Safari in the Maasai Mara

By Maya Karlan

          I had a fabulous safari with my family including my grandma. We saw so many animals! There were three things which I liked the most: being with Grandma, seeing animals, and watching animals doing things.

          My grandma came to Africa for the first time. We played a game and made a bet on how many times she said, “awesome.” My brother won. My brother, sister and I slept in the same tent as Grandma.

          We saw so many animals; it was crazy.  I was most excited to see a black rhino because it is the rarest rhino, and I studied it in 2^nd grade. The rhinos are usually in bushes but they were out in the open, and there were two of them. Seeing the rhino made it so that we saw the Big Five: rhino, buffalo, lion, leopard, and elephant all in one day! We saw 5 leopards, 3 playing and 2 resting in trees. We also saw one cheetah lying down. It was very cool. We all got in the safari jeep, and we said, “We’re going to see a cheetah. We’re going to see a cheetah.” And then we saw one.

          We saw animals mating and eating. We saw two types of animals mating, the ostrich and the lion. Before the ostrich mates the male dances and waves its wings. Then the male gets on top of the female and they mate. The lion mates every 5 minutes for a few hours. When the lion mated the male got on top of the female and shook his butt. Then the male peed, but that’s not part of the mating. We also saw an eland that died of old age, and vultures were pecking at the eland. They stuck their heads up the eland’s butt and mouth. Then a hyena came and scared the vultures away. The hyena started ripping out the eland’s guts and made a hole in the tummy for the hyena to eat. We went back three hours later, and the vultures were still there! We saw four vultures come out of the tummy that the hyena had made.

          We had a fabulous safari because of how much we saw. Also it was fun because Grandma was there.

    

                

     

Adventures in Science

In September we visited the Science Museum of London during an overnight layover.  As the kids and I sat eating lunch, a museum educator approached us.  She said that the museum was looking for kids to try out a new workshop and to be photographed for the museum's website.  Well, the workshop is being offered right now, and our photograph is on the advertisement for it!

http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/visitmuseum/events/workshops/invent_event.aspx?eventId=%7B2B104196-6A48-43EA-882B-172D4BF363D2

Just yesterday we visited an even better science museum in Santiago Chile.  It's called Museo Interactivo Mirador (MIM).  http://www.mim.cl/prontus_mim/site/edic/base/port/inicio.html  It was filled with terrific hands-on experiments!  It reminded us of the science museums we have visited in Helsinki, Stockholm, and Bergen (Norway). 

Thank goodness for science museums when we learn on the road.  It's not easy gathering all the materials we need for experiments as we travel.  Plus it's difficult to do the experiments in a hotel room!

--Cindy

Kiel: The Food List and the Audi

             We are in Kiel, Germany. We had to fly into Hamburg(er) and then drive to Kiel. The moment the five of us landed we all realized we had to eat a hamburger for our list of place foods. A few months ago we made a list of places where the name of the place is also a food thing (or sounds like a food thing).  Here is out list so far (saved on Mom’s cellphone). If you can think of any more, please add them as a comment so we can add it to our list!

• Turkey (just did it a month ago)
• Basel
• Greece (done: we ate some meat, a couple years ago)
• Hungary (we skipped breakfast one day, a few years ago)
• Chile (going to do in a month!)
• Hamburg(er), just did it.
• Frankfurt(er)
• Lima (going in Peru, we need to learn how to say lima bean in Spanish)
• Bologna
• Sandwich
• Tamale (we were there, but forgot to find tamales. But Daddy says we’ll have to cook them ourselves, no Mexican restaurants there)

           

While at the Hamburg(er) airport we went to a restaurant called Cindy’s Diner which sold mostly hamburgers. All of us shared one burger. It was a regular burger other than the fact that it had some weird red sauce (possibly ketchup) which made the burger taste like “sweet and sour burger”, and was the size of a cookie. It was disgusting! We all had a bite and then threw it in the trash because it was so disgusting.

            Today we rode in one of the coolest cars any of us had been. There was a TV with cable, so there were channels. None of them were good and they were all in German. The seats went back a little and gave us a massage. We could get two different types of massage. There were also very good seat warmers which made our backs burn. For the heater we could choose what temperature it was. It could also be cold. We are hoping Daddy's conference gets us one of these cars again tomorrow for our ride back to the airport.

