JulieLeung.com: a life told in tidepools » homeschool

Egg Drop Experiment

jjl — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 07:59:21 +0000

Inspired by the Ignite Seattle challenge and Bre Pettis’ blog posts, the girls and I decided to try our own egg drop experiment even though we couldn’t make it to the meeting on Tuesday night.

First I got out the shipping box I had received from Apple with my MacBook repairs and I let the two older girls create their own contraptions with those egg crate and blue foam packing materials plus lots of duct tape. I figured anything Apple was using had probably been proven effective in various drop situations.

I also thought it would be fun to use ordinary household objects. So Elisabeth and I stuffed an old baby bath sponge inside a Lego container. She packed the remaining empty space with washcloths. For a fourth experiment, I did a little reading online (while trying to research how to do the actual drop) and decided to try popcorn packed inside an empty (sugar) carton.

We didn’t watch Bre Pettis’ video until after we had dropped our own eggs. As always his creations and ideas are inspiring. He also included a simplified equation that could be used to calculate the speed of the egg. Since our drop was 8 feet, the egg reached a speed of 15 miles per hour on its way from our deck rail to the concrete outside our garage.

The girls made the suggestion so I made fried rice for dinner: we ate the three eggs that survived the drop.

For more details, please watch our video! The girls each describe their creations and then we discovered which ones would survive the fall…

I can’t wait to try this one again. It’s fun and educational. And as Bre suggests, a great thing to do as a group. Thanks to Ignite Seattle for the inspiration!

Favorite pictures of the week

jjl — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 14:04:41 +0000

Ted and I have had fun photographing these Red Emperor tulips which have begun to bloom in the past few days. The girls and I planted the tulips as partcipants with other teachers and kids in a Journey North project (see this map of tulips across the continent, and a few in Europe). My days have been full with family and I plan to post more soon. In the meantime, I thought I’d try to remember how to post pictures with the setup I have at the moment (ecto spoiled me!) and share some of these spring sights with you. Hope you are enjoying beauty wherever you are in the world.

There is a spoon

jjl — Thu, 19 May 2005 11:22:11 +0000

and the girls had fun today discovering that our silverware can conduct electricity.

Mohnkuchen und Kopfsalat: food mp3s auf Deutsch

jjl — Mon, 09 May 2005 15:07:18 +0000

Ich mag Mohnkuchen!

I was happy to discover Roland Tanglao with Boris Mann auf Deutsch, speaking on the delights of poppy seed cakes and other German treats available in Vancouver.

Note to Ted Wenn wir wieder nach Canada gehen, mussen wir Mohnkuchen kaufen!

On my first trip to Germany at age 15 I enjoyed the poppy seed treats. Later, I asked a former exchange student who had become a pen pal to send me a recipe but I somehow misplaced her letter with its metric instructions (I didn’t know how to convert them at the time). Thanks for the reminder Roland and Boris: ich muss ein Rezept finden! I must also subscribe to Dogma Radio’s feed so I won’t miss any further podcast installments in Deutsch for Andreas. Ja wohl!

Coincidentally, the girls and I have made an mp3 in German on the topic of food. We weren’t discussing lieblings dishes but instead singing a song from a book we’re using for our studies. The girls became addicted to this silly tune about peas and pears, asking to sing it every time I took out the book, so I decided one day to try to record it. I don’t yet know how to podcast so we did the next best thing and made an mp3 on their blog.

As is obvious from the recording, our German skills need some help, but I think at least we are learning. The girls are learning simple phrases such as was ist das?, was ist los? and ich mag____. From our time together at Northern Voice, we knew Roland and Boris spoke German but I didn’t know they would make a podcast together to help others learn! Now we have a new homeschool resource: I let the girls listen to Roland and Boris speak German.

Why should my children learn German? Heritage aside, in this small interlinked world, someone might write a blog post about them auf Deutsch. I may be biased but I agree that my girls are die wirklich coolen Kids: danke!

Side note: through the technorati feed for “bainbridge island” I learned that we had some German guests on the island this weekend.

