I have a seven-year-old daughter [C], and I'm always interested in providing her with a lot of good learning experiences outside of school (without getting too serious or obsessive about it). With this thread, I'd like to share with other parents ideas, tips and things to do that provide enrichment above and beyond school (or homeschooling curriculum, if that is what your child is doing).

I'm a teacher who has taught at the middle school and high school level. My daughter went to a Montessori school from preschool through kindergarten, and now she's in 1st grade. (I'd highly recommend a genuine Montessori program for any child: the self-paced, experiential nature of the program is superb, as are its social aspects.)

In that this thread is for people to drop suggestions, I would appreciate it if critiques, arguments, etc. be handled in PMs.

So, here we go.

TV time


Good games
Along with the usual assortment of games such as checkers, Connect 4, Sequence for Kids (a favorite of hers), chess, playing cards, Monopoly, etc., we have some good thinking games such as Set (a pattern recognition card game - once she got the hang of it, it became a favorite); Qwirkle (patterned tiles); Othello (strategy game); Mastermind for Kids (code breaking with Disney character tiles); Mastermind (code breaking with colored pegs - she hasn't tried to be the code breaker yet, but she enjoys making a code and listening to me think out loud as I try to solve it - she nearly stumped me the other day, much to her delight); Very Silly Sentences (DK games - kids build "Mad Libs" type sentences with colored word tiles, teaching them underlying sentence structure and parts of speech).

Striking a healthy balance between fiction and nonfiction reading
While C loves unicorns, magic ponies, princesses and all that, I try to encourage her to read nonfiction as well, particularly in science and nature. We have a few books with great pictures of animals, as well as a "kid's book of knowledge" with lots of illustrations on hand (she likes tracing some of the pictures in it). Of course, we have a decent assortment of books on hand here, and we spend a fair amount of time in one of the local libraries.

Magic and Optical Illusions
Magic and OLs are a lot of fun for kids, and they can also teach them a lot about the senses and skepticism. You can download plenty of great optical illusions from the internet (if anybody's interested, I could post a few favorites here).

For magic, we started with some magician's marked cards a couple of years ago (no, she's not allowed to play poker with this deck) as well as some simple cup tricks, and now she has a pretty good repertoire of illusions. She loves this book we picked up at the library, Jon Tremaine's Magic and Card Tricks - great illustrations and easy-to-follow instructions. When we work on tricks together, I talk about the magician's art, how an illusionist needs to divert the audience's attention by tricking their senses. Yes, she was deeply disappointed that there's no such thing as magic (at least a far as I know), but she's now developed a healthy skepticism towards illusion and magical claims.

Science & nature
I try to spend a good deal of time outdoors with C, taking her camping and taking her to parks. Like many kids, she has an assortment of magnifying glasses and bug catchers, and we've collected some interesting critters over the years (and, of course, burned some leaves with the magnifying glasses). As usual, this fall we collected a bunch of leaves, pressed them, and made a colorful collage which she brought in to school.

We talk a lot about germs and cells so I got her a microscope for Xmas (I bought a large box of prepared slides as well - should be some interesting viewing). We'll have to see what germs around the house we can pick up, prepare and view under the scope. Come spring, we'll go out to the local pond to see what's floating around in there.

Map-making & orienteering
We have a small wooded park around the corner that we go to often, and we sometimes do treasure hunts or scavenger hunts there. Treasure hunt (a favorite): I bring a clipboard with paper and pencil, a compass, and stuff to hide. She and I make a map with orientation points and NSEW markings, then one of us hides clues around the park, some of which are riddles and others for which the seeker has to use the compass. She and her friends love scavenger hunts as well.

Number sense
Since she's always talking about "a gazillion million billion", I've been trying to get her to develop good number sense. I know my schooling didn't do so (if you've ever read Innumeracy, you know what I mean). The Montessori program uses colored counting beads so that kids can pick up and hold "numbers" to connect the abstract numerals with concrete representations. I have a set of Cuisenaire Rods, similar to the counting rods at school, that we use now and then.

I have a set of counting chips (similar to ordinary poker chips) that we use for addition/subtraction and multiplication (she asked me the other day why 2+2=4 and 2x2=4, so why doesn't 10+10=10x10? The chips were very helpful in demonstrating the idea).

We also use graph paper to multiply columns by rows, and we've made cutouts to show tens, hundreds and thousands.

