Long ago, we were given the game "What's Gnu?" as a gift. What better time to dig it out than in the waning days of summer leading up to the return of school? So Tabitha (six years old) and I did just that a couple weeks back. Neither one of our children has been...
I was in New York City for a conference recently. I arrived at JFK airport on a Monday evening and took public transportation into the city. I observed the following scene. --- At about 8:30 p.m., a mother and her (roughly) 6-year old twin girls board the train and...
...it's probably true for number language too. University of Pennsylvania researchers have studied the quality of parents' speech to their toddlers, and its relationship to the children's vocabulary later on. "Quality" of speech was measured by how well an adult...
We were driving home recently. Griffin was in the back seat reading his book about U.S. Presidents. Griffin (9 years old): Who was the capital of Wisconsin named for?Me: Is this a quiz or a question? This is an important distinction with Griffin. He has both in his...
I take both kids grocery shopping pretty much every weekend, and I have since each was an infant. It's a routine for us in which Mommy gets some quiet time around the house and I get some extended time around town with my little ones. This time of year, the...
Someday there will be a full-sized paper version of a Talking Math with Your Kids book (Hear that publishers? Wanna talk? You can find me at the About/Contact page.) Until that day, there is now a mini-version (15,000 words; roughly three chapters, $4.99) available...
We went to the State Fair last week. Having wondered about the height of the Giant Slide, and having developed a technique for measuring things, we needed to collect the information required to answer our original question. The only problem? No one but me wanted to...
This post follows up on a conversation I had with Griffin a while back about the height of the Giant Slide at the Minnesota State Fair. Our house in St Paul sits on top of an odd hill; higher than others around it. Historical reasons for this are murky but it makes...