Senor Parrot's Perch

It’s science fair time at my daughters’ school. Science rules. Science Rocks. Science fairs are the quintessential science education experience. When I heard this yesterday evening, I was pumped, ready to spring into action and make…whoops, I mean, guide, my third-grader in her science fair project. I had it already picked and designed in my head. We talked it over and agreed to make several demonstrations on electricity, creating our own electric dynamo and powering it in various ways. As a side project or maybe, after a bit of research, we’d do a solar power project and maybe something fun like a potato battery. In two minutes I had about twenty books held on reserve for her to read and glean from. Then the stunning news.

My wife burst both our bubbles when she told us that parents had complained about all the work they’d gone through in previous science fairs. It seemed that parents do all the work on these projects while their kids plug into TV. Can you believe that? So, now, it’s a group project where the kids get placed in groups, select a project from a pre-qualified list and then work together. Ugh! How am I supposed to engineer some high tech learning and bonding time with my girl that will dazzle the judges and get her a scholarship to UW-Madison? I got dem science fair blues.

Personally, I work in a fantastic team at my place of employment, for the present. It isn’t always that way. I’ve been on teams with total slackers and been stuck with all the work. In my classes, I’ve seen student teams nearly torpedoed by one or two slackers. Without controls and penalties, along with the rewards, I’ve never seem teams work well. Even families are failing as teams in these science fairs, unable to get their kids to do their share of the work and learning. Epic failure.

Well, our science books will be waiting for me at the library by Saturday morning. Me and my third-grader will just have to learn how to power the future by ourselves. Our science fair demo will be for just us, with maybe a video posted on youtube for the family. My daughter will be as pumped as I am about exploring the world of nature and science power, and we’ll have a really good time.

I.N.K. stands for Interesting Nonfiction for Kids. It’s a blog for writers and educators, focusing on kid’s nonfiction. I’ve read it from time to time and found it very interesting, and I returned to it again this morning. The I.N.K. blog is a good place to connect to kid’s nonfiction writers and educators and to listen into their conversation about their craft and their books.

Kid’s Nonfiction is important because it seeds the fallow ground of our kids’ minds and produces much different results than fiction. Unlike learning magic, nonfiction actually empowers kids to see the possibilities within themselves and it works like much like the yellow brick road to Oz, taking kids to a place where they can grow wiser and find answers to their questions.

After eating out last Friday night, the girls wanted to shop. It’s a still a little too close to this past Christmas to start in with shopping again, so I turned them down. Driving home, though, I remembered an ad (really a sponsorship on Wisconsin Public Radio) for a new store in the Madison, WI area called I’m Board that specializes in board games. We’d never been there so we went looking. Good idea, too. The girls got to shop and we discovered a fun, new store.

We found it fairly easily and went inside to find board and RPG games for all ages, but primarily for teens and adults, with lots of really cool games I’d never seen or heard of before. After spending about 30 minutes or so here we left with two games and a Game-On attitudes.

If you live in the Madison, WI area, I’d recommend looking for I’m Board. It’s on University Avenue in Middleton, just west of Middleton Cyclery on the same side. They have an open game room with many games available to play and scheduled times for other games where kids and adults from around the area can meet and play.

I also really like I’m Board’s motto: Unplug * Interact * Reconnect. It’s true. We have more fun, connect more with each other, and share in lots of fun and create more memories while we play these games together. What games did we buy? Poo (a card game where monkeys toss poo at each other) and Say Anything.

Increasing core knowledge is critical to reading comprehension and learning. Vicki Cobb has written a thought provoking post titled An Outside-The-Box Proposal.  She writes about bolstering students’ core knowledge by  including writing by award winning children’s non-fiction authors in the classroom curriculum. In her article she asks several questions:

• What would happen if teachers and authors worked together to share knowledge and skills?
• Can an author’s love of the subject infect students with the love of learning?
• What would happen to learning if non-fiction books replaced textbooks, moving from enrichment to the core knowledge component in the classroom?
• How would students be affected if they got to meet and talk with the authors?
• And (this of course appeals to the economist in me), how can we do this within a school’s budget?
• What would happen to the learning environment of your school if your teachers and award-winning children’s nonfiction authors collaborated in a large-scale project where everyone was involved in sharing knowledge and skills?

I like this idea. In the upper level college classes we start to read sources instead of textbooks and that’s when the real fun in learning takes place. It’s OK when we have them together, but reading the original and talking about it is much more stimulating and it gives everyone more confidence, ending up in more advanced and more agile learning.

My own daughters are drawn to reading science  books, probably in large part because their mother is a microbiologist and I just love the stuff, and we both enthusiastically encourage it. But if they weren’t well written, telling a rich story, I don’t think they’d have anywhere near the interest that they do. On trips to the library they will grab an armful of books about the ocean or physics to take home to read just for pleasure reading.

