The Importance of Mathematics

Over at Math-Blog there's a post with a lecture from Timothy Gowers about the importance of mathematics, not simply in terms of practical application but also in terms of culture. It's fantastic and will give you an itch to start colouring nodes and play with prime numbers even if you don't think you're a math person.

Pick a time when the kids are gone or asleep and grab some chocolate, a cup of tea and listen. You'll enjoy it.

Why We May Need to Consider Sending the Kids to Public School

3 accused of using corpse head to smoke pot

The headline (no pun intended) says it all except for the fact that the three boys are all homeschooled.

I'm convinced. I'll be enrolling the kids in the fall. I can't have them going through life not knowing how to construct a proper bong.

One of Those Brag Posts

Catherine drew a picture of a mermaid for a project her Guides troop is working on. She lost it and drew another picture. We later founf the mermaid picture but we're both pleased that, for a time, we couldn't find it because here's the second picture:



Pretty damn nice. It's got depth, focus and composition. The colours are good and the facial expressions on the beasts hint at a story.

Just awesome.

A Request From My Daughter

Catherine has eagerly started Key to Algebra and was working away at factoring this morning when she asked me this:

"Do you know what I would really like? I'd like a book like The Story of Science but all about math and that I could read myself."

Um. Yes. That would be really neat. Unfortunately I don't think I've seen a book like the around. Certainly The Story of Science: Aristotle Leads the Way itself is pretty heavy on math history. If anybody has any suggestions of non-fiction books that talk about the history of math, please let me know!

Unexpected Evolution of a Lesson

It's been a while since we actually did an honest to goodness science experiment. I set out to fix that today by suggesting a realy simple one that will also go towards one of Catherine's Girl Guides badges - Invisible Ink.

I googled invisible ink and found quite a few different ideas. While it was the old lemon juice one I needed I also found ones involving baking soda and corn starch so I think we may have to explore this a little more over the course of the week.

About.com had a good page on the matter so Catherine read it and gathered what we needed. Then she and Harry got down to business with paintbrushes and lemon juice.

After the juice had dried I lit a candle and we applied heat to the pictures. The lemon juice turned brown as expected. Lesson learned. But of course then we saw the swirls of soot on the underside of the paper. Harry stuck his finger on one dark patch and found it was just a thin and fragile layer of soot. Catherine wanted to try more soot pictures so we held paper above the candle and moved it around to get interesting patterns. As we did so we watched the way the smoke from the flame rolled up and off the paper.

I think that's a good thing to remember with kitchen experiments sometimes. What you may set out to do may be neat but given some fun materials the kids will explore and experiment and reach farther.

There's another way to make lemon juice ink appear with salt and crayons and I think we'll try that tommorrow. I'll also take down the litmus paper and strew a few more interesting things on the kitchen table and see where the kids take it.

The 10 Year Old Tutor.

My daughter had a friend, I'll call her Annie, over today. Annie is a great kid and lives right next door (although it took them a year to finally get to know each other). I've been thrilled because although she has other friends around, this girl is special. She likes Bratz and Barbies, painting and reading and even, and this is the best part, grabbing the butterfly nets and magnifying glasses for extended bug hunts.

Today they came in and after some playing Annie asked Catherine if she could write cursive. Catherine said she couldn't. They both decided to play school and Annie would be the teacher with the dry erase board.

Ten minutes later I came into the room and Catherine had done more work on cursive writing in those ten minutes then she had ever done before. And it was legible too. Annie simply wrote examples on the dry erase board and asked Catherine to copy them which she happily did.

She is now Catherine's cursive writing tutor. That's what I told her anyhow. Catherine offered to teach her the ancient Greek alphabet. Kids teaching kids. Hopw fun and sane is that?

A Move to Wordpress?

I like Blogger, I really do. It's suited me for quite some time...Except when I worry about what would happen to all my posts if Blogger went down for good, or simply lost my blog. Or when I think of the security measures I can't have that Wordpress users do.

But I do find Wordpress a little intimidating. I have not the first clue what to do and I'd have to (I assume) pay for hosting.

Anyone want to help me out on this one?