fun with kids

So much fun to be had.

I'm a big fan of parenting and having fun with your kids. I saw a bumper sticker that said "Focus on your home" and I think there is a lot of good that can come to that. A friend of mine, whom I have very high respect, Charles Ivey, said "Be sure to not forget to focus on your own back yard". Charles did great things for our nation and it was nice to hear that someone like him had a local emphasis too.

Ok, enough philisophy...what are fun things to do with your kids?

I love to play the recorder with my daughter Bryanna. Recorders are super cheap on ebay or amazon and there are tons of songs to be gotten from the internet. The songs we've been focusing on lately are hot cross buns, Ode to Joy (Beethoven (interesting use of this song in Get Smart (it was used to trigger a nuclear bomb by Kaos (the bad guys)), twinkle twinkle, amazing grace, silent night (some fun high notes to learn on a recorder), scarborough fair (one of my favorite simon and garfunkel songs), brahms lulluby (some tricky low note combinations for me), yankee doodle, jingle bells, when the saints go marching in. Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring is my nemesis...high notes, low notes, timing: all this makes for a challenging song (and practicing this song makes all the others seem easy). We play just a few minutes a day max. For hard sequences, we play slow and break them down to smaller sequences to learn the pattern.

I love to read with my 2 year old Tallula. We also play some fun interactive games together (Arthur, Sesame Street, Dr. Sues, Blues Clues...a lot of these games are old and can be bought used for really cheap on amazon or ebay). This morning we had fun watching a few episodes of Pingu. If you have never heard of Pingu, you are in for a real treat...tons of episodes available on YouTube. My brother swears they don't speak a real language but I notice that there are dutch subtitles on some of the episodes...do you know if they are actually speaking a language?

My father sang to me when I was a child. I loved this. I try to sing with my kids too. There is a wonderful book full of children's songs that I love to sing to Tallula: A Treasury of Children's Songs: Forty Favorites to Sing and Play by Fox, Dan (can get used for cheap from Amazon).

A friend of mine showed me a sterling engine...wow, those are cool! Bryanna and I built a thermoacoustic stirling engine (from a kit). If you have an easy explanation of how these works, I'd love to hear from you. I believe Los Alamos have spent millions (maybe billions) studying these things. Our engine is totally awesome and was used as part of a fun skit Emmett and I performed at the St. Francis on Christmas Eve lunch called Juggling Physics (which included 'interpretive juggling' of the four states of matter (electrons were simulated with rings and they were flying fast by the time we got to the 4th state of matter, plasma).

Yesterday Emmett and I were learning about simple projectile motion in flash. There are so many cool resources to learn how to program flash on the internet. With the internet being able to fly across international borders with ease, it's delightful to learn wonderful things from all the creative minds in other countries. For the simple projectile motion, Emmett and I empirically derived that around 45 degrees is the optimal angle for a given speed to make a projectile fly the farthest (and this was translated to baseball where if you want to throw the ball as far as you can, aiming for a 45 degree launch angle would get the ball the furthest).

Here are some cool physics tutorials in flash:
http://www.actionscript.org/resources/articles/840/1/Simple-Projectile-Motion/Page1.html
http://www.actionscript.org/resources/articles/742/1/Physics-in-ActionScript-30/Page1.html

Now here is a super cool program to learn more about physics:
http://www.crayonphysics.com/ (and with cross over, it works on a Mac)