my advice? Buy two bags... maybe three.

So back to the protons. Here's the big thing about protons. They are the one single thing that tells you the most about what you've got. If it has 92 protons then it IS, absolutely and positively, Uranium. If it's 93? Not Uranium. 93 is Neptunium. 94 is Plutonium and I have to admit here that I only just now realized that they're named after the planets... That might have been a useful hint back in 6th grade when I had to memorize the periodic table, but at my age it's probably only good for bar bets. But I digress.

The point is, if you had a molecule of Oxygen (8 protons) and you somehow managed to remove a proton, you would then quite suddenly have Nitrogen (7 protons) with all of its different properties. So 92 protons is Uranium. Now why Uranium-235? The 235 means that there are 235 total thingies in that nucleus. And by thingies of course I mean protons and neutrons (since electrons are all floating around outside the nucleus). So that means 235 mini marshmallows. This is why you should always look up the details before wheeling your shopping cart up the candy aisle and saying "hey, we'll just pick up some marshmallows and have a nice little spur-of-the-moment lesson on nuclear fission - I'm sure one bag is enough!" Two bags. Trust me.

So if there are 235 thingies, and 92 of them are protons, that leaves 143 neutrons. Now you see the pink problem. It turns out there are more pink mini marshmallows in every bag I've opened so far. I don't know if that's on purpose or not, random (we don't buy that many -- it's a really small sample size!), regional, or what, but not only are there more pinks, there are orange ones too, which look an awful lot like the pinks and you can fake it a little bit in that direction if you're running a little short. I personally think they're short of greens because the greens taste vile, but then I don't think I'm really their target demographic anyway. In any case. For our model we used green for protons and pink (or orange... just a couple) for neutrons.

Pile up all those marshmallows on a plate. Then get your hands a little wet and start squishing. You don't want a homogenous mess, you just want them damp enough to stick together, but maintain their identies as protons and neutrons. Once you have it reasonably stuck, take the spare neutron. This is the one the nuclear reactor fires at the uranium...

Let your enthusiastic kiddo do the firing (if your house is anything like ours this part is way more fun than anything else, even the part where they're allowed to eat a few subatomic particles). The uranium splits, more or less in half, and what comes out? More neutrons! Now if you had a whole class of kids you could illustrate a chain reaction. One neutron blows up one nucleus, which then releases let's say three neutrons, which if they're lucky run into three more nuclei, which split themselves and go on to release more neutrons, and soon you have a few dozen sugared-up children running around the lab flinging marshmallows at each other. Now you know what a nuclear bomb looks like.

One thing you have to mention, although I'm sure it gets lost in the fun of blowing things up, is that most things don't do this. In fact most Uranium doesn't do this, because most Uranium is actually not Uranium-235... it's Uranium-238. More neutrons (still 92 protons though!!) Uranium-238 doesn't go around splitting in half and flinging neutrons at its classmates. It's much more likely to just lose a piece here and there... a couple few parts here and there, even entire Helium neutrons (2 protons with 2 neutrons), which are called alpha particles, and electrons and positrons, which are beta particles, and which can make a proton into a neutron or vice versa. Of course if you're changing the number of protons (which each of these bits falling off is doing) then you don't end up with Uranium in the end. Actually it goes through a lot of different steps before it ends up as Lead. This is the whole half-life thing that radioactive elements go through. They lose pieces at a reasonably predictable rate, turning into other things on the way to something stable. What we were doing with the marshmallows is nuclear fission. Start with Uranium, end with two molecules of something completely different and about half the size.

That's a rather big difference.... and why you can still get old red Fiestaware with the Uranium glaze. Now I'm not saying I'd eat off them myself (although my grandmother did for years and lived well into her nineties), but your vintage salt and pepper shakers aren't going to blow each other up in the china cabinet. They will however lose enough particles to keep your geiger counter clicking.

If I had to homeschool on a desert island....

Nevermind the perfect curriculum, the magic math-fact-memorizing trick, or the schedule that somehow makes everything happen. They don't exist. But who cares about them because Santa (well okay Grandpa) brought a Digital Blue USB microscope, and what could be more fun than anything made 200x bigger. If you click around Amazon you'll find a few different versions under slightly different names, and three types of reviews: either "I love it and can't live without it" or "it's junk" or "the guy who says it's junk doesn't know what he's talking about".

Is it a professional quality microscope with everything you'd ever need? Of course not. But you know what? A four year old can use it. It's plastic so when you get frog guts on it you can squirt bleach all over the place. It plugs into the computer so you don't have to squint to see anything and it's easy to point at one thing or another, it takes pictures and movies, and it's super-easy to set up (and leave up!) so you can throw anything under there anytime. I have more pictures of 200x-sized ants than anyone could possibly want.