            We also got conference name tags and necklace thingies. Our first ones!

            Other than all that, it was a full day of school in the hotel. And yesterday was several hours of math during a long layover in Heathrow.

            Maya, Max, and Gabi (who threw a fit in the middle and stormed out)

The Dire Consequences of the Economist Parent

I’m not sure whether to be proud or embarrassed by this post. I’ll let you be the judge. We’re settling in to our seats on a plane, and we don’t have 5 seats together. So the kids start haggling over who sits where (usually the debate is focused on Maya and Gabi not wanting to sit next to each other). So they had their “assigned” seats from the boarding passes, and being the economist in me, I told them to setup a market and trade. Initial random assignments should not determine final allocations. Great lesson in both auction theory and the Coase theorem! 

So I helped them setup a second price sealed bid auction (yes, others saw this happening and we got some strange looks). It worked, in a sense that everyone accepted the decisions and recognized the process as fair. But Max made off like a bandit (got $5 from Maya), because Maya and Gabi overbid and had tons of regret later. But they learned a bit about how the auction works…

We're now back home for a week, nice to be here for a bit... next week we do a mini-tour of the South, visit the civil rights museum in Greensboro, and not sure what else yet.

-- Dean

ad-hoc Bad Science lesson

Fun ad-hoc science lesson today, courtesy of Ben Goldacre (http://www.badscience.net) videos. This required pausing a lot to explain vocabulary ("placebo" & "nocebo" I explained in advance) and repeating for the kids to catch Ben's British accent (the kids know how to say many Tube stop names in British... Tottenham and Cockfosters being their favorites... but other than that they still hear through American ears...).

http://www.badscience.net/2010/12/im-doing-this-awesome-massive-nerd-tour/

The kids really thought it was funny to hear about pacemakers working... even before they got turned on.  And how a placebo pill with more formal packaging works better than one with worse packaging (that one I told them about from Ben's book, not in the video).

And then this one was a bit longer, a debate on homeopathic medicine: http://www.badscience.net/2006/12/homeopathy-video-stream/

This second video was a good way to introduce them to what "statistically significant" means and what "meta-analysis" is.  The best tidbit I thought: Why did homeopathy appear to do well against cholera in the 19th century?  Because the "conventional" medicine of the time (bloodletting) happened to do bad. Talk about backhanded compliments, but Goldacre nailed it when he said something akin to "sure I recommend homeopathy when the conventional medicine does no good, and may actually have bad side effects... since we know that homeopathy is no different than a placebo, and placebos can actually do some good".

Fun day.

Off to a game of Pandemic over dinner...

-- Dean

First (belated) blog post: Manila, London, Helsinki, Cairo and Istanbul...

The 2011-2012 homeschool year has begun, and we're already behind with our first blog post! Let me just give a shortened run-through of what we've accomplished so far....

We started our travel in early July, and we began school when we got to Manila, Philippines.  The goal wasn't for us to homeschool throughout the summer.  Rather, it was for us to get a head-start because we knew we would be having lots of adventures that aren't purely academic and part of our structured homeschooling curriculum.  (A bit of foreshadowing here: we didn't do much of any homeschooling in all of August...)

We are using the Calvert Homeschooling curriculum.  It is sometimes more skill-oriented than we are  accustomed; however, it's quite comprehensive.  All 3 kids are studying composition, grammar, reading, spelling, science, social studies (for Max and Maya that includes geography and world history), math, and technology (which includes a typing tutor). In addition, Gabi (3rd grade) is studying Greek mythology and Famous Americans.  Maya (6th grade) is studying art history (sculpture) and French, while Max (7th grade) is studying art history (architecture), Latin, and Spanish.  There are plenty of books and papers to keep organized.  Plus each child has his/her own web portal that includes online lessons and research resources. 

We started school in Manila because, in the past, we haven't found many touristy things to do in that city.  It was a little hectic at first for a couple of reasons.  First of all, although the kids were eager to try out their new school materials, they weren't exactly ready to start school only a couple of weeks after summer vacation started.  Also, we all had lots of questions about how the curriculum worked. (There is plenty of online work, and we had to figure out how to access some of the programs.)  Plus, we had to get used to switching gears frequently -- from 7th grade Latin to 3rd grade science.  It was a bit hectic at first.  We continued to school the kids in Accra, Ghana, and the kids attended approximately 10 days of school by the end of July.

