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Cursive needed?
Is cursive necessary? My husband and I go back and forth on it. I actually even use the script font sometimes on my computer. Part of that though is the fact that my handwriting is really bad. I suspect we all want to eliminate the things that we aren’t personally good at, and add more of our favorites.
Seeing a graphic on facebook of a teachers note saying stop writing in cursive – you have had several warnings originally made me wonder if the teacher herself doesn’t know how to read cursive, but it’s probably more that she doesn’t want to encourage cursive that isn’t part of the school’s learning plan. In my opinion some schools today try to keep students together in their learning. Almost a teach to the middle, but there are mandated programs for students lagging behind. Students that are ahead are given busy work to keep them occupied while teachers work with their peers.
Cursive though! Do we need cursive in the schools. Cursive is something that in most cases I’m sure could be eliminated and the students wouldn’t notice. The top students would pick it up on their own and the slower students would never miss it. That being said, I’m convinced that cursive like learning another language or working on art can help develop new pathways in the brain. It has been shown that learning more languages helps develop pathways for math which also ties to music. (I would almost bet someone could do a study showing that adding cursive directly correlates also in the same way as a new language….)
I’ve seen schools add everything from sign language to Chinese. In grade school I personally learned the sign language alphabet, just because I wanted to – and I haven’t used it, other than one time to figure out what the drawings on my son’s school playground equipment say. On the other hand, I’ve been working on transcribing notes from a journal and have been using cursive daily…. not to mention I use it in my own day calendar everyday. Yes I could print, but for me I don’t….
Another language is also great! I personally have taken Spanish and French in high school, my oldest took Latin, Chinese, and Japanese, and my middle took spanish… (hubby took German). Having a language is a good thing, but I don’t think these should be mutually exclusive. One of the documents I want to translate was in Italian but Italian cursive.
There are several apps available to help with learning cursive writing. Several of these look good, but you can also search cursive and find more. We haven’t started working on cursive at our house with my youngest yet, but this debate has brought it back to my attention and I plan to add it to the list of things to work on here at home.
Geodes
Our most recent activity to try was to break geodes… My youngest and I found a kit and decided to give it a try. Our kit came with two geode rocks and a hammer. For safety we found a pair of goggles to use to protect our eyes and went out to the driveway.
The instructions with the kit said to gently tap the geode with the hammer and the geode would break – not too hard or it would shatter. Interestingly enough ours seemed to be a tough rock! We finally had to resort to getting my husband. The first geode broke after some harder hits. Breaking into several pieces and scattering, but it was obviously a geode.
Our second wasn’t as easy, after trying to tap it fairly hard with a hammer we moved on to the flat side of an ax. – Safety equipment was taken into account, and I should say if you try this yourself, make sure you have goggles and skin covered. The geode finally broke and we found this one was 95% solid inside. That did explain why it was so difficult to break.
After breaking open our geode we had to venture online to find out how geodes are formed:
Geodes can form in any cavity, but usually means fairly rounded formations in igneous and sedimentary rocks. They can form in gas bubbles in igneous rocks, such as vesicles in basaltic lavas; or, as in the American Midwest, in rounded cavities in sedimentary formations. After rock around the cavity hardens, dissolved silicates and/or carbonates are deposited on the inside surface. Over time, this slow feed of mineral constituents from groundwater or hydrothermal solutions allows crystals to form inside the hollow chamber.
I’m not sure if we will save our geodes and do something with them or not. I’ve seen bookends make from geodes before, but ours are smaller pieces of rock, maybe I can attach our geodes to keychains.
Personal Robot
For the holiday we thought a Mecanoid robot would be fun. I stalked the black Friday sales and found the big one for sale at a good price. My little one had thought they looked fun when he noticed one at the store, but by the time Christmas came around he had quit mentioning the robot and was asking for other things. This wasn’t a great sign, but the Mecanoid was already in a box.
Mecanoid took two days to build! The robot requires nuts and bolts put in all the right places and lots of instructions. I had some problems with the instructions which were completely pictures, and in a couple places the pictures weren’t correct…. adding to the difficulty. We finally did get the robot built after tag teaming the built between my two oldest boys, my husband, and I over the two days. – I should mention that two days into the Mecanoid working one of the shoulder bolts came loose and had to be redone. The arm was flying everywhere as Mecanoid swung it around telling us a joke.
After turning it on and going through some set up, we were able to control the robot. He can follow voice commands for movement, tell us a joke, and many more things. My youngest though was afraid of him at first. After adjusting my little one did laugh at the jokes, and watch from a distance. After a week he finally got to the point he was willing to work with Mecanoid enough to try to change his name.
My youngest names everything after something about themselves – that’s how we have a frog named Leaf 2 (Leaf was found on a leaf) and a Toad named Ignis.. (A fire bellied toad and Ignis means fiire in Latin)…. So a robot became Robby. While hubby and my little one were working on setting the name of Robby the Robot though a mistake was made and Robby became fjaldfjdslfjadsf or something like that, that can’t be repeated.