In deference to the insectophobic or otherwise squeamish, here's a picture of snapdragon seeds instead. Because you know, gigantic ants really aren't everyone's cup of tea. And don't even get me started on frog parts... but oddly enough the kid set really goes for that sort of thing, and if you set them loose with something "icky" and the means to take really really high-magnification pictures of it, you get all kinds of neat stuff, and a whole list of people who refuse to visit your photobucket page just on principle.

Speaking of principles... We don't have any qualms about dissection in general here (although we do generally stick with invertebrates until we get past the "hacking" stage in learning to handle a scalpel), but for anyone who wants the experience and something to throw under the aforementioned microscope without sacrificing animals, flowers make excellent dissection specimens. Lots of parts to look at, no guilt even if you end up chopping the whole thing into tiny bits, and you can get excellent specimens from the clearance table at the local nursery or wherever it is you buy plants. The snapdragon whose seeds are pictured above came from Home Depot and cost a dollar. It looked pretty sad, as plants go (being an annual, and right at the end of its blooming season), but it had both flowers and seed pods to compare, which was really very cool.

Math Enrichment

I have to say I'm not orderly about enriching math, so this is all very scattershot and random, but someday I aspire to orderliness..... Right now this is working for us. Also just as a general thing, I should admit that I have very little interest in enriching arithmetic. As far as I'm concerned, arithmetic is arithmetic and (provided you are really understanding it) if you can get it done fast then definitely do so. There are some things that will contribute to the understanding (I'll save my essay about the abacus for another post), but it's only once you have that basis that I'm really interested in all the options, because SO MANY suddenly open up when you have the tools to figure through them.

1. Lots of books... I really like Martin Gardner's books of puzzles, at least in part out of nostalgia, since I read them as a child. And there's something about learning card tricks and calling it schoolwork that lets a kid think he's getting away with something. George Gamow wrote about math and physics in fun and interesting ways (very dated, both in the style and the content, but I like them anyway!), Lewis Carroll, The Number Devil, Flatland... someday I want to read Godel Escher Bach, but I haven't gotten to it yet.... That sort of thing. We don't actually read any of these on any schedule or with any kind of linear progress... they just get picked up and put down and found and discussed and whatever. I've only flipped through Mathematics: A Human Endeavor at the library, but it did look good, and I really do like Jacobs' books in general. TOPS science has some math kits too, but I've not used them myself (I do like their science though!)

2. Proof... Anything worth doing (mathematically) is worth proving. So even with arithmetic, if you are learning about dividing by a fraction, can you PROVE that it works in every case (multiplying by the reciprocal). I print out "proof paper" in the two-column format just because I'm such a geek, and we write it up with steps and justifications. Once you have a couple rules under your belt you can put them to really good use. Of course geometry is the classic application (and we have our copy of Euclid and a study guide, and a really good pointy compass to go with it) but Algebra can be just as "proofy" -- we have a copy of Algebra by I.M. Gelfand that I adore.... Very thin but VERY dense, and it does two things for me. First, it asks for proof -- will this work for all values of x? And second it dumps you right in the middle of seemingly impossible problems and asks that you just start digging your way out. We do that one more-or-less collaboratively. .. insofar as he does the work but we discuss it at great length, before, during, and after.

3. Statistics -- This isn't really enrichment as much as it is just my little pet peeve... statistics education is severely lacking in the standard curricula and no one is getting out of my house without understanding enough to read original scientific research and enough so you'll know, when the news report cites a scary-sounding number whether you really need to be terrified, or amused, or just sensible. Annenberg has a telecourse called Against All Odds, which I like. The textbook is cheap because it's a few years out of date, and we got some extra books to go with it that set up the lessons and give extra exercises in using Excel and SAS. Someday we'll buy a SAS student edition and DS will find out how much he could make as a programmer and I'll have a heck of a time convincing him that he needs anything else to make it in the world... so maybe I'll put that off for a while.... But we're surrounded by statisticians among our friends, so it's not just practical education; it's necessary to keep up with the dinner conversation.

4. Random other stuff... Every so often something just comes up. We listen to a CD in the car and go off on a long tangent about rhythm and fractions and meter in poetry and somehow I end up at the sheet music store... Origami makes for interesting topological problems... There's a whole long list of math stuff related to handiwork -- knitting and crochet can be fantastic if you're discussing non-Euclidean geometry (google crochet hyperbolic plane, or check out this article), and there is a Japanese decorative craft called Temari that's perfect for geometry on spherical surfaces. Spanish blackwork embroidery has a lot to do with fractals. Whatever comes up can frequently be expanded on: when you learn about pi there are dozens of ways to try to find it yourself (and learn about irrational numbers and approaching a limit at the same time!) We just had a simple statistics problem that took on a life of its own when I asked DS in the car what the chances were that I'd blindly grab two identical jelly beans from a bag of 50% red and 50% yellow... and how it changed if you started out with 4 (2 of each) or 4 million.... Opportunities present themselves all the time.