World Maker Faire 2011

We went, we saw and we loved it! And I can't believe we almost didn't make it to the Faire. Our plans kept changing, but as I mentioned before, all's well that ends well. So here we were, in Queens, going to see... Actually, we weren't sure what we were going to see. Except we knew there would be robots there.

Sure thing, almost right at the entrance, there they were. And the best part was we could touch them, pick them up for a closer look and even play with them!!! Pretty awesome, right?

Most of them didn't resemble people, not even a little bit. So when M saw this little guy, he was practically jumping for joy.

But the fun didn't stop there. First, we came across AnnMarie Thomas' Squishy Circuits. And she was there her own self! A while ago we made a couple of circuits and played with them. We built a couple of circuits using just some LEDs and a motor. So while at AnnMarie's display we concentrated mostly on the motor and the buzzers. This was one of the busiest displays too. One of the things that I really liked was that the Squishy Circuits seemed to attract just as many girls as boys. Also, kids were very active and unafraid to try things. After all, most of them already had plenty of experience with playdough so this probably didn't seem like a whole new thing to them.

All in all, M got to play with quite a few toys and kits aimed at teaching kids the basics of electrical circuitry. The one that really stood out, IMHO, in addition to the Squishy Circuits, was this one above. Basically, it's just black conductive paint. This particular paint is specially formulated to be non-toxic and washable. So you paint with it, wait for the paint to dry, then hook up a battery to one end and an LED light or a buzzer or whatever, to another end. Or you could paint little (or big) wooden blocks with it, attach some mini-LEDs, mini-switches, etc and turn any block set into a circuit-building set. Pretty cool!

Over here on the picture the paint was used to draw pictures of musical instruments. Then kids could play music just by touching the pictures.

I was very happy to see Thinker Linkers at the Faire. M already played them at our local Maker Faire where he spent quite a long time building some very large and complicated structure. This time he was more interested in finding more robots. Still, he stopped by Thinker Linkers area and worked with Chris on assembling "a house for a robot". I really hope Marbles, our local kids museum, will add a huge mega set of Thinker Linkers to its collection of building toys! And if not Marbles, then maybe Durham's Life and Science Museum then even though it's a drive for us.

In the spirit of the Faire, we made not one, but two things - an LED throwie and this recyclables weaving craft. Guess which one took more time, more components and was more complicated?

 And while you're guessing things, guess who in our family has the biggest head. Oh, but before you fall of your chair laughing, I am much taller than this in real life... at least 3 inches taller. Ok, maybe 2 inches. Still...

This was just about the best part of the Faire. Or at least right up there with all the other awesomeness that was going on. You see, the Faire was happening at the New York Hall of Science and the ticket to a Faire included admission to NYHS. Let me just say, if you are looking for something kid-friendly and amazing to do in NYC, put this destination at the top of your must-do list. Just make sure to leave plenty of time to explore the place.

Homeschooling Report - Month 1

I realize it's been forever and a day since I last posted anything. Well, there's been so much stuff going on lately that August was pretty much a blur.

We just finished our first month of homeschooling and, based on the experience, I already adjusted the plans for the second month. It's definitely a learning experience for both M and myself. Some worries I had prior to starting out never materialized. For example, I was afraid M would hate worksheets, but he doesn't. Some things that I thought he would be interested in, such as our geography lessons, he has no interest in.

Here's what we normally do:

Math Games - starting our days with math is working out really well. We usually play a simple, usually hand-drawn, game. For example, a game where we take turns rolling the dice and placing glass marbles on the sun rays.

Math Worksheets - last month M did 2-3 worksheets every other day. This month I will try daily worksheets and will concentrate more on logic and fine motor skills ones (i.e. mazes)

Math Lessons - we are using Al Abacus from The Right Start Math. It's a bit of a slow going right now. We usually go through the entire lesson one day and then review key parts the next day.

ABCs - right after math we usually do our reading lesson. The first part consists of reviewing a letter of a Russian alphabet. I'm using this really fun primer, "Учимся читать", and I like it so far. M seems to be ok with it although he's definitely not excited. He's doing a fabulous job figuring out first letters in words, but last letters are still very challenging. However, he blends sounds much better now.

