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| There has been a lot of consternation and fuss over the last week or so that Hydrogen is so far away from Helium on the periodic table. Since they're 1 and 2, Peo wants them side by side. Oh, she'll tell you readily enough that she understands that Helium belongs in its column because it's a noble gas, but since Hydrogen is unassigned, she wants it moved over beside Helium. I don't have a good answer for why she shouldn't be right. She's also been playing with her letter magnets in an anthropomorphic way lately. This morning the two play themes met: Peo: "Moooooom! Hydrogen is lonely and has nobody to play with, so Oxygen is going to play with him!" me: "Good idea, because Oxygen likes to play with Hydrogen. Lots of elements like to play with Hydrogen because it's so reactive. In fact, Oxygen really likes to play with two Hydrogens at once." Corran: "Yeah, but Helium isn't!" Peo: "Yeah, so Hydrogen and Oxygen are going to take a class and Oxygen is going to help Hydrogen in the class." Me: "Is it a class about water?" Peo: "Yeah. And baby Boron is sad because it keeps falling over." Followed by self-play with elaborate narration regarding baby Boron and Mother Boron being helped by other elements, Mother Boron lecturing some elements in playing nicely, and later shouts of excitement that, "Part of Neon is in MY NAME! I have some Neon in my name!" | ||||||
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Blatherings
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November 6th, 2009
October 28th, 2009
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| During dinner last night, Peo announced that she could not possibly go to bed because she had to get to Chicago for her paleontology club meeting. She was not pleased when we said she couldn't go to Chicago right before bed time, although she was less upset than when we refused to drive her to the airport a few weeks ago for her flight to China/Cartoonland to meet Kai-Lan in person. We have since been informed that the reason we haven't ever seen a Cartoonland plane is because they travel underground. (Of course if there was a paleontology club in Austin that let 4 year olds attend, I would totally take her.) | ||||||
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October 27th, 2009
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| One of the hallmarks of a "gifted" person that distinguishes them from other smart people is that, if you ask them a very basic question, you will frequently get a convoluted/overreaching and quite possibly incorrect answer. This is because the gifted mind assumes that a very basic question must have some other side to it, a hidden agenda, a trick answer, or something else to make it worth asking. It's a significant problem in testing gifted people of any age, because a badly made test can result in a highly gifted and knowledgeable person looking clueless. It's one of those things Corran and do ourselves, and when we spot it in others, we make a mental note that they're someone we might want to get to know better. Peo has demonstrated this occasionally, but came up with a good version on the weekend. After I took her to that Spooky Science Extravaganza I posted about earlier, I was trying to get her to recount what she'd seen to Corran. Regarding the experiment where the kids dragged a soapy film over bowls that contained water and dry ice, Peo told Corran that the bubble was filling with gas. I asked her what kind of gas it was, hoping for her to give a basic description like "white" or "cloudy" or "smoky". Instead, she frowned with thought for a moment before carefully guessing, "Noble?" | ||||||
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Gacked from ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} noiseinmyhead and will have to be shown to Peo when she gets home from school:http://thesoundsofscience.com/videos.ht | ||||||
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October 24th, 2009
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| I took Peo to GirlStart's Spooky Science Extravaganza today, which necessitated quick completion of her Tyrannosaurus Rex Skeleton That Has Just Been Dug Up By A Paleontologist costume (her choice, her description). I guess I did okay with quickie printouts of dinosaur bones from a Google image search, plus a paper-mached-over dinosaur hat thing from the dollar store (to be able to paint it black and white like a skull), because she won the prize for Cutest Costume. She says her favourite thing there was the demo of "blood cells" using candy. She also really enjoyed holding bubbles full of dry-ice-smoke, eating a graham cracker frozen in dry ice so smoke would come out of her mouth (I was a bit worried about the safety of that one but it went just fine), and picking apart an owl pellet for bones (which was pretty hard with adult-sized latex gloves on so we brought it home for further dissection later). My favourite part was when she surprised the lady at the "blood cells" table by beating her to the punch on the explanation of what white blood cells do. I also dug the volunteer going around in a giant Beaker costume (as in the icon). | ||||||
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October 17th, 2009
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| Here's a nifty milestone...Peo built her first electronic circuit today. With gobs of help from Corran, of course. She got a book called The Amazing Book of Facts at the resale shop yesterday and she's big-time into it. This morning she was reading about electricity so Corran decided to help her build a circuit. She explained to me how the electricity goes around and around, and how she has to touch the foil to the LED's wire to make it light up. She also explained to me that one AA battery wasn't enough and that they needed two. Video and pics were taken, and one of these eons I'll catch up. :) PS Only two years until she can start kindergarten... | ||||||
