Odd Bits: Spring Birds, Audiobooks, and More

::1::

American White Pelican, courtesy WikiPedia

I've always had a hard time knowing what to do outside, but counting birds for the eBird project has become a favorite. So far this year I've seen ten species (and I didn't hardly peep a foot outside in January, because it was so miserable), and but surprise was that there are already American White Pelicans in the area this year. I looked them up, and they're not common in our area until closer to April, though it's not unheard of to see them around the area now, either. Pelicans are cool. They have a really distinct way of circling around overhead, always near our river. I like watching them; this year we'll have to see if we can't get down to the waterfront while they're there so we can watch some of the other things they do. Pelicans are fun to watch.

::2::

There's some cool free audiobooks out there. LibriVox has several of our favorites, such as Children of Odin, and The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Before Achilles. Those are some that the kids go back to over and over. This week, I found another free one that I want to have a listen to: Lafayette and the Revolution, about how a French Marquis came to be fighting in the American Revolution.

::3::

So, NASA's been finding planets around other stars for a while. I even had an app on my phone for a while that would show me things about them, before I deleted it in favor of language learning stuff. Now, they've found some cool ones: planets that might have water. And they're not even that far away. I need to figure out where Aquarius is, because that's where NASA says this Trappist system is located, and it'd be cool to know how to stare in their general vicinity.

::4::

The kids invaded and nabbed my electrical tape to enhance their sticks. The big guy has created a pilum; the small two immediately copied him, but theirs are swords, they tell me. It's really quite remarkable what a little electrical tape can do to a stick. And the things they come up with in "play"; I certainly didn't tell them to recreate ancient weapons. I just said to go outside to play! I'll be interested in seeing how long these stick around: they are carefully stacked outside the door, after I told the kids that their "weapons" were not allowed in the house.

::5::

I'm a Constitutionalist, and I learn foreign languages for fun: I believe that words matter. They have meaning and how you put them together is important. But it still sometimes catches me by surprise to see how big a difference it makes to change the structure of a sentence, even just a little bit. With a little bit of mindfulness, we can avoid teaching (or at least avoid reinforcing) ugly stereotypes by tweaking the way that we speak about groups of people: The "zarpies" example in this article is particularly interesting. Reading that article made me think of the research on teaching colors that I read a while back - the one that explained why color is so difficult to teach, and why kids often will take a lot longer than you'd expect to really get the hang of it. Turns out that some linguistic mindfulness will go a long way here, too.

"What are Quadrants?"

Well. I don't know. Let's find out.

A quadrant is an old tool for measuring latitude. Guess today is a pretty good day for explaining latitude. Here's a picture of Ptolemy using a quadrant (hurray for WikiMedia!).  

This is a pretty cool project. I think it's just a bit beyond where Hero's at; he's not that interested. Though I am tempted to make one and do it myself.

Soggy in Space

What happens when you wring out a wash cloth in space? It certainly wasn't what either Hero or I guessed!

A Little Stargazing

Photo Credit: NASA

We headed outside at about 10:30 pm last night. It was chilly. We had our lawn chairs and my phone, with the Skywatch app. Love that app! So many times I've wished for a real live person to give me a tour of the sky. Skywatch does that for me, so that I can figure out what I'm looking at up there.

Last night when we first got out, Hero wanted me to show him Orion. However, that's a Winter constellation around here, so he wasn't up. We did, however, find the Big Dipper. And with the help of Skywatch, we also figured out Ursa Major. That was particularly exciting to me, since I've known that the Big Dipper is a part of Ursa Major for ages, but had never quite figured out where the larger constellation is. Now I know. We also located the North Star. He wanted me to show him the "South Star, that's opposite." I gave him the short answer; it was bedtime. But we'll be back to the concept.

We've done a lot of reading about Astronomy, but I decided that it's time to take it outside. Hero has been able to find things when I try to show him in the sky, and the boys both love to find the moon. So I'm planning to get outside about once a week. Gotta love homeschool for this kind of thing! Next time, maybe we can find the Little Dipper and Ursa Minor. I'm looking forward to it.

