No Dig Garden

061028NDG
Originally uploaded by quadrapop.

We recently made a no dig veggie and herb garden in the back yard.

See the slideshow at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/quadrapop/sets/72157594348272961/

The other one...

060927alxarris
Originally uploaded by quadrapop.

Here's Alxarris, she's a bit more camera shy than her camera slut sister. It took me amonth to get a decent shot of her.

The box they are peeking out of is a nest box made by C photo of that being made coming soon.

Result of a Brainfart

060823daverat
Originally uploaded by quadrapop.

At least that is what my husband reacons happened when I took the kids to the Pet shop early in August and came home with two ratlets, cage and food things....

The rat in this image is Dave (she's a girl;-) Here she is about 5-6 weeks old.

After a some what stressy start (the 3 yr old would not leave them alone...) they have grown into a fine pair of young rats. Their cage and run area is constantly evolving as they become tamer and we think of new things to make for their amusement.

This exercise is in part a Home Ed project centered on Health and Physical Ed, with forays into Tech and Science.

But really I got them because I felt outnumbered and needed some female pets to even up the gender balance in the house;-)

Acid-Base Karaoke

Some fun with Queen and Acid-Base reactions:
http://meaghersclasses.podomatic.com/entry/2006-09-18T09_13_34-07_00
Actually there are a number of useful video podcasts on this site made
by Perth Chemistry Teacher, Richard Meagher. The podcasts are aimed at
Yr 11 & 12 level.

And they still want the right to bear arms...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4371403.stm
at least one a year for how many years?

inspired use of food...

...to illustrate the parts of the cell....
http://kristyk.org/2006/09/25/because-melons-are-good-for-more-than-eating/

Every aspiring comic artist should have this

This is a blog entry with links to the best scans (and history) of Wally
Wood's 22 Panels That Always Work that you are likely to find.
If you have an aspiring comic book artist or writer in your family then
these are a must. Download the images and print them out and stick them
up in the loo or give them to your proto-comic artist with all due
reverence.

Thanks to Neil Gaiman and his blog for this
link.

another stirling engine site

Stirling engine info site - you may have to scroll around a bit...

stirling engine

http://www.ent.ohiou.edu/~urieli/stirling/engines/engines.html
need to scroll down for a description

Homeschooling on Life Matters

Homeschooling Teenagers
unfortunately there is unlikely to be a transcript and the podcast is only available for about 4 weeks from publication.

I know a couple of the people interviewed. We haven't been in Sydney for several years and had lost contact with one of the families interviewed so it was great to hear their voices.

Shakespeare on line - complete works

http://www-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/
http://ise.uvic.ca/index.html
http://books.google.com/googlebooks/shakespeare/

enjoy

Love K

Post Modernism and thoughts on Classical stages of learning

The other morning on The Book Show on RN they were discussing the
teaching of English and History in schools...
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2006/1664443.htm
as happens my brain went off on a tangent (what I love about RN - it's
thought provoking radio) and got me thinking about the tages of learning
our children go through.

I agree with the Classical idea of the 3 stages (vocab, grammer,
rhetoric) in each subject, but do not apply this to each child's learning at the same age.

Anyway, as our children progress through their childhood we can see them
going through these three stages in everything they do.

They learn to speak and understand single words or phrases, then to
speak and understand complex sentences, and finally to discuss how those
sentences are put together and relate to each other in different forms
of speech or information (at about this time reading and writing will
happen spontaneously if they have not appeared already)...

Watch your children as they learn a new skill or take up a new interest,
they will progess through vocab, grammer and finaly rhetorical stages.
(even within those 3 stages you will see similar stages occuring if you
look closely enough)

Schools are failing when it comes to ensuring that each child has
mastered enough of each stage of understanding (vocab, grammer,
rhetoric) in a subject before moving onto the next stage with its
increased complexity - thus you have children that are only barely
capable of the grammer stage (putting the vocab parts together in the
right order) being asked to perform complex rhetorical disections (post
modernist ones in the RN show's examples) of texts that most would not
be capable of till adulthood at uni...

My thought for the morning...

Math in Nature

take a photo journey through maths in nature

Catching up...

Something to make the skin crawl...
AND AN INSPIRATION FOR ALL ARACHNID LOVERS!
You can get to know your own forehead mites the following way: stretch
the skin tight with one hand, carefully scrape a spatula or butter knife
over the skin in the opposite direction, squeezing out traces of oily
material from the sebum glands. (Avoid using too sharp an object, such
as a glass edge or sharpened knife.) Next scrape the extracted material
off the spatula with a cover slip and lower the slip face down onto a
drop of immersion oil previously placed on a glass slide. Then examine
the material with an ordinary compound microscope. You will see the
creatures that literally make your skin crawl.
— Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life, Belknap 1992, 177.

