Stop covering him already!

Why is the media giving so much air time to Pat Robertson's comments about Haiti? It just encourages him.

Silver Lining

We watched the pilot for the Knight Rider reboot series on Hulu last night. We weren't terribly impressed. It seemed more like a soap opera than we expected or wanted. All the younger adults in it looked like models, not like the FBI agents/linguists/scientist geeks they're supposed to be. My husband was able to point out one positive thing about the series: finally, Val Kilmer is not going to be French kissing onscreen...he does K.I.T.T.'s voice!

Silver Lining

We watched the pilot for the Knight Rider reboot series on Hulu last night. We weren't terribly impressed. It looked more like a soap opera than we expected. All the younger adults in it looked like models, not like the FBI agents/linguists/scientist geeks they're supposed to be. My husband was able to point out one positive thing about the series.

Silver Lining

We watched the pilot for the Knight Rider reboot series on Hulu last night. We weren't terribly impressed. It looked more like a soap opera than we expected. All the younger adults in it looked like models, not like the FBI agents/linguists/scientist geeks they're supposed to be. My husband was able to point out one positive thing about the series: finally, Val Kilmer is not going to be French kissing onscreen (he does the voice of K.I.T.T. ;) ).

Carnival of Homeschooling

The homeschool carnival is up here.

Foreign Language Instruction in our Home

Second language acquisition is a weighty topic in our home. As newlyweds, our first major spat was a difference in opinion on how best to teach a foreign language. My husband, who was studying to be a German teacher at the time, believed that the best way was immersion and practice. I, based on my own experience learning four other languages, felt that he was missing the boat and that students needed to start with much explicit instruction in grammar and vocabulary in order to actually "learn" a foreign language and be able to use it properly. Believe it or not, we really fought over this. Most couples prefer to fight about money and housework!

Fast forward eight years...dh speaks German to our children all the time. I occasionally read to them in German, put on German cartoons, and use German when speaking to them or their dad. They understand German fairly well, but have yet to speak it regularly. There is some progress in that dd5 has learned that the best way to get her father to do what she wants is to ask for it in her cute low-level German; he can't resist her "Vati, bitte...."

Clearly, continued effort is necessary to help them gain fluency in German. We just got a free upgrade in our internet speed, so we have started watching German-language TV programs at home. I bought a 1965 German reading book called with Fun with German that my husband can use to teach her how to read German once she's well on her way to English reading proficiency. And I plan to teach her German and English grammar and vocabulary explicitly once she manages reading in both languages.

I don't fight with dh now now about language learning. We each teach our children according to our own opinions, and we have time to do it because we homeschool. Chalk up a point for family harmony and hopefully another one for eventual German fluency for our children, too!

STOP

A Crestone opinion forum.

Crestone, Colorado

Our family just spent two nights in Crestone, Colorado, a little town in southern Colorado just north of the Great Sand Dunes National Park. The Crestone area attracts "spiritual tourism" because of the several meditation and retreat centers there--Buddhist, Zen, Hindu, and even a Carmelite monastery. Crestone town is very tiny, taking up only about 8 blocks. It does have a few stop signs, though, and the locals appear to consider them a forum for expressing themselves, be they full of new age hopefulness ("Stop being afraid") or feeling political ("Impeach Bush!"). I took a picture of one of the stop signs and will post it later.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince review

...in haiku:

Slow darkness misting
Persistent worries, shadows
of fate and courage.

A very impressionistic movie. Read the book first, and don't try to watch it if you're tired.

Will she be a programmer?

With my third child, now a big 11 weeks old, I've kept myself occupied during nighttime feedings by reading things on the internet. My precious little daughter now expects her to be fed and held while bathed in blue rays from the computer (I do turn the screen brightness WAY down). She even likes to be held so she can watch the screen sometimes. Does that mean that her "comfort occupation" as an adult will be one involving spending hours looking at text-intensive content? In short, will she be a programmer? Or turn to blogging like her mom? The world could use more cute bloggers. :D

A Driver's Plea

Please, oh, please turn into the proper lane! You can always switch lanes later, and you're less likely to hit someone who thought the coast was clear.

