These curious little balls commonly known as water pearls (I prefer my name) are in a word…captivating.
Their usefulness in exploring science and math are obvious and you can find tons of great ideas all over the Internet for incoroprating these little gems into your learning adventures.
Or maybe simply playing with and marveling at them holds just as much educational value.
Sometimes poetry can be found in the most unexpected places.
During the course of our virtual traveling this summer, we decided to touch down in Times Square via a Ravensburger puzzle. The adventure took place on our dining room table until this past week when we decided some fresh air and bit of sunshine was in order.
We slid what little of the puzzle we had completed onto an unused presentation board so that it could be stored outside. The board allows us to leave the puzzle on the picnic table over night tucked safely from the family of four rambunctious raccoons and other neighborhood nocturnal wildlife who have adopted my boy’s ninja warrior pool as a watering hole—check out the foot print!
So with only a few days of summer left, unplug in the great outdoors!
– Kim
Help us grow a collective “Unplug” list. Share your ideas on our Facebook page. Pass it on, and let’s see how long of a list we can create. If you have a longer story to share about “unplugging,” email it to us at [email protected] and we may just feature it here on four&twenty.
Here’s one from my house:
Play a board game.
My boys invited a friend to our house. Since the PS3 was off limits, they decided to play a board game. They were shocked to discover their friend had never played Monopoly, “No way.”
After a few minutes of indignant boy noises they, they stomped off to the game cabinet and passed on their wealth of knowledge in the most chaotic dissemination of Monopoly rules that I have ever witnessed. Midway through the game I brought them a bowl of popcorn so I could eavesdrop for a minute. The mock landlords were taking their jobs very seriously.
For the next couple hours my boy’s buddy was unplugged.
That’s the way with imagination.
– Kim
At first the Unplug Challenge gave me laryngitis. Seriously, the vibration of my vocal chords was a jumprope snapping, “No No No No No!”
The simple summer goal was to challenge my boys that low tech is fun. It began with a Victor Hugo quote posted prominently on the front of our refrigerator, “He who every morning plans the transaction of the day and follows out that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through the maze of the most busy life. But where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incidence, chaos will soon reign.”
My plan was more like a nudge. So each morning I reminded my boys that it would be their responsibility to deny the technological progress of the 21st century, dust off their imagination, and engage in endless possibility.
At first my boys were bored.
R-e-a-l-l-y bored.
I reminded myself that boredom might be just the garden for imagination to bloom.
And on it went, “Mom can I _____________________.?”
Each time the blank was filled in with a noun or phrase having to do with video games or the word-wide-web, the answer was an affirmative NO.
Guess what?
The Challenge is doing the trick! I’m witnessing the resurgence of imagination in my pre-teen and teenage sons.
This weekend boredom led Liam and Søren to rummage through our shed where they discovered our old inflatable pool. That gave them an idea.
Since the adventure was to consume most of Saturday and Sunday, I enjoyed the snapshots I encountered here and there.
To begin, blowing up the thing was quite a challenge. Think Home Improvement. Yes, they actually began trying to use Dad’s air compressor to inflate. Not bad. I didn’t have the heart to stop their Tim-the tool-man-Taylor technique. Instead, I steadied myself for the pop. Luckily the compressor and the pool were not compatible so we never got to that point. Next, they tried the bicycle pump. No luck. Now think Tale of the Three Little Pigs. Yep, old school. They huffed and puffed for nearly an hour. Sure enough I eventually heard the hose running and, donning their beachwear, the quick-change artists were splashing, which is about all that a big lumbering teenager can do in an inflatable pool. Or so I thought. Not long after a few rounds of splashing, I saw them rigging up a balance beam, adjusting the ladder.
“What are you thinking boys?”
“Backyard-Ninja-Warrior!!!”
Of course.
That’s when the fun got really fun—cannonballs from the ladder and walking the plank.
Suffice to say, my boys are enjoying old school activities, the kind that don’t involve watts or mega bites.