Positive/Negative Travelling Exhibition (nearly over)
A travelling photography exhibition highlighting the plight of HIV/AIDS
in SE Asia. Currently in South Australia.
http://www.positivenegative.net.au/whenwhere/sa.asp
Sneak preview on website at:
http://www.positivenegative.net.au/photos/photos_picone.asp
Resource pack:
http://www.positivenegative.net.au/schoolresources/

Disasters!
http://visz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/woalert.php?lang=eng
the things one can do with google earth!

Cosleeping article:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2179265_1,00.html

http://www.askoxford.com/wordgames/?view=uk
we've been doing a crossword a day (mostly DH and me) but there is
hangman and other harder word games too. and you can get the UK version
or US version and so have consistent spelling across the games

I had to share this priceless moment:

S: How much money do you need to be rich, as a human?
Mum: What, in real life?*
S: Yes
Mum: Well, it depends on where you live...
(pause)
S: I don't know... (runs off to the living room)

Mum sits wondering what that was all about.
*This isn't such a silly question as I've been caught out by questions
relating to Runescape or other online aspects of our plugged in
children's lives

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-2168328,00.html
interesting article about the barbarians vs romans view of history and a
book by Terry Jones (yes, the ex-Python)

All for being a barbarian, myself...

Not recommended if you have a dial-up Internet connection, but
broadbanders might enjoy some selections from NASA TV:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap060529.html

(sound, video)

Rocket launches, maths tutorials, interviews with scientists, images
from space probes...

Kids cartoon on ABC at 4.27pm atm, CGI and very amusing, even has some
aspects that look quite period...
http://www.ytv.com/programming/shows/Jane_Dragon/
collaboration between Canada's Nelvana and NZ's Weta W'kshop...

Article on Home ed and the 'creative class' in USA

http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/02/27/171819.php

What Lori has to say is true of Australia too, the creative class is
highly represented in our home ed communities and the States are
responsible for setting their Education Dept's regulations.

Each time there is a review of the various Education/Schools Acts it
becomes harder to edcuate your children at home without government
intervention and increasingly more onerous 'requirements'.

Victoria is going through a review right now and may well lose the least
interefering recognition of Home Ed in all of our Education/Schools Acts.

WA is coming up for review.

'School at home' is unworkable as no families have 25+ kids to control
and the whole point of home ed is individualised learning. Home Ed is
about learning not mass education. Home Ed is about true socuialisation
within the community not within the artificial world of an institution.
Home Ed is about preparing children to take part in society not a
factory. Home Ed is a symptom of the Information Age.

100 best first lines:

http://www.litline.org/ABR/100bestfirstlines.html

Top 10 sample:

"1. Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, /Moby-Dick/ (1851)

2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in
possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. —Jane Austen,
/Pride and Prejudice/ (1813)

3. A screaming comes across the sky. —Thomas Pynchon, /Gravity's
Rainbow/ (1973)

4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano
Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him
to discover ice. —Gabriel García Márquez,/ One Hundred Years of
Solitude/ (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)

5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. —Vladimir Nabokov,
/Lolita/ (1955)

6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its
own way. —Leo Tolstoy, /Anna Karenina/ (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)

7. riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay,
brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and
Environs. —James Joyce,/ Finnegans Wake/ (1939)

8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking
thirteen. —George Orwell, /1984/ (1949)

9. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age
of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it
was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the
season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of
despair. —Charles Dickens, /A Tale of Two Cities/ (1859)

10. I am an invisible man. —Ralph Ellison, /Invisible Man/ (1952)"

So, which is your favourite?

Glass Blowing in Margaret River

060123MP31firepear
Originally uploaded by quadrapop.

We visited Margaret River recently and visited The Melting Pot and Kent Legrand Glass. To see more photos of our stay please go to my Margaret River Trip set

IYD&D

2006 International Year of Deserts & Desertification

More info from Education Network of Australia on Deserts

A flickr group for IYDD

Optical illusions links

Websites with lots of optical illusions and their explanations.

http://www.planetperplex.com/en/optical_illusions.html

http://www.grand-illusions.com/opticalillusions/

http://www.grand-illusions.com/opticalillusions/index02.shtml