The Scrub Club

The Scrub Club is website that promotes good handwashing. It includes webisodes showing six heroes (each a step in handwashing) fighting villians like influenza and salmonella.

Things to Do With Kids in Yokosuka

This nature institute in Yokosuka looks promising Institute for Nature Study Mabori . They certainly have great info on Japanese Fireflies. (This is a computer based translation.) This was listed as part of the Yokosuka City Museum.

Outstanding NASA Page for Scouts (and other interested kids)

I've spent almost the whole week working on cub scout stuff, from holding training to attending meetings. It is a good thing that we didn't take off when the school was on spring break, because my kids had an impromptu spring break for the last three days as I schlepped them from meeting to meeting. (The good news is that Cauliflower has beaten his Nintendo DS Star Fox game and unlocked a bunch of free play levels.)

One of the other leaders happened to mention a cool scout related page at NASA's education section. If you are a scout leader, you have to check this out. If you are the parent of curious kids, you should check it out. If you are looking for all the ingredients of a ready-made science or space related unit study, check it out. Did I mention that this site is cool? And that you should check it out?

(Update: There is a Girl Scout keyed section too.)

Recorded Books Giveaway

There is another audiobook giveaway at Recorded Books.
They are featuring a series by James Patterson. I don't know much about the series, it features kids who are genetic modifications of humans and birds. The reviews seem mixed, but it might be right up your alley (or that of a teen reader you know). There is an audio excerpt available of the first chapter if you'd like to check it out.

They will be picking winners from the comments section.

Jet Flyover Scares New Yorkers

When my oldest son was about four he asked me why I always watched airplanes as they flew across the sky. We lived across from National Airport and I had developed a habit of watching any approaching plane until it was clear that it wasn't going to hit anything. I didn't even realize that I was doing it until he said something. DH worked at the Pentagon and we had lost several friends on September 11th.

I was reminded of this while watching a video of one of the planes used as Air Force One as it did a low flyby of downtown New York. Evidently, there were many who thought that there was another attack happening. Here is the New York Times article. This was very poorly planned.

Handwashing Song

One of the recommendations for teaching kids to wash their hands long enough is to have them rubbing the soap around as long as it takes to sing Happy Birthday. Yesterday my kids came up with this version.

Happy Death Day to you.
Happy Death Day to you.
Happy Death Day Influenza Virus.
They make your cells all explode.

Not quite Ring a Round the Rosie, but hey.

Bill Bennett's Book List

Author and former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett has a list of books he thinks every high schooler should read before they graduate. The list is compiled from suggestions made by a number of well read and well written colleagues of Bennett. There should be not shock that the list is dominated by classics.

Shakespeare's plays, especially "Macbeth" and "Hamlet," I have read both of these, as well as several others. But I far prefer watching or even listening to the plays. I was lucky enough to live within striking distance of the Folger Shakespeare Theatre in college. So I was able to see top rate performances of several plays. I wish there were a video version of Stacy Keach playing Richard III. Wow.

"Fifty percent [of respondents] cited such documents of United States history as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address." I would go even further to suggest the Federalist Papers as part of this. The book The Citizen's Handbook is a good reference. Bennett himself edited a book of writings of the founders tittled, "Our Sacred Honor."

Huckleberry Finn Just read the book. You can ignore the often silly or trivial analysis essays that often come in the "critical" editions.

the Bible I've gotten all the way through once. Not nearly as often as I should.

Homer's "Odyssey" and "Iliad." - I've only read retellings. Excellent versions, but this is something for me to remedy.

Dickens's "Great Expectations" and "Tale of Two Cities." I've read both of these. But I wonder if reading Dickens' long works ends up making one feel that they've already done Dickens. I'm not sure that I've read any of his work since college other than A Christmas Carol.

Plato's "Republic." I think I read this in college. But I really couldn't tell you what was in it.

John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath." I faked my way through reading and discussing this in college. I came to find out that even the student group leading the discussion hadn't read the whole book. I read and enjoyed Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row years earlier. My dislike for this book may have been more dislike of that particular professor, who always managed to rub me the wrong way, even when he was saying something I agreed with.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter." Yes. (What was everyone involved with the 1995 Demi Moore version thinking. Sure, we'll completely change the ending of the book and no one will notice. Bah.)

Sophocles' "Oedipus." Yes, and Antigone. I love the comments on these books in Who Killed Homer?

Melville's "Moby Dick." I don't know how I avoided reading this, since it or White Jacket were almost mandatory freshman reading at my college.

Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four." Definitely. I went through a distopia phase. Animal Farm, Brave New World, even We. Great books.

Thoreau's "Walden." Yes. But I think Thoreau is over rated.

The poems of Robert Frost. Not nearly enough of them.

Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." No. And knowing that a certain former president gave this as a gift to his wife and his intern may be enough for me never to bother.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Great Gatsby." Yes. But I have to disagree with this one. I don't think that most high schoolers have enough life under their belts to digest this one well.

Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales." The prologue and a few tales, including The Knight's Tale, which is a great story.

Marx's "Communist Manifesto." Yes. Fortunately, I read works by Soviet dissidents shortly after this. Nothing like reading about the reality of life under communism to take the bloom off the rose.

Aristotle's "Politics." No.

The poems of Emily Dickinson. Again, not nearly enough.

Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment." Brother's Karamazov, but not this one.

The novels of William Faulkner. Oh yes. Some of the hardest and most rewarding books. I should work through these again.

J. D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye." Yes, and I didn't really get what all the fuss is about. Maybe my childhood was too pleasant.

De Tocqueville's "Democracy in America." Hanging my head, no.

Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice." Yes, and most of her others. Persuassion is my all time favorite. This would be on my desert island list.

The essays and poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Not really.

Machiavelli's "Prince." Yes. Very good.

Milton's "Paradise Lost." Another one I need to pick up.

Tolstoy's "War and Peace." No. Anna Karenena was on my list of things to do when I got out of the Navy. I got about half way through it and decided that Anna was a self-centered person who really never would be satisfied and gave it up. I had a similar reaction to listening to Wuthering Heights years after reading it the first time. And Jane Eyre creeps me out more than a little. Funny how I perceived books differently as a single college student and as a married mom of three. Love triangles only seem tragic now, not enticing. I'm even disappointed with Guenivere and Lancelot.

Virgil's "Aeneid." Again only a retelling.

I won't make this a meme because I don't think I have more than 3-5 regular readers. But I'd love to know more about your reading biography. Have you read and enjoyed anything on Bennett's list? Would you propose a different list?

There is nothing published in the last 30 years and no science fiction unless you count 1984. I would have to include Starship Troopers and perhaps Ender's Game. Not to mention The Caine Mutiney or Boorstin's The Image.

Free Poetry Reading

Recorded Books is offering a couple free downloads of poetry readings and a contest to win CDs that they come from. The drawing is based on the comments section, which is pretty sparse right now, so seems like the odds are good.

We love poetry at our house. I can pretty much cure any bad mood (mine or my kids) with a dive into Favorite Poems Old and New (especially with Daddy Fell into the Pond or Song of the Pop Bottlers).

China's Missing Girls

From this article on Slate:

Sixteen million girls are missing in China. And now we know what happened to them: They were aborted because they weren't boys.

The one child policy plus a bias toward boys.

In another post on Slate blog Human Nature, they report on how the one child policy has encouraged development in a black market for children, including children who were kidnapped.

Emmanuel Books

Our little base library has a homeschool resources corner. It is pretty much a desk with a bunch of catalogs to puruse, but it is at least a recognition that homeschoolers might be library users, so I'm pretty thrilled to see it. The librarian said that he'd take any catalog donations that I might want to make, so I've been trying to add a bunch of homeschool specific catalogs to what is mostly a classroom oriented collection.

So I requested all kinds of homeschool related catalogs, including several that I've never seen before. Today I was especially impressed with the catalog from Emmanuel Books. They are a catholic religious and homeschool catalog. They feature a lot of Laura Berquist titles and books recommended in her books. But I was totally wowed by the number of historical fiction titles that I'd never heard of before. Many of these were reprints of older titles. And in several cases I'd read other books by the author, but not realized how many other books were available.

If you are a book lover, especially if you are a homeschooler that uses a lot of living books, this is a catalog well worth browsing.

What Books Would You Buy?

I have a very generous Amazon gift card. I'm a little stumped what to get with it. It should be something a little frivolous and for me (which rules out things like math or handwriting books).

I was thinking of the Middle Ages volume of Susan Wise Bauer's History of the World, but it's not out until 2010.

Maybe one of Thomas Sowell's economics books? Maybe the Dorothy Sayers volumes that I don't own? Science fiction that I haven't read yet? Nature books like a book on birds of Japan?

What would you buy?

Kitchen Tales

My kids treated me to breakfast in bed yesterday (oatmeal and coffee). My middle son brought me my coffee and looked a little stressed. Our coffee maker has been giving me fits and I thought that he might have been having trouble too.

He explained that he hadn't been sure how to make the coffee but finally he put the water up to the six mark and since he read on the coffee can that it needed two tablespoons per six ounce cup of water, he put in two tablespoons of coffee.

It was a very creamy sweet latte.

I did supplement with a diet Coke later, so all the children are still fine.

Carnival of Homeschooling - Peter Rabbit Edition

The latest Carnival of Homeschooling is up at Home Education Magazine. Come enjoy the offerings.

Artichoke Looks at Dandelions

We went outside into the common area around our apartment to enjoy a little nature time this morning. Things didn't go quite as planned as the sprinkles we felt soon turned into a real downpour.

