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...