Contents:
Introduction to Genetics for Younger Kids
I came across a nice interactive step-by-step guide introducing genetics for younger kids on curriki.org an open learning resource for teachers, students and parents. With click and drag options and multiple choice answers, kids learn about genes and how they are passed from parent to offspring.
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Rocking Out Your Morning
Today, our regular guest blogger, Joanne Arcand takes us on a tour of minerals used in household goods.
We all know that a big part of our daily lives involves materials made from plants and animals. From our clothing, our food and drink, our furniture, even the gasoline that drives our cars came from natural sources (mostly). I am in the midst of curriculum writing for a Grade 3 Science unit and have been doing research on rocks and minerals. Its amazing how many of our everyday substances come from these unremarkable items that get skipped across the water on lazy spring days.
Heres a shortened version of the facts found at this site..
Top Three Minerals You Have Encountered Today
Talc
Take talc, for example. Talc is a mineral refined from magnesium silicate. It has the lovely property of gliding over skin and laying on top of pores. Resistant to water, acids, and bases, it has been used in cosmetics since 3500 BC. It gets used in all sorts of applications from eyeshadows (because its translucent), lotions, blushes, deodorants, and is the white powder coating you see on chewing gum (its also added to fruit flavoured gum to make it extra chewy).
Because its usually inert (meaning its not jumping around reacting to things), talc makes a good filler for powders like carpet cleaners. Somehow, we like to have lots of powder in our insecticides in order to feel like its going to work and instructions like sprinkle 1/8 teaspoons onto floor to kill ants isnt as fulfilling as sprinkle liberally wherever you see the six legged invasion.
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How Memory Works
At K5 we advocate for little and often when it comes to learning. Spending 20-30 minutes per day with learning activities prepare young kids, not only for the study skills theyll need later in their academic lives, but also by focusing on essential reading and math activities helps to build the foundation for later, more complex concepts. We often talk about how in grade 4 the focus on reading shifts from learning to read to reading to learn.
With that said, we thought wed go through the four types of memory and what parents need to pay attention to in order to help their kids commit learned facts to their long-term memory.
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Having trouble Logging into K5 Learning?
Were thrilled to see so many new families trying out K5 Learning. Thank you for signing up for our 14-day free trial. With this new volume of users, were also seeing more requests for retrieving passwords for both adults and their kids.
I thought Id run through how to retrieve and reset passwords for parents and their kids as the processes are different. When you sign up for a trial account, the way we set up your account is one parent with his or her own password (with access to the parent dashboard) and associated kids (with access to their individual login screens). That means every kid is associated with one parent and each parent can have up to 4 kids associated with them.
Parents who Forget their Passwords
Parents who have forgotten their password may submit their username on the following page. Well email you a link to create a new password. Note: your username is your email address!
When Students Forget their Passwords
This process is a bit easier for parents, as you have control of your childrens accounts. You can easily reset their passwords from the parent dashboard.
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Using the K5 Referral Program to Give to Kiva
When Diane Allen wrote a review about K5 Learning on her popular blog, dallenhomeschoolreviews, she was automatically entered into our referral program. The K5 referral program is pretty simple. Any person who signs up for the trial that mentions where they heard about K5 from it can be a specific blog, a friend and then subscribes, we pay $25 to the individual that referred that family.
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The Good Work of Grassroots Reading Organizations
A friend put this poster on Facebook yesterday and it caught my attention.
What a clever way to raise awareness I certainly looked up the web site: burningthroughpages.org.
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The Metric System: How Not to Get Lost in Translation
Our regular guest blogger, Joanne Arcand, helps us unravel the confusion over the metric system.
By Joanne Arcand
The other week, I was talking to a traffic officer who works near Niagara Falls, Ontario. He remarked that the stretch of highway immediately after the border crossing from the USA into Canada is a surefire way to catch up on his quota for speeding tickets for the month.