Hero's Rover

This is Hero's Rover, which he built today while we were trying (only semi-successfully) to read from our Solar System book. After a while I stopped bugging him about the book, because he's telling me about this Rover, and it's cool. Here's what he says about it, in his words:

"My Rover is an 'Angry Cat' technology type of rover. The red piece, as you see in the picture, is a little light that has a transmitter that goes to the receiver, and then the Rover also has a little slot that holds nine baggies, and those nine baggies hold little samples, inside of the Rover. The arm is really small, it's between one and two inches long, and it's invisible. The white arm that holds the satellite head, that is the arm that can spin any direction and stop at any time and shoot. From both sides at the same time. It drives around on cities and on other planets. It sends back the information on my little receiver that you see in the next picture. It measures how wide and how tall and how fat it is, with its little red piece that I've already told you about. So, and, and the orange piece is the antenna. It sends the signal all the way to my device, all the way to the planet, whatever planet I am on. And that's the end of the Rover information."


He also built a receiver. He wants to talk about that too.

"The receiver is the thing that the Angry Cat Leader, me, Hero, the Hero Angry Cat is the Leader. So I'm the one who holds the receiver, and I have 10 rovers. Five of them right now are taking images of Ultron's technology [Ultron is an Avenger's villain], and the other 5 are taking pictures of a planet called 'Deplety.' Deplety is a rock planet. And my rovers are on different locations. Two of them, right now, are on the western part, and the other two of them are on the eastern part, and the last one is on the way southward piece. And the 'Angry Cats' are good guys. They are defenders; they save peoples' lives. They can walk through a fiery building and save people. No matter how scary people think an Angry Cat is, they will help. They can breathe water, they can breathe fire, they can breathe ice, and lava. They can also breathe rock. And they only do that to bad guys. Like for instance, a battle between the Angry Cats and Ultron is going on. I need to get back out there an start leading my army of Angry Cats again."

I thought about stopping him and making him "do school," but then I came to my senses. There's a huge amount of synthesizing going on here from the astronomy that we've studied this week. And when the things that he learns show up in his play then is when I notice that they really get internalized, and they stay with him. Can't argue with that!

Astronomy Clips

In honor of the Mars Rover landing, we're watching some astronomy clips.

Thirteen Planets - including our Dwarf Planets. Pretty interesting. I didn't realize there are so many dwarfs!

Classical Homeschooling Carnival #18

Here it is again - another Classical HS Carnival! We've got quite a few entries this time, so settle in and enjoy!

A lot of families mark the start of their school calendar at this time of year. Cellista, of La Scuola d'Argento shares an intimate glimpse of a day in the life with her post, The First Day of School.

Paula ran unto a new idea late in her planning, and is reworking her schedule in Planning 201: Retreat and Regroup at Wakefield Academy.

Other folks are steaming along, full speed ahead. Nadene, of Practical Pages, shares how read-alouds have become the glue that holds their homeschool together through good days, bad days, and everything between, in Read-Alouds: the Homeschooling Glue.

Paige shares her new writing program with A Week with Classical Writing Aesop: Day 1. It's the first of a 5 part series on Elemental Blogging.

At Delightful Children's Books, Amy has made a great list of 11 Children's Books About Stars and Space.

If your student is a further along in their educational journey, try Regina's Ninth Grade Biology Notes at Green Apple's Blush.

Here on Baby Steps we have finally begun our study of Ancient History, and we kicked it off by building a Shaduf.

Last, but certainly not least, MissMOE has a lovely review, History Portfolio Review, posted at Homeschooling While Living the Life of Easier. She has many pictures, both before and after the pages were used, giving a nice feel for the portfolios.


That concludes this edition; I hope you enjoyed it! Submit your blog article to the next edition of Classical Homeschooling Carnival using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

More Moon-gazing

We dashed out to Barnes & Nobel to pick up the copy of Art Across the Alphabet that I'd ordered. Somewhere in the process of ordering it the numbers got crossed, and the number they tried to notify me at was disconnected. Clearly not my number, as it works just fine. But I called them this afternoon and it was just in time: tomorrow it would go on the shelf. So I had to get it today. But I got this information after I told some piano students that I had no plans to go anywhere and it would be just fine if they dropped by to pick up the left-behind music just any old time. I'm going to be here. Fortunately, B&N is open until 11. So I left the house around 9:15. (I've got a point here, just wait for it.) It was a quite enjoyable trip. In addition to the book I ordered, I took a swing past the bargain books and hit the jackpot! They had poems, myths, and fables for $9.99, 50% off, members get another 10%. So they were right about $4. I got The Real Mother Goose, A Child's Garden of Verses, and some myths. Very cool. I managed to leave behind the book about gardening that lept of the shelf and begged me to take it home. But I did thumb through the part on starting seeds and learned that I've got a serious light problem. The fix is likely a grow-light, but I've gotta figure out where to plug it in.

