flynn011

"Killer" has been working on animating a WWI poem for his history project this term.  With the help of a local sixth former (17-year-old) who's a computer whiz, Killer has completed the project and uploaded it to YouTube. Here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jt9R3IGlOXE Please visit, comment, and encourage him -- he found the whole thing a lot of hard work, and I'd like to see him get some attention for it. Thanks.

I've been investigating my children's personality types.  For this purpose, I like the book called Nurture by Nature  written by Paul D. Tieger.  Although I found it difficult to pinpoint my own type, that's probably because I'm ENFP -- the one that finds it difficult to make decisions! The knock-on effect is that I find it hard to decide what my children are as well.  However, they stumbled onto a quiz that they took on-line. http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp Thus, they informed me of their personality types themselves. I was surprised to discover that Killer is an introvert.  He always seems so outgoing and jolly and energetic, but then again, I'm not the only one who has noticed that he sometimes gets out the Beano books and reads while his friends are over. Considering how much he and I seem to clash, I'm also not surprised that he's almost exactly my opposite: ISTP. ISTPs are easily bored with convention I'll investigate further whethe...

I had the privilege of driving with my son to Ikea the other night in order to return a damaged item.  It's a two-hour round trip, and gave us some valuable one-on-one time. On the way, I thought I'd ask him how life was going.  He's only 7, so I'm not sure how much detail I was expecting. Nevertheless, he opened up to me.  "I just wish I did my work better." Mommy-probe got into high gear: what do you mean by work? work, as in chores at home? work, as in homeschooling?  And when you say you want to do it better, do you want a schedule?  Something written out? He was pretty quiet after that, so I gave him the low-down of what our homeschool schedule was going to be like this year: the Bible study, the history, the map skills and math and art. "And you'll have a project this year.  Something for history, when we're studying World War One." "I could do something with poetry," he said.  "Like make computer stick people do the acti...

What is it with boys and computers, eh?  I mean, sure girls will play computer games, too, but research shows that fewer girls than boys display addictive behaviour when it comes to gaming, and it all seems to come down to the way their brains are wired. An article called Boys and Video Games: A Natural Attraction?  reports the fact that three brain structures --  the nucleus accumbens, amygdala, and orbitofrontal cortex -- were stimulated more in the male brain than the female during a controlled test of reactions to computer gaming. These three areas of the brain matter when one looks at their functions.  The first, the nucleus accumbens, is the  region involved in motivation and reward, feelings, and drug addiction    The second, the amygdala, are a pair of regions in the temporal lobe (located toward the bottom of the brain near the ears) and are linked to emotions and aggression, and more importantly for this post, to forming patterns related to l...

I decided to try out what I've read recently about boys and their preference for visual learning modes when I went to tutor a 15-year-old boy in Language Arts (GCSE English to my UK followers). First, he wanted to understand paragraphing in an essay.  I drew something like this: Fruit Bowl Paragraphs, I said, were like pieces of fruit, and the essay was like a fruit bowl.  Most simple essays have three or four pieces of fruit in their fruit bowl, such as an orange, a pear, and an apple.  The key to good writing is to make sure each fruit-bit remains whole; in other words, the writer has to make sure that bits of orange don't try to get into the apple, but that the orange stuff keeps to the orange paragraph, and the apple stuff stays with the apple. I love it when a light seems to go off in a child's brain!  Imagine, 15 years old, bright, top-set sort of student, and yet no one had ever bothered to really explain paragraphing to him. His next concern was about knowing...

Since re-reading Michael Gurian's book  The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons From Falling Behind in School and Life , I've been thinking about my provision for my sons in a whole new light.   My 3-year-old is still supposedly in non-school mode -- a bit of Montessori practical life here, a bit of reading or writing there, and a lot of playing cars with his 5-year-old sister. My 7-year-old, however, has had a mixed bag over the past year of success and stress, and it's for him that I need to make some changes Here's what definitely worked : having a daily checklist for him to tick off his accomplishments; getting a chance to work on the computer once he had finished his work for the day; map skills (by both  Carson-Dellosa and School Specialty Publishing ); the new handwriting program called  Write from the Start ; playing active games before we started school such as "The Giant Says" (ie, Simon Says but with a gobbling-up bit when you do it wrong); and ...

Mouths full of food, cups of tea at our side, children playing bubbles outside or finishing up their radio plays for the day's topic, our last co-op of the year was typical of our two-weekly meetings. Various discussions followed about our plans next year, about who might join our group, about the topics we could cover. And then this bizarre but funny conversation started. It went something like this: Mum 1: I've got so much time now that I've been cross with my husband and stopped ironing his shirts. Mum 2: I don't own anything that I iron. Mum 3: I think we should all save the planet and just stop ironing altogether.  In fact, I want to design t-shirts that say: "Go Green: Stop Ironing!" Mum 2: Why do we iron anyway? Mum 3: I think it all started with posh people -- they could afford to have servants who ironed for them, and then everyone else wanted flat clothes, too -- to look posh. Mum 1: I think there are some parts of the world where you really have to ...