Michelle Healy and Donna Gordon Blankinship both had separate articles hit the streets regarding the latest studies involving young children and TV. Television content DOES affect behavior. No DUH! Michelle Healy’s article was reprinted in the Reno Gazette Journal. I found Donna Blankinship’s article on-line when I googled to find the first one. Here are the two articles:
Indian Country Today had a nice article on the Lyrid Fireball over the Sierra Nevada. Darn! We missed it! Seems like the main burnout spot was along the western side of the Sierras about midway between Sacramento and Fresno. The Watchers had this article, too!
The Grunion Run of 2012 has started! – If you can make it, it would be fun to attend the 8 pm Program at Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in San Pedro, CA, for their Meet the Grunion Program followed by a visit to the beach to see these little fish for yourself! Here is more information about the program at the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium.
What is a Grunion Run????? Grunions are little fish only found along the Southern California Coast and northern Baja California. There are all kinds of jokes about going to see the Grunion Run along various CA beaches because it happens late at night.
An old November 14, 2011 issue of Time Magazine caught our attention last week in the waiting room of a doctor’s office. Most time-worn, old magazines hardly grab the attention, but this one was different. Unfortunately, as is often the case with magazines in doctors’ offices, the first integral pages were missing of the article “Education Can Save Us” but we were so fascinated by the discussion of the Khan Academy, that we further explored it later on-line. It is simply amazing! Here is the Youtube introduction:
This FREE stockpile of lesson plans is well worth the attention of parents, teachers and students! We were looking at the lessons in beginning arithmetic. Some people complained about the lessons being a bit on-the-back-of-a-napkin crude, but considering how it all came about, it still helps students learn by drilling on the basics. Here is an article How Khan Academy Is Changing the Rules of Education by Clive Thompson from wired.com that explains how it evolved.
You can peruse the website without logging in. If you want to track your progress, you will need a Google or Facebook account as explained on the Getting Started page.
By the way, I found the missing pages (as well as the rest) of the article “Education Can Save Us” on-line as “When will we learn?” here by Fareed Zakaria.
The Huffington Post had some great photos of Saturday morning’s (6 am PST) lunar eclipse in this article. I wasn’t awake for it, so I’m glad to see the pictures! I hope you enjoy them, too! There are a lot of good links for additional information in the Huffington article “Lunar Eclipse Photos: Pictures Of Total Eclipse Of The Moon From Around The World.”
When we were in the airport last weekend to catch a JetBlue plane to Chicago, a billboard caught my eye. It advertises a joint effort between JetBlue and PBS that has been developed to keep kids reading! You’ll find fun reading activities provided by PBS KIDS® and helpful reading tips for children of all reading levels. Check it out! Let’s Read is the main page. There are many activities on the Activities page. It is well worth your time to find some fun ways to get your children reading more enthusiastically!
The Long Beach Press-Telegram article No Bullying by Kelly Puente got me thinking about how to get our preschoolers to behave nicely with other kids in their daycare classes and on the playground. The PeaceBuilders program sounds like a good way…. Here’s a Kansas study for Positive Behavior Support. I also have many more links from my post I wrote in 2009 on reducing toddler behavior problems.
Lemon pucker power! Austi had me laughing so hard when he kept putting the lemon in his mouth over and over while he winced every time. His face-making was so similar to these kids trying it in this video that I saw on Grandparents.com! Some think it is terrible, but I remember doing it myself as a kid, too! It had me in tears because I was laughing so hard!
Grandpa Ron and I just got back from a weekend in San Diego where we visited friends and the Palomar Observatory.
We drove up the mountain to the observatory yesterday but got there at 4:05 – and it closes at 4 pm!! So we walked around a bit and took some pictures, but we decided to try again today. The San Diego Train Museum was going to have to wait for another time! We got up to the observatory today just in time for the 2:30 tour. The tour was fantastic. We really enjoyed it. The guide was great. Grandpa Ron had been there as a boy in 1954. A lot has changed since then! Check out the links if you are interested in astronomy. Tony Flanders blogged about it on May 23, 2010 for Sky and Telescope. The observatory currently consists of three large telescopes. The biggest one is the 200 in (5.1 m) Hale telescope> Then there is the 48 in (1.2 m) Samuel Oschin telescope, and a 60 in (1.5 m) reflecting telescope. The gift shop has lots of books and star/galaxy related objects for kids as well as grown-ups!
We never got into the site to get a ticket for the Women’s Conference! Three of us tried separately at 9 am and patiently awaited the magical moment when the auto-refreshed screen would tell us our place in the queue but none of us got into the queue! By the time I noticed my url was dead (and so was Leslie’s) and I went to another computer to try again at 9:50 am, the Main Event (Tuesday) was already completely sold out!
So we are signed up one more year for Monday only. Guess we’ll reserve the conference room for the webcast again. I’m actually not as upset as I was last year about not getting tickets because the webcast option is excellent. We still get the main stage presentations even if we don’t get to choose the side sessions that get televised.
It looks like they tried their best not to overrun the servers by shutting down the rest of the site (the links and all) but I bet they still were swamped given what happened to us…. oh, well….
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MyGrandmaSue 