So we got back home around 10pm. It was a beautiful night here, cool and crisp, and you could smell spring. Not too cold. So I grabbed the binoculars and my camera and took the Boy back out for some night time nature study. Anyway, I studied nature. He played with his little snow shovel. After, why else would we come outside? I took a couple of pictures, but if the weather is good (I heard rumors of rain) I may try again tomorrow night. The view through my binoculars was much better, and I think I can do a bit better if I play with my manual settings. But that's way to complicated for what I wanted to do tonight. Tonight I was moon-gazing. I also took a peek at that nebula in Orion's belt. And looked (unsuccessfully) for the Pleadies. And I contemplated learning the names of those dark sploches on the Moon. Mares, I think they're called? And I glanced at Saturn. And wondered if that other bright spot was Venus. It's in about the same spot that I last found Venus, but those planets are tricky: they move. And I don't know how much. I hadn't bothered to bring out my little glow-in-the-dark star map, or I might have had a better idea of what I was looking at. It was a good time anyway. I would have stayed longer had it been a bit warmer, but we still got about 20 minutes.

Total Eclipse!

Kudos to my sister for calling me up and telling me there was an eclipse going on! I think I'm going to have to find some sort of astronomy calendar to look up cool stuff like this and see if I can't know what's going on. Since the Monkey was sleeping, I had to find a window to watch through, and so there is a slight reflection in some of my pictures, particularly the first bunch that I took. I'm editing it out as much as I can, but I'm no photo editing whiz, so be patient with me!















Once the moon was fully eclipsed, I got to looking around. I took a couple of photos of Saturn, after I took a peek at it through my bird-watching binoculars. I was pretty excited by what I saw in those binoculars: I could see the rings! Only I need to get some sort of stand to put the binoculars on so they don't move too much. The natural movement of the hands is not at all a problem when looking at birds, it's not a serious problem when looking at the moon, although it's a bit annoying, and it's a relatively serious problem when looking at another planet. The image jumped around more than my 17 month old son!

Then I got out my telescope and had another shot at getting it to work. It was still a bit disappointing because I was unable to get it to focus. However, it was a huge improvement on my past attempts because I did manage to get the moon to show up in my telescope! So maybe there's hope for this telescope after all!

After that I took another batch of pictures, but by this time the Monkey was really getting tired of looking at the moon.



And for something a bit whimsical & very cool try this photo, called ten moons, also taken during last night's eclipse.

The Moon is Lost!

Or else I am, lol! I've been looking and looking, and even when there aren't many clouds I seem to be lunarly challenged. It's a bummer. But there's no way I'm getting up at 3am or even 5am to find the moon in the dark sky. It's supposed to be 14% illuminated tonight, so the New Moon is coming very soon. Not to mention the 3 days of rain Andy says is in the forecast. At least then I won't have to feel bad about loosing the Moon. Who does that anyway? Loosing the Moon.

Phases of the Moon: Day 6

Still cloudy. In fact, the Weather Underground is predicting clouds for the next several days - Friday at least. I tried both last night and this morning to locate the moon and again couldn't even find the bright spot in the clouds that gives away where the moon is. I'll try again tonight, but I doubt that there's going to be much change: we have a pretty thick blanket of clouds out there and it's been sprinkling off and on. I may be doing this for 2 months to get the pictures that I wanted to get!

Today I headed over to Nasa.gov for my moon education. I found some really cool pictures - there's one of the Jupiter, Earth, and the Moon taken from Mars - they have a drawing of how the planets were lined up for them to get that one and everything. I think that the neatest thing here is that the Earth is at quarter phase!

Also interesting, it looks like they're planning to do more expeditions to the Moon - and set up housekeeping! They've got some pretty cool concept drawings for Moon Cars that have space suits attached to the outside, so the astronauts could go from their cozy little car, hop into a space suit, and walk around a bit to do what astronauts do on the Moon, and then reattach the suits to the car, crawl out, and keep on driving. Pretty exciting.

The last thing that I'm going to post for this today is this really interesting video taken by the Ranger 9 in 1965 as it was purposefully crashed into the moon. They've got a lot of the pictures it took worked into a video so you can see what it looks like to dive toward the moon. You can see the mountains in the middle of the craters and everything! Give it a minute to load, then the picture on the left starts moving.

Phases of the Moon: Day 5

Well, instead of getting a new picture of the moon, we're getting water from the sky. Which means that even if I could see the moon, I couldn't take my camera out to take pictures. Bummer. But we need the rain. And, the moon isn't going down until almost noon tomorrow, so if it clears up maybe I can get a picture in the morning. For now, it being Sunday still, I'll post this instead:

And I, God, said: Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven, to divide the day from the night, and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and for years;

And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth; and it was so.

