Vicarious Thoughts

Focus on Astronomy

Strudel — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:16:27 +0000

With the warmer weather approaching, I’ve been keen to get out and reconnect with the night sky. Sadly, the weather hasn’t been cooperating recently.
So here are some links to resources to start you off if you’re interested in getting into some star gazing. All you need to start off are some warm clothes, a map to guide you so you can work out what you’re looking at and a torch to see by (most people recommend the torch has red cellophane over it but I cope just fine without).

Southern Hemisphere Planisphere PDF download from PsychoHistorian from the 2009 International Year of Astronomy. Planispheres are usable throughout the year and irregardless of which year. Consequently, it doesn’t have additional information relevant to particular months like planetary placement.
A clear explanation about planispheres is available on Wikipedia.

SkyMaps have a Southern Hemisphere sky chart for September 2010.
Additional information is included on astronomical events happening during the month as well as lists of highly visible objects by the naked eye and also by binoculars.
They also have downloadable monthly star charts for Northern hemisphere and the Equatorial region as well as a variety of other products to purchase.

The Royal New Zealand Astronomical Society have September Sky Charts and what I consider to be rather indepth information for watching the skies in New Zealand.
They also have a List of Solar System Events happening in September tailored to New Zealand – including that Daylight Savings starts on the 26th September at 2am (clocks going forward by an hour – Remember: Spring forward, Fall back). Scroll past the table of dates to get to the information on planetary movements.

On my personal wishlist is the Atlas of the Southern Night Sky, of which the Second Edition is due out this month.

And getting back to my original problem, working out whether the night will be good viewing – this site may help. Skippy Sky has graphs of cloud cover predictions for NZ, Australia and some other countries.

This is Why I’ll Never be an Adult

Strudel — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 03:15:59 +0000

There’s more grins to be had with the rest of the article accompanied by cartoons. Click on the image to see more. (from Hyperbole and a Half)

Daily Posts for 16th & 17th April 2010

Strudel — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 12:30:26 +0000

Miscellaneous

I admit I’ve been tearing up at the most pathetic things recently (children’s TV shows even *sigh*) and this poignant advert on wearing your seatbelt called Embrace Life from the UK was excellent at getting a tear from my eye. I have to say that it was such a refreshing change from the ones we see in New Zealand and the soundtrack (if I watched adverts regularly) wouldn’t make me tune out from another room.

This blogpost from Dumb Little Man on the 7 Profound Lessons from 7 of our Historical Leaders has some choice quotes within.

And finally, this blogpost about Spring Cleaning your Photo Library from Simple Scrapper has three easy tips for getting digital photos organised: Label/Catalog, Delete Duds, and Backup. Pretty simple really.

Well, that’s all for these two days. :)

Daily Links for 9th April 2010

Strudel — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 11:50:39 +0000

Craft

Daisy Yellow has a link to instructions on how to do paper weaving with kids (via CraftyCrow). I remember doing this when I was a kid and it was more basic than these instructions. Then again with the plethora of coloured/textured/printed papers and other materials available as a result of the rise of scrapbooking I guess it’s not quite as surprising that the instructions are more involved and you have to admit the results speak for themselves. I’m keen to see what effects we can come up with.

This is a lovely idea to make dinnertimes a little more special. This short blogpost at The Wonder Years talks about how they created candleholders and that each child has their own candle at dinnertime that they get to blow out at the end of the meal.

Miscellaneous

I really enjoyed reading that an anthropologist in South Africa used Google Earth to map known caves and found fossils and then using the satellite maps found more possible cave locations and as a result uncovered 500 more caves to investigate from which he has so far found two partial australopithecus sediba skeletons. I bet they’re glad they went to the initial effort of entering in all their existing sites! (more info on the skeleton find at the BBC)

Zen Family Habits has a post entitled Is Today the day You Start Over? and everytime I’ve flicked to it it’s given me the warm fuzzies (awww!) so felt it needed to be shared.

