IdyllopusPress Presents

Tag: homeschool

  • The grandparents of the Power Puff Girls

    The grandparents of the Power Puff Girls are those big-eyed waif pictures from the 60s and 70s that went so well with Tang, the space-age powdered orange drink choice of astronauts. The prototype were those painted by Margaret Keane, and despite the cutesy factor, the world looked cold for those parentless children. When I was…

  • Will it still bounce (and we’re still lousy scientists)

    Another We Are Lousy Scientists posting. We made a bouncing ball. You need borax, cornstarch glue and water. The instructions also tell you that you need a lot of other things like a cup that you mark as having your borax mixture and a cup you mark as having your glue-cornstarch mixture and things like…

  • Some people don't have to remember to dance, they just do

    In the meanwhile, I try to teach H.o.p. about the earth’s yearly cycle. I’ve been telling him about it for several years and he’s been fed all the information through a number of enjoyable educational venues. Ms. Frizzle tells him about it. Astronomy disks tell him about it. He likes what the planets look like,…

  • Talk amongst yourselves about Harriet Myers–we'll make hydrogen sulfide

    Yeah, yeah, I know. Harriet Myers, Harriet Myers. Whatever. We’ll see what the Bushtroll does next. In the meanwhile, we made hydrogen sulfide!!! And it smelled real bad. Bad enough that it chased H.o.p. from our little science lab (kitchen). “Eeeeeew, yuck! That stinks!” and he ran. It’s tough doing science when your seven-year-old flees…

  • I am a lousy scientist – exploring inertia

    Krampf’s science this week involved exploring Newtonian inertia via the simple experiment of putting a glass over a marble on a table top, pushing the glass in a circle which causes the marble to spin in a circle, and you should be able to pick up the glass and have the marble spinning within it…

  • Our next exhibit

    Pure poetry aided and abetted by Erik Satie, recommended by Norwegianity. Every afternoon at four o’clock, he finds himself in a room where he sits and watches the passing of the telephone lines playing on the opposite wall. The other day H.o.p. saw something that was only a positive archetypal figure in a brief story.…

  • We are lousy scientists

    I subscribe to Robert Krampf’s Experiment of the Week newsletter. Today Experiment #442 Melting Ice was the offering. H.o.p. is game for anything to do with water and ice. Perfect. We were instructed to put an ice cube in boiling water and hold one under a stream of cold water. The question was, which would…

  • It is not "real life" – it is what we’ve been educated to believe is "real life"

    I don’t often post human-interest type stories like this one below, from CNN, but aside from my wanting to note that had this been an anti-war demonstration gone wrong, in which case I think a lot of people would have ended up in jail (I don’t believe any arrests happened), I wanted to hear some…

  • The War of Reds and Greens

    The above picture of a frozen lake of water on Mars was taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft. The story is here. I tell H.o.p. about it and he goes, “Wow!!!!!!!” and we get rather excited. I’ve just finished showing H.o.p. a few more Photoshop tricks after…

  • Mark your calendar to buy this book in October

    Or rather marking my calendar to buy this book. You may mark your calendar to do whatever in October. Pam’s House Blend has a post on a new book by Jim Loewen that’s due to be released in October, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of Segregation in America”. A quote that Pam supplies from Publishers…

  • Eclectic homeschooling with blogs

    Klondike Kate’s Aurora continues her watch on the sun’s antics. Her enthusiasm is catching. “Science is cool” she writes, and if H.o.p. was a little older and interested yet in the sun and sun spots then I’d be reading to him her entries. A sample: There is an intriguing picture in the film strip on…

  • Transitioning to Homonyms as Hurricane Emily weakens

    And suddenly from Gumby we go to homonyms. “M-e-a-t and m-e-e-t. Meat and meet, two words that sound the same but aren’t spelled the same,” H.o.p. informs from out of nowhere, stepping away from Gumby. “Yes, homonyms,” I take the opportunity to inform him. “I know!” And H.o.p. in a matter of Internet seconds is…