The Three R's

I am now officially teaching dd5 reading, 'ritin', and 'rithmetic. I've been teaching her to read out of old phonics textbooks for a few months now; it's going so well that now I sometimes have to tell her to stop reading and go to bed (sniff...she takes after her mom...and her dad...). A few weeks ago I added a daily sentence of copywork to her formal education. And on Tuesday, we started her kindergarten math book; I decided to go with the Math K5 worktext for several reasons:

1) It looks like fun. In fact, she begged today to do three sheets instead of the two I'd told her she'd be limited to.

2) It doesn't require a packet of specific manipulatives. IMHO, math manipulatives are over-hyped, for popsicle sticks work just fine to practice addition and subtraction, manipulating actual coins and bills is more meaningful than playing with plastic tokens, and I want to teach fractions with freshly-baked pies and pizzas (yum!).

3) Math K5 covers the basic subjects I want her to learn during her kindergarten year (which in many states would still be a preschool year for her due to her fall birthday) while I study her learning preferences in order to decide between Saxon and Singapore math for her later use.

Similar theme in 2 very different books

While at my brother's house in Oklahoma, I picked up one of his paperbacks, Tom Clancy's Without Remorse, in which a Vietnam veteran loses his girlfriend to a vicious drug dealer and proceeds to "clean up" Baltimore's streets as he seeks revenge. Then yesterday, I read the very popular teen fiction book, The Hunger Games, in which a girl is forced to fight to the death against other teenagers in a "game" set up by political overlords to keep the people of outlying districts painfully aware of their status as subjects.

Both books deal with the issue of when it is justified to kill another person. Not a pleasant subject, and one I hope never to have to grapple with personally. I preferred the way this question was answered in The Hunger Games, where the author demonstrates how killing done to protect a vulnerable, innocent other from imminent death can take place without any subsequent guilt. In Without Remorse, the protagonist's decisions to end others' lives are not so clearly justified, and I do not feel that he was a hero or a model of good, or even acceptable, morality; he seemed far more motivated by a desire for vengeance than a desire to protect present and future drug addicts. I cannot accept vigilante justice in a place that has functional police and courts.

We must never be casual about inflicting violence on anyone, but there do exist circumstances which justify the use of deadly force. I support the U.S. Constitution's right to "bear arms" because people need to be able to protect themselves and others from deadly force wielded by criminals. The police can't be everywhere, and there are evil people who seek out "soft" (undefended) targets all over the world. When we stop them from intentionally killing innocent people (yes, I saw the memorial of the Oklahoma City bombing while I was there over Christmas break), we do a good thing.

Amarillo excitement

During the Christmas break, we took a little trip to Oklahoma City to visit my brother and his wonderful wife and children. Because of our infant, we decided to do the eastbound leg in two easy stages, spending the night in Amarillo, Texas. I can't even hear "Amarillo" (pronounced the Texas way, not the proper Spanish word for "yellow") without thinking of the country song "Amarillo By Morning"; via Grooveshark, I proceeded to inflict various versions of "Amarillo By Morning" and random other songs about Texas on my long-suffering husband. (I love George Strait's music!)

After a pleasant drive through rural America, we arrived in the early afternoon at the motel. I was so excited for Vietnamese food--pho, specifically--for dinner, having done some internet research beforehand. There's a little strip mall in northeast Amarillo that has several authentic Laotian, Vietnamese, and Thai food restaurants. In the darkness, though, it was a scary little group of restaurants with minimal lighting in the parking light, empty storefronts, and an overall ghetto appearance. Then when we entered the restaurant, we nearly choked on the cigarette smoke. Who knew that you could still smoke in restaurants in Texas? Fortunately, the only smokers were Vietnamese guys playing cards together at one table, and they were kind enough to stop when they realized that we had small children and the smoke was bothering us. The pho was tasty, although the broth wasn't as yummy as I've had in the past; I was very happy, however, that they gave me basil leaves instead of cilantro, as has happened to me at a couple of restaurants in Colorado. Cilantro is for salsa, not Vietnamese pho.