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October 5th, 2009
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| Peo learned the Mandarin words for red and green ages ago on Ni-Hao Kai-Lan. Today I did her a nice turn and looked up a bunch of other colours on a Pin Yin dictionary. Then I whipped up a document with very large text and put each set of words (the Pin Yin/Mandarin and the English) in the corresponding colour, since we have a shiny new colour laser printer. She loved it, and was particularly excited that I'd put the first seven in ROY G BIV order, since she's learned about ROY G BIV from the TMBG Here Comes the Science DVD. But as Corran pinned the document to the wall beside her maps just now before bed, Peo realized (with some prodding by Corran) that in Chinese, the colours don't spell out ROY G BIV. So she shouted, "Chinese Roy G. Biv isn't Roy G. Biv at ALLLLLLLLLLLL! He's someone DIFFERENT!" And then giggled maniacally. Incidentally, before anyone gets envious of a 4-year-old who is committing the periodic table of elements to memory, realize that today she got up while she was supposed to be napping to insist on reading another element first. I acquiesced just to get her back to bed, but then she lingered at the poster, whining things like, "Awwww, not Lithium! I've already done Lithium! I know all about Lithium." Repeat ad nauseum with a half dozen other elements until I finally made her pick one, and she did, then ran into her room and slammed the door. *sigh* | ||||||
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October 4th, 2009
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| Peo got sick yesterday. She had a fever after her nap and then when we tried to feed her some chicken soup for dinner, she claimed to be full, then wandered off and barfed her earlier meals all over the living room. At least we can confidently say that Seventh Generation's carpet cleaner does appear to get out blueberry barf stains... She knows that when she's sick she gets extra TV time (and she has attempted to oh-so-dramatically fake illness in the past to get this benefit, though it has never worked because she'll cough and say she's sick so I'll say then she needs to go to bed and then she'll either admit she was faking or claim she's suddenly better), so this morning she told Corran that two of her red blood cells were feeling better but three red blood cells were still sick, so she needed to watch three extra things on TV. At the end of each, she dutifully reported a new healthy red blood cell. One is still sick at this time. Oh, and we had to explain that white blood cells fighting off germs was a good thing, because on the TMBG video, they look angry and Peo knows that fighting is mean, so she thought white blood cells were bad guys. In other childhood geekery, we were talking about Mars, Red Rock Conservation Area in Vegas, blood, and other things that are red because of iron. Peo wants to know if the skin on her plum is red because of iron...anyone know? Presumably not everything red in nature is iron... | ||||||
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October 2nd, 2009
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| Peo has just asked Corran if there's also a Periodic Chair. | ||||||
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September 30th, 2009
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| I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that I'm probably the only mother who ever had to console her crying almost-4-year-old due to having excitedly gotten a kids' book about the periodic table out of the library only to be CRUSHED, nay, DEVASTATED to discover that it didn't cover Curium. "*sob*sob* But I wanted to read about Curium because it's number 96 and I like 96!" (The book appears to only cover naturally occurring elements.) | ||||||
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September 28th, 2009
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| Isabella Rossellini teamed up with Sundance Channel to make a series of short web films about weird mating habits in all sorts of species. They're very interesting and done with a lot of humour and fun sets/costumes, although there are some parts that some might find gross, and it's almost certainly not work safe. http://www.sundancechannel.com/greenpor There are three seasons, accessible by the tabs on top of the video, and some extras for those who like background info. Seasons 1 and 2 are shorter and stick to the mating issues for the most part, while Season 3 videos are a bit longer with some environmental comments as well. If you dig this sort of thing, I highly recommend Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex, which was a lot of fun and not overly technical, making it great for adults and even older kids. If your kids are old enough to know about sex and you're not offended by them seeing comical/artistic representations of sex organs, the Green Porno videos might be okay for them too. Obviously, watch first and decide for yourself. Peo's far too young but I'm sure teens would love this stuff. eta there's a news story about the videos here: http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wir | ||||||
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September 25th, 2009
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| Pi digit recitation is soooo last year. Now it's memorizing the periodic table (thank you, TMBG!). We have to cap how many she's allowed to read before bed like we used to have to cap how many words could be spelled/read before bed. Today during lunch I decided to see what's stuck so far. Me: So what element is H the symbol for? Peo: Hydrogen! Me: What about O? Peo: Oxygen! Me: And C? Peo: Carbon! Me: Do you remember what number carbon is? Peo, thinking: No, what? Me: 6. They all have numbers. Peo: Yeah, hydrogen is 1. Me: That's right. What about He? Peo: Helium! It makes balloons go high in the air! Me: Yes it does. What about Fe? (I was trying to be tricky.) Peo, immediately: Iron! And it's my favourite element! Me: Why? Peo: Because it's a metal, and I love metal things. Me: You do? Peo: Yeah, because robots are made out of metal and there was a BIG robot that shoots pongo-pongo balls out of its MOUTH! See, last year at Maker Faire there was a giant robot that shot ping-pong balls out of its mouth and Peo still has hers as a coveted prize... I suppose learning the elements is like building blocks to someone bent on world domination, eh? | ||||||||
