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We're nearly finished filling my daughter's backpack with all the supplies she'll need for kindergarten. (The last item we need to find is a pack of feathers. Wonder what they'll use that for?) For the most part, I'm confident she's prepared. She can write her name, knows all her letters and numbers, and is just starting to read on her own.

Choo! Choo! Chomp! Even though I coordinate our school's science fair, science is a subject that we haven't spent a lot of time on yet at home. However, my daughter has learned a few things through watching shows like The Jim Henson Company's Dinosaur Train on PBS. The show encourages basic scientific thinking and skills as well as discussing various dinosaurs, life science, natural history and paleontology. Both my kids like watching Buddy the Tyrannosaurus Rex travel on the dinosaur train with his adoptive Pteranodon family. Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous - I can barely say those words but thanks to the show my children can easily recite them along with spouting out other interesting dinosaur facts.

The PBS website also contains a lot of wonderful content useful in helping to prepare pre-schoolers for school. Several fun scientific activities can be found on the DINOSAUR TRAIN website for parents and teachers http://www.pbs.org/parents/dinosaurtrain/activities/ or http://www.pbs.org/teachers/dinosaurtrain/lessonplans/. Here are a few but make sure to click on the links above for more:

• A Colorful Hypothesis: help your child understand and apply the term "hypothesis"
  
• Dinosaurs A to Z - learn the alphabet letters and memorize some dinosaur names from A to Z
  
• Dinosaurs of a Feather - all about bird feathers
  
• Make a Dragonfly - learn basic insect anatomy by creating a model of a dragonfly
  
• Homemade Fossils - learn what fossils are and create a model of a fossil
  

A couple weeks ago, while reading a post on the wonderful Bookie Woogie blog, I learned about JellyTelly. JellyTelly is an online Christian TV series by VeggieTales creator Phil Vischer. Kids learn about the Bible by watching the free daily shows. The short segments feature cartoons, puppets and real-life characters. Focus on the Family partners with Vischer on the show. While the daily shows are free for all to watch, subscribers can access all the content on the site. Here's a clip from the show.



There's a verse of the week, episodes like the one above where kids can learn about books of the Bible, JellyTelly jokes and a silly Sunday School lady. My daughter likes to watch the show, and I highly recommend it as a useful and entertaining resource for Christian families.

This month Tyndale House Publishers released a DVD video series called What's In The Bible? Many of the JellyTelly characters appear in the DVDs. We haven't had a chance to watch them yet, but I think that they sound like a wonderful way to learn about the Bible at home.

Have you watched JellyTelly or the new DVD series? What did you think?

“I’m not interested in creating a book that is read once and then placed on the shelf and forgotten. I am very happy when people write that they have worn out my books, or that they are held together by Scotch tape. I consider that the ultimate compliment.” - Richard Scarry

Richard Scarry's books get plenty of attention in our home. Let's just say we have one of those taped together books of his, well loved and read often. See the photo to the right-case in point! Every time the kids and I read one of his books we discover something new. Scarry's books contain so much detail and the his animal character illustrations are darling. Our favorites include Huckle Cat, Sally Cat, Lowly Worm and, of course, that sneaky Goldbug. We never get tired of searching for Goldbug.

The books have been translated into 30 languages over the last 40 years and over 150 million copies have been sold. Now, kids can watch their favorite characters in the new TV series Busytown Mysteries. The series, produced by Cookie Jar Entertainment, just starting airing on weekends on CBS. (Check here for local air times.) Huckle Cat and Lowly Worm, along with other friends try to solve mysteries in Busytown. They search for clues, ask the questions and use their reasoning skills - who, what, when, where, why, how? The episodes feature 2-D animation and the characters look like they've walked off the pages of Scarry's books.

Thanks to One2One network we received two episodes to review:
"The Falling Fruit Mystery" - Huckle and friends try to figure out why the cherries have fallen down from farmer Patrick's tree.
"The Dragon Hunters" - There are reports of a fire-breathing dragon in Busytown. Huckle and friends investigate to find out the truth."

As soon as I started playing the episodes, my preschool daughter excitedly exclaimed, "Hey, I have those books!" She pointed out Goldbug and Lowly Worm and a few of her other favorite characters. She watched both episodes all the way through and then decided that she wanted to solve mysteries, too. The series is a huge hit with her and we are planning to look for it tomorrow morning on our local CBS station.

