Random Monday

Joining in with hilarious Deb @ Not Inadequate, who has amused me with her Random Monday for ages. I thought about stealing the idea, but now she has Made A Button so I can go legit and I need to join in because noone wants to be standing all alone at a dance, do they?! So here are my very random thoughts and musings this sunny Monday morning...

• Australians eat more beetroot (beets to you Americans) per capita than any other country. I would hazard a guess and say most of those are sliced canned beetroot on our hamburgers ("you eat beets on your burgers?") and the rest in salads out of cans. Although they are getting "trendy" and fresh roasted beetroot is getting as popular as slow-roasted shoulder of lamb.

• Caravan parks in Australia are expensive! $200+ a night for a cabin in off-peak season is a lot of money to pay for a freaking jumping pillow. We could nearly afford a cruise for that money if you factor in petrol and meals.

• Clean 1000 thread count sheets and freshly shaved legs make me feel very happy. Maybe because the two rarely co-incide.

• The smell of a new book is almost as good as rain after a hot day or freshly mowed lawn. Priceless.

And apparently they also make it in a can. Of course they do.

Do you eat beets on your burgers? (don't knock it 'til you've tried it!)

How much per night would you be willing to pay for a holiday?

What everyday thing makes you happy?

What do you love the smell of? Do they make it in a can?

Go outside and play!

It's easy to think reading others blogs that they've got their "stuff" together. My chaos post left some feeling readers feeling a bit inadequate (but also hopefully inspired!). But we all feel that way. I am constantly feeling guilty that we don't spend enough time outside and look wistfully at blogs where the kids potter about outside happily.

Both Video Boy and Wombat Girl tend to naturally be "inside" kids. They gravitate towards inside activities - reading, puzzles, board games, TV and the ubiquitous "screens" (of which we have many!). My kids this morning...

Video Boy in his natural habitat...

Wombat Girl enjoyed the wonders of DSi...

I know I'm not alone in thinking that my children spend too much time inside. And to a certain extent, that's OK - they are a bit wired that way. They live "in their heads". But I have moments (well, maybe a bit more than that) where I am concerned about their indoor habits.

I do a bit of work for National Parks (oh, the irony!) and one of their big pushes is Wilderquest as part of their Children in Nature program, inspired by the writings of Richard Louv, who has coined the term "Nature Deficit Disorder" - which is the concept that, generally speaking, our kids are living more of their lives inside, doing structured, adult-organised activities far more than even our generation.

And I'm not the only one thinking these thoughts - my friend Hela over at Thrifty Mothers asks "How Come It Was More Fun When You Were A Child?" Within a generation things have changed so much - I was 13 when I received my first Game and Watch, Snoopy Tennis. Until then, we had a black and white TV with no remote and no VCR. No home computer. No video game platforms. No iPods, iPhones, iPads. We had to make our own "fun" because it didn't come all pre-packaged. Some of that was indoors (we lived in an apartment for some of the time I was growing up) so there was Lego, dolls, puppet theatres, cubby houses. But even that was open-ended, child-led play.

Now I'm the first to admit that I love my tech and we have a lot of it in our house. Its pull is powerful. The learning that can come from it is amazing. The connections we make to other people and the world of knowledge at our fingertips is astounding. But very often, it is all too easy to opt for it, rather than do what we "used to do".

So this spring I have been trying to encourage (not nag!) the kids to do other things and in particular, go outside. We have been gardening, going for walks and the trampoline is always a stand-by. But I'm thinking for my kids, the naturally indoorsy ones, with lots of screen temptations, I'm going to have be more thoughtful than just saying "go outside and play". And I don't want to be too controlling - banning all tech. Having adult-enforced screen-free. I need to be more....inventive? Strategic? Cajoling? Something like that.

What's a tech-mum to do? Google of course! With a smattering of inspiration from Facebook! I came across some fabulous websites (here and here) for ideas for outdoor play! Even though a lot of this is directed to toddlers/preschoolers, I think older kids given the opportunity and lack of peer pressure to be "cool" (which we see in high school very obviously) love this sort of play.

