kids
sastyk | October 26, 2010Along the theme of time - finding it, using it, fast, slow, in-between - I thought I'd re-run this post. I have a *lot* of experience with four little boys, one autistic, in getting things done around the kids ;-) - they help now a lot more, but sometimes this is still necessary, so I thought it might be worth rerunning my meditations on how that works. Asher will turn five this week, and Eli is ten now - and while Asher is now one of my primary aids, Eli is still sometimes a lovable hindrance, despite some improvement - but in a nice way, and we're used to it. Still, getting everything…
sastyk | October 21, 2010Robyn's Adapting In Place Blog has a really great sermon she gave about teaching kids about the environment. I really like her points both about multiple environmentalisms, and also about the way kids react to empty nonsense like "101 ways you can save the planet." The whole thing is well worth a read! Robyn is one of the most intelligent and passionate advocates of good education of all kinds I know, and this is her stuff at its best!
I also discovered that I was under a double whammy with kids when teaching conventional environmentalism. First, as I already said, kids can smell a lie, so…
sastyk | September 16, 2010Science Blogs is celebrating the beginning of the new school year with a series of 101-style posts, introducing the basics of a concept. I've got a couple of basics posts I'd like to do, but this one seemed particularly apt to me. I'm a homeschooler, but it isn't only homeschoolers that struggle with the question of how you frame our ecological situation for children in ways that are honest, not too frightening, engaging, and age-appropriate. Because most schools of every type offer a very superficial education in ecology, most parents of kids going to school will need, just as badly as…
sastyk | June 24, 2010At my house today it was 82 and humid. It is hot, but there's a breeze, and shade from the trees. The air is heavy and moist, but rich and green and earthy as well, and my house stays cool downstairs. In New York City today, the temperature was above 90, and I can still smell, from my childhood in other cities, that shimmering hot urban mix of garbage, asphalt and pollution. Don't get me wrong - I love cities. But hot town, summer in the city is not always when urban life's virtues shine.
I was an urban kid for part of my childhood, which is why I remember so strongly and passionately…
grrlscientist | December 25, 2009tags: Dangerous Wands: The Ghetto Harry Potter, Harry Potter, teaching, poverty, funny, humor, parody, streaming video
A little birdie whispered into my ear about this video .. to say the least, as a former college professor and Harry Potter fan, I LOVE it, and I think you will enjoy it, too!
grrlscientist | December 18, 2009tags: Hamburger Make Up Artistry, food porn, Buy Me That, streaming video
This is another video in the Buy Me That series, which is designed to teach kids how to think critically about the television commercials they are constantly bombarded with. In this episode, we see some kids playing with a toy that turns out to be the opposite of what it is advertised to be.
Perhaps this video should be required viewing for all kids in the weeks before Christmas?
khannula | November 27, 2009Anyone who donated to the Geobloggers Giving Kids the Earth challenge should have received a "giving card" via e-mail in the past few days. If you're confused about it, here's the explanation:
HP made a huge donation to all the social media challenges, but didn't donate money to specific projects. Instead, they gave each individual donor a Donors Choose giving card. That means you get to decide how HP's donation gets used.
If you want help finding projects dealing with the Earth Sciences, I added a bunch of new projects to the Geobloggers Giving Kids the Earth. (Most of the projects that we…
khannula | October 30, 2009Jess is looking for posts about outreach that we've done. I'd like to talk about outreach that other people have done.
This month, many of the bloggers here at Sb have been participating in Donors Choose, a campaign to raise money for schools. October is a crazy month for anyone who goes to the Geological Society of America meeting, so I teamed up with Highly Allochthonous and Eruptions in the hope that, between the three blogs, we'd be able to scare up some support for K-12 geoscience education.
October's over tomorrow, and the geobloggers' challenge has raised more money than any other…
khannula | October 24, 2009The DonorsChoose social media challenge ends tomorrow at the end of next week. Rumor has it that HP has a large pot of money (like $200,000) to split amongst the groups that raised at least 1% of the total... and they'll split the money at the end of the day tomorrow. If we raised that 1% of the total, HP would donate another $2000 towards the projects that we suggest. As of tonight, the Geobloggers challenge has raised $2215. The total amount raised, amongst all the bloggers and tweeters and others, is $282,116. So we're $600 short of giving a lot more money to engage kids in the Earth…
khannula | October 12, 2009It's ! It's also the week before the Geological Society of America annual meeting, and I'm going to be spending this week running around like a chicken with my head cut off, trying to get everything graded, an exam written, a post written about my talk (Tuesday afternoon), and my student's poster printed. (He's graduated and currently fighting forest fires, and he put the draft poster together by himself, so I guess I can wrestle with the dreaded plotter.) So I'm probably not going to try to help you understand climate myself. However, I can be a cheerleader for this week's events!