ABC Games - these are simple games for reading and writing that I put together for him. For example, we played a "letter chain" game where I named (and wrote down) an object in the family room, M circled its last letter and then had to find another object in the room that started with the same letter.

Reading - boy, we've been reading A LOT lately. This is M's most favorite "lesson" by far. I was thinking we'd be reading fairy tales or short stories, but M chooses books for his story time and so far he chose to read "Девочка с Земли" [Girl from the Planet Earth], "Приключения Незнайки" [Adventures of Neznaika] and "Карлсон, который живет на крыше" [Karlsson-on-the-Roof]. These books are rated for elementary school-aged children, but M loves them.

Art, Science, Geography - I haven't been very successful at any of these. So next month we're trying something different. Instead of having these as separate activities, we will incorporate them into math and reading lessons.

Starting Homeschool - What Level Are We?

We've started our first week of more official homeschooling in August. I figured, 4.5 years old is just about the perfect age to start getting ready for an Ivy League school.

All kidding aside, I'm pretty relaxed about the whole academic performance thing. And no, I'm not trying to make a genius out of my child. What I'm trying to do is to get across an idea that learning can be a lot of fun and do it in a very informal way.

This semester I decided to concentrate on Russian language (reading), maths (counting, arithmetic, basic geometry), and geography. Along the way I'm hoping to work on M's fine motor skills and a few other things.

We're starting pretty early because in September we'll be in NY for a few weeks and I want to get some routines established before that. Also, we simply couldn't wait any longer and that goes for both of us, honestly. Seeing all my prep work, M'd been asking me if we could start school right away.

So I created a schedule back in July. But now after a week of actually doing it, I'm already making big changes to it. I expect that I'll keep adjusting it as we progress. For example, the first day we did all the activities back-to-back with just a few breaks. But later in the week I adopted a less overwhelming approach. Early in the morning we'd do the math and reading work (which would take about 20-30 minutes total). Then we'd spread all the rest of the fun stuff - science, sensory play, geography, some writing games - throughout the day. It seems to work better that way and doesn't even feel much like school, just like a really fun play.

I also made some changes to the activities themselves to adjust for M's current interests. For example, the last couple of days he was busy painting a wooden rocket. He spent quite a lot of time on it too, working mostly independently (even getting the paint of the top shelf and pouring it carefully into the paint cup). So I cancelled one of the art activities.

Math games we play had to be adjusted as well. But more about that a bit later. Also, our daily story time is taking much longer than I thought it would. That's because right about the time we started our lessons, M got really into this Russian sci-fi book for kids called "A Girl from Earth" [Девочка с Земли]. The book is really for 8-10 year olds and I'm not exactly sure how much of it he really understands. But he loves it!

So his vocabulary now includes such words as "индикатор" [indicator], "грузовой отсек" [cargo hold], "бандит" [bandit], "склисс" [skliss, an alien flying cow], "звездолёт" [starship], "кают-компания" [mess hall], "отражатель" [reflector] and many many more. He also is busy playing out some of the parts of the book (and a cartoon based on it), such as buying the indicator from a giant snail, fighting space pirates, loading the flying cow into a cargo hold of a spaceship, etc, etc.

Back to homeschooling through... This week we

• played a bunch of math games
• practiced basic math (subitizing to 4, addition, subtraction to 4, sorting, grouping)
• reviewed letter "A" and found it in a lot of words
• identified beginning sounds of words
• read A LOT of the "Girl from Earth" book and "Dad, Mom, Grandma, 8 Children and a Truck" book
• built short words with magnetic letters
• made playdoh and played with it
• did a couple of science experiments
• did art - sun art, tennis ball toss art, and paint with marbles art projects and painted a rocket
• learned what a map is
• learned a whole lot about Thailand, including tasting some jackfruit (never again!)

And, for Friday field trip, we went to a planetarium!

Some people asked me if I'm teaching M at a preschool level or above. I honestly don't know. Some of it seems to be totally preschool stuff, like most of our art projects and most of letter-learning activities. Math is a bit more complicated since he is working on addition/subtraction. Besides, I don't have a very clear idea of what they teach in preschools here anyway since it kind of varies.

I'll post more on the math and reading later.