So, this morning we were having homeschool friends over to "play". And instead of opting for Ben 10 on the Wii to ensure they were occupied, I went a-strewing...

Chalk and chalk boards (and possibly bricks)

Kitchen stuff and pouring/measuring stuff

Log cabin toys, toy cars and toy dinosaurs and plastic animals

Science "equipment"

Some of these toys had not been played with for years! (bonus - I found a "lost" DSi in the log cabin box!) I left these out and just encouraged the kids to go outside and see what took their fancy.

So of course they jumped on the trampoline... o.O

And came inside to drag out the Uno Stacko and Uno Attack (sigh)

However, I persisted. Gentle encouragement and time meant that eventually everyone ended up outside...

...and looky what they did:

There was this amazing whole town going on down there, complete with signage, animals, food storage and even after our visitors left, signs drawn up by Wombat Girl to indicate who lived where (including the Mayor).

As we waved our weary visitors goodbye, Video Boy commented to me "you know, when you put all that stuff out there, I thought you were going to come out with us and be all control-freaky and tell us what to do". Wow - maybe I have to let go a bit more often. But it wasn't my intention at all to be "control-freaky" today - it was totally my intention to leave out stuff that might inspire them to play outside.

Mission accomplished and I'm so inspired to keep looking for ways that we can do this more often :-)

Spring has sprung!

One of the things I love about living on the coast south of Sydney is that we actually have seasons. We used to live up in sunny Queensland for a bit and while it was kind of lovely, it was generally hot, humid and warm. That was it. All year round. But here, we have a cold-ish winter (but no snow, and actually not even frost because we live so close to the ocean), crisp autumn days, a warm to hot summer and lovely spring days.

It's like a Cinderella climate - not too hot, not too cold, just right. And just when you've had enough summer, along comes autumn with the promise of doonas and hot chocolate. And just when you're tired of always wearing long clothes, along comes spring with the promise of swims in the pool and chilled sav blanc on the balcony.

Well, the days are getting longer. The birdies are chirping much earlier in the morning and the sun stays up past 6pm. The days are getting warmer. White legs venture out of trackky-dacs and into shorts. The bit between your big toe and the second toe gets sore from wearing thongs (flip-flops?) for the first time in months.

So we have made a bit of an effort to get outside. Off screen. Away from monitors.

First up a little game of Klop. This is a game from Finland (all the best stuff comes from Finland) and helps your gross motor skills, your maths and gets us out of the inside. Wanna find out about Klop? Watch and learn peeps:

If I had have watched this before we played, I sooo would have sung that song as we played:

Bendy elbow - genetic feature!

In a month or two, this sand will be covered by a pool!

We have also spent some time in the garden. I've shared with you before how I lack a green thumb. But I do manage to grow some Australian natives in our front yard, and every few years or so, I have to trim them back and pull out the grass from the garden beds. This results in huge piles of branches and grass:

I always forget to do the "before" shot! This is the "just after before" shot...

The after shot

I nagged encouraged the kids to get off the damn screens and come help me in the garden. I got my way had willing helpers for a while, and they got to learn some new "life skills" of using garden tools and muscles they rarely get to:

Using bush saw

Using secateurs

Raking

Even though I don't actually "garden" as such, it doesn't stop the garden from blooming at this time of year:

Grevillea hookeriana

Kangaroo paw in flower - Anigozanthos sp.

Grevillea "moonlight" hybrid (no Australian garden is complete without one)

An orchid of some description that I did not plant, I do not look after, yet flowers without fail every year

Totally loving spring and being outdoors. Now, where's the radox bath and Dencorub? My muscles hurt!

Creating order from chaos...

We have been diving headlong into an amazing rabbit trail of maths, and science and art and if I don't share with you some of these thoughts and experiences and links they will be lost forever like much of the mists swirling through my brain!