My kids like to learn. But something about their textbooks doesn’t grab their interest the same way a good, short, well-written science book does. One of the aspects of these kind of books is that they teach in a narrative, story-telling style, that puts the information into a more accessible context. Also, these books are usually teeming with fantastic illustrations and photographs -who doesn’t love any book by Nic Bishop? When written this way, the books hold kids’ interest so much better and they retain a lot more of what they have read. After finishing a good book they want to go back to the library to find another. When we’re in the  bookstore, they pull them from the shelves and ask to buy them.

So, go out and get smart. Get an armload of good science books today and start reading. I’m sure you would like Pelican’s Catch by Janet Halfmann. There’s many more out there that everyone in the family will enjoy.

I enjoyed this MovieWeb interview with children’s book author Cressida Cowell, who wrote the How to Train Your Dragon books. In the interview, she talks about her feelings about having her fantastic book made into an animated movie. She also talks about her unique summers spent on an isolated island with her family that in many ways inspired her writing.

The first time I saw How to Train Your Dragon Book 1 in a bookstore, several years back, I was hooked.  I was eager to see the movie when it came out. I took the family to see it in 3-D at the IMAX. It was too intense for the youngest, but my oldest and I enjoyed it every bit as much as we did the books.

I saw this singing robot at Wired magazine. Watch the video and read the subtitles closely, since much of it is in Japanese. This is Cool Science! A robot diva programmed to mimic a human singer’s facial movements breathing patterns.

Japanese engineers have taken a different tack in their robotic development, working to make more lifelike robots that will integrate well into human society. To do this, they’ve followed some interesting learning curves. I liked how they use maps of mouth movement and even integrating breathing patterns into the robot’s speech.

Did you catch the reference to using hidden Markov technology to train the robot when to breath? What they are referring to is (more…)

Moose and Magpie, by Bettina Restrepo and illustrated by Sherry Rogers is an interesting and entertaining children’s book designed to teach young children about Moose. Moose are not you’re usual topic for a children’s book. I also found it a bit odd in its approach, but my younger daughter loved it, laughing all the way through. Since she’s the better critic, I’m going with her assessment.

Magpie loves a good, funny riddle, and good natured Moose enjoys them, too. The two friends pass through the seasons as Moose grows from a calf to adulthood, and along the way kids learn (more…)

Here’s some Cool Science News: Google has developed a self-driving robot car and has been testing it out. Right now, it requires a human in the driver seat to take control in an emergency, but think of the possibilities!

Parents, have a teen tethered to texting? Here you go! Have an idiot driver who takes the same commute you do every day who swerves around across three lanes, only in their lane on the average? (I’ve got one on my commute – honking has never changed his behavior.) This is just the think for them, too.

Here’s the story from SmartPlanet and the video:

Those amazing little bees appear to learn how to navigate from their hive to pollen sources and then back again. In today’s Cool Science News we repeat a little article from the New York Times, Training Flights for Bees, science writer C. Claiborne Ray reports that scientists have monitored the flying patterns of young bees and determined that they appear to learn how to navigate between food sources and the hive.

Each flight is a little longer in distance, taking the 3-week old bees on more complicated trips into the wild. These result in the bees learning to navigate their environment and become fledgling food finders for the whole hive.

It’s interesting what careful observation teaches us. Using radar techniques, the scientists were able to track the bees as they learned to navigate the environment around their hive. This shows that bees have the capacity to learn complex behaviors that (more…)

I’m a sucker for books like this. Loving science, married to a scientist, I’m drawn to the lives of these wonderfully fascinating people. Whaling Season: A Year in the Life of an Arctic Whale Scientist by Peter Lourie details the life of John Craighead George, a field biolgist studying bowhead whales, and living with the Inupiaq Eskimos in Barrow, Alaska. Known as “Craig” to everyone around him, he has been studying the whales for most of his adult life, taking careful measurements of every harvested whale, and collecting lore from the Inupiaq over the many years he has lived among them, all the while he keeps his eye out for hungry polar bears as he travels the ice-packed landscape.

Author Peter Lourie has done an excellent job with this book. He portrays the day-to-day life of the scientist, showing how his work is done, the enjoyment and satisfaction he gains, the relationships he builds with the Inupiaq, and the valuable results of all his hard work.

From a family of scientists, it is really no surprise that John Craighead George would become one himself. From early on he loved the outdoors and spent many days in the wilderness. He spent some time when he was a young man working at a scientific station in Alaska, and after earning his Ph.D., he returned to work as a field scientist to study the bowhead whales that live year-round in the frigid arctic waters.

One facet of his work is to monitor the number of whales harvested by the Inupiaq. Each whale that is killed by the Inupiaq must be measured and samples of various parts are taken. Craig is careful to respect the Alaskan natives as they carry on their traditional livelihood. He has also carefully noted all their stories and descriptions of the bowhead whales, discovering the generations of knowledge that they have accumulated (more…)