For big numbers, I talk to her about the differences among thousands, millions and billions (and gazillions, of course). For example, I tell her that there 3,600 seconds in an hour, and that it takes about 11.5 days for a million seconds to go by. So, I ask her, how long would it take for a billion seconds to go by? 31.7 years. (This, of course, surprised the heck out of me when I read this in Innumeracy years ago.) But in this age of astronomical federal budgets, it's good to know one's orders of magnitude - a trillion here, a trillion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money. (You've no doubt figured out that, it takes 32,710 years for a trillion seconds to go by. Even at a thousand dollars a second, it would still take an awfully long time to pay down that national debt...).

We also use a calculator to figure out how many seconds old we are, or how many seconds it is until Xmas.

Another good resource is a book we picked up at the library, Andrew Clement's A Million Dots, which, of course, has a million dots in it. He starts by showing dots arranged in a group of ten, a hundred, five hundred and a thousand, then each page has about 23,000 dots on it, with a number fact to correspond with a particular dot (e.g., for dot 600, "The wings of a mosquito beat 600 times each second"), with a running tally of the dots so far. C enjoys looking through it, and thinks it's just crazy that the book has a million dots in it.

That's all for now. Hope what I've shared might be helpful in some way, and I'm looking forward to hearing from you fellow parents and teachers.


- Charlie

Cooking?

Absolutely! Recipes, measuring, care in preparation, gasses/liquids/solids (and not getting burned!) - all great stuff. Please share.

Building stuff with wood, making a fire, playing around with engines (maybe too young), looking at stars, finding the north star and noticing how all stars seem to circle around it.

Since you've already played with a magnifying glass, I wonder if you've made an image on a wall with it.
http://www.practicalphysics.org/go/Experiment_605.html
for some reason this trick is not well known even though almost everybody knows the burning leaves trick.

Also please post your optical illusions.

Jakov wrote:Building stuff with wood,

Any ideas? We made a wild platform swing once, but I haven't done much lately.

making a fire,

When we go camping, she generally wants to either fish or build a fire.

looking at stars, finding the north star and noticing how all stars seem to circle around it.

With us being so close to the city, the lights and pollution make it tough to see the stars. She's yet to see the Milky Way, but I hope to take her up to the mountains next summer. Upstate Pennsylvania has one of the best stargazing spots (Cherry Springs) in the East. I guess I should invest in a star map to go along with the cheap telescope I got her last year.

Since you've already played with a magnifying glass, I wonder if you've made an image on a wall with it.

Haven't done that - thanks for the idea and the link. We made a camera obscura not too long ago, and she was pretty amazed at the upside-down image in the box.

I don't have a specific activity in mind, but I have always found this technique helpful when speaking to young children. If your kid asks you a question, don't answer it immeadiately. Ask them the question and let them think about the answer. For example, if they asked 'How do people know what colour dinosaurs were?", you would say "How could we find out what colour dinosaurs were?". Whether they get the right answer isn't important. Assure them that in brainstorming there are no wrong answers. Each wrong answer gets them a step closer to the right answer. Wrong answers may even open up opportunities to talk about other subjects and concepts.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm not a parent or teacher.

Jakov wrote:Also please post your optical illusions.

She likes motion illusions, anything to do with animals, strange dots, and trick pictures. Some of her favorites:




Dots
Stare at the center, and a green dot will appear to be chasing the pink dots:

Ghost dots:


How many legs:

Horse or frog?

Rabbit or duck?


Size/perspective illusions:


What is this?



Hidden face in picture:


Figure/ground illusions:


Is the dancer spinning clockwise or counterclockwise? If you stare at it long enough, you should see both ways.


And this one's a bit racy, but I was told that young kids will only see dolphins in it, while we adults see only the two lovers in amorous embrace:

Crocodile Gandhi wrote:If your kid asks you a question, don't answer it immediately. Ask them the question and let them think about the answer.

Excellent point. We adults and teachers are often too quick to offer an answer, but what I've found over the years is that pausing and asking a question is often more effective in getting kids to think. And encouraging kids to ask good questions is equally important.

(I used to teach a class where we'd be discussing a particular short story or essay, and all I was able to do was to ask interpretive questions. Those classes were amazing when they took off, especially when kids started figuring out interpretive questions on their own and generating their own discussions - kind of put me out of a job! )

re: "TV time" in the OP
Last night, with my daughter glued to the computer (doing some game on PBS linked from her school's eboard), I just realized how limited I was in simply talking about "TV time." (How quaintly old-fashioned of me!)

