Hugo Estrada's House of Wonder

Here is a quick update on what we did yesterday.

1. Yesterday Isabella was introduced to the magical world of the Greek alphabet. I will see how far we can go into learning classical Greek as a father-daughter project. I see that it will be very, very slow :P

2. Isabella also created a bungie cord out of rubber bands. Lesson after conducting tests with a Pooh toy: it could be dangerous if humans tried it. Then she worked on a zip line model for Pooh.

3. We worked on bridges too. Isabella learned about different types of bridges, and we conducted an experiment on structure. She got to learn about precision in measuring instruments, margin of error, worked on multiplication and division, how changing the structure of paper can increase its structural strength. Did you know that by making to folds, a piece of paper can hold over 200 grams?

4. Leadership training. I granted permission to Isabella to tell her younger brother what to do. I keep giving her tips on how to make him want to do what she needs to do, which is cleaning up after their own messes.

It was a good day.

This was a comment to @geobabbler 's entry on GIS for Kids

I have been thinking about teaching the children of Crunchy Granola Academy more about GIS, and I was also thinking about having some GIS activities for my daughter's Brownie meeting.

Here is the comment that I wrote on the site:

We should exchange some ideas.

You probably want to move from the concrete physical to physical maps and then into gis. And if possible, being physically present in the grounds of the place where they are mapping would be good to help the kids make the mental leap that gis translates into the real world.

I have done walking papers with my children, and that is something that they really enjoyed. It is Concrete, they have a physical map, and they get to walk around some area.

I also have had my kids in the OSM parties. In one we got the hike Rock Creek Park and in another we hiked the zoo.

I would say that the gps unit is not really that interesting to them because it doesn’t seem to do much except to show a tiny map.

However, they did like entering notes for different points on the way in a notebook.

A possible activity that you can have for them, although this will take a little bit of planning is to create a short orienteering course. We could skip the compass if that is a problem and the area is small enough, the most important thing would be to use a map to find different points in a playground or a room.

Another activity, if these are taking place at a school, would be to map their classroom, first creating maps, and then adding points of interest, then adding demographic data, such as how many children are in different parts of the classroom.

If this could then be translated into software, then the basic concepts should be understood when you move into mapping a school grounds or some local park or area.

I will have to look at Portable GIS to see if I think my kids could handle it.

I will probably cross post this comment as an entry in my website.

Crunchy Granola Academy
So after almost 2 months and a half, I finally have the time to actually interact with my children.

Today I did math with Isabella again, I attempting to teach Alexander to read, and then I worked with Isabella on her homework. Then we practiced the violin. Isabella showed a surprising interest in Old Time music, and what finally got her practicing violin was her desire to learn how to play Boil Them Cabbage Down, which I am learning as well.

Isabella did two exercises in math which is good. At some point she decided that she was bad it, which really angered me because she is actually quite good at it, but hopefully in the next month she will be back to normal on that front.

Old Time Music

So after working a lot over the weekend, I decided to buy myself a present, and I got a book with Old Time fiddle music. At home there are three sources for interest in this music: interest in folk music in general mainly the easy listening pop stuff from the 60s, but some other stuff as well, my interest in contra dancing, which I barely ever do, and Railroad Tycoon.

So now I have about 60 tunes to learn. I doubt I will get through that anytime soon, so I won't buy another music book retail until I finish reading that one.

In any case, I am going to have a lot of fun with it. And it seems that Isabella likes it too.

Chess, Hebrew, Torah

These have taken a back seat right now. I will get them back on track once everything returns to normal in the following weeks.

Erlang, Cobol and Tech project

Same thing. Although there are these really cool android classes over the internet that I have been taken. I must do the task to really learned them though. Then I will create a schedule for the rest.

Exercising

That really took a back seat, and now I am all achy. I had to go to the doctor today on that. That I must start working on because I must protect my health. Let's see how it works out.

Bella dictating:

I was trying to clean the room with my Daddy. It was not fun at first. But then we had a little fun, and we even had a little star gazing. Finally, the room seemed spotless. It looks dear. No toys, cloths, or books on the floor. I even did a tiny bit of dusting.

The room looked great.

I was scared at first, but then it came out really clean!

I discovered that I was a super neatnik!

I was looking down the front page, and I saw that Isabella, our proud student and Crunchy Granola Academy, has more finished hobby projects than I. It seems that I better start doing more home coding :S

This one, like the last one, was done all by herself. She also made the graphics. Now that she is on vacation, the no programming after 7 restriction has been lifted.

Oh, and scratch is awesome.

Learn more about this project

Here is another beautiful project from Bella.

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This is the first program that Isabella did pretty much all by herself. :)

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Learn more about this project

Bella did her first programming tutorial tonight! This is her work; a scratch project. I am so proud of her. Crunchy Granola Academy seeks to give a sound technology education to its students!

To stop it, click on the red stop sign on the top right. To start it again, click on the green flag.

I got a Spacewarp 20 that I bought at a yard sale about 3 years ago for $2. Isabella at the time was really interested in gum ball machines. I believed that the reason why she liked it was because she liked seeing the ball falling down the spiral. So when I found this toy, I decided that it would be a good substitution.

This is a video of the 5000 model, but it looks very similar to the 20.