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September 13th, 2009
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| Just watched the new They Might Be Giants Here Comes Science DVD today with Peo, and she LOVED it. We did too, although Peo's kind of bummed that the John and John puppets aren't there. They’re animated this time. The first song, "Science is Real", is pretty much a hardcore slam against the anti-science movements like "intelligent design" and that sort of crap. There's a great line about how it's fun to imagine things like angels, unicorns, and elves but when you want knowledge you have to look at the facts. Awesome. It will give Peo good ammo to fight off religious incursions she'll inevitably face as she gets older. It's also really funny how they revisit the sun stuff, first by doing mass of incandescent gas but then followed by miasma of plasma. It skews for older kids more than ABCs and 123s, but in our household, it's never too soon to learn about DNA. And yes, Peo shouted out that it was DNA before they said what it was. We were very proud! | ||||||
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July 20th, 2009
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| Regarding the issue of Peo refusing to eat because of being fat as posted yesterday... I left a message for her teacher this afternoon, and she got back to me later. When she asked Peo about it, at first Peo said she'd made it all up. But the teacher could tell that wasn't true so kept asking her about it, and meanwhile another kid, let's call her K, was looking nervous. Apparently after awhile this other kid joined the conversation and pointed the blame at almost every other kid in the school, one by one, before breaking down and admitting she was the one who told Peo that if she ate her whole lunch, she'd get fat. Then she was very upset and said she only meant it as a joke. K is only three. Apparently she has older brothers in regular full-time school who tease her all the time. The teacher's theory is that her brothers say things like that to her so she repeated it to Peo. I actually feel really bad for K now. And Peo seems to have dropped the issue and ate fine at dinner. So we're not going to bring it up again and give it undue attention in her mind. | ||||||
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July 19th, 2009
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| Peo has taken to refusing to eat much dinner some nights because she says it'll make her fat. After much discussion and wringing bits of information out of her, it sounds like someone at her school - possibly even an adult - has been saying something to do with the volume of food she eats (she eats a lot, more volume in a day than I do some days) and linking it to getting fat. In case there's any confusion here, Peo is still wearing 18-24 month sized pants, which are all turning into capris on her long legs, but still droop on her thin midsection. When she lifts her arms and is wearing a snug shirt, you can see her ribs through the shirt. She has always been 10th percentile or less on weight, 5th or less since age 2. So, um, yeah...not fat. I've had several conversations with her about what's nice to say and not, how she's nothing close to fat, how she eats healthy food and does lots of exercise so she should eat when hungry and not worry about it, etc. It's not sinking in. She's got it in her head that eating too much makes you fat, and that her standard amount of food is too much. A conversation with the head of the school is in order, methinks. Such statements aren't appropriate to kids of any age or size. As long as kids are eating healthy food, it's beyond inappropriate for the volume to be criticized! What a total bummer, to have a not-quite-4-year-old who is perfectly healthy in terms of both food consumption and weight think she's too fat. Jesus-frickin-Christ-on-a-stick. | ||||||
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June 21st, 2009
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| Peo's teacher told Corran on Friday that her reading has impressed the older kids at school. Peo thinks this is great because the big kids praised her...pretty much manna from heaven for a littler kid. Unfortunately, the teacher also told Corran that some of the older kids were also starting to show signs of competitiveness with Peo over it. Peo hasn't noticed. She's too happy. Here's to hoping it doesn't go ugly in any way. This teacher is really good at this sort of thing, so we are indeed hopeful. But when I mentioned it to a knitting friend who works for the local gifted association, there was a lot of nodding and dire hmm-hmming because this can be the precursor for harsh judgment. And let's be clear about this: nobody said the dreaded G-word to these kids, nobody elevated Peo in any way, nobody did any of those things that the parents of gifted kids get accused of. Heck, Corran and I haven't even met most of these kids, since Peo gets dropped off earlier and picked up later than most. All that happened was Peo read in front of them. | ||||||
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June 3rd, 2009
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| *sigh* How many 3.5 year pods do you know who throw temper tantrums during pre-bedtime tooth brushing because the water is in laminar flow when they want it turbulent or vice versa? Mind you, she was being stubborn about going potty until I asked her if her per would be laminar or turbulent, and then she HAD to go in order to find out. And then declared her poop to be turbulent. Ow. | ||||||
