The Burrow

https://tinyurl.com/lelwng9 Remember the first time you saw this? You saw what you saw.   Then, someone said she saw something else. Really?   Yes, really. Hmmmmmmm..... I worked in the Reading Lab today with a young man who zipped through the assignment in record time.  We looked on the bookshelves for inspiration. The O Volume of the encyclopedia was of marginal interest (notwithstanding the orangutan and the optical light telescope). The Book of Minerals made for interesting reading (aloud, by me, which was hardly the point of our time together) and picture gazing and a semi-scientific explanation of prisms. The Science Explained book brought it all together in the section on optical illusions. He'd never seen the Rubin Vase before.  Ours were blue and gold, but he saw the faces and I saw the vase and neither of us were quite able to see what the other saw.   It got better. brucepurdy.com There was a ruler in the cadd...

This, apparently, is My Plate. It's the newest incarnation of The Food Pyramid.  Every school child listening to our Nutrition Expert knew that. I felt very old, especially when I realized that I was the only one who noticed the voices on the television during her entire presentation.   She engaged the kids, though, and that was as important as engaging the adults.  They acted out bran and germ and carbohydrate to demonstrate the beauty of whole grains.  We had fun with those My Plate stickers, affixing them to their appropriate sections.   Yes, I said, I did want a mask although the Brussels sprouts were my first choice.  And then, there was the forklift. The youngest member of our group looked through the door into the warehouse and raised his hand. "I want to ride on the forklift!" "Oh, we all want to ride on the forklift,"   our docent sighed. It is that kind of place. Respect  is the first item on the ub...

"I learned something right now.  I don't usually learn something but I learned something right now." Thus spake a 2nd grader, a young man who was working on distinguishing between the long and short vowel sounds.  We read the often used words as I tried to find examples of that-which-passes-for-rules in spelling the English language.   Two consonants after a vowel make a short sound (except when they don't) was simple enough, and so was an e at the end of the word makes a long sound. It got tricky when we got to cage and case and mice and nice.  That c  is quite a problem (as was quite,  but we'll get to that later.)  If it's cage and case why isn't it mike and nike?  The e at the end of the word was the clue, and his face when he realized that the e at the end makes the c an s  lit up the classroom. That's when he decided he'd learned something.  He went on to zip through the ce  words, and enjoyed the story to which they we...