Okay that’s all I have to share for this post. :)

Kinda Daily Links for 10th and 11th April 2010

Strudel — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 11:52:14 +0000

Playing catch up at the moment hence the out of whack dates :)

Home Education

The first link is entitled When Rote Learning Makes Sense and I came across this blogpost via Why Homeschool and the part of the article they included in their blogpost really resonated with me as well. I can remember clearly being envious of people who were able to recite their favourite poems and passages when I was younger – and to be honest this has certainly not changed.
As far as our Home Education goes, we already do a little recitation each day with our current rhyme, song, and virtue affirmation. Haven’t quite got to learning poetry on top of this and I think I’ve been putting this off subconsciously until we’re comfortable with our current workload.
The original blogpost also included this passage:

Learning Aloud
Just as we use our mouths to repeat a phone number over and over to retain it in short term memory, other things can be learned in the same way. One key point here to remember is that the cycle of repetition must be short and quick and no less than three times.

Another point is that if students cannot pronounce a word, there is no way they can remember it. When reviewing flash cards orally, for example, students need to do it quickly, pausing only a second or two for recall.

If it doesn’t come, then they need to look at the answer and repeat it aloud, then go on. If done quickly, by the third or fourth iteration, most students can have 100 percent accuracy. The danger is when a student gets stuck on one card for too long, all of the other information in short term memory is lost, making the study ineffective.

One way to help students learn how to do this is to do the flash cards with them, modeling the speed and what happens if the student can’t remember: let them look at the answer, but making sure that that student gets a chance to respond correctly again. If the students are in a line (or even better, several lines), the first student answers a card, and then goes back to the end of the line while the rest of the students in the line give their responses to the cards one by one.

I’m keen to see how I can adapt this advice into the phonics part of the day, which right at the moment I’m experiencing some reluctance to even try – the alternative I see if all else fails is to back off for the moment, which I’m hesitant to do as I know how absolutely overjoyed she’ll be when she’s at the stage where she can read independently.

I should also mention that the comments on the original blogpost have quite a bit of content in them themselves.

Miscellaneous

Here is a blogpost extolling the uses of aluminium foil. I can testify that the tip on using it to Protect Young Plants works. I had a huge problem with slugs and snails grazing on my seedlings germinating in seed trays. No matter how high I would put them the snails would sniff them out. However placing the trays on a sheet of aluminium foil foiled those annoying slugs. The only caveat is that the tops of taller seedlings mustn’t be touching anything nearby as the snails will use it as a bridge into the tray.
I’m currently using aluminium foil to line the inside of a seedtray that I have filled with Jiffy-7 Peat Pellets (I purchased them from Bunnings) that I’m trialling at the moment. This works dually as a deterrent for the slugs and snails once again, and also because the foil is fairly strong I can water my seedlings by pouring water into the lined tray and the peat pellets soak up the water that way. And an added bonus is because there’s no spillage and no seedling mix involved I can keep my trays inside without any mess.
Some of the other tips are intriguing; I’m keen to see how well the aluminium foil ball works in the dryer – just need to wash something that creates static. I gave the tip to use foil to sharpen scissors and that one worked for me.

Well, think I’ll call it quits at two links for these two days. :)

Daily Links for 24th March 2010

Strudel — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 11:26:56 +0000

This’ll be a quick one as I need to hit the hay.

I attempted the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge at ProBlogger last year but never got further than Day 3. However, from all reports it’s a useful exercise that results in, well, results. I’m keen to complete it at some point and this guest post on ProBlogger has some useful tips for maximising the potential of some of the day’s tasks.

Keeping on the topic of blogging, Daily Blog Tips has an article on 10 Things Your Blog Doesn’t Need. From the obvious choices of animated gifs and auto-starting music, to the thought-provoking comment verification, there’s definitely a couple of entries I need to have a look into.

I love the crispness and simplicity of the designs on these dyed eggs (via The Crafty Crow), the instructions are nice and detailed and I can see me cheating and trying to use stickers instead since we don’t have a wide range of decorative punches in the house.