And I, God, made two great lights; the greater alight to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night, and the greater light was the sun, and the lesser light was the moon; and the stars also were made even according to my word. -Moses 2:14-16

Phases of the Moon: Day 4

Still a waning gibbous (84% illuminated), and I've been learning about the names of the stuff on the moon. The trick is coaxing my photo editor into changing the font color so you can see a few labels. Gonna have to work on that.

Interestingly, it's not going to be very long before I have to get my moon pictures in the morning. Moon rise moved about 45 minutes later this evening, and if that's the normal amount of change, I'll eventually need to get daylight shots of the moon, which I'm sure are not going to have nearly as much in the way of contrast on the craters as these cool night time ones have. You can see it especially well along that line where the light and the dark meet. I ran across the name of it today, but I've forgotten it and will have to find it again. In the mean time, it was cloudy outside tonight, so I had a hard time getting a good picture of the moon. What that means is that I took a bunch of pictures, and actually, it looks like several of them turned out pretty well. Here are some of my favorites:

Phases of the Moon: Day 3

Well, we are officially in the "waning gibbous" phase of the moon now. Here's another interesting tidbit: they think the moon is actually moving away from us at the rate of about 4cm a year. Not that you'd notice to look at it. Also interesting: the moon makes an orbit around the Earth every 29 1/2 days. Here I'd always thought that a lunar month was 28 days. Today's factoids are courtesy Space.com, which also has an article about the moon's bulge. Who knew the moon bulges? I'm off to read about it.

Here's another Wunderground photographer that's doing moon pictures. His shot from last night it breath-taking!

Phases of the Moon: Day 2

Weather Underground says that today's moon is still a full moon, and that 97% of the moon's surface is illuminated. Huh. Here I'd always thought that a full moon was a one-night Event. But they do have a spiffy star chart that you can play with to make it show all sorts of different things. It says that the moon rose at 6:55 this evening. Which would explain why I couldn't find it when I was looking for it before that. One thing I'd like to learn about the moon is when it's going to be in the sky. For instance, you often see the moon up there during the day time. Does that ever happen when it's a full moon? Or are full moons always at night? Gonna have to look around and see what I can learn about the moon in the next few days. I'll post any good links that I come up with. And maybe tomorrow I'll try the telescope again. Although it's supposed to be cloudy for the next 3 days, and then raining after that for 2 more days, so hopefully I'll be able to see the moon.

Phases of the Moon

I've been trying to get a good shot of the moon for a while, and as I was watching it get closer and closer to the full moon over the past two weeks & being amazed at how quickly the moon was moving through its phases, I thought it would be fun to take a buncha shots of the moon, and record how it moves through the phases over the next month. So, tonight being not only a beautiful moon, but the full moon, I thought that it would be a good time to start my "Phases of the Moon" project. It was also fun to take the Monkey out and show him the moon. Of course, the cars going by on the street were more interesting, but I think he did at least glance at the moon. Maybe I can get my telescope to work and get some really cool shots of the moon by setting up my camera and the telescope in tandem... of course, that would require figuring out how to use the telescope. Apparently it's more complicated than "the big end points at the sky."

Complecations

Tried my new telescope tonight. Apparently there’s a little more to it than “the big end points at the sky.” Gotta look around and see if I can come up with some sort of instructions on how to use one of these thingys. Otherwise, this is going to be singularly disappointing.

New Toy

My neighbors are having a very nice yardsale across the street. They have tons of stuff, and started bright and early this Wednesday morning to earn money for a mission project they're involved with. I, of course, can't resist such a large yardsale, so when I rolled out of bed this morning I ambled on over.

They had a telescope!

They were also kind enough to put a sold sign on it while I went to the bank, cuz I didn't have the $15 in cash today. So, now I have a telescope! A while back I had wanted to make some observations, but the weather conspired against me. Now I can try again, and see all kinds of cool stuff in the night sky!

However, I'm gonna need to find something else to look at, because it looks like Taurus is only up in the daytime now. I'll need to find something to look at in the starts that you can actually see at night right now.

Watching the Sky

I had these fabulous plans for this evening: last night I was driving home from a family get-together & it was so bright & clear outside about 9pm, and the moon was up (it's a waxing crescent right now) and it was really cool looking, cuz you could actually also see the dark part, but below it and a very little to the south was this very bright thing. Looked very bright & kinda big to be a star, so I came home & looked it up this morning. Turns out it was Venus. Orion's right there in the same neighborhood. Saw it last night too, although I didn't think a whole lot about it. Right above Orion is Taurus, which contains both the Crab Nebula & the Pleiades. Man was I ever looking forward to dark tonight! Gonna go watch the sky & see what I could see.