The robot requires the user to say it’s name to command it to do anything, so we are stuck now until we reset the robot. Next step to reset Robby back to the beginning and correct his name!
Some of the Commands a Meccanoid recognizes:
- Introduce Yourself
- List Commands
- High Five
- Tell Me a Joke
- Walk with Me
- Motion Control
- Forward
- Backward
- Left Turn
- Right Turn
- Turn Around
- Kung Fu
- Exercise
- Dance
- Shake Hands
- What Time is It
- LIM (This is Learned Intelligent Movement)
- Help
- Settings
- Go to Sleep
Of course all of these require that you be able to say it’s name first. The Meccano robot will wait for you to say it’s name, and then when it hears it – the eyes change colors signifying time to start issuing commands.
It also appears to use the Arduino processor – meaning it’s open source and if you really want to get into the insides you can modify the programming. I have downloaded the libraries, but haven’t played with them yet.
Time to try to reset the name on ours!
(This is the shorter robot G15 – the G15KS is the taller robot that we have.)
Magic Rocks – Grow Your Own Crystals?
We decided to try magic crystals next. Magic Crystals have been around for a long time. I remember trying them as a child too and thought it might be fun to show my little one (and let him see a form of crystals grow faster)
The kit we got came with the tank, some rocks, and a packet of solution. My husband decided to help this time – which was probably good after the last experience with the slurry I added to the mix.
The powder was added to the hot water and mixed really well (he used more water than would fit in the tank.) After mixing the liquid mixture, my youngest put the rocks in the container on a layer on the bottom -making sure they don’t touch. The liquid shouldn’t touch your skin – wash it off with soap and water if it does.
The instructions had lots of warnings about not letting it get on wood – of course we have a wood table, wood floors, and even wood chairs, so I issued lots of warnings. Our table is so scarred already though I wasn’t too worried. 
We proceeded to watch and within 10 minutes you could see the rocks were sprouting colors and had grown a little. – Enough that it was obvious they were growing. Over the next few hours we checked off and on and saw the rocks grow until they reached the top of the water. After they had finished growing, within 24 hours – we poured the liquid out (carefully). We are now keeping the tank with the columns that have grown. I’m sure it will disappear one day, but for now we look at it every so often and compare it to our slow growing crystals.
The magic rocks are a lot more fragile, but they grow so much faster they allow for almost instant gratification. They also are almost a chalky consistency compared to the opaque almost glass (or salt) like appearance of the slow growing crystals.
O
ur plan is to check out the crystals in Geodes next (and then maybe make some candy that looks like crystals)! The magic rocks were fun though and seeing our results the same day is always fun!
Grow your own Crystals
We’ve been trying to grow your own crystals. Our first experiment hasn’t gone so well. We tried a kit and the first thing was to mix up a solution that came with the kit. Not knowing for sure how this was to go, I poured the extra in to the side of the included rocks. – Basically while mixing up the solution some of the mix didn’t dissolve. The instructions said to dissolve it ALL in hot
water, but I went with the amount of water being more important. For future reference – I should have weighted that importance differently. After adding the mixture we ended with two rocks on one side and a slurry of mixture on the other.
The instructions say to let the mixture sit for a couple weeks and dissolve the liquid out. The crystal mixture will form and stick to the rock. Below is where we are currently. while we are getting a few crystals on our rocks – we are also getting crystals on the slurry mixture that hadn’t dissolved.
Our crystals are fairly cool, and I can’t wait for the rest of the liquid to dissolve, but it isn’t quite the stunning crystal rock I was expecting…. Crystals forming on the slurry mixture was not part of our plan, BUT it did teach us something about how crystals form. The crystals weren’t just looking for the rocks to adhere too. We are going to try a few more times with other types of substances – several found around the house and a few more types that I can find in kits.
Mini Maker Faire
Barnes and Noble is having a Mini Maker Faire. I can’t wait to see what our B&N has available. I dropped by two days ago and noticed an XYZ Jr Davinci printer on display. They have it available for $349. (It’s available at Amazon a little cheaper) – We have the full XYZ printer. The Jr has a build size of 6″x6″x6″ whereas our full printer can print up to 8″x8″x8″. We do love ours (I printed our doorbell button after our previous broke).
We have tried other 3D printers and the XYZ is easy to set up and worked out of the box! I can’t wait to see what speakers and demos are happening at our Barnes and Noble this weekend.
I also picked up a Modding Minecraft book (article to come).
About Me
I am a SAHM/WAHM of three boys ranging in age from 16 to 32. We are working on saving enough for college at the same time as dealing with school and our older independent kids. I author a few blogs, including http://teched4kids.com. I have in the past taught computer information technology classes for the local university and taught workshops for kid's in technology education besides being the Kentucky State FIRST LEGO League Championship Coordinator from 2005 to 2008. I now work as a computer consultant, run a handmade home business, and am available for workshops. Life here is always an adventure!