Daily Links for 23rd March 2010

Strudel — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 10:44:29 +0000

Crafty Stuff

These bunny finger puppets (via Craftzine.com) are cute and the instructions are clear and make it look like quite a simple project, even going to suggest a set of them can be knocked out in an evening. The materials look like they shouldn’t be hard to find at our closest Spotlight – though I suspect I’ll be buying acrylic rather than wool or wool-blend felt there.

Here’s a pattern for a knitted cowl scarf perfect for the coming winter months (via Craftzine.com). It’s a knock off of a $US750 Burberry scarf which seems a horrendous amount to pay for nearly any piece of clothing, let alone a scarf.

Homeschool Stuff

This site also falls into my 101 in 1001 category as one of my goals is to have a better idea as to where all the countries of the world are. PurposeGames (via The Homeschooler’s Notebook) has timed map quizzes which I’m using to drill myself on country locations but also so much more.

Misc Stuff

Three articles drew my attention today about writing and they came from three different perspectives. The first, is entitled the Rare Handwritten Note (when was the last time you sat down and wrote a letter to someone?), the second is from about How to Blog When You’re Not a Writer, and the final article is in a similar vein but from a scrapbooking perspective, But I’m Not a Writer.

If you’re looking for an alternative to Google Analytics for whatever reason, I suggest you have a look at GoingUp! (via SmashingApps) It’s a free site and you can utilise it to do most of what Analytics offers but also stuff it steers away from, for example, Google Pagerank and keyword ranking for alternative search engines.

This is getting a little eclectic but I wanted to make note of three more posts.

This one from CSS Tricks talks about changing the layout of web forms so that the information the user considers to be most important (eg the message containing the information they want to relay to you) at the top and the boring, standard inclusions at the bottom of the form. This helps apparently, to thwart user fatigue when filling out forms and makes a lot of sense to me.

This post is entitled The Missing Step in Planning and gives us a great rundown on what you should be thinking about and putting on paper before getting to the dreaded business plan. This list certainly would have helped me with my initial planning for my last venture and though I doubt the author will like my saying this, if all you get done is that list then you’re better off than procrastinating doing a business plan completely.

I’m a big fan of the semi-cartoon-y landscape-y :) website design that is often accompanied by flash. Ajaxian highlights a new jquery plugin called Spritely which acts as an alternative to using flash in these kind of designs and I have to say my fingers are itching to have a play with it.

Daily Links for 22nd March 2010

Strudel — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 10:51:36 +0000

Well, this is actually favourite links from my rss reader for the last two days :)

Homeschool Stuff

Sam likes to jump around while counting so the idea of making a lifesize number line to practise addition and subtraction is sure to appeal to her.

I’m not a big fan of Easter as it seems a bit incongruous celebrating it in autumn, but at the same time it feels wrong to completely deny our daughter the chance to enjoy the holiday. So, activities like growing grass in eggshells (via craftycrow) seems like an interesting way to acknowledge the holiday of easter.

I’m not sure how close Sam is to being ready for this easter themed cvc reading activity, but it’s one idea for the pile of plastic eggs I picked up for a couple of dollars last year.

These Salt Crystal Trees look like a lot of fun to watch grow and I’m guessing with a bit of experimenting you could get a brilliant effect.

Misc

Trying to reduce our grocery bill by baking more is all well and good – but finding things to bake that are savoury isn’t easy. Luckily, Lifehacker highlighted this site which has a number of savoury recipes to try.

I came across this origami site a while ago but it got lost in my bookmarks, so Lifehacker again is to thank for this link. It’s a brilliant site to remind yourself how to fold the traditional origami designs and has a few I haven’t come across before as well.

Nearly missed it

Strudel — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 10:58:03 +0000

Oops! Got caught up in putting together a proposal for a family trip to Wellington. I knew the place had a lot of things to do, I just didn’t realise how much.

Love in a Mist. Always been fascinated by this flower, and how the soft spiky parts (called bracts apparently) remind me of fractals.

Candle

Strudel — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 10:33:36 +0000

Pretty impressed with myself that I managed to take this photo using the manual settings and it only took 3 photos to get the right settings and start tweaking. :)