It seems the lovely folks from the USA read our speed limit sign (100) too quickly and try to go 100 miles per hour (the unit of speed south of the border). For a few minutes, it must feel like theyve hit the autobahn of North American highways (no wonder we Canadians are so happy, we spend less time driving!). Then, the reality. Our speed limit in the Great, White North is in kilometers per hour. By traveling at 100 miles per hour, the drivers are actually moving at 160 kilometers per hour. If caught, the ticket is $600 and 6 demerit points on their license. That good ol metric system, eh?
Having grown up in the metric system, it makes sense to me to have a measuring system that uses ten subunits for every measurement. I always have to look up the conversion between pounds and tons, but I know that there are 1000 kilograms in a tonne.
As with many things, the conversion to metric in Canada began with the price of gasoline. It seems the US measure of the gallon (3.78 liters) differed from the imperial gallon used in Canada (4.55 liters). People filling up in the US were getting confused when they suddenly needed more gallons to fill their tank. So the Prime Minister at the time (a guy named Pierre Trudeau who was as close to a rock star that a politician can get at the time) decided to adopt the base ten measuring system used in France at the time.
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Will Our Childrens Children Read Paper and Ink Books
Yesterday, as I was eating lunch on our local shopping street, I watched the shop attendants from the third bookstore to go out of business on that street, lugging the last vestiges left behind into a nearby truck. Theyd had a book sale for a month and they still managed to fill a small truck with boxes of books.
It makes me sad to first see independent book stores go out of business and then smaller chains go out of business. Last time we visited one of the larger chains of book stores even my daughter commented on how many trinkets were on sale and how the books are being pushed further and further back into the store.
Is this the beginning of the end for paper and ink books? Will our childrens children never know what its like to turn a page or smell the fresh ink from a newly bought book? How will eReaders and eBooks change the way our children learn to read? eBooks like the Dr Seuss collection we mentioned on his birthday allow kids to have books read to them, to point on words to have that word read out aloud and they have more interactive illustrations. Are these new applications taking away the simple pleasures of just reading a book?
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Will This Be How Our Schools Look in the Future?
The not-profit conservative education policy think-tank, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute today released a new book, containing a selection of articles on how the US education system must change in order to realize the potential of digital learning.
Education Reform for the Digital Era provides estimates of the costs for online learning modules and ideas on how to change a system that has been leapfrogged by advances in technology. The chapters are as follows:
- Teachers in the Age of Digital Instruction, by Bryan C. and Emily Ayscue Hassel;
- "Quality Control in K-12 Digital Learning: Three (Imperfect) Solutions," by Frederick M. Hess;
- "The Costs of Online Learning," Tamara Butler Battaglino, Matt Haldeman, and Eleanor Laurans;
- "School Finance in the Digital-Learning Era," by Paul T. Hill; and
- "Overcoming the Governance Challenge in K-12 Online Learning," by John E. Chubb.
I cant pretend that I have read the book in its entirety, but I will. What I have gleaned from the chapters, blog posts and from watching the video from their panel discussion, is that, although an extremely complex system, at the core lies the recognition that digital learning has inherent advantages over whole-class learning.
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Fun to Read Books for Young Readers
Let us introduce you to Marvin Mayer, author of Sammy Squirrel and the Sunflower Seeds and Ferdinand Frog's Flight. After a lengthy career in finance, he found his true calling writing childrens literature.
By Marvin S. Mayer
In 2007, I retired from a lengthy career in banking, bank regulation, and asset management. My associates and supervisors consistently gave me high marks for my writing abilities. So when I moved from Dallas to East Texas, I enrolled in a "Writing for Children and Teens" correspondence course at the Institute for Children's Literature. That opened a door of fun and excitement I had not known.
I joined a local writing group and The Society for Children's Writers and Illustrators ("SCBWI.") In 2008, my first book, Sammy Squirrel and the Sunflower Seeds was published by Publish America. Ferdinand Frog's Flight, a picture book, was released in 2011 by 4RV Publishing. Both books have brought me, and the children to whom they were given (or sold) a lot of pleasure.
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