This week’s sprog blog will be delayed on account of the younger Free-Ride offspring had so much school work to do last night, and then again early this morning, that you’d think the kid was trying to get a grant proposal submitted. (A salient difference is that probably most grant proposals submitted to NSF or […]
The Free-Ride offspring have been hunkered down with their school work (not to mention wondering whether their soccer practices this week will be called off due to … snow?), but they took the time to dash off some drawings to suggest where the parts of their minds devoted to science are lately. The younger Free-Ride […]
The elder Free-Ride offspring is thinking about a project studying the behavior of Snowflake Free-Ride, the rabbit in residence at Casa Free-Ride. While finding interesting questions to ask about the bunny is pretty easy, working out reasonable ways to get data that might help answer those questions is somewhat harder: Elder offspring: I want to […]
We had to fetch the younger Free-Ride offspring from school yesterday midday on account of an unscheduled bout of vomiting.* Because, you know, the microbes and immune systems tend not to take account of things like our work schedules. (“Or whether we have a science test,” the younger Free-Ride offspring chimes in.) Anyway, since experience […]
The younger Free-Ride offspring’s class is apparently just about to move on from sediment-related issues and start a new science unit. Indeed, this week they even did an experiment as a preview of the new unit, which the younger Free-Ride offspring recounts with these four panels: “First, blow up a balloon and tie it.” “Then […]
As you may have guessed, I’ve been buried in work. (Maybe Khrushchev was talking to me?) Nonetheless, the Free-Ride offspring continue to go to school, to interact with the world, to learn stuff … and to represent much of it visually. Here are some recent images from the younger Free-Ride offspring, who has been studying […]
This week, the sprogs had a look at Dinosaurs Life Size by Darren Naish. The Free-Ride offspring are, at eleven and nine, some years past maximum dinosaur enthusiasm. Still, they have an appreciation for arresting pictures, interesting facts, and the scientific detective work that goes into reconstructing the details of dinosaurs’ anatomies and ways of […]
There are plenty of thrills and chills around Casa Free-Ride these days. Sadly, most of them involve stacks of exams and the horrifying spectacle of a wordy nine-year-old trying to write a concise summary of a 28 chapter book. While we get our diabolical workloads under control, here’s a post from the archives appropriate to […]
The younger Free-Ride offspring shares a diagram from school. As promised, much of the science so far this school year has been earthy, and part of that is learning where rocks come from. (No, it’s not the stork.) Different kinds of rocks, of course, have different origins. They also present different spelling challenges. (Yes, I’m […]
The Free-Rides have been a tad busy (and sneezy, and coughy) this week, which has rather cut into our time for science-focused conversation. However, I was able to extract a couple of drawings from the Free-Ride offspring this morning. From the elder Free-Ride offspring: It is possible that the current interest in blowfish is related […]