Sorry I

This week I had excellent news and was a busy bee. I gave presents to the children: e.g. a book on microscopes, a Dutch cooperative learning game called Tridio, Hive (we immediately started playing that one - I was beaten by a 7 year-old), a set to bake a cake or an applepie.
Probably my article will get published on blanco regel, my first e-zine article. It's an article on blogging filled with ideas.
Well, my writing starts to ressemble my coocking: trying to obtain combinations of healthy and good taste thinking, sporadically off, often looks strange because of frequent lack of interest for the presentation.
I wrote a new publisher an e-mail and got a request for a full or a partial the same day. To distract myself from the book I'm going to invent games and do writing contests. I enterred 4, in Dutch.

scaffold the morning ritual

I find it difficult to wake up the children when it's dark in the morning. It's nearly completely dark when the children go to school. Also it's rainy and cold.
How could I construct a scaffold for this?
First what kind of development do I want to see. I want them to use their own alarm every morning, to set it and to wake up when it rings. I want them to dress up and make their food for school and not to forget sports items they need that day. I want them to find their socks themselves.
To get them to do this, it will be necessary to first teach how to use batteries and to know how to read the time and to set the time right.
To stand up in the morning and put out the alarm seems easy, but for a child it's not that easy. When your eyes aren't awake, you can't use them as well as during the daytime. Especially in the winter when there's less sunshine.
Then to dress up, it's necessary they know approximately what weather there is and what you need to wear. Ideally they should watch the weather news or read it in the newspaper.
The older boys master all this very well. I could let them teach this to the young one.

Puzzle Sunday (31)

I searched 'blogtagpuzzle' on WWW. It's another neologism. Another I found was mindspecs. So if you ever need to find this blog, if you're in a serious need of a puzzle, just use your mindspecs and google.

To find the way accross the web makes me think of this pathfinderpuzzle from Oskar from Deventer and Puzzles.com.

Blogtagpoem

metapicture of internetsearch

village and city life
blame yourself http://www.displaypagerank.com/
making home fun teenagers

city and village life
sublimated sex
alzheimer's + multilinguals + less chance
chez odile
everything is illuminated ... guillotine
les belles images + de beauvoir
sexy ice rocket
variance in evolution
Vygotsky and scaffolding examples
"everything is illuminated", Kundera
pygmalion effect school
Kangoeroe Math Competition
teaching "everything is illuminated"
ELEPHANT PRINCIPLE ENCYCLOPEDIA
mums and young boys

(I've put the tags that people searched today as in the list to obtain this 'print'of tags used to come here)

Puzzle Sunday (30)

A both ecological, logical and light celebrating puzzle is this puzzle in which you position light bulbs in a room in such a way that it fits the numbers.
To shed light in every corner.

prisma light

Light is it a reflection or a symbol? Is it static or dynamic? Does it live or is it the reflection of movement, and is movement the reflection of life?
Why is light so important, and is the absence of it a cause for depression?
Why does life need light? Is life energy, and what is energy?
Why is shedding light a metaphor for learning?
When can some not bear light and why? What is the other sense in "unbearable lightness". Has it anything to do with bears?
Why do some prefer dark, and why do people who are in full light not understand those who are not? Is life colour?
Is colour what makes light? Do you love prisma's?

Puzzle funday (29)

Humor and Maths don't seem to have anything in common to nominalists, they do for verbalists.
MATHEMATICS AND HUMOR, University of Chicago Press, 1980. Paper, 1982. Japanese translation, 1983, Dutch translation, 1990. -- In MATHEMATICS AND HUMOR I i} explore the operations and structures common to humor and the formal sciences (logic, mathematics, and linguistics), ii) show how various notions from these sciences provide formal analogues for different sorts of jokes and joke schema, and iii) develop a mathematical model of jokes (joke schema) using ideas from "catastrophe theory"...
I found examples that contradict that maths and humor don't go together here, here and here.