Pedigreed Housewife World

I flew to a girl’s weekend last week and since then the kids have been asking a lot of questions about flight.  In fact they’ve been begging for a “flying experiment”.  Today we’re “finally” going to talk about how things fly in the air. When the kids get up from their naps they refuse their usual snack and half hour of tv to get straight to the experiment.  I love the enthusiasm.  Since I know that they have been thinking about flying for a while now, I asked them why they think a plane stays up in the air.  “Because that’s what flying means” Briana tries.  I hand them foam airplanes (courtesy of Arby’s happy meals from some time ago) to get them thinking about the parts of the planes.  Then I ask again the question in a more specific way – What PART of the plane keeps it up in the air?  Briana looks down at the plane in her hands and says “The Wings!” Abby is playing with her plane already and saying, “flap flap” as she flies her...

So I can’t take credit for today’s activity.  My kids are hooked on a tv show called Sid the Science Kid and after each episode they insist that we repeat the experiment ourselves.  I thought I’d share this one because the kids have been talking about it non-stop all week. Sid was teaching the kids about smell and how the molecules travel through the air and into our noses and that’s how we smell things.  The nice thing about following Sid is that the kids have already learned the basics, so we can just have fun with it.  Today we’re doing a smell test to see if the molecules from different foods can travel up to our noses and tell us what the food is without seeing it. I had mini potting cups leftover from when we planted our herbs, strawberries, and tomatoes on Earth day so I decided to use those.  Into each one I placed a different item – garlic (which replaced cinnamon in round 1), coffee grounds, chocolate, peanut butter, and grapefruit. ...

I just finished reading a book called ‘Moonwalking with Einstein’ by Joshua Foer for my other pet project, www.readerroundtable.com .   The book is about how Foer, a journalist, set out to understand and report on the US and World Memory Competitions and ended up winning the US Memory Championship and setting a US record in speed cards.   In it he states that memory is the “seat of our values and source of our character” (p. 269) It also stipulates, in defense of rote memorization in schools, that you must have memorized facts to apply them and that in applying them you learn.   I.e . you can’t learn without memorizing.   So I thought we should work on our memories this week.   (By the way, my one and only Reader Roundtable plug – if you want to talk about how children learn and the benefits of rote memorization in schools and/or any other aspect of the value of memorizing, log in and join our Roundtable book club discussion on Nov 16 th at 9pm EST o...

Briana has been asking me to show her how to read a real map for 2 weeks now.   Last week was her 4 th birthday and in all of the preparations I did not plan an activity for the week – the first time since I started the blog that I didn’t do an activity (except holidays and vacations).   While she was happy with new toys to play with, Briana was still angry that we didn’t do an activity.   She made me promise on the way to school on Monday morning that we would definitely do a map activity after naptime.   I’m happy that she’s thirsty for new knowledge. When the kids get up from their naps, I uphold my end of the promise and am ready to teach them how to read a real map.   They, however, insist that Barbie and Ken need new clothes on before we can start.   Apparently, learning about maps is a black tie affair in Barbie’s world.   Now we’re ready. Directions The first thing we do is to learn what directions are on a map.   I draw a s...

With Halloween coming up, the girls have been learning “spooky” songs in their school music class lately.  Briana told me that one such song was about bones and how they make you move around.  I laughed because she somehow thought bones were like ghosts or something and they pushed you all day.  I then explained to her that bones are under our skin to protect our organs, hold us up, and let us move.   I had the girls touch their knees.  See how hard it is under there?  That is a bone.  We poked our arms and feet for bones and discovered our skull in our head.  But there was a lot of skepticism, so this week I told the girls we’d learn more about bones. I figured that I might as well start with bone songs since that’s what sparked their interest in the first place.  I thought that I knew two songs about bones, but upon looking up all of their lyrics online, I discovered that they were actually the same song.  ‘Dem Bones’ i...

By now my kids are well accustomed to me chasing them around with a camera.   They also like to turn the camera around and take pictures of me by themselves.   Since the camera is a mainstay in our house, I figured I should teach the kids how it works. We start by making a pinhole camera.   This is super easy to do.        Take a cylindrical cardboard oatmeal box (any empty cardboard box should work).      Poke a hole in the center of the bottom of the box with a pencil.      Put wax paper on the other end (the open side) of the box Done.   We sit in Briana’s slightly darkened room (rainy day about 5pm) and turn on her princess lamp.   We pull a blanket over our heads and stick the side of the camera with a hole in it outside of the blanket.   I tell Briana that if she points the camera at the lamp then we can see a picture of the lamp on the wax paper. As an aside,...