Star Wars Playdate

It's been super-hot here every day this week and we've been trying to stay indoors as much as possible. But Monday wasn't too bad which was great 'cause that was our official Star Wars Playdate day with our homeschooling group.

Let me just say, the mom who came up with the idea did an amazing job organizing the whole thing. They even had time to bake Star Wars cookies!

We all got together at a local park. Everyone was encouraged to bring their Star Wars toys and dress up. M finally had his dream realized - all his friends brought their light sabers and were allowed to have as many battles as they wanted. Aside from almost non-stop light saber battles, there was some hard-core jedi training. It included Nerf gun practice, insignia making, light saber crafting, learning to navigate dangerous fog-filled jungles of Dagobah.

The capstone of the event was an epic battle - all the little kids against 2 teenagers who volunteered to be the bad guys (in exchange for a chance to handle dry ice).

It was super awesome! It also helped that a day before the playdate I scored this paper mask of Darth Vader for $0.25 at a Kids Exchange Sale. M was so thrilled. He put the mask on right away and walked around the house, breathing noisily and humming the Imperial March which is, of course, Darth Vader's theme.

He wore the mask as the playdate as much as possible, but insisted on being on the side of good. You see, his Vader is a rehabilitated one who's nice and even "helps Mama wash dishes".

Summer is So Crazy

I thought that once summer is here we were going to be sort of bored, looking for things to do and friends to hang out with. After all, many home schoolers we know follow the traditional school year. For example, our preschool co-op is over and done with 'til September and so it the Math Trek. Rrrrright......

Over the last couple of weeks we've been very-very-very busy with the capital "B", dashing from one thing to the next and being late just about everywhere we'd go. Plus we're not exactly taking a whole summer off either. We study a bit each day, mostly through reading books and talking about stuff. But also I've been teaching M to read. He knows most letters and reads very short words. Anything longer than 4 letters puts him off. But I think it's just a matter of practice.

So we practice, although not as much as I'd like. This is us playing the "5 marshmallows" reading game. It's simple - I write 5 syllables on paper cups, turn the cups upside down and hide a mini-marshmallow under one of the cups. When M opens his eyes, I tell him "The marshmallow is under... "му" (for example). Now he has to find the right cup by reading all the syllables. No guessing! If he gets it wrong, I get the marshmallow.

For this game he likes assembling all his little toys and "sharing" the hard-won marshmallows with them, giving each one a bite to eat. So it takes us a while to get through all five marshmallows. But it's fun and it works.

He's still heavily into putting together various contraptions. The new twist is he might want to sketch it out first. So he takes a sheet of paper and a red marker (gotta be the red one!) and carefully draws two vertical lines for the body, a jumble of wires in between (some squiggly lines), a few gears (small circles), and caps it all off with a head - an egg-shape with no facial features.

This is M assembling a refueling station for his new Star Wars toy (thanks, Grandpa!). The droid starfighter took forever to fuel up 'cause it needed "three million and fourteen gallons" of fuel. No matter since Darth Vader and the minions were patiently waiting.

Finally, this is M in the Contraption Room at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham. It's an awesome room that is full of spare parts to build the basic simple machines and put them together into Rube Goldberg-like contraptions. I'm in love with this room! In fact, I want to scale it down just a little bit and re-create here, at home. Maybe next school year.

M didn't like it at first 'cause it wasn't a robot-making room. But after some sulking and whining, he said, resignedly, "ok, so then let's build some machine" and we started. He was particularly fascinated with pulleys. In fact, that's all he wanted to do for almost 40 minutes - explore pulleys. So we put a little contraption together. Then I started adding to it - a ramp here, a lever there for the plastic ball to negotiate. I thought it'd be interesting to M, but he was way too absorbed with the pulleys and hardly paid attention to my creations.

We've also been going to pools. Yes, the real ones! M finally got into a big pool and now it's a challenge to get him out of it when it's time to go home. Plus I got him a floating vest and we usually borrow inflatable arm bands from a new friend, Yura. Wearing all that M proudly negotiates water all by himself. Now he's actually asking me for swimming lessons! Yay!!!! No pictures of this part 'cause I'm in the water with M and Chris hasn't had a chance to come with us yet.