The next morning we hit Cadillac Ranch (truly an odd landmark), the local botanical gardens (not much to see in the winter, sadly), and historic Route 66. All that sightseeing took us less than two hours, and then we left Amarillo. Would you believe that I didn't see a single man wearing a cowboy hat in Amarillo? From what I saw on our drive, the real cowboys live in rural areas and seem to prefer baseball caps these days.

Vacation is over!

And I have so many fun things to write about. The wondrous places I went and people I saw in exotic locales (OK, Amarillo, Texas and Oklahoma City), parenting milestones reached (and then retreated from, in the the case of our infant), and book reviews of deep literary works (Clancy, anyone?). You know, sometimes weblogs really NEED to shut down for a bit. 'Tis a noble endeavor to spare the internet the unfolding of such weighty content a while so that more servers can come online.

Christmas Break

I'm taking one! A real one, where I'm researching hotels and landmarks ahead of time. I hope I can turn over the landmark researching task to dd5 in a year or two....It's a learning opportunity, y'know!

Drills

Drilling in math is fun. At least, it was for me in elementary school. I keep coming across the idea that "drill is kill"; I've seen it so much that I have almost started to believe it. But then I think back to what I remember about elementary school math. In 6 years of math (kindergarten was not so academic way back then...), I have only four memories of what I did in math:

1) In 2nd grade, we made little colored picture cards with the times tables on them. For instance, all the "two times" would be pink pencils, "three times" yellow bears, and so forth. We used the cards to practice our times tables.
2) In 2nd grade, we wrote all the numbers up to 1000 in a book made of ten sheets with a grid for 100 numbers on each sheet.
3) In 6th grade, we did timed drills on arithmetic. I thoroughly enjoyed the competition with myself and my classmates to accurately recall and write the answers in these one-minute drills. Probably because I usually did very well. :)
4) When we learned to calculate interest, I was proud of being able to calculate and show my work for ten consecutive years of compound interest all on one line of paper; I don't think the teacher appreciated my itty-bitty writing.

Why did I enjoy, or at least remember, only repetitive activities? Aren't repetitive activities supposed to be mind-numbing? (As an adult, I do find repetitive activities boring, but children aren't just little adults.) There's not a constructivist, "fuzzy math" activity up there, although I suppose you could still find elementary school children today counting up to 1000 jelly beans in a group at some point in their schooling. Imagine my surprise to read today that editors of The Mathematics Teacher, in refusing a paper for publication, stated that "rote drills do not constitute an authentic mathematical practice". Apparently, I didn't actually do math in elementary school. Funny, I ended up a top math student in high school (the kind that went to state contests) and earned a BS in mathematics. All that "inauthentic" math practice back in elementary school gave me a good foundation for mathematical achievement later on. Remembering my own past, while anecdotal and not likely to convince any true believer in the stultifying effects of math drills, helps me be more firm in my resolve to give my children the kind of math foundation I received. I bet in a few years they'll beat me on timed drill contests!

New in Town

We recently watched the movie New in Town starring Renee Zellweger and Harry Connick Jr. It had some funny moments, and Harry Connick Jr. was handsome. HOWEVER, why didn't they film it in Minnesota?? The movie is full of Minnesota jokes and references to New Ulm events and structures, yet the movie was filmed in Canada. We never see New Ulm! A city with its own unique German heritage and a tourist destination in its own right! Lame.

This film is a caricature of Minnesota cliches; it's like the movie makers were trying to turn Fargo into a "rom-com", leaving out most of the senseless violence. The so-called Minnesota accent was overdone. I'm married to a Minnesotan and have lived in and visited that lovely, sometimes very cold state; people in the Twin Cities area, at least, don't speak with the strong accent this movie had them using. And while scrapbooking may be popular there, I can't imagine a Minnesota woman pulling out her scrapbook and showing each page thereof to her new boss right off as her boss drives at night on unfamiliar, snowy roads.

