Last weekend, my son’s UU religious education (RE) class learned about labyrinths, which many UUs and people of other belief systems use both metaphorically and as a spiritual practice. The assistant RE directed noted that another local church has two labyrinths in the woods on their retreat property, Rolling Ridge.

So we took a ride over there yesterday afternoon to walk the labyrinths and, perhaps, meditate while on our path. (Okay, with my kids, meditation — in the silent, pensive, inward-looking sense of the word — was but a pipe dream.)

It occurred to me only after I parked the car that it’s winter in New England. We still have snow on the ground. A labyrinth is, in fact, a path. On the ground. And therefore under the snow. Suddenly I was reminded of last winter when we (and when I say “we,” I mean “I”) decided it would be fun to finally try letterboxing with the kids. In the snow and 20-degree weather. It was not fun, nor, as you might expect, did we find the boxes. We did learn something that day, however: walking around in the woods, looking for something someone else has left there, on an Arctic-cold, overcast day does little to bring about family peace or unity.

See the curved path outlined by the rocks?

Given that I’ve made the same mistake two years in a row, I must be in some sort of deep, soul-level denial about winter. Either that, or I’m just incapable of learning from past experiences. The jury is still out.

Anyway, luckily, we don’t have all that much snow left, and the labyrinths were somewhat visible because they’re marked with logs and large stones. If you looked closely, you could see the curved patterns in the snow, but you couldn’t see for certain the specific path laid out. So we did the best we could to follow the intended labyrinth paths, but I’m sure we’ll have better luck once the snow melts.

Sometime in June.

Tags: labyrinth, Rolling Ridge,

We began President’s Day weekend with a flurry of activity out of the house, and then returned home to a cozier flurry of activity inside the house. Some of us chose to doodle, while others dabbled in 3D programming, while still others cooked and wrote and read.

Mr. Enigma sat down to draw in his sketch book. The Duke walked by on his way to do something else, noticed that Dad was drawing, peeked over his shoulder and asked, “What are you drawing?”

Monkey see, monkey do

They talked about the drawing for a moment while my husband kept working. Suddenly, The Duke grabbed a chair and pulled it up alongside Mr. Enigma’s recliner. Then he went into his room, grabbed his sketch book and pencil, and sat down next to his Dad and began drawing.

They worked that way for at least half an hour, and what a special, bonding time it was. Completely unplanned and uncoerced, creativity begot creativity.

While this side-by-side drawing was going on, my daughter was hogging my laptop, programming her first 3D animation in Alice. She took the tutorial and spent about an hour noodling around. Her finished piece was, as she put it, “A Shakespeare kind of thingy,” by which she meant a whole bunch of characters fought, declared their love for each other, and died, all in a 20-second animated movie.

What was I doing? Well, my daughter was using my computer, so I read, started getting dinner ready, and took pictures of my family just hanging out and doing stuff. It was a good day.

To see scenes from my daughter’s first movie, click the link below.

Keep reading… »

Meet Ooch (a.k.a. Brett Outchcunis), a professional yo-yoer (sp?). He does the most amazing tricks with a yo-yo, AND he gets paid by Yomega to promote their products and teach people how to yo-yo. He’s especially good with a crowd of kids, which we learned this past Saturday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Family Day in Boston.

How’s “professional yo-yo guy” for an unconventional job? Can’t you just hear the adults (but probably not his parents) in Ooch’s youth needling him with comments like, “Those yo-yo tricks are great, but you can’t get a job as a yo-yoer. Why don’t you apply yourself to school/work/something-serious-but-uninteresting like you do to that yo-yo.”

Heh. And here he is now, still playing with a toy and actually getting paid to do it, a living testament to do what you love and the money will follow.

You hear that kids? Do what you love, follow your dreams, and don’t let anyone tell you you can’t. [/steps off soapbox]

During Saturday’s show, which focused on the physics of yo-yos, Ooch invited my daughter on stage to demonstrate a key physical property of the ever-popular “around the world” yo-yo trick: centripetal force. Ooch is clearly blown away by my girl’s mad cup-swinging skillz. Who wouldn’t be?

Tags: yo-yos, Ooch, Brett Outchcunis, AAAS, yo-yo physics, do what you love

My family spent Saturday afternoon at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Family Day in Boston, where we saw all kinds of great stuff. I’ll post more about the expo a little later, but I want to tell you first about one particularly outstanding product we learned about while there: a free programming interface for kids called Alice.

I’m excited about this program because my 9-year-old has said she wants to learn how to make her own computer games, and we’ve been looking for a child-friendly application to help her learn how to do that. We couldn’t find anything that looked like a 9-year-old programming novice would be able to learn quickly and easily. Half the battle with helping young kids maintain their excitement is to enable them to complete a project in a short period of time (like two hours on the first try). Everything we looked at either had a huge learning curve or would have probably been too difficult for our daughter right now.

And then, Saturday, we just stumbled upon Alice by accident.

Carnegie Mellon developed Alice, a drag-and-drop programming interface that allows you to create 3D worlds in a Java-like language. Sometime this year, a new version (3.0) of Alice will be released which will enable actual Java programming, not Java-like programming.

In the meantime, two versions are available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, standard Alice, designed for high school and college-aged “kids” and Storytelling Alice, for middle school-aged kids. I think even some younger kids will be able to use Storytelling Alice, given that my 7-year-old son sat on my lap this morning and explained to me how he thought it worked. After watching me for a few minutes, he definitely understood the basic idea behind how to build a world and make the characters in it do what we wanted them to do.