The End of School Year Post

Wait, what am I talking about here? Aren't we homeschooling? Not only that, but we don't really have a schedule so far (well, we're still pre-K and I don't think a formal curriculum or schedule is appropriate or needed at this point).

But it just so happened that our homeschool pre-school co-op wrapped up for the school year and we went to Lake Wheeler for the year-end party. It was really just a big playdate with some snacks. No learning activity was done this time and no books were read. Just lots and lots of free play. Beats any graduation party if you ask me.

That same week we also attended a Homeschoolers Showcase. It's an annual event that marks the end of school year for older homeschoolers. This was our first year attending (as visitors). It was so much fun that I'm considering claiming a table and preparing a presentation for the 2012 Showcase.

M and Chris got to attend as well. Finally Chris met other HS families and met some of M's friends from the preschool co-op (and their parents). He also got to see what older HS kids get to work on and accomplish (again, for now the only record we're keeping is this blog and a [small] stack of art work; oh, and all the junk Star Wars and junk Space Exploration toys we've been making).

M also loved the showcase. First, there was not one, but two REAL ROBOTS there, made by kids from the robotics co-op. M really liked the little robot that could pick up pipes and load them in the box. M kept "feeding" him all the pipes and admiring the 'bot. It's been over a week now and M still asks me when we're going to make our own robot just like that one, except with eyes.

Inspired by robots, M spent almost an hour by the huge LEGO table piecing together something or other. It is very hard work for him since he has such hard time controlling the tiny LEGO pieces. But he kept at it for a long time!

Finally, here are a couple of pictures from the Memorial Day weekend. Our good friends invited us over for some grill-and-beer action. There were other kids there - 5 more boys. So imagine all the fun they were having! After spending quite a lot of time slipping and sliding across the wet tarp (tearing up the lawn in the process), M and a few others settled down for an experiment. They were trying to fill up plastic bags with water from the sprinkler. Amazingly, this simple activity kept them busy for about 40 minutes or so!

Messy Art Again and All the Rain

This last week has been a very busy one for us. At least I remembered to take my camera with me, most of the time.

M asked to do a Big Messy Art project! Hooray, this has never happened before since he'd rather do almost anything else than paint. But this time he asked, no, insisted, on doing the "blow-dryer art". Remembering lessons learned the last time we tried this project, I prepared a couple of ping-pong balls, paint thinned with water, and a piece of paper securely taped to the box.

Also this week - we've had quite a lot of rain, but in between all the showers and thunderstorms we managed to go pick some mulberries. Actually, we got to go a couple of times, once with Chris and then, during the week - just M and I. For that second trip I got an old trike out of the attic. It's an old Kettler that I picked up at a Kids Exchange sale a year or so ago. I thought I got a good deal on it, but turned out the bike needed new set of tires which meant that the entire rear wheels assembly had to be changed. So for right now it's running as is and I'm just counting on M outgrowing his trike soon enough.

Big surprise this year - turns out, M can ride a trike all by himself... on a smooth surface and preferably on a slight downhill slope. Anything rough or uphill requires too much work, so he stops pedaling and asks me to push him. But boy, he loves riding downhill, going as fast as he can. Except that he keeps looking over his shoulder to make sure I'm not holding the bike. And when he does this, the bike swerves widely which scares me a whole lot since the breaks aren't all that great either.

Still, we managed to get as far along the Art Museum trail as the Two Mulberries. You see, the mulberries at the trailhead get picked a lot. When we got there, there weren't that many berries within easy reach. But most casual walkers don't go far enough into the woods and runners and bikers don't care about stopping and snacking. So it's left to us, serious berry hunters, to pick and eat them berries.

With our bellies full (we also had a mini-picnic half-way to the mulberries), we started heading back, but got caught in a downpour. So M pedaled and I pushed and panting we got to a little pavilion half-way to the car. It's a very nice pavilion with sweeping views of the entire Museum Park, but we never before made it there.

Another thing we did this week was testing our water wall. I saw this idea here and liked it 'cause it looked so simple. Besides, I already had all the components - a big piece of left-over peg board and lots of containers. So I took the next step - handed it all to Chris and told him that, when put together properly, it would make a terrific water toy (yes, he is a very patient and understanding man).