R-e-a-l-l-y enjoying, imagine that.
– Kim
This summer we’re exploring our Italian roots via an extended virtual tour. It’s such fun visiting all the places we would visit if we could really visit. Thanks to the wonder of technology, we can experience the landscape of Italy in the comfort of our home.
We’re beginning slow. On Sundays we eat Italian, risotto is a new family favorite that we are trying to perfect. Our touring is geographic and historical and with each click, we wander where our heels lead. Art, music, people, events, we never quite know where the trail will lead. And the great thing about a trip like this is that we can afford to stay as long as we want!
By mid-June we dove into year-one Rosetta Stone. On the 4th of July when we decided to explore the Venetian art of Millefiori, we were daring enough to venture the art of translation. “Millefiori” is Italian for “thousand flowers” by the way. Originally this art form was accomplished with glass and fire. Thankfully, nowadays a millefiori-esque process can be used to make designs with polymer clays. So we pulled out our tub of Fimo and experimented. Using the Millefiori cane technique, we made long tubes with the simple star shape and were delighted by the simple act of slicing star after star until the tube was a transformed to a mass of tiny beads—a souvenir of stars.
– Kim
It‘s true. I’m one of those people who do not get sports analogies. So last week, I was tickled when I noticed Søren unraveling a baseball.
The activity began when he found an old ball in the ivy. He tossed the treasure toward the lolling blue sky a few times then snuck into the work shed and emerged a few minutes later with a pocketknife. He deftly skinned the thing and was delighted to discover that its innards were a tightly wound mass of fine thread.
He spent an hour or so unwinding without an ounce of boredom. When our backyard had been properly spider-webbed, he came to the end of the fine thread and hit a layer of wound cord. He kept at the business of unwinding and was delighted to discover that at the core of the baseball were two wooden hemispheres, “Mom, look…!”
“I never knew.”
I suggested Søren make something out of the baseball components and went back to my gardening, assuming he would shrug off my suggestion. But soon after that he came to me with his summer baseball sculpture, a non-functional tropical smoothie tumbler.
Now there’s a sports analogy I can chew on.
– Kim
It’s the same every year. After the rush of December festivities there is that tiny six-day space to reflect upon the year passing and to anticipate the year ahead. In that small space there’s a certain stillness of mind, it’s brief, but wonderfully still and remarkably hopeful.
I’m sure you know the place, the place where we breathe life to resolution.
But here I am, well into January 2012 head spinning, wondering how I missed the respite of that space. Was it the ordinary bustle that craves my attention like the stomach flu? Was it four transitions looming—a daughter entering her final university undergraduate semester, a son preparing to graduate high school, another son preparing to enter high school, and my youngest son moving on to conquer middle school? Was it the back-to-school dash? Lesson Planning? Grocery shopping? Dust? Laundry?
Faster! Faster! Faster! Is this what life is to be?
So even though the six-day window has passed, here it is, for 2012, my resolution is distilled to a single word: Balance.
The potential of the dandelion is inherent to its essence. So it is with our children.
A quality elementary and secondary education provides abundant opportunities for each child to master skills—phonics, grammar, vocabulary, reading comprehension, math facts, grammar, historical and scientific facts, and so on— that will allow for deeper exploration. But when foundational skills become the central objective of education, we sacrifice the promotion and development of curiosity.
Curiosity is the gateway to the labyrinth of learning.
Education that has no room for curiosity, is not only disheartening, it’s dangerous.
Curiosity and imagination are vital to the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual well being of the child. Stimulating the heart, mind, and soul is essential to a full academic experience.
I firmly believe that educating checklist style promotes the skill of cramming.
Let’s face it. The skill of cramming is central to most academic pursuit.
What did we do for New Year’s Eve? Movie night. Sure, we belong to Netfiix, but we also have an expansive old-school DVD collection.
I am happy to report that last night old school won, Between the Folds.