Change that to"media time," which would include computer time, iPod time, and iPhone time (I have a few years to wait for the latter two). I'm not a Luddite, but balance is important, especially for developing minds.

More on magic and illusions:
Having just finished a book on magic and perception, I talk with C about some "magicians' principles" - basic ideas that allow them to fool people's perception .


Among them,

- large movements mask small movements (deception through sleight of hand)
- the effectiveness of apparent invisibility / camouflage
- the influence of past experience on perception (to provide continuity of experience in spite of gaps; to allow for efficient inferential leaps)

- making moves seem natural allows the magician to lead people down an incorrect inferential path


C read about and taught herself a "floating pencil" trick from that book I mentioned above. Using a thin thread attached to the eraser and her shirt, she is able to make a pencil appear to levitate out of a bottle. She chose red because she was wearing a pink shirt and thought it would camouflage better than black or white thread.

We've talked about animal camouflage in the past, how markings can fool the eye, and now I can talk to her about the limits of perception - how it's useful from an evolutionary standpoint, but also how it can be fooled. It's a nice confluence of ideas, linking camouflage, optical illusions, and magic together.

With these topics, I try to emphasize how our perceptions/inferences are useful in most everyday situations, but, as illusions demonstrate, they can be fooled very easily: it's not really magic, just errors in our cognition. And from this discussion, we can go on to cognitive biases sometime in the future (using riddles is a great way to do this).



[Smilies provided by C ]

ChasM wrote:

Jakov wrote:Building stuff with wood,

Any ideas? We made a wild platform swing once, but I haven't done much lately.

Now that I think of it, the only stuff I remember building were shelves and tables. But even though adults would probably call it DIY, I remember it being quite interesting to use hand saws, screwdrivers, nails, hammers and the like.
I once nearly made a windmill and was planning to take a dynamo off an old bicycle and make it power a lamp.

Bows and arrows are quite fun to make and use. As small children normally don't have the strength to use anything but the least powerful bows its unlikely they'll hurt anyone while shooting. The only tools you need are a knife, saw and string. Perhaps feathers if later you want to make the arrows fly straighter.
Of course these days in popular culture you might see archers shooting arrows like in Lord Of The Rings and its nice to have tried it yourself.

looking at stars, finding the north star and noticing how all stars seem to circle around it.

With us being so close to the city, the lights and pollution make it tough to see the stars. She's yet to see the Milky Way, but I hope to take her up to the mountains next summer. Upstate Pennsylvania has one of the best stargazing spots (Cherry Springs) in the East. I guess I should invest in a star map to go along with the cheap telescope I got her last year.

Also you could download a program called Celestia for free. It does all the maths to work out where each celestial body is, then renders it onto the computer screen and allows you to click, travel and move forwards or backwards in time.
link - http://www.shatters.net/celestia/
video of it being used - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrPYQraAcws

You've written about how you're worried about media exposure, but only most media is bad. If you watch documentaries or lecture programs it can be a valuable and enlightening experience. Problem is that these programs are poorly advertised so you have to look for them yourself.
You don't need telescopes to enjoy the stars. If you go out with your naked eye and perhaps watch Carl Sagan's Cosmos beforehand you'll probably get your mind blown.
I believe there's a quote by Neil deGrasse Tyson that goes something like "There are more stars in the universe than all the words that have ever been spoken by every human who's ever lived".

Thx!

-C

Outings (obvious ones I guess, but if anyone wants to add to this list, go ahead):

Planetarium (with or without the "t", depending on whether you're a South Park fan or not)
Botanic Gardens
Library
Museum
Art Gallery
Bushwalking
Picnic

Great ideas so far.

My son (just 9) and I made birdhouses in the shop for all our friends this christmas. There are all kinds of online plans for the birds appropriate to your area. Then, if you are lucky you get to watch the parents do their nest building, and rearing and if you pay attention, the fledging of the young. Wonderful stuff. Last year we had swallows and wrens. You need pretty specific hole sizes for different birds so do a little research first.

Often before bed time my son and I sit and watch a youtube or two. I am subscribed to "Spacerip" which is a layman level astronomy/cosmology channel. The pieces run 2-8 mins and will keep you up to date with seriously neat graphics and photos. "One more, and then it's bedtime, yes?"

If you go camping, learn how to start a fire with a bow, this is a useful survival skill for you and your kids, and will impress the hell out of them!!

You can make a neat little indoor bow and arrow out of a plastic coat hanger (the bow, just cut the hook off) and a straw with a pin taped or hot glued to the end.