However, all was not lost. We cowered under the overhang of the building and watched the raptors fly to shelter in the trees on the hill behind the building. Soon there were three clearly visible on branches high above us.

When the rain tapered off, we spent a little more time watching as various birds flew out of their sheltering spots and came down to look for food on the wet grass. Artichoke (1st grade) found a couple dandelions too examine and sketch. Here's what he noticed.

On the stem there was reddish brown, green and more brown.
There is a hole in the stem.
The flower is mostly yellow.
The seeds are brownish black.
The seeds have fluff and blow away really easily.

Rutabaga drew a very detailed sketch of a dalek (we've been on a bit of a Doctor Who binge here). When I convinced him that drawing nature would also help him to sketch the science fiction and robots that he favors, he gave me a very nice tiny sketch of one of the local birds. He thinks that he's identified it as a crested myna. I agree that it is very myna like, but I'm not totally sure about this id.

Bellum vs Guerra

Mackubin Thomas Owens wrote a post on National Review Online in which he observed that there has been a traditional distinction between war between a legitimate enemy and war against thugs like brigands.

"The Romans distinguished between bellum, war against legitimus hostis, a legitimate enemy, and guerra, war against latrunculi — pirates, robbers, brigands, and outlaws — "the common enemies of mankind."

I fear, however, that as we deal with the pirates in this area, we will fail to be ruthless enough, instead of treating them as below contempt. We will probably grant them all sorts of rights of as criminal suspects, even as they routinely violate the rights of their victims.

Happy Easter Monday

I celebrated Easter Sunday by not getting on the computer all day. Did wonders for my attitude and enhanced our family time. But on Monday, Christ is still risen. And he will be tomorrow too. Awesome.

In Germany, both Sunday and Monday are Easter holiday days off. I sort of like this idea because it allows me to spend Sunday reflecting on the resurected Christ and Monday on more mundane activities like eating egg salad sandwiches and counting the remaining peanut butter eggs in our shared treat basket.

Free Speech Zone

I loved this description of an appropriate free speech zone, from Southern Utah University student Jeffrey Wilbur.

In light of SUU officials plan to designate "Free Speech Zones" on campus, I thought I'd offer my assistance. Grab a map. OK, ready?

All right, you see that big area between Canada and Mexico, surrounded by lots of blue ink on the East and West? You see it?

There's your bloody Free Speech Zone.

Yeah, what he said. I have never understood the logic that a college student somehow gave up their right to free speech because someone might get their feelings hurt. I wonder if I can get a T-shirt of this free speech zone, yet?

Japan: Cherry Blossom Time

The cherry blossoms here have hit their peak and are now waning. If you aren't lucky enough to live in one of the Washingtons (DC and Washington State both have lovely cherry trees), then here is a sample of the Japanese heralds of spring. The bark on these trees is delightfully rough, totally unlike a birch tree or a palm tree. And one of the little surprises is that sometimes blossoms appear right on the side of the trunk or a main branch. I especially liked this bunch of blossomes nestled under a big fungus.

This shot is from the open base event last Sunday. There must have been thousands of our Japanese neighbors who came to visit, eat genuine American food (in many cases cooked by genuine American sailors as fund raisers for all sorts of events and clubs) and picnic under the cherry trees. Can you spot the Japanese with the takeout pizza boxes tied with string to take home. Or the giant variety pack bags of chips? The line at the right of the photo is for the Starbucks stand. And some people fret that America is culture-less.

This is another view of one of the ponds at the shrine we visited in Kamakura. I love the contrast of the light blossoms with the greenery and the still reflections in the water.

Japan: Kamakura

Kamakura was the choice for our first field trip in our field trip plan because we'd visited it before with our indoc class, so I felt resonably sure that I could get us there and back again. Plus I knew where to eat once we got there and I knew that the access to the Hachiman Shrine would be lined with cherry trees.

We ate at a little ramen shop not far from the train station. I lingered long enough over the sample food in the window display that the waitress came out to find out what we wanted. Artichoke and Rutabaga had pork cutlets with miso soup and rice.

Cauliflower and I had dumplings. Watch out, these come hot enough to raise a blister on your tongue and hold their heat for a while. Both of these pictures are of the model food in the window. A friend of ours, whose wife is Japanese, tells us that they've had good luck choosing restaurants by the quality of the model food. Not just what is pictured but if it is a higher grade model or not. I think this is sort of middle of the road.

Then we walked over to the torii that marks the beginning of the access path to the shrine. It was amusing to find that we weren't the only family making this walk. The path was thronged with people and every third one had a camera pointed at their family or cherry blossoms or their family with cherry blossoms.

