Category: Technology
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Portable: Pseudo-pain au chocolat.
On Tuesdays I leave the house by eight in the morning, to drive out to the suburbs so we can spend our co-schooling days with Hannah’s family. This school year I’ve been driving even a bit earlier, picking up the daughters of another family as well before swinging north. The trip is not quite an…
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Internet contract for kids.
After I wrote the Internet safety lesson I described in a previous post, I learned that my good friend IRL The Road Scholar had put up a lot of good links related to Internet use in the homeschool. This included a set of "10 digital commandments for kids" in the form of a contract for…
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Difficulty parsing.
For a minute I thought this comic was about NFP. And then I thought: Wait a minute, this stick figure is a guy.
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It’s not just your Rice Krispies.
The breast pump is talking…. but what is it saying?!?!
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Co-schooling via Skype.
Hannah’s 8yo threw up this morning while she was loading the car, so we tried something new today: co-schooling via Skype. After a few technical glitches, we agreed to connect at 12:30 and try to run through some of the older boys’ schoolwork. I moved one of my cool school desks in front of the…
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“My client is not in a hurry.”
Said architect Antonio Gaudí about his life's work. National Geographic this month has a pretty good article about an interesting (and I think, beautiful) building, well over a hundred years in the making: Sagrada Familia Basilica in Barcelona. In 1883 Gaudí inherited the Sagrada Família from another architect, who had laid a traditional neo-Gothic base. Gaudí…
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Watching station for five.
See the comments for more information about this… Multimedia Message [EDIT IN 2026: The photo didn’t transfer from the old blog. It was probably a picture of three to five children, not all of them my own, watching one computer on three to five sets of headphones with the help of this thing: It really…
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Smart kid!
Hurrah for the third grader who, faced with an "invention fair" project, actually invented something that people will probably buy: the curvy bun for a curvy bratwurst. The buns sell for $2.50 for a pack of five at Connell’s Orchard shop in Chippewa Falls, WI. It was Sydney’s idea to package the buns in…
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Audiovisual.
So one of my homeschooling friends (hi Cathie!) is really into the idea of different "learning modalities," you know, some people are auditory learners, some are tactile learners, that sort of thing. She always tells me that I am a classic visual learner. I admit I am not always sure that I buy it. And…
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Sequelae.
I live far, far away from the Gulf of Mexico. I have never walked its beaches and have not seen its waters (unless you want to count a single airplane flight into New Orleans for an American Chemical Society conference some years ago). The kind of natural getaway that's within a day's drive of my…
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They don’t make ’em like they used to.
Popular Mechanics remembers five banned toys of yore, including the "Atomic Energy Lab." Called "the most elaborate Atomic Energy educational set ever produced" by the Oak Ridge Associated Universities, this sophisticated science kit contained four types of uranium ore, its very own Geiger counter and a comic book called Learn How Dagwood Splits the Atom. A…
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“For our light days, we have iPhones. For our heavy days, we have the iPad.”
From Althouse, the best way of phrasing what I (and many others) thought on first hearing the name of the new Apple tablet device. Did Apple have any women on its Name-That-Device committee?
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