That reminds me: Hot glue guns. Hours of entertainment and a pretty constant reminder about not burning yourself. You can buy popsicle sticks at a dollar store, and all those almost complete decks of cards and also toilet paper tubes now have a new purpose in life. Reminder for parents, don't do hot gluing near a carpet. My son has a portable blackboard about 3' x 4' that we turn over and put on the hardwood floor here to protect it and avoid me having to pick the inevitable spills off the floor.

Great thread, more if/when I think of stuff.

Bolero wrote:Outings (obvious ones I guess, but if anyone wants to add to this list, go ahead):

Planetarium (with or without the "t", depending on whether you're a South Park fan or not)
Botanic Gardens, Library, Museum, Art Gallery, Bushwalking, Picnic

Living near a metropolitan area, we're fortunate in having a great variety of museums, zoos, gardens, etc. nearby. We do have a famous botanic garden a few miles away - I suppose I should make a day to take her some time next summer.

And, thinking of local resources, seeking out interesting geological sites in one's area is important as well. Not too far from here there's a park with "ringing rocks" - a glacial field of boulders that when you hit them with a hammer, they "ping" like a piece of metal. C was intrigued when I showed her vid clips of me hitting the rocks - I'll take her up there next spring for a little camping and hiking.

The unfortunate thing about my area is the prevalence of deer ticks and Lyme disease. I've had it a couple of times, and a few of my students have had rather severe cases. Makes one pause when taking the kids out in the woods.

@Onyx
birdhouses & hot glue - great idea!
and I'll have to work on my survival skills. I've seen the bow/firestarter done on TV but never done it myself. Thanks for the tips.

More on microsopes:

Cali posted some great stuff on making your own "infusoria culture" for breeding protozoa - great stuff for viewing under a microscope.
http://www.rationalskepticism.org/post626622.html#p625682
http://www.rationalskepticism.org/post626622.html#p626278

Well, I broke down and gave C her microscope as a pre-Xmas gift. I posted this in the "Self-Taken Pictures of wildlife" thread:

My kid's microscope arrived the other day, and I couldn't wait until Xmas to give it to her (I know, terribly impulsive parenting...). She's been very busy collecting samples of things to look at - ribbons, dust bunnies, pencil shavings, saliva, etc. - but the most delightful find was a dead "stinkbug." While these beetles are annoyingly ubiquitous (most likely due to the stinky chemical they emit when threatened), their apparent dull dun color belies the beautiful patterns and colors when viewed under the scope at 40x (the scope has 40x/100x/400x magnification with above and below lighting). I was surprised to find that I could take snapshots of the images with my camera, so here y'go:




Cali, would you happen to know what those orange protuberances are on the forehead above the eyes? I told my daughter that they might be another set of non-compound eyes, but I wasn't sure.


http://www.rationalskepticism.org/fun-games/self-taken-pictures-of-wildlife-t9018-1400.html#p625624

(Those orange thingies are a separate set of eyes, btw.)

I've made a digital slide show with these and other images for her to show her classmates. The teacher had a great idea - suggesting that we start with the magnified images and ask "What is it?", then reveal the regular-sized image. I'll post it here when I get a chance.

More braindroppings on video games:

C likes playing one of my Xbox car games, Burnout Paradise, an open road game (as opposed to a closed-track circuit game) that has roads winding through a city, suburbs and up into the mountains. Last night she was driving around here and there in her favorite car and was proud that she was able to navigate back to the "junkyard" (where you trade in your ride for a different car) by using the mini-map and the large map. Good to develop those orienteering / map-reading skills at a young age.

Get her to draw her own maps of the house and/or garden.

We do that - and she thinks it's fun. As I mentioned in the OP, we do treasure hunts in the local park, making our own maps. I got the idea from a parent at her Montessori school, who taught a mapmaking/orienteering activity for the kindergartners and gave me some good suggestions on how to start (the fun factor weighing heavily in the mix).

Kids should be taught the realities of life.

For example, when going to the bank, involve the kid. Fill out the deposit slip and ask the kid to give the money to the teller. Tell the kid:

I give or deposit my money to the bank to keep it safe. The bank uses my money - and the money of other people - by having other people who need money use the money to buy things like a house or car. In return for the bank using our money, the bank pays me some money, called interest.

I can also pay other people by giving them this piece of paper called a check. By signing this check, I am moving my money to the person I'm giving the check to.