My first circuit

jjl — Thu, 05 May 2005 15:46:02 +0000

The box has been in the house for months and yesterday I encouraged the girls to try making something with Snap Circuits. When the light bulb turned on, Abigail’s face lit up too. I didn’t think it would happen! She stared at it for a while, amazed. Soon the girls were all addicted to circuits. Abigail, with help of Michaela, assembled the next two examples in the book. Elisabeth didn’t want to take a nap and miss the rest. The motor spinning a fan was fun. When the switch was turned off, the red circle of fan sometimes decided to fly on its own, whirling a foot or two into the air once in Ted’s office. We all laughed. The girls, proud of their creations, wanted to show Ted, marching into his office, circuit board in hand. Abigail also made a circuit that played Happy Birthday with a whistle chip controlled by clapping or touch. Then Michaela wanted to make one by herself so I helped her. She did a short cut from her sister’s but it wasn’t a short circuit.

The Snap Circuit kit is great. We have another 98 experments to try. If I remember correctly, I have to thank Katherine for her recommendation. I wish the diagram book had more explanations describing the way electricity and circuits work. It’s been a while since I’ve studied them and I don’t remember making physical representations with light bulbs and sound, although I’m sure I did at least once or twice in my education. In a sense, these are my first circuits too. I’m enjoying learning along with my girls as we put the pieces together and make connections outside and inside ourselves. Soon we’ll have a veritable circuit city….

Thanks to Doc Searls, I burned the soup..but it was worth it

jjl — Wed, 04 May 2005 10:20:36 +0000

I believe in taking responsibility for my own actions. So I know it is not truly Doc Searls’ fault that our spicy soup for dinner last (Monday) night developed another burned flavor, bits of black mixed among the vegetables. Just large pieces of wild rice, yeah, that’s what I told the family: Add some Tabasco.

the blame game

No, if I blame anyone I should blame blogger Chris O’Donnell. I was playing the dangerous game of browse-the-aggregator-for-a-moment-while-dinner-is-warming when I spied his post from yesterday. The partial feed was too tantalizing to ignore:Doc Searls connects open source, Microsoft, home education and Gatto I couldn’t wait to read what Doc had written. While the aggregator retrieved, the soup burned…

Later last night, while the pan was soaking and the kids were sleeping, I returned to read Getting Flat, Part 2 from Linux Journal. Doc’s piece, with references to works by Thomas Friedman and John Taylor Gatto hit me with its truth immediately, in a way that soaks into the soul. Although I had other duties that needed to get done last night, I wanted to post on it ASAP. While I sorted through piles of papers and evaluated bills, Doc’s words continued to cook in my mind (maybe even burn?!).

I have to say it now

Doc’s piece impacted me enough that I am willing to reveal something I’ve been reluctant to write on this blog in the past. He begins with a critique of Microsoft’s belief in the bell curve.

What’s wrong here isn’t simply the focus on Microsoft in a country where open source is a huge phenomenon. It’s that both Tom and Microsoft continue to believe IQ tests are important ways to measure citizens in a flat world. Because if there’s one thing the world is flattening fast, it’s the old caste system we call The Bell Curve.

Although I’ve never worked at Microsoft, I may be able to understand part of the company’s culture and values. Why? I attended the same high school founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen did. Lakeside was the only school where Bill G received a diploma, dropping out of Harvard after a year. It’s been called the Ivy League high school of the west coast, or something similiar, and the brick-and-ivy campus in north Seattle as well as the tuition of close to $30k a year, only encourage the comparison. To survive the competitive admission process, kids must score well on exams and demonstrate talents.

a reputation and an identity

School shapes us. The reason I haven’t mentioned Lakeside by name on this blog is because it has a reputation. My mom sent me there after years of frustration with public education, thinking it would be best for me. I wasn’t a typical student: I commuted miles across towns each morning on metro buses and received loads of financial aid. Although I’m biased as an alum, I’d guess that Lakeside School has two prominent associations in people’s minds: if you went to Lakeside, you must be wealthy and smart, in an elite way.

