Pedigreed Housewife World

For the last few weeks it has been raining off and on here and my ever-curious daughter, Briana asked me while driving home from school one day what makes rain.  I tell her that rain comes from when water on the ground like in lakes gets hot and floats up into the sky.  That’s called evaporation.  The floating water is called water vapor.  Then if the water vapor gets really cold, it will stick together and turn into a cloud.   That’s called condensation. If the cloud gets warm then it will evaporate again and the cloud will go away and there will be a nice clear sky.  If the cloud gets cold with all of that water in it, it will get heavy and turn back into water and fall back onto the ground as rain.   That’s called precipitation.  If it gets really, really cold then the rain turns into snow.  Then all of the rain on the ground forms lakes and oceans and that’s called collection.  So a cloud is really just a lot of tiny drops of water waiting to get hot and go away or get cold and tur

I was planning on doing experiments this week on the water cycle because Briana has been asking a lot about why it rains.   It has been a very rainy Fall here.   Of course, it doesn’t rain at all this week.   The one time I was counting on rain!   I check the weather forecast and see that it’s going to rain most of next week, so I decide to postpone rain experiments until next week. So what to do this week? Last week my cousin-in-law, Jessica, whose PhD work was on teaching kids to read with the help of media, commented on my Beginning the Basics blog that, among other things, I should encourage story telling to help my girls with reading comprehension.   Briana likes to make up stories, usually so that she can talk when she doesn’t want anyone else to talk.   She interrupts my husband and I’s conversations all the time and tells us that we interrupted the story she was telling.   When we ask her what her story was, she tells us some variation on a princess story or a story about L

I usually don’t blog about the everyday learning things we do.   It would be pretty boring to read that we sat around the playroom floor counting how many times we could jump or reading a lot of books everyday.   But in this one case, I’m making an exception because I have found a lot of interesting info on teaching the kids to read and I thought I’d share the wealth. First of all, Briana has become very interested in reading since her 3 rd birthday.   She wants to know how to spell everything and she wants us to point out the words in the books we read her, and I want to help her out, of course.   I googled ‘teaching toddlers to read’ and the resultant volume of contrasting information made me want to continue on our slow, random path of learning letters.   But I diligently poured through the info anyway and stumbled upon a couple of homeschooling sites that say all of the “Your baby can read” style teaching methods are flawed because they force your baby to memorize thousands of