The chaos that is my dining table!

And there is SOOO much good stuff whirring through my brain that I don't know where to logically start and how to group it all so it might make some sense, so instead, I think I will just let you follow our story - our rabbit trail that led to so much good stuff...and maybe, you will like some of it too!

After viewing Vi Hart's diatribe on parabolas, the kids were keen to actually graph some parabolas. But before we actually got to that, Hubby wanted see the video, so we watched it again, and that led us to reviewing the ones on spirals and fibonacci:

As we were watching, Video Boy grabbed the graph paper (because you always have spare graph paper lying around, don't you?) and started experimenting with the fibonacci spirals shown in the video - he calculated the fibonacci sequence and used it to guide his rectangle drawing and measuring:

Both kids then started to use the graph paper to join up lines within each rectangle to create a pattern:

Video Boy also did some maths doodling involving square waves and cylinders:

And some random patterns:

Wombat Girl is a bit more analytical, planning out her pattern and carefully translating it onto graph paper:

We then looked at another Vi Hart video (she is unbelievably good - even if you have to pause, rewind and think to fully grasp what she is on about!), this one about Fractal Fractions:

In it, she talks about a iterative process called ABACABA - Wombat Girl loved it and immediately set about continuing the pattern:

We also had a quick look at the ABACABA link on the YouTube page. Did you know that the ABACABA pattern shows up in maths, geometry, poetry, art and music? There is even a book which includes a picture of a Klein bottle (4 dimensional geometry, anyone?). 

I also got into the act, re-creating the phi-flower using the Golden Angle, starting with red (primary colour), measuring 137.5 degrees, yellow (primary colour), 137.5 degrees, blue (primary colour) and adding leaves every time that were a mixture of the colours they lay between: 

Now Phi is an "iterative" fraction. This led me to thinking about fractals. I had this old video tape from 1988 lying around. So I fished out the old VCR from the shed, and we watched a documentary about Chaos and fractals. It was pretty cool. And then Video Boy opened up the iPad and showed my this cool app called Trees of Life which creates trees using iterations:

So then, we watched Vi Hart (again)'s Binary Trees:

...and straight away Video Boy did his own:

Sierpinki triangle!

There are huge number of iPad apps that you can download load (just search for "fractal") which allow you to explore fractals, create them and even look in great detail at the most famous fractal of all - the Mandelbrot Set (and did anyone else notice the cardoid shape that was in Vi Hart's video about parabolas?).

Computers being all clever nowadays, mean that you too can get into fractals and learn some programming at the same time (maths - tick, technology - tick, logic - tick, art - tick) via the very clever people at Khan Academy (can anyone say self-repeating?).

Well now. That all got a bit heavy (but pretty), didn't it? We did some other stuff too...

We enjoyed watching Test Your Brain - Perception, which shows just how fascinating our brain is in trying to make sense of the world.

This led to Wombat Girl showing us V-Sauce's amazing video This is Not Yellow (watch if you want your mind blown):

Did you love the art? (Helena, I'm talking to you!). Did you notice the gorgeous Escher stuff at the end? Because we watched this on iView too (Little Brother - did you notice the Jean Michel Jarre music?).

And just in case you were wondering, yes. We did, in fact, do some work on parabolas. Both the boring way by hand, drawing up cartesian planes and labelling them, and also using Maths GV graphing software I downloaded. Wombat Girl is currently trying to figure out how to graph a circle without looking up the equation.

So after all that chaos, I dare you to look at a tree again in the same way and not be amazed by the wonder of the world and the interconnectedness of it all...

All I can see is fractals...

PS: Some of the more observant may have noticed my beautiful fractal image in my blog header has disappeared. I was playing around with the design, when Blogger informed me that I had used up all my storage on Picassa and it wouldn't let me load the image (or anything else) into the header. It does not give me the same message when I upload pics to my posts...so go figure. One day I may figure out Blogger.