Both versions of Alice come with a library of scenes and characters; each character has a handful (or more) of ready-to-use methods (actions), so that if you want your character to walk, run, talk, turn, smile, cry, think, etc., you can just drag that method from a list and drop it into your program. You can also create new methods.

I took the 30-minute tutorial for Storytelling Alice and then spent another 30 minutes playing with the software. In that hour, I learned how to create a new world, add characters to it, and program those characters to do what I wanted them to do. I also learned some programming terminology, like what a method is. I finished a brief movie in about 30 minutes. Not too shabby!

The Alice.org website also offers free instructional materials, a user forum, additional characters and scenes, and other helpful information. When I have time to play with the tool more, I’ll learn how to do programming loops, “while” statements, and other standard programming thingies (pardon my technical language) that will allow my characters to interact more naturally. Eventually, I suppose I’ll let my daughter have a turn. It was her idea to learn how to program, wasn’t it?

And did I mention that Alice is free?

My only disappointment thus far is with the publishing capability. The “publish as movie” function doesn’t work yet (at least not in Storytelling Alice). And if you publish as an HTML page, anyone who wants to view the page has to have Java, Java 3D, and Java Media Console installed on his/her computer.

Otherwise, Alice rocks. Check it out at Alice.org.

Tags: Alice.org, Java, Java programming for kids, Carnegie-Mellon, 3D programming, Java, free programming software

ere’s a good article about unschooling in City on a Hill Press. In it, I found several worthwhile snippets about unschooling, but also some concise and precise explanations about problems with today’s public school model.

Take this tidbit about how schools have changed over the past 100 years or so, for example:

“Before there was all this standardized curriculum and testing — all that began in the late 19th century — there was no such thing as school failure,” Glass said. “People just went to school or they didn’t.”

Now that the curriculum has become more rigid, it has begun to create problems. Glass said, “It’s the system that produces winners, losers, those who pass, those who fail, those who count as somebody and those who count as nobody.”

So true — and definitely something that has contributed to our decision to homeschool.

However, the article also states that “Children with two working parents must attend school,” which is patently false. Many single parents homeschool while holding down a job, and many families with two working parents homeschool. Where there’s a will, there is very often a way.

Tags: unschooling, homeschooling, school failure, City on a Hill Press,

Whew. I think I’m finally recovering from all the excitement - I’d forgotten how much energy it takes to win a Super Bowl!

So which one is Goliath?

The Giants deserved the win. They won three tough playoff games on the road, including the NFC championship game in Green Bay where it was so cold it looked like Tom Coughlin’s face was going to fall off. And on Sunday, they played hard the entire game and even recovered from a couple of big mistakes. As the lead changed hands for the final time in the 4th quarter, it was hard to contain my exuberance in a room full of Patriots fans.

So I didn’t.

It’s a shame we live in hostile territory, too far from NYC to take the kids to the parade today. They were rooting for the Patriots — silly kids — but I bet they would have enjoyed the celebration in NY. It might have even helped them put their sports loyalties in the proper perspective.

I’m thinking about taping the front page of yesterday’s local paper to the window next to my front door. It sports the headline “Super Shock” with a large photo of a dejected Tom Terrific.

Would that be mean?

Tags: NY Giants, Super Bowl, Patriots

Blogger and homeschooling parent Celeste has written a terrific post, “Show Us the Body,” in which she compares demonstrating the benefits of homeschooling to providing evidence of Big Foot’s existence. She writes:

I still don’t know whether Bigfoot exists, but I do empathize with the poor believers who are struggling to produce evidence. As a homeschooling parent, I’m very familiar with the challenge of working with intangible evidence and trying to convince people that SOMETHING is happening, even though it can’t be seen or measured.

How much do my children know? How much did they learn today? How long did it take them to learn it? Are they ahead or behind? Homeschoolers are constantly being asked questions like these, and it’s really hard to give answers that will convince a skeptic.

Of course, we all know the benefits of homeschooling are real, whereas Bigfoot is just a big hoax.

We do, right?

Celeste’s post resonated with me, not so much because I need to explain homeschooling to others but because I sometimes need to remind myself of our goals. As a new homeschooler (year 1) of children who previously attended day care, preschool, and K-2, I know how hard it can be to trust that homeschooling is “working.” In previous years, I had some level of certainty that the kids would eventually learn to read, write, and do algebra. I was never big on whether they were “on track” with a particular schedule of learning because I believe that kids should move at their own pace and learn when they’re ready. But at least I knew they were being exposed to structured learning opportunities that were covering the basics.

But look who’s supposed to cover the basics now! It’s up to me and my husband to make sure our kids have the opportunity to learn what they need to learn. (Let’s ignore for the moment the huge debate about what kids “need to learn” in the first place. That’s a book-length post.) As I expected I would, I do sometimes panic: Are they learning enough? Am I doing enough and providing everything they need in order to learn? Are they still interested in what we’re doing or am I boring them to tears? Do they still love learning, as they have since they were born, or will I, like so many schools, unintentionally stifle their passion? Are they figuring out who they are and what they enjoy doing with their time?

Taking the Long View

I’m discovering that in the short term — and I consider looking back within a single year the short term — it’s almost impossible to answer those questions. While it’s vital to reflect on the short term and make adjustments to fit the kids’ needs, it’s also important for me to keep it in perspective. These are events or trends that happened during a relatively short, fixed period of time; they don’t necessarily predict future trends or events, nor do they exist in isolation. They exist in the context of everything that came before them and, eventually, everything that will come after them. And they reflect the whole child and all of what he or she was experiencing as a human being during that time, not just subject matter knowledge.
Keep reading… »

Tags: homeschooling, stock market, bigfoot, long-term investing