Any librarians who do programming may be interested in this great opportunity. It's a chance to learn and help a library sciences student at the same time. The class is called "Mastering Program Planning" and it is being taught by doctoral student Jennifer Brown. It's a five week class starting February 13, so if you're interested, click on over and get registered.
Shapes, shapes, and more shapes. Circle, triangle, square, rectangle - it all starts of easy enough. Then it get a bit more complicated when you move from two dimensional to three dimensional - sphere, cylinder, pyramid, cube, prism. Then, before you know it, your tongue is in a knot, and you're totally confused. Just what does a decagonal gyroelongated bipyramid, compound of truncated icosahedron and pentakisdodecahedron, or a prolate hectohexecontadihedron look like? It's all in the name. The trick is understanding the language of shapes, and a little bit of Greek and Latin. For help with the Greek and Latin, [...]
What is Go? Well, besides being one of the words in the dictionary with a ridiculous number of definitions, it is the American name for the oldest board game in the world still being played in its original form and using the same rules devised over 2,000 years ago. By comparison, the rules of chess were finally established a mere 200 or so years ago. Go is also considered to be the world's oldest game of mental skill. Unlike chess, which has six different kinds of pieces, which move and [...]
The Lunar and Planetary Institute has done it again! They have developed another delicious educational experience to share with libraries and educators - Edible Rocks. Who would want to try to eat a rock? Just about everyone, when the "rocks" are chocolate bars, "Three Musketeers" (the candy, not the book or movie), "Nestle Crunch," and chocolate covered granola bars. In this activity, children learn and use terms that geologists use when studying and describing meteorites, except they will be using the terms to describe candy bars. They also get the opportunity to draw their observations and write descriptions of [...]
A few weeks ago, I came across a very interesting online store, the Carnivorous Plant Nursery. Their focus, shockingly, is on propagating and selling carnivorous plants from all over the world. But they also believe in education and helping educators of all kinds. To this end, they have a "Free Stuff" page on their website. There I found a printable, color and cut flip book of a Venus flytrap eating a fly. There are coloring pages of a Venus flytrap about to eat an insect, and a sundew with a trapped fly and spider. [...]
Fate is a funny thing. A few months ago I got ambitious one week, and wrote and published ( I thought) three blog articles. Unbeknownst to me, it was the same week that the STAR_Net blog was being moved to its new home on this website. For some reason, one of my articles made the move. The other two disappeared into the ether. I could have taken this experience as a reminder to always back up my work on at least one flash drive. Instead, I decided it was the universe giving me the opportunity to work harder on my article. [...]
A few weeks ago I decided to have a program where the kids could relax and let their creative juices flow, and where some of the parents/grandparents could flash back to their own childhoods and have a good laugh. The program, I expected, would be a short one. Then we could spend the rest of the time making thank you cards and notes for our summer reading club sponsors. It was the week of Independence Day, after all, and it's hard to get folks to come to the library that week. Things turned out a bit differently than I'd anticipated - in [...]
There's lots of research these days that supports the idea that a healthy body supports a healthy mind and intellect, improving one's ability to learn, understand, and retain information. Cultures throughout history may or may not have made the connection between a healthy body and a healthy mind, but they did encourage physical training and health for their children, as well as their adults. Often physical fitness was required for their very survival. That's not so much the case in the technologically advanced societies of today. Because we have become more sedentary, spending more [...]
How can kids use the scientific method to develop better, higher flying paper rockets, or, better yet, shock the administrators on the third floor? It's easy! For the last several years, I've been doing stomp rocket programs at my library. Whether it's during summer reading club or in the middle of the school year, it always draws quite an good crowd. The pre-program preparation requires a fair amount of work, but it's both fun and the results make it worth the effort involved. Each time I do the program, I add a bit more experimentation to the kids' activities. [...]
I recently received this e-mail from Christine Shupla, with the Lunar and Planetary Institute. I hope she doesn't mind my forwarding her announcement. I've attended some of these webinars in the past, and they are fantastic, as well as a lot of fun! I remember one where we created the phases of the moon by taking bites out of Oreos. At the same workshop, we created the layers of the earth with Rice Krispie Treats and other candies. I gained pounds of knowledge... and sugar calories. It was great! Of course, I don't think they actually intended for the participants to [...]