So Microsoft’s use of IQ tests or emphasis on the word “smart” doesn’t surprise me. Lakeside kids, which Gates and Allen still are somewhere inside, as we all are still children – can start attending the school in fifth grade, at age 10, and grow up in a culture where intelligence becomes identity. Why are we all at this school? Because we’re smart. It’s an identity that requires significant investment, both financial and otherwise, so it reinforces itself out of necessity.

I am thankful

Lakeside did provide me with a challenging academic education. Teachers at the school played important support roles in my life when I needed other adults to care for me. For those two factors I am grateful. The private school helped me survive adolescence, mentally and emotionally. I also became active as a runner on sports teams, developing physical abilities I wouldn’t have discovered if had I stayed in a larger school.

But Lakeside is also a culture – or at least it was a culture – that emphasized the belief in the elite, rather than belief in everyone. With words the school may say otherwise, but de facto, by definition, it values intelligence that can be measured on tests, prizing and thereby preserving belief in the tip of the bell curve. Doc described how he hated being judged as a child in school:

I hated being judged in school, right from the start. In fact, I hated being in school at all. In kindergarten I’d stare at the window and wish I could leave. The teacher sent me to the “thinking chair” repeatedly for not paying attention. I remember wondering what I was supposed to be thinking about. In first grade they put me in the slow reading group, because I was uncomfortable reading out loud. I could read; but for me reading Dick and Jane out loud was torture. And the sweet suburban sentiments of the books only made me wish I was out playing rather than cooped up in a classroom.

A school like Lakeside requires judgment – how else to determine who can be admitted? How else to prepare kids to excel at further judgments that happen in the system from SATs to MCATs?

A school that requires significant investment, financial and otherwise, can not help but become incorporated into family values, values the children absorb easily during their early years of education, values they will promote and pass on later in adult life as they create corporations.

what is IQ?

In his critique of Microsoft, Doc then quoted classic Gatto …genius is as common as dirt… and wrote

Here’s an undeniable fact: nobody has an IQ. Tests that measure IQ aren’t thermometers or dipsticks, despite the quantitative implications of “quotient”. They’re merely bunches of questions. You might answer them well on one day and poorly on another, without being smarter or dumber at either point in time.

Ted and I have been arguing over our children’s education recently. I wonder whether someday they might return to the school system and I worry whether I should prepare them for exams. I’m concerned that they wouldn’t be able to pass the right tests and swim in the system. When I give our kids a workbook, sometimes they don’t know what to do. They can draw in their journals, plan experiments, shape paper into three-dimensions, analyze stories and write their own tales. They can invent and create but they don’t know much about multiple choice and playing the testing games. Yet if Ted and I trained our children how to take a test and excel at it, would they be intelligent? What is intelligence? Although I’m concerned for my kids, wanting them to thrive in the world, I don’t believe tests measure much. My arguments with my husband however reveal that somewhere inside I still believe in the system, or that surviving it is important.

no need to fit in the new flat world

Doc continued

I say all this because it’s clear to me–and probably to Tom Friedman, too–that the flat new world isn’t big on fitting. Here we reward differences. We value uniqueness, creativity, innovation, initiative, resourcefulness. Every patch to the software in the server that brings you this essay was created by somebody different, with something different to contribute. Yes, a meritocracy is involved. But I can assure you it has nothing to do with grades or IQ tests. It has to do with quality of code and with the virtues that produce it, only some of which are fostered in school.

Despite being married to Ted, I can’t claim to be an open source expert, yet I agree with these values. Also this great quote:

Work matters, but curiosity matters more. Nobody works harder at learning than a curious kid.

Curiousity kept the kid alive

Our desire to preserve our childrens’ organic curiosity plays a large part in our desire to homeschool. Too often the school system crushes curiousity out of a kid. Kids have a natural desire to learn. It emerges almost from birth, with tiny hands and feet eager to crawl around corners and open cupboards. Boys and girls are happy to explore and discover, to dig deeper in the garden dirt, to walk further into the woods, to scribble songs on construction paper scraps, to pour salt and pepper into water glasses at the restaurant, to pick up slugs and rocks in the garden.