The path is lined on both sides with shops and restaurants. There are western shops like Italian restaurants, Leonidis chocolates and a yeast bread bakery. But there are also interesting Japanese shops catering to the visitors to Kamakura and lovely traditional looking Japanese buildings living cheek and jowl with the most modern glass and concrete. This one sold all sorts of welcoming or happy cats. You are supposed to be encouraging different outcomes depending on which paw is raised and what color the cat is. For example, gold cats welcome wealth. We're not sure what a pink cat would welcome.

A couple doors down from the happy cat shop were these lovely buildings.

The shrine itself was full of people. Fortunately it covers a pretty large area and we found a side garden with a small admission that was much less crowded. We watched birds, watched fish and spotted turtles. Wandering amid the trees and the flowers along the water was incredibly relaxing.

On the walk back through the shopping district, we stopped for ice cream. The kids had remembered this from our indoc visit too. The green is green tea and the purple is sweet potato or taro. We all had the sweet potato/green tea swirl, which had a most intriguing blend of tangy sweetness and a fresh green taste. None was wasted.

Finally we hit the core of the Komachi Street Shopping Town, which you can find by looking for the red torii visible from the East Exit of the train station. Lots of cute little shops. Kimono stores, jewelry stores, stores selling loose knit sweaters that are large enough to fit over a kimonos large sleeves, sweet steamed dumplings in bamboo steamers and an incredible paper store.

The paper store was called Shatoh and specialized in washi paper. There were racks of rolls of washi paper in lovely shades. There were also drawers full of 1/2, 1/4 and 1/8 sheets. A 1/8 sheet is about 8x11. Cauliflower and I picked out a handful of 1/4 sheets while the store manager taught Rutabaga and Artichoke to fold tiny little samurai hats. I also picked out a couple cards and a pack of origami paper. I really liked the folded emperor and emperess figures she had and the small folded men's and women's kimonos on cord that I could see framing or using as a Christmas ornament. This is definitely a shop I'll drop in on again. It doesn't look like their website is up, but the shop address was 2-7-26, Komachi Kamakura.

From there it was back to the train station, hitting the public toilets (outside the East Exit, near the police sub station - don't forget to have your own hand towel) and then riding back to Yokosuka, well tired but happy. I feel like I've finally earned my avatar. And I got to relish the cherry trees before they faded and blew away like pink snowfall. I even got to see some new birds of Japan to add to my little life list. Here's to many more adventures.

Note: Books that I found of interest for our field trip included Kamakura: Fact and Legend by Iso Mutsu, an Englishwoman who married a Japanese diplomat in 1905, traveled the world with him and then settled in Japan; and Shinto: The Kami Way by Sokyo Ono and William P. Woodward, which is a deceptively simple book that explains much of what is going on at a Shinto shrine as well as Japanese attitudes toward the Kami. A book which sounds interesting but isn't in our library is A Year in the Life of a Shinto Shrine by John K. Nelson.

Japan: Field Trip Plan

I was talking to another homeschool mom here about the disadvantage of living on base being not being forced to encounter Japan on a daily basis. When we lived in Germany, we were far from any base, living in a German house in a German neighborhood. We road the bus, shopped in German stores, visited with the lady at the stand selling asparagus or plums or strawberries or whatever was in season that month. We even had encounters with German chimney sweeps and carpenters and plumbers (all in German, including the time I suggested hanging my pictures from beaks in the wall).

But here I'm in an apartment building surrounded by other American families, on a base with a commissary and a post office and youth sports and scouts and and and. It actually takes a bit of effort to get out and encounter "real Japan."

Anyway, the other mom was encouraging me to just make time and go. She pointed out that if we went and did something every week, that would be over 100 trips. It's hard to argue with that sort of logic. And it seems sort of short sighted to be putting off encountering real live Asian culture in favor of reading about it at home. So yesterday we put our words into action and went up to enjoy the cherry blossoms in Kamakura. The nicest reward was having all three boys tell me that they enjoyed the trip and wanted to do it again. Cauliflower has announced his desire to celebrate his birthday in Kamakura eating dumplings and shopping. Well, we can probably do that.

Nature in Japan

Barb at Handbook of Nature Study has an outdoor challenge posted on observing blue jays and robins. While we don't seem to have those birds here, Artichoke and I did see a pigeon on the balcony yesterday and we realized that we hadn't actually seen any pigeons on base before. I don't know if this is because they migrate or because there are such huge numbers of seahawks on base (I've yet to really identify these birds, but I think they are a goshawk).

Anyway, it reminded me that we've been doing very little nature study during our homeschool days in this "deluxe apartment in the sky." Which also reminded me of Kevin Short's columns on nature in Japan. He has some nice ones up right now on tree frogs and trees. I save them or print them out because the archives only seem to save a month's worth.

Looking for more of his columns led me to this interesting blog post about favorite nature activities for Japanese kids from the blog Education in Japan. The posts on field trips look especially interesting. There is even one long post about what to see in Kamakura.