So, this afternoon, I go on a walk & even find a nice spot that would probably work for starwatching not too far from home. It's nice and open, and this afternoon it was filled with birds, including Red-wing Blackbirds, which I love to listen to. But as I'm coming back the clouds are rolling in... I doubt that I'd be able to see the moon, much less a planet or a Nebula. Bummer. But they'll probably still be there on Sunday (I'm too busy tomorrow to try it.) I should check the weather & see if that might be a better time to look at the sky.

Astronomy for Kids: Taurus
Astronomy for Kids: Venus
Weather Underground: last night's star chart

Science

Andy is a scientist. He works on linear particle accelerators for a living. I've seen several physicists of our acquaintance drool over a chance to see these wonderful(?) machines he works with every day. At home he looks into the mysteries of over-unity motors and he presides over the inner works of our computers and the network he set up between them. He knows an amazing amount about the human body, ranging from chiropractic adjustments to reflexology, acupressure, and massage. He occasionally ponders concepts of time travel and flight in his spare time.

Not surprisingly, the math/science component of Monkey's education is a topic of great concern for him.

So when I set out browsing through HEM this afternoon, I perked right up when i saw that they're featuring science right now. Here is something interesting. Something I am going to need to know about. I dived right in.

First, an article about teaching high school science from a scientist, "Learning and Doing Science," by Cafi Cohen. She's clearly unimpressed with regular high school science, and the reasons she gives for it are valid.

Classroom science ... focus[es] on ... the "body of facts" and "systematic knowledge" and "general laws." The result? Students taking biology read the text, complete worksheets, bumble through "experiments" (which, sadly, have but One Right Answer), and take exams to demonstrate that they can differentiate porifera from coelenterates. Classroom science... rewards memorization and regurgitation. Answers are prized; questions are discouraged.

Although I would say that my most intense and memorable science teacher worked hard to bring us interesting labs and was truly committed to seeing us reach our potential (he was also the class advisor), a lot of both the physics and chem classes I took from him were just like she describes: memorize, the stress over coming to the "right answer" in the lab, rehash on the test.

In contrast, real world scientists practice definition (2) above, "knowledge of the physical world gained through observation and experimentation." ...

They focus on doing, rather than on memorizing what everyone else has done. Instead of rehashing another's explorations and discoveries, real world scientists study the unknown, the not-yet-understood. Their questions are just as important as the answers. Unlike the situation with classroom science, real world scientists are often rewarded for asking new questions and for creative experimental design.

Interestingly, as I consider the dichotomy Cohen talks about between "real" science and "class" science, I realize that even when we did have a nice open-ended project - for instance building little balsa wood bridges to see how much weight we could get them to hold - it was often more competitive (whose bridge holds the most) than comparative (what design elements hold the most). Cohen talks about her son's ongoing interest in model rocket design. She tells a little about how he played with various elements of his rockets as he entered competitions. That's experimentation. How much more will he have learned from doing the "same" thing 50 different ways in search of the best flight possible? I'm quite sure that he learned more about rockets than I did about the strength of balsa wood or the strongest architectural shapes it can be made into: I only got to do it once. Then we moved on to something else.

Lesson for me: There is wisdom in letting an interest run its course, in finding materials for repeated experiments. Even when the Monkey manages to choose something that I'm not terribly interested in, which I'm sure he'll do at least once or twice.


Several of the other article I read were as much a list of reviews of science-related books as articles. Here are some of the books that appear most likely to find their way to our family's bookshelves:

The Amature Naturalist by Gerald Durrell

From Franklyn M. Branley's "Let's-Read-and-Find-Out" Science Series:

Snow Is Falling
Hurricane Watch
Tornado Alert
Sunshine Makes the Seasons
Flash, Crash, Rumble, and Roll

The Cloud Book by Tomie de Paola

It's Raining Cats and Dogs: All Kinds of Weather and Why We Have It by Franklyn Branley (this one's supposed to cover pink(!) snow)

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett

How Artists See the Weather: Sun, Wind, Snow, Rain by Colleen Carroll

Weather Dude: A Musical Guide to the Atmosphere by Nick Walter

The Weather Factor by David Ludlum (weather's impact on history!)


Yeah, I know, I'm showing my own biases in what is interesting, but with the Monkey so small at all I'm not sure where else to start. And even a few of those books would add to the foundation of science books already in our personal library.