Tuesday is…
khannula | October 4, 2009My other half sent me this link on Friday: from Wired, rating weapons used to kill zombies (in Zombieland, and elsewhere). Their number 13:
13. Rock hammers
Not to be confused with tremendous mallets, these things are faster to wield and don't leave you exhausted after two or three swings. Used for busting rocks, they can easily be repurposed to bust zombies.Advantages: Combines all the best qualities of the 1911A1 and the pump-action shotgun.Disadvantages: None. Anyone who suggests otherwise eats babies.
The e-mail reminded me about one of the projects from the Geobloggers DonorsChoose…
khannula | September 30, 2009There's an issue of Eos sitting on my desk at work with a front-page article about how to manage outreach. Earth scientists know stuff that's important - this week's huge earthquakes (covered all over the geoblogosphere) are just one example. Water's another. And climate. And volcanoes. And landslides. And... well, you get the picture. So outreach is important.
But the best outreach might be the stuff that goes on every day in schools. My kid's lucky - he lives in a college town, with all sorts of students and professors providing opportunities to learn cool stuff. But a lot of kids don't…
khannula | August 4, 2009There was a mountain lion in the courtyard of a local elementary school playground today.
A mountain lion.
At the elementary school.
A neighbor called the police, who called the Department of Wildlife, who shot the mountain lion. A young male, about 75 pounds, probably recently headed out on its own. Apparently that's the age they usually are when the DOW kills them for wandering around in town.
I just finished read The Beast in the Garden, this year's common reading at the college, so the story sounds eerily familiar. The Beast in the Garden is about the mountain lions that began showing up…
khannula | July 23, 2009I'm going to take a vacation tomorrow. I'm going to get up early in the morning, ride my bike to my office, and hunker down in front of my computer, putting some of my collaborators' contributions into a grant proposal.
What? That doesn't sound like your idea of a vacation?
What about last week, when I spent a glorious two days in my office while my husband and six-year-old went camping and swimming in a hot spring? No?
They actually do feel like vacations to me. See, I'm spending this summer at home with my six-year-old. There are a few options in town for summer childcare, but I decided not…
khannula | June 10, 2009There's a meme going around about plans for summer reading. While I was reading Sciencewoman's list, I realized that I was avoiding the meme. See, I didn't even manage to finish my spring reading list, so I'm not ready to talk about big plans for the summer.
I had good intentions. I read Dirt: the erosion of civilizations. I bought Last Child in the Woods, and brought it along on my spring break travels. And... I didn't finish it.
Here's the gist of the book: kids should go outside and play in wild, overgrown places. Really, they should. They'll be happier and healthier and more creative and…
bioephemera | May 29, 2009
Thank goodness Science has finally given us protection against. . . Kooties!
Kootie Killer promises to "kill 99.9% of germs & Kooties without water!" This claim is clearly rigorously lab-tested and evidence-based, but although I wouldn't dream of questioning its veracity, it does invite the question. . . what the heck is a Kootie?
Personally, I always thought cooties (with a "c") were symbiotic, invisible organisms that spontaneously accrued on children, causing healthy developmental conflict with members of the opposite sex. Shows you what I know. Apparently, the Kootie is a yellow-…
purepedantry | March 13, 2009This is just unbelievable. At a day care center in Arkansas, 10 kids were accidentally given windshield wiper fluid instead of Kool-Aid:
Child welfare investigators plan to talk to the owner of an Arkansas daycare center where 10 children were sickened after they were given windshield wiper fluid to drink.
"They'll go out, they'll get an explanation and they'll try to sort (it) out preliminarily," said Julie Munsell, spokeswoman for the state Department of Human Services.
Hospital officials say a staffer mistakenly put the blue liquid in the refrigerator after shopping and later served it…