With only a few days left in 2007 (and having temporarily fled my children for a cat-free location, so as to give my immune system a chance to recover from cat allergens), this Friday I offer the sprog blogging year in review:
Category Archives: Kids and science
Tradition takes its toll
The tradition in the Free-Ride family (passed down from my family) is that, on Christmas morning, no one gets to start opening presents until everyone is awake and ready to start opening presents. It doesn’t matter how early the kids are awake. Until the last sleepy parent is ready, you just have to wait.
Santa does leave filled stockings on the foot of each bed, so there’s something to keep you occupied, but that only keeps you satisfied for so long.
The fact that we are visiting the grandparents-who-lurk-but-seldom-comment introduces an interesting complication to the power struggle between sleepy parents and impatient children.
Green gingerbread construction.
As I mentioned earlier, the sprogs and I decided to try our hands at building an entry for the contest to build a gingerbread house using sustainable building design practices. We read up on principles of sustainable design and stocked up on unsulfured molasses and powdered sugar.
Here’s what we did and what we learned.
Friday Sprog Blogging: co-evolution
Have you ever tried to have a conversation about one thing and found that, almost immediately, the conversation veered someplace else entirely? This is one of those.
I had heard the horrifying news that there are high school teachers — in our pretty good school district — who actually tell their students that it’s OK to cut and paste stuff from the internet into their papers without quotation marks or citation, and that Wikipedia is a great source of authoritative information (which, again, one need not cite, seeing as how the internet is like our shared brain).
My response was to launch a preemptive strike on the sprogs’ understanding of proper credit and critical evaluation of sources. It was during our discussion of the latter issue that the Free-Ride offspring seized control and took the conversation in a more interesting direction.
Dr. Free-Ride: You guys already know that there are some books that are good sources of information and some that aren’t. If you had to write a report on undersea life, you could probably get information from —
Elder offspring: One of our science books or guidebooks.
Dr. Free-Ride: Or maybe even an online source like the Monterey Bay Aquarium Online Field Guide, since the aquarium is pretty serious about accurate information. But would you want to use the giant squid book?
Younger offspring: No, because they say it’s dark at the bottom of the ocean because of curtains, and that’s not why it’s dark there. Sea plants and stuff block the sun.
Dr. Free-Ride’s better half: Well, it’s also really deep.
Dr. Free-Ride: It’s a long way for the light to travel.
Elder offspring: But there are creatures like lantern fish that can make their own light so they can see down there. I think it’s called an adaption.
Dr. Free-Ride: An “adaptation”, actually. And I’m pretty sure there are other fish that don’t even use vision to get along. That’s another adaptation to an environment where there’s not much light.
Friday Sprog Blogging: random bullets of December.
*For Hanukkah this year, the elder Free-Ride offspring got E. coli and the younger Free-Ride offspring got Rhinovirus — not the actual microbes, but the Giant Microbes stuffed versions. These gifts actually exploited a convenient loophole in Casa Free-Ride’s moratorium on new stuffed animals, seeing as how bacteria are not part of the Animal Kingdom, and viruses aren’t even technically alive.
The eyes on these plush microbes did offend the sensibilities of the Free-Ride parental units, but we survived years of toy snails with eyes not properly located on eye-stalks. The real outrage was the identical claim on the swing tags of both the E. coli and the Rhinovirus that the stuffed microbes were 1,000,000 times actual size.
“Preposterous!” declared Dr. Free-Ride’s better half. “There’s no way that virus is anywhere close to the size of E. coli!”
Santa’s scientific credentials.
David Ng at The World’s Fair asks what kind of scientist Santa Claus might be. I’m not sure I have the answer to that, but I at least have a hunch about what kind of scientist might make the most headway studying Santa. (Of course, if Santa followed Socrates’ advice to “Know thyself,” that would be the kind of scientist Santa should be.)
Friday Sprog Blogging: nighthawks.
We’ve arrived at the portion of the school year in which it is dark when I walk the Free-Ride offspring home. This means that a good bit of our observation during the walk depends on our ears instead of our eyes.
Elder offspring: (in response to the high-pitched screech-y song of a bird-like shadow swooping above us) I wonder if that was a nighthawk.
Dr. Free-Ride: I don’t know. I’m no kind of expert on bird songs. I’m not even sure how I’d tell a bird from a bat when it’s this dark.
Younger offspring: A bat is a mammal.
Dr. Free-Ride: I know that a bat is a mammal. But, in the dark, I’m not sure how I’d determine simply from how an animal sounds whether it’s a mammal or a bird.
Brain-Friendly Giftables, 2007: the ‘Hanukkah starts tonight?!’ edition.
As I mentioned last year, the Free-Ride household celebrates both Hanukkah and Christmas. And reliable sources indicate that Hanukkah starts tonight.
That means I’m on the prowl for eight nights’ worth of gifts that will engage the Free-Ride offspring’s brains without breaking the bank. And, I suspect I’m not the only adult on such a mission today.
Thus, it seems to be a good time to add to the Brain-Friendly Giftables compiled last year. Here’s a round-up of smaller items that feel like more than mere “brain-snacks”:
Friday Sprog Blogging: academic integrity for first graders.
A bonus sprog blog! Somehow, this has become cheating week, and this conversation feels like it fits in with our discussions of how do-gooders do bad and of how freshman engineering students think about cheating.
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Dr. Free-Ride: (arriving to pick up the sprogs from the afterschool program) Hey, gather up your stuff! It’s time to go home.
Younger offspring: OK. I just need to get my homework back from [a first grade classmate].
Dr. Free-Ride: What is [the classmate] doing with your homework paper?
Younger offspring: Copying the answers.
Friday Sprog Blogging: eyes and empiricism.
Dr. Free-Ride: C’mon and get out of bed. We have to leave soon.
Younger offspring: My eyes are watery.
Dr. Free-Ride: Eyes will do that sometimes.
Younger offspring: Are my eyeballs always wet?
Dr. Free-Ride: Pretty much, yeah.
Younger offspring: Are my eyeballs always squishy?