If we are being honest most of us hold pretty low expectations for a sheet of paper. Scribble, scribe, crumple, and toss. But this film hyperbolically demonstrates the magnitude of paper’s underutilization. Truth is folding paper taps into paper’s latent potential. Work a single fold and the sheet of paper, and voila, the sheet of paper will never be the same.
This film takes us to the intersection of math and science and art and invites us to linger.
When I shared this film with my science workshop last spring, I wrote a ridiculously complex equation for a hyperbolic paraboloid on the board.
Next I handed out large pre-cut squares of paper and told the students to do the math. They were to fold a single hyperbolic parabola. Well into the folding with the room quiet except for paper crinkling mathematically I reminded them to consider their own endowed potential, “Think about it, even paper has hidden potential that is realized with a bit of concentrated effort. Is your potential worth the work?”
This afternoon, on the very first day of 2012, my oldest son handed me a gift.
As you can see, it looks suspiciously like a Christmas ornament, but it’s not.
Honestly, I am quite sure this is more than art. This is language, inspiration, translation, transposition.
Taylor took everything he gleaned from this film and globed it to haiku.
This is visual poetry at its best.
Watch the film and I think you will see what I mean.
Here’s to more critical creative thinking in 2012!
“Mom, how many times have you seen A Charlie Brown Christmas?”
I was flooded with memories. Childhood had markers back then, and the Charlie Brown specials were on the top of the list.
“Um… thing is, when I was a little girl Charlie Brown was a treat regulated by television networks. There were no DVD players in the olden days.”
The little exchange triggered my husband to read this article to our family.
It all began 46 years ago, and they say Charlie Brown is here to stay.
Tidings of joy!
I began the writing workshop with Cuisinare rods and colored pencils. My writers looked puzzled.
“Today you’re going to make a Cuisinaire construction and then describe how you made the construction with words on paper so that a reader will be able to navigate through the paragraph to create an identical construction.”
This is my idea of a hands-on How To paragraph.
“Just like math, when writing instructions you have to show all your steps.”
Young writers need to practice working through the process of crafting words. It’s challenging teaching young writers that words need to be wisely chosen and crafted carefully to accurately communicate a specific idea to an audience of readers. This is challenging because the task is a process that involves tremendous effort on the part of the writer and young writers want to skip steps. Participating in this work over time sets a foundation for the rhythm of the writer’s routine to be established.
Before beginning, I challenged my writers to keep in mind the cardinal rule of our writing workshop:
“Words are scribbled on paper for a reader to read… your words are a gift.”
The young writers eagerly spent an hour an a half contentedly drafting rough drafts paragraph that they took home to self-conference and craft to final draft.
“Next week we will exchange final drafts and see if readers can make the construction.”
Begin all writing experiences by breaking the task at hand into steps. Remind writers that writing is a process. Getting young writers to engage in process is a tricky business that takes time to root, but truth be told, process alone takes the daunting out of writing.
We broke this specific project down as follows:
What’s your big idea?
Make a construction with Cuisinaire rods. Map the construction on graph paper with colored pencils.
Write it down…!
Begin by use a topic wheel to outline each step involved in the construction. Craft a paragraph following the topic wheel outline. Be sure to introduce the topic with a sentence that hooks the reader into the big idea. The supporting sentences should include specific details that will allow the reader to navigate through the Cuisinaire construction without a hitch. Craft a single sentence at the end of the paragraph that will conclude the exercise and add an interesting clincher that makes idea of the paragraph echo in the mind of the reader.
Conference with yourself and someone else…
Now, re-read what you wrote and decide, as a reader, if you are accurately communicating your big idea. Use a red pen to make changes. Ask someone else to read your work and to add red marks when they find confusing areas, holes, or dead ends in your “How To” paragraph.
Revise
Make a final sweep with the red pen for common errors—spelling, punctuation, capitalization, tense, and so on.
Final Draft
Use your best handwriting or type up a final draft!
