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I meant to post earlier this week about Natalie Angier's most recent NYT "Basics" science column when it first appeared, but schoolwork and festivities got in the way. You can read the entire column here (registration is free); and here are some bits and pieces (emphases, as always, mine): [Faye Cascio’s ninth-grade physical science] ... students can articulate their reasoning because, for one

Rebecca at Ipsa Dixit reports that her family has the brand-spanking new title, Einstein Adds a New Dimension (Smithsonian Books, 480 pages), the third volume in Joy Hakim's wonderful Story of Science series. From a recent Edutopia article (Edutopia's "Daring Dozen" profile of Ms. Hakim last year is here): Journalist and textbook author Joy Hakim is still writing, adding to her textbook catalog

John Holt, on helping a very young boy learn the names of different words, from How Children Learn:I was careful, when I told him the name of something, not to tell him as if it were a lesson, something he had to remember. Nor did I test him by saying, "What's this? What's that?" This kind of checking up is not necessary, and it puts a child in a spot where he will feel that, if he says the wrong

I've been cogitating for the past week or so on the things I read in Natalie Angier's science book The Canon, partly in preparation for my regurgitation earlier today and partly in preparation for the kids' science studies next year (informal plans for which I hope to post before too long). So everything was rolling around in my head quite nicely when my I started to read one of the books from my

Herewith some choice bits from science writer Natalie Angier's latest title, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science, in the hopes that, especially if you're the parent of school-age children, educated at home or elsewhere, you might consider adding this to your library list or bookshelf, possibly the latter for a handy one-volume (under 300 pages) reference. Ms. Angier's

In today's Globe and Mail.

Edit-Me Just a snippet from yesterday's Globe & Mail article on the new Canadian creation museum, in Big Valley, Alberta. It cost only a fraction of the U.S. version's $27 million, but interestingly while its U.S. counterpart is known as the "creation museum", the Canadian version bills itself as the "creation science museum". Read the rest here: The museum sits about 60 kilometres north of

PZ Myers has the creation museum carnival up and running. It looks like a terrific round-up of articles, which I look forward to reading the rest of the week post-4H, and I'm pleased that my little entry (the previous post) could be a part of it. Many thanks to Dr. Myers for the rounding up, and for the original idea, to John McKay, whose blog is named after Farm School's favorite cockroach (here

I shouldn't even be here posting, because we're getting ready for the big 4H Beef Club weekend -- achievement day, interclub show, and sale. (No, Laura doesn't have to sell her heifer calf; only the steers get sold, heading straight to their doom and little wrapped packages. One reason an older friend of hers and longtime 4H member suggested a heifer over a steer.) I've been reading and hearing

Listening to CBC radio while working in the garden last week, I heard an interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times science reporter Natalie Angier about her new book, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science, which sounds very worthwhile. I take most Amazon reviews with a grain of salt, but I'm intrigued by the reviewer who called Canon "a prose-poem of science",

I've added a new button to the right for Project Beagle, which I discovered at the Beagle blog. You can read more there and at the Project Beagle website; the actual ship plans are here. As the website notes, we aim to provide the most compelling event of Charles Darwin's 2009 bicentenary by building a sailing replica of HMS Beagle and sailing in Darwin's wake. The build and Beagle's arrival