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May 7th, 2009
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| Been meaning to mention this since last weekend... I took Peo to Pioneer Farms here in Austin, which is where the Biscuit Brothers is filmed (and as far as Peo is concerned, is an actual, operating, Magical Musical Farm). There was a Biscuit Brothers concert along with other May Day celebrations. You know that the Biscuit Brothers' show - which teaches kids about music, everything from musical terms to types of instruments to the science of sound - is accomplishing its educational goals when we were on the other side of the farm from the stage and, when some low notes came over the hill, Peo said, "I hear a bass!" By which she means the double bass. And she was right. Awesome. :) PS I linked to the About page for the Biscuit Brothers because the main page has automatic music. | ||||||
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March 24th, 2009
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| Infodump time. I wanna clean out the browser. 56% Of MBA Students Cheat Regularly Cheating Goes Global as Essay Mills Multiply - Most of you probably have heard my story by now about the student I encountered when I took ceramics a few years ago who argued that cheating, including the buying of essays, was okay because "it's not fair that some people are smarter or work harder and get better grades". Aside from that hopefully obvious downside of effort-based reward in public schools these days, there's obviously an increased general sense of higher education as a means to an end (a document saying you've been there) than actual education. I wish I could say I don't know how these people could go on to function in real-world scenarios, but having met my share of lazy-ass office workers and assorted sychophants, I can actually imagine that good cheaters probably do well in life by consistently cheating and sucking off of everyone else around them. Sad, but probably true. A Conservative Pundit’s Plus-Size Remark - "Criticizing a woman’s weight is one of the 'last frontiers' of socially-acceptable prejudice, says Meghan McCain, the daughter of Senator John McCain." Yup, probably. Energy Company Debits $1.28 Million From Your Bank Account - This is why Corran and I never sign up for auto-pay on anything. It just always strikes us as a dumb idea to let someone else access your account. Given how many companies we've had over the years pull various shenanigans - ranging from the cable company who splits your bill without telling you and adds a new charge you didn't agree to, to the home alarm company that won't cancel your account when you move out of town and sell the house because they'd like a few more months of payment first before letting you go, unless you're going to use them in your new residence - the very idea of letting these companies have direct access seems foolish to us. We like to maintain control over our finances, thanks. A lesson to marketers about the importance of reading the blogs they pitch to but who probably won’t read this because they don’t read the blogs they pitch to - Very funny. If I had time to read blogs regularly, this one would be high on my list because of entries like this. Wolverine toy, more inappropriate than Barbie - gacked from the blog above. Which resulted in her posting this. FTC To Require Advertisers Using Testimonials To Show Typical Results - Frickin' awesome! Woot! Best Buy Accused Of Paying Bonuses To Managers Who Don't Price Match - Yeah, well, big shocker. Yet another reason we're glad we stopped all Best Buy shopping back when they came out with their "demon customer" crap, since we're total demons, according to them. | ||||||
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February 8th, 2009
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| 1) Teaser for the cake I'm working on for entry into the 5th Annual That Takes The Cake, Sugar Art Show and Cake Competition here in Austin at the end of the month (this is about thumb-sized): ( Read more... ) 2) We took Peo to Darwin Day at the Texas Memorial Museum today. It's a nice little museum with animal displays and lots of good skeletons. On one floor there's a giant DNA model and when we asked Peo what it was, she said, "It's shaped like DNA!" Score. :D One of the Darwin Day activities was a really cool crafty idea: the kids get pictures of creatures and are asked to glue on various sizes and shapes of pasta to imagine what the skeleton underneath might look like. Peo was just happy to squirt glue all over and stick noodles on randomly. But when I handed her some spaghetti close to the end, she wanted to stick it vertically into some of the salad pasta (the little short rings). It wouldn't stand like that, so I suggested she stick it into the wheel pasta, and put some extra glue in the holes for her. Then she stuck in some more, and I helped her arrange them so that physics would be her friend and keep it balanced. ( photo here ) Prior to this, all of the other kids were gluing their noodles on flat. Once Peo did this, all the other kids at the table - all of whom were much older than her - started saying that that was a good idea and they wanted to do it as well. Some of them could make it work and one other parent was able to figure out the trick of spreading them for multidirectional weight distribution, but many had to give up. An hour later when I came to get Peo's from the drying table, I noticed that almost all of the kids who had come after her had at least attempted the vertical pasta deal with varying degrees of success. My little trendsetter...and isn't it convenient to have geeky, crafty parents? | ||||||
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Blatherings
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