More Books

It's been too long since I posted, and *PSYCH* this isn't a real post. Just wanted to share with you a list of books I haven't read but want to. :-)

7 must read books on education

March's Books

• The Mount, by Carol Emshwiller
• Making Do, by Jeane Westin
• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver

Dilemma

We got a new (to us) minivan last weekend. I'm kinda sad. I mean, we got a good deal, and it's a nice minivan. A really nice minivan. The nicest car I've ever had. It has leather seats. It has seat warmers. It has power everything. If I can figure it out, it has a hands free phone thingy. I haven't found the button that blows your nose for you, but I'm pretty sure it's there.

What this car doesn't have is a tape deck. We've been listening to Joy Hakim's "The History of US" on tape from the library. We're only on book 4. Do you see my problem? Hint - there's 11 books in the series. (Well, 10 books and a whole book of appendices) We're not done yet and the only tape player I own is in the old minivan whose hind end can not take one more blow. Seeing as how I like the kids who ride in the back of said crippled minivan, I can not in good conscience drive it just so we can finish listening to this series. (Can I?)

The new car does have a CD player, but the library doesn't have this on CD. I can't find it on the internet on CD. Grr.... But wait. The library does have an e-resource - netLibrary. The car does have an auxilary jack that will accept a music player....

And so again life as we know it, or at least my happiness, is saved by the awesome powers of the internet and the WorldWideWeb.

February's books

• The Woman who Wouldn't, by Gene Wilder
• Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese
• The Opposite of Fate, by Amy Tan
• Flights, edited by Al Sarrantonio
• The Magicians Book, by Laura Miller

Math Day

I am getting excited about planning a Math Fun Fest Day for our local homeschool group. We were calling it "Math Salon" but that just didn't capture the feeling I have about it.

I am envisioning a place with different stations set up, manned by parents and older students, like at a children's hands on museum. All the stations would have some fun math related activities to do.

Here are some ideas I had:

3D spacial table - w/ things like perplexus and tetraxis
Game table w/ games, there's so many of these we'd have to break them up into themes - Set, Quirkle, Rush Hour, ...
Tiling activities - like fractiles, blokus, pentomino,
Puzzle table -
Oragami table with instruction books and some folded inspiration
History table(s) - with Babylonian, Egyptian, Roman and Arabic examples and puzzles
Chess table with sets set up to play, chess puzzles, etc...
Story table with selections from Living Math reading list - this could be one where a host read to kids, kids read to themselves, or parents read with their kids
Family math table with math games from the book
Music table(s) - pitch and rhythm are both very mathematical, but what exactly to put out?

A friend suggested Bucky balls and Zome Tools.

And here are some a friend emailed to me:

Vi Hart's videos are full of interesting ideas.
I got really excited about stars for a while, and wrote a Logo program to space N ticks evenly around a circle, so that I could print them out as templates for star doodling.  Her other stuff is neat too.

Calculating pi by measuring various round objects and doing the division is
pretty fun and really helps kids understand the meaning of pi.

Playdough for fractions?  Make a ball, cut it into wedges like an orange,
talk fractions.

Laminated hundreds charts are fun for coloring patterns on.

Older kids could make paper slide rules and learn how they work.

Roll 2 dice and graph the rolls to see if we could generate a bell curve.

Build paper models of platonic solids (printable templates @ Wolfram)

And here is some inspiration for the web:
Constructing the Universal Classroom



What ideas do you have?