More on the previous post

OK, I'll be fair. I just delved into the study report itself (posted by the author here) and saw what the actual reading remediation programs were. The programs were Corrective Reading, Wilson Learning System, Spell Read Phonological Auditory Training, and Failure Free Reading (smallest sample group in the study). Per the authors, "All of these programs provided systematic and explicit instruction in word-level decoding skills. Failure Free Reading focuses on developing recognition of words by sight, while the other three programs emphasize phonemic decoding." So, one of the four remediation programs used was not phonics; but, it wasn't whole language, either!

What's interesting to me is that Failure Free Reading, while emphasizing decoding at the word level and eschewing phonics, apparently brought about an improvement in phonological decoding skills in this study. What mechanism makes that happen? I'd love to see the curriculum itself to see how it facilitates development of phonological decoding ability.

Another thing phonics can do...

I'm an unabashed fan of phonics instruction to teach reading. Not very odd, considering we have a phonetic system of writing, but still viewed as reactionary and less effective in some circles. I'm not sure what drug exactly people in those circles used to fry their brains while their parents were paying for tuition (I'm including alcohol as a drug here--I live near a college, and I'm no stranger to what goes on substance-wise), for synthetic phonics appears to be the most logical and successful way of teaching English reading, despite all of English's lovely archaic spellings and foreign words.

While perusing science news this morning at one of those odd hours I owe to my six-week-old, I came across an article stating that reading remediation positively alters brains:

As the researchers report today in the journal Neuron, brain imaging of children between the ages of 8 and 10 showed that the quality of white matter -- the brain tissue that carries signals between areas of grey matter, where information is processed -- improved substantially after the children received 100 hours of remedial training. After the training, imaging indicated that the capability of the white matter to transmit signals efficiently had increased, and testing showed the children could read better.
....
Keller and Just also found that the amount of change in diffusion among the treated group was directly related to the amount of increase in phonological decoding ability. The children who showed the most white matter change also showed the most improvement in reading ability, confirming the link between the brain tissue alteration and reading progress.

Did you catch that? The kids got better at phonological decoding, and their brain tissue improved in quality. So, not only will phonics help a child read, but it makes his or her brain better! That's cool. :)

Whew!

It's official. My brother is still a punk. He is not even dating anyone, much less engaged.

Facebook Fun

My punk baby brother (OK, he's actually about 24 years old and studying engineering at BYU) just posted on Facebook that he's engaged! What??? I didn't even know he was dating anyone all that seriously. If this is for real, I'm in shock. But, knowing him, I will continue to suspect a hoax until he confirms the news personally. This is the boy who bleached his hair right before I got married and proclaimed to anyone who would listen that I was going to get so mad at him for ruining my wedding pictures with his crazy hair. I didn't get mad; I had more important things on my mind than the trivial detail of his hair color....things like, was I going to go through with the wedding?

MacGyver quote

Recently viewed quote on MacGyver: "I died...and went to Thanksgiving?" (upon waking up injured in a room full of Amish people).

I love that show. :)

I just discovered a new educational resource

Instead of searching randomly on the internet for free educational games, I can start my search with a great website I just discovered: Internet4Classrooms. The makers of this site have gathered together links for a large number of online educational games and put them in categories based on grade level standards covering kindergarten through eighth grade. For example, this link takes one to a list of links to games that deal with colors (under the subject of math) for kindergartners. I look forward to exploring this website some more!

Baby blessing

Today my husband gave our new baby a name and a blessing in church (see this link for an explanation of how that is done in the LDS church). It was a beautiful day, made even better by the presence of many relatives who sacrificed to travel in the snow and be a part of the event. Families are wonderful...when they're wonderful. ;)