Yet often, as Doc described happening in his own life, by the time the educational system has finished with the child, the child has finished with education. Learning has become boring. Often it becomes a game of passing tests and pleasing teachers. Education seems disillusioning or irrelevant. One size doesn’t fit all: the system of uniformity leaves behind painful blisters, so to speak, on the mind and soul. Ted and I believe in discipline. There are times to do what one doesn’t want to do. We have structure. But I also believe in giving children the freedom to explore with scissors and glue, shovel and microscope, to stare at ants or birds or stars without any specific purpose, without a box to check or lesson to fulfill, only an imagination to satisfy.

We want our kids to keep that creative spark and let it burst into flame. We want them to develop initiative and resourcefulness, to learn how to teach themselves and pursue passions. We want each child to be who she was made to be, not someone stuck into a mold and squeezed but someone unique and confident, able to contribute to the world in her own ways.

Despite our occasional disagreements, Ted and I agree on his statement I want my girls to be ready to thrive in the flat new world..

There’s much more to Doc’s piece but I’m out of time and have a pot to scrub: please read.

Also read Ted’s Doc spills the beans on Open Source and Homeschooling.

Coincidentally, I happened to write part of this post while listening to Kayne West’s The College Dropout (an album which I requested from the library, out of curiousity, months ago when Grammy nominations were announced) – some fascinating relevant lyrics floating past me that I wish I could quote.

Other education related pieces:

Amanda Witt on Socialization. Years ago when Abigail was a baby, I read David Guterson’s Family Matters. I remember how he answered the socialization question, describing his children’s interactions with people of all ages, having tea with a British neighbor and also spending time with a Japanese friend, learning about World War II from both of their perspectives. The idea of spending enormous quantities of time with people the exact age as oneself is artificial, I believe, and dangerous, promoting conformity (and feeding the marketing machine). Building relationships with people across generations builds community and diversity.

The island where we live will soon have a vote on a tech levy. Cathy Nickum at Bainbridge Buzz responding to intense critique of her published questions, observed that education is about loving the questions. Yes, more and more I am learning to ask and love questions. Our two-year-old is learning to ask questions too. We hope she never stops.

The sound of signing

jjl — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 14:09:18 +0000

For six weeks this spring, the girls and I took a sign language course and it changed us more than I had imagined. I had been trying to teach my daughters a few signs, using a book, so I was eager to enroll them in a class taught by someone fluent in ASL. Abigail and Michaela were the official students but I believe my two year old Elisabeth benefitted as much as they did. She and I sat in the back of the room, learning along with her older sisters. The teacher showed the class how to sign songs, such as Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and the alphabet. Elisabeth has taken her time learning to talk but suddenly she started singing songs and signing too. Sentences followed. Before we took the course, she may have tried to put two or three words together but now she can string together long sentences and pieces of songs. Coincidence? Perhaps, but the instructor confirmed that sign language can help open the door for other communication.

I learned I liked sign language. I liked our teacher. Unlike English, ASL required the face and body as well as the word. Happy is accompanied by a smile and surprise by a drop of the jaw. Our teacher’s eyes and facial expression changed with the shape of her hands. ASL involves more drama and acting than other languages I have studied, because body language counts as much as the words/signs themselves. Since I like to gesture and speak with my hands, using my body when I talk, sign language feels natural to me. I want to study more ASL somehow.

Through Amba’s post A Town of Sight and Silence (on the excellent Ambivablog) I read an abstract of an Italian study that concluded: These results suggest that learning a sign language may lead to a cognitive advancement in hearing children. Not surprising! Amba also mentioned a community on Martha’s Vineyard where nearly everyone spoke sign language and a town planned in North Dakota for the deaf. I agree that ASL University looks like a wonderful link to fill my desire to continue studying.

Sign language is a way to share stories that speak through silence. However, since we started studying ASL, our house is not as quiet as it once was.

RIP Tadpole Jo

jjl — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 14:00:58 +0000

It’s not every morning that you have to tell your children that their pet has died.
I am grateful.

Our tiny tree frog tadpole liked to hide between the rocks at the bottom of the aquarium. It didn’t swim around often. For fear that it would die without us noticing, I would check twice a day, whenever we turned the light on and off, to see whether our tadpole was still alive.