In August, we were in London for the month. Dean was working at the London School of Economics, and  I (Cindy) decided that we would homeschool in a less traditional way.  I didn't want us to be cooped up in a flat with books all day when the entire city of London is filled with great educational opportunities.  Max and Maya attended Arsenal soccer camp for part of the month.  However, some or all of the kids and I visited museums practically every day in August. Some of the museums (and museum-like) places we visited in London and which we highly recommend are:
1. Victoria and Albert Museum  (museum of art and design) http://www.vam.ac.uk/
2.  Natural History Museum  http://www.nhm.ac.uk/ 
3. Kew Gardens  http://www.kew.org/  botony lesson!
4. Geoffrye Museum (furnishings from 1600-present) http://www.geffrye-museum.org.uk/
5. Courtauld Museum  (impressionist art) http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/gallery/index.shtml
6. Tate Britain (art from 1500-present) http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
7.  Tate Modern (modern art) http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/
8.  The Garden Museum http://www.gardenmuseum.org.uk/   another botony lesson!
9.  Florence Nightingale Museum http://www.florence-nightingale.co.uk/cms/  biology and public health lesson!
10. Portrait Gallery http://www.npg.org.uk/
11. National Gallery http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/
12.  Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology http://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/petrie
13.  British Museum http://www.britishmuseum.org/
14.  Hampton Court Palace (occasional home of Henry VIII and 6 wives)  http://www.hrp.org.uk/hamptoncourtpalace/

We were sad to leave London because we became quite comfortable there.  However, in early September, Dean had a conference in Helsinki, Finland on behavioral economcis and development.  The kids got to see some of their favorite economists (Maya has had an affection for Sendhil Mullainathan ever since he kept stealing her crayons in 2006, officially known to the children as "the summer of Sendhil" as we travelled with him for 5 weeks in India). The first thing we did in Helsinki was visit the highly recommended science museum that Dean took Maya and Gabi to 2 years ago, but Max and I had never been.  It's called the Heureka Museum, and it's awesome!  http://www.heureka.fi/portal/englanti/  We learned how to build an arch, we enjoyed a temporary exhibition about nutrition (where we learned that a green pepper is a better source of vitamin C than an orange), and we saw how coins are made.  The exhibits are very hands-on.  At some point, Max rode a bike on a wire across the top of the building.  I think it was a balance/counter-balance lesson. (It was very safe.  Here's a picture:  http://www.heureka.fi/portal/englanti/exhibitions/  )

After a couple of days in Helsinki, we headed to Cairo where Dean spoke at a conference on microfinance.  We enjoyed visiting the Egyptian Museum http://www.touregypt.net/egyptmuseum/egyptian_museum.htm where we saw King Tut's sarcophagus, mask,  and all the jewelry that was inside his tomb.  Then the next day we visited the pyramids and the Sphinx.  We climbed inside a pyramid to see the tomb.  Very cool! After that, we spent 3 days homeschooling again. 

Now we are in Istanbul, our last major stop before heading home for a couple of weeks.  Yesterday we visited the Archaeology Museum where we saw all sorts of great artifacts. http://www.istanbularkeoloji.gov.tr/main_page  Today, we walked 1 1/2 hours to the Hagia Sophia, a huge 1,500 year old Byzantine church that was converted to a mosque and then to a museum.  I had learned about the Hagia Sophia in my art history class with my cousin Camille, and Max currently is studying the Byzantine period in his history text. The kids and Dean jumped up and down when we got inside, in honor of Camille, since that is what she said she did when she saw it for her first time too. Something tells me her enthusiasm was a bit more genuine than Dean's and the kids'. This afternoon we very much enjoyed seeing how the architects of this massive building were able to put a huge round dome over a squarish building.  (It wasn't easy!  The original dome collapsed after an earthquake shortly after it was built, and the builders had to find a better design.)

Anyway, tomorrow and Tuesday we plan to do more homeschooling before heading home.  Of course Dean just kept the kids up past midnight playing Pandemic with them while I wrote this up, so I'm not sure how early a start we'll get.  It's difficult to break away from the fun (and educational) touristy adventures (and game playing) to get back to a standard curriculum.  We will have to work on finding a balance between appreciating our location and accomplishing more formal schooling.  I suspect this isn't such a bad problem to have, though. :-)