He set to work. Turned out that the bolts I had didn't match the holes in the pegboard. Nothing some drilling couldn't fix though. M seemed to be interested mostly in getting a hold of the drill. Once the wall was assembled, he showed remarkably little interest in it. Hmm, back to the drawing board since he generally likes everything that is remotely like a marble run. I might try PVC pipes and clear tubing instead.

At the end of the week we made a great discovery. We found a new (to us) park not far from the house (15-minute drive). The awesome feature of this park is its slides. They are built into the slopes. Somehow this makes them a lot more attractive to children of all ages (and to adults as well). M and a bunch of other boys from the local homeschooling group spent close to 2 hrs on these slides! Or rather on the rubberized slopes. There's something very compelling in being able to slide down the hillside.

Math Games Week 2 - Grids

We are continuing playing with math this week through the Moebius Noodles project (do you like the name, by the way?). The first week was all about symmetry. The second week's theme is grids and functions.

The games were a lot more challenging for me to wrap my brain around. Yet they were fun. We got to try most of them:

The first game was called Chimera Grids. It introduced the concept of structured variations and some big words such as table, row, column, cell, combination. Since M is not into Star Wars (more on this later), our grids were all about the Star Wars characters. In one we created chimeras or combinations of torsos and legs of three different characters - R2D2, Chewbacca, and, of course, Darth Vader.

The storyline of the second grid is built around R2D2 looking for a suitable house for himself. I can't start to describe how much fun M had with these grids. Who would've thought, really?! I can still hear his happy laugh when we came up with a chimera we called Chewvader. "Чувейдер рулез!"

The next game was all about introducing gradients. There are so many ways to do it, but ours involved pen and paper (yeah, I realize I need to learn to draw better). This time it was R2D2 that traveled along a horizontal line. When he went to the left, he got bigger. When he went to the right, he got smaller. The big question we discussed was just how small (or big) would R2D2 get if he continued traveling way beyond the page's boundaries. M asked me this question - would he be so small that a bacteria would eat him? I said that yes, he'd get super-tiny like the nanobots we'd been reading about and even smaller. Then I asked him what would R2D2 need to do to escape from the hungry bacteria. With just a slight pause and a look at the paper, M said "R2D2 would need to move this way" pointing to the left side of the picture.

We also played another gradient-related game a couple of days later. It was basically role-playing the Goldilocks and Three Bears story. Except instead of the Three Bears we had Three Robots and instead of Goldilocks - a DIY Death Star made out of egg carton cells. First the robots had to eat bolts and drink gasoline. Then they all went on a walk around their garage. The Death Star landed and scared them. They all had to hide behind different-sized objects. Finally, they all made friends and there was much cheering.

We never got around to making our own grids as such. But the day before this assignment I asked Maria, the math brain behind the course, if comics could be viewed as examples of grids in literature. She said that without a doubt they would. Funny enough, the next day a homeschooling friend gave us just that - a blank comic strip and challenged to come up with a story. I wasn't sure M would be into it. Boy, I totally underestimated my son. Into it? He loved the activity. Of course, I had to draw everything and write the words. But he came up with the entire story - the plot, the lines, the sets.

It's in Russian, so if you don't read Russian yet (how come?!) it's all about Luke Skywalker saving Princess Leia from evil robots, flying her safely through an asteroid belt and into the Galaxy far-far-away.

The next game was called "Grid Hangman". It is played just like the regular hangman game, but with a grid (also, instead of hanging anyone we built a house). So you make up the rules of how the elements in your grid will change from cell to cell (in both rows and columns) and the other player tries to guess the rule. Admittedly, I didn't tie it into any kind of Star Wars story so M's reception was lukewarm. We will try again when I figure out how to get it more Star Wars-y.

The final game was Multiplication Towers. We just played it today. At first M was into it since the story was Wall-E building his towers of multi-colored trash in the grid cells. At first M helped Wall-E find just the right interlocking blocks (by color and size) , but somewhere in the middle of the second row he got tired of the game and moved on to something else (building a Starfighter that came to frighten and then to friend Wall-E). Good thing too 'cause turned out I didn't have enough blocks to complete that row let alone for the entire game. Didn't get a chance to take a picture either.