We also took some time to check out the interactive Busytown Mysteries website at http://www.busytownmysteries.com. Kids can choose their favorite character, pick a Busytown car and travel around Busytown visiting the countryside, wharf, park and downtown. My daughter'

Quite a few years ago, before the kids were born, our neighbors hosted a Halloween costume party for the adults in the neighborhood. We always had fun trying to decide what kind of costume to wear. Unfortunately we moved from the neighborhood and haven't been to many Halloween parties since (besides the ones for our kids.) If we were attending this year, I think we might have went with a "Fawlty Towers" theme just so we could enter the Fawlty Towers Lookalike Contest on Facebook. My husband would make a good Basil Fawlty. The Grand Prize includes a Signed John Cleese Photo, Signed Fawlty Towers DVD, Fawlty Towers embroidered white terry-cloth bathrobe, Fawlty Towers story of Britain’s Favorite Sitcom book and Fawlty Towers corgi toy car.

To mark the 30th anniversary of the series, BBC Warner just released a Fawlty Towers remastered DVD set on October 20th. Now I've written about what the kids and I like on my blog but haven't mentioned a whole lot about my husband's favorites. He's been a Monty Python fan ever since I've known him and thinks John Cleese is the cheese. For those not familiar with the Fawlty Towers television series, it's a classic British sitcom from the 1970's starring John Cleese. Cleese plays a hotel manager named Basil Fawlty who is snobbish and often rude to the guests at the hotel. His incompetent staff and annoying wife don't help matters. It's the perfect farce and the hilarious series amuses my husband greatly. I've never seen the show but from viewing the YouTube videos, it does look like it could garner some good laughs.


While we haven't had a chance to watch the new DVD set, thanks to BBC Warner and their PR firm, one very lucky Brimful Curiosities reader will win the Fawlty Towers Remastered: Special Edition box set. (For the first time, I'm slightly jealous of my readers!)

To enter, leave a comment letting me know which Fawlty Towers character you look the most like. (Check out the "cast and crew" tab on the BBC America Shop for name ideas.)

• For contact purposes, if you are a non-blogger or your email is not accessible in your blog profile, please leave a valid email address within the comment section.
• Contest is open to US only
• Contest ends on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 11:59 PM CST.
• Winner will be chosen at random

I've posted a spoilerish review of the first episode of the TV series, Lewis, over on the Scholar's Blog Spoiler Zone. I put it over there for the American fans who don't want their viewing to be spoiled since I've no idea when the show will air in the US, so considered yourselves warned if you look before you've seen the episode!

Someone kindly loaned me a copy of the first episode of the new Lewis series "Whom The Gods Would Destroy", written by Morse regular Daniel Boyle. Starring Kevin Whately as the eponymous Lewis, and Laurence Fox as his sergeant, Hathaway, this episode focuses on a middle-aged Oxford graduate, an artist, who was found murdered near his houseboat. Lewis and Hathaway find themselves investigating a murder case that risks implicating some of Oxford's most esteemed social and academic figures, such as the potential candidate for the Vice Chancellor's job at the University of Oxford. Both the victim and the potential Vice Chancellor belonged to a small group of men known as "The Sons of the Twice Born", who are named after an epithet of Dionysus - relating to his birth. The group's activities are shrouded in Greek codes, quotes from Nietzsche and a Dionysian fondness for drugs. The title is part of a quotation from Euripides: "Those whom the gods would destroy, they first send mad."

This was a good episode - the writers have clearly developed Lewis from the man who was always a steadying influence on Morse into a man with a darker side and I was impressed with then writers and with Whately himself. Lewis is no longer Morse's moral centre, following his wife's death as a result of a hit and run accident three years earlier. Instead he gets angry - and I mean scarily angry - I actually thought he was going to punch Hathaway at one point when he was raging about a character who had been involved in a car accident when he was high on drugs; the character got himself a good lawyer and got off, and whilst he was left in a wheelchair, the other driver was killed outright. The character shows great contempt for Lewis and Hathaway when they visit to talk to him about the murder and it's after this that Lewis gets really angry. But his anger is understandable and I sympathised with him, which is very important. I think the series wouldn't work if they had made Lewis into an unsympathetic character. You might not condone his anger, but you understand it.

I must say I'm puzzled by accounts of negative reviews of this episode in the media - apparently one reviewer commented that "Lewis" aspired to mundanity, which made me wonder if they'd watched a different episode to this one !