Today is the start of the WNBA preseason, giving me a needed dose of women’s-sports watching to tide me over until Wimbledon starts at the end of June. I am, as it happens, hopelessly inept at actually playing basketball (and softball, for that matter), but am finding I have to raise my game this year. […]
My son and I went to his first Music Together class in our new area today. We’d done Music Together for over two years before we moved, and I knew it was a program I wanted to continue. Not only did we have a fabulous teacher back in New York, but I liked the pedagogy
Every young child I know loves to smear things on walls, whether food, paint, or merely dirty hands. Channel that impulse with a three- or four-inch paint roller. It’s not for children who like to bludgeon with such objects, but for others, it can provide a surprising amount of amusement, indoors and out. “Paint the
Preschoolers are more likely to eat fruits and vegetables when the produce comes from their own garden rather than a supermarket, concludes a study by researchers at Saint Louis University. More specifically, preschool children from rural southeast Missouri were more than twice as likely to eat the recommended five servings of fruits and vegetables per
Today is the Day of Silence, a time when students bring attention to anti-LGBT bullying, harassment and discrimination in schools. Friday, however, marks the start of Global Youth Service Day (GYSD), in actuality a three-day event that “highlights the amazing contributions youth make to their communities through year-round volunteering.” According to the GYSD Web site,
A few new online map applications could be great fun for older kids as well as adults: Wikisky is a detailed sky map with constellations, astronomical photos, and more. Try clicking the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) button (the leftmost blue button) to see galaxies galore, or click “Astro Photo” or “The Collection” to see
A quick idea for preschool amusement and learning: Take a metal cookie sheet or pizza pan, preferably with a small rim around the entire edge, and stick a number of fridge-magnet letters and numbers to it. It makes a great “tablet” for spelling and counting, especially during dinner prep when the fridge is unavailable for
Gardening season is upon us, even here in the Northeast where winter tends to linger. To get in the spirit before you tackle tomatoes or cabbage, try making a grass-seed caterpillar with your kids. The short instructions are to mix dirt and grass seed and stuff into an old nylon stocking, then water and wait.
My laptop experienced a fatal error yesterday that required a complete mindwipe and restore. Luckily, we have more computers than creatures in our house (even counting the cats), so it didn’t affect my blogging. Twice lucky, I’d just done a backup, so it didn’t affect my sanity. As I sat watching a repeat of last