Saturday morning, April 9, when I turned on the light, I noticed that the tadpole wasn’t moving. I found it motionless at the bottom of the tank, beneath rocks. Scooping it out with a spoon, I put it in a cup and tried to figure out how I would tell the girls when they woke up.

The kids took the news okay. We had to go out that morning so I didn’t have a lot of time. I sat them down on the sofa before breakfast. The news wasn’t a large surprise since we were always wondering whether Tadpole Jo, as the girls had named it for gender neutrality, was happy. It hadn’t eaten anything. It lived within the rocks. We worried about it. There were a few tears. I felt upset, that I had failed both my children and the tadpole.

I don’t know if we will get another one. The kids seem to want a fish. I think they are afraid another tadpole would die. I too fear that the tadpole would not survive although I have a list of ideas I would do differently the second time around.

A few days before Jo died, I challenged Ted to try to take a picture of the tadpole. Between the small size of the creature, its movement and the glass and water depth, tadpole became a challenge for photography.

Here’s the best picture Ted took:

Here’s a picture of Tadpole on a slide:

Since we had somewhere to go that Saturday morning, I put Tadpole in a plastic cup on a shelf in the refrigerator so we could look at it later under the microscope. I suppose this is a strange way to live, when one puts pets in the fridge after they are dead, the sure sign of a microbiologist mom (although I have heard a few stories about dead pet rabbits put in the freezer).

However, by the afternoon though the eyes had already started to decompose and no longer looked froglike. Tadpole Jo is missed. The tank sits empty and cleaned on the countertop. I’m not sure we how we will fill it.

Purple Peeper-eater: our experiments with a package of purple Peeps Bunnies

jjl — Fri, 08 Apr 2005 11:24:48 +0000

Since I like to try what I read on blogs (it’s documented!), I took some suggestions and cooked up a few experiments in the kitchen with the kids. I figured a 99 cent package of purple Easter Peeps Bunnies was a small price to pay for science…

Floating Peeps:
Both Michaela and Elisabeth wanted to see whether Peeps would float or sink.
And float they did.

Losing color and eyeball

Zapped Peeps

Abigail wanted to try the microwave, but didn’t want to zap any longer after the marshmellow inside started appearing…

Baked Peeps

Nice and crunchy after a few minutes at 350 degrees F.

Boiled Peeps

I was amazed to see the entire Peep disappear as it was boiled, transparent in a pot of water.

Fried Peeps

The Acid Test

Vinegar seemed to have little effect on a Peep.

The Taste Test

The girls each wanted to eat one so I let them have one purple Peep a piece.
I tried to try one myself but couldn’t get beyond the first bite…

Transparent process

jjl — Sun, 03 Apr 2005 11:31:27 +0000

Watching the frog eggs develop this week surprised me. I’ve never seen a tadpole appear. The eggs which were dull black dots last Friday when I took them from the pond, now have transformed into transparent sacs, growing in size to accommodate the metamorphosis begnning now. If I move the bowl sometimes I will see them wriggle inside the membrane, these creatures now around a centimeter in length, long and thin, life shaped like a comma. Looking at the one in the tank, I can spy a pair of gills and the distinction between head and tail. It’s amazing to watch them change from egg to tadpole, as if they are in an invisible womb, or rather a visible one. I wonder what it would be like to see our own children as they change through these small stages of early life. What would we think if we could watch them form from the earliest moments? Since we can see these tadpoles as they grow, we could call it a transparent process. But it’s not transparent: I have no idea what is happening. I can only observe and be amazed.

Footnote:
I wrote this paragraph a week ago. Monday morning we noticed the tadpole in the tank had hatched. During the past week we’ve fed it goldfish flakes and watched it dart around the tank. It spends most of its time, as a proverbial aquatic ostrich might, hiding its head in the gravel, camouflaged as debris. Already the frog-like eyes can be seen as well as feathery gills. Since it is a small frog, a tree frog, I imagine that the metamorphosis will happen fast. We are excited to watch this little life transform.