How Kids Learn Valuable Skills through Gaming.

Most parents wrestle with the concern of how much is too much with gaming and screen time for  their children.  I know I have.  In our modern live's screen time is a given.  I think it is important as my son's parent and educator to monitor or be aware of my son's time spent in gaming. I also realize that my son models me and learns as he sees me using my screen time.  I am an example to him in self directed regulation of my own screen time.  With a child who is sensitive and differently abled, time on social media, and the social communication skills that is need to be safe and self regulated is something that is a huge concern and needs to be looked at.   It isn't so much of a lesson taught and learning unfolding with the learner as it happens.  This takes involvement on my end and sometimes shadowing my child in order to help but knowing when to step back and allow him to developing these skills on his own.  This is the art of parenting.  When to guide and when to pull back and how to know?
One of the things I struggled with in school was, my mind was not wired to learn in a non hands on style. Auditory processing during lectures where I have to sit passively listening and taking notes was/is NOT my optimal learning style. It is still almost impossible for me to stay focused on a teacher just talking if the subject matter is of no interest.  We have all been learners who's minds wander during a teacher's lecture. Many times in this learning environment if you miss a bit of information given, when you mind wanders, you are lost and unable to catch up. Algebra comes to mine here for me, where the learner must stay engaged or they will miss steps. Progressive learning in steps where you need to stay plug in to the speaker is hard for me to do in a 45 minute chunk of alotted time.  Not every learner can do this, sit passively and absorb information. We get caught up in this model for "what is" learning or education. Teacher talks, students listen, repeating it back to educator who then puts it all on a test whereby student proves that he has mastered the lesson by passing.

I was not a student who leaned well that way.  I think a lot of us were not students who learned well that way. There are so many different kinds of intelligence and learning styles. I needed to move and problem solve in a visual and preferably sensorial friendly way.   I like manipulatives in education where I can see and use my hands to know.  Let me do and I learn.  This is why I love and am drawn to the work of Maria Montessori and the materials she developed.

Gaming suited me, it felt good and my mind seemed wired to learn in this fast moving multimedia formula.  Crafting games and some other gaming themes, if done right seem to me to lead learners through portals into all kinds of organic learning.  I like getting to move, create, design, problem solve and control my learning environment.  Control of the learner is what and where we have come from.  Where I want to go in education is:  A learner controlled environment, where the learner leads and is in control.  Talk about taking ownership of learning.  Why are we not using gaming as a tool in our educational tool chest more? Some educators are of course.  Minecraft has all kinds of curriculum and learning communities that have sprung up.  You can learn programming mod, to chemistry lessons with Minecraft curriculum vendors.  What I really love about Minecraft is my son gets to play with others. Social communication peer interactions in communities on line.
One of my son's mentors helped me to see the many things my son is learning when he plays Minecraft.  

This educator Michael B., whom I found through a school-community called SelfDesign Global calls this authentic learning.  Learning that happens naturally when we do stuff. My son like thousands of other children loves Minecraft.  Minecraft is a crafting game where digital worlds of biomes are generated by the streamed game.  There are many versions  of this game.  He is playing a Personal Computer versions here on a private school server.

This is a tree house at night

Using only blocks users build/craft shelters or anything that can be imagined with the blocks available.  The users can make tools and use the natural resources available to them in the biomes. Quickly and what seemed liked to me intuitively, the gamer learned how to make tools, mine for ores, cut down trees, start fires, build communities and survive the nights. There are two main levels of difficulty in the game. survival mode is more difficult and things come after the gamers during the night in this mode which can upset younger children.  In the creative mode all resources and tools are available to the user. The gamers will not have to make tools or find resources and there are no monsters, so the user simply gets to create. Besides the obvious learning that goes on in gaming, how to play, learning the rules, learning the physics of the game it's self, something fascinating happened when my son started to get more proficient on the game and wanted to learn more about how too do things he did not know how to.  My son who is very limited in his his reading and comprehension ability started researching how to play Minecraft on the computer.  He mastered Google.

He quickly found YouTube videos of tutorials of other Minecraft user's teaching him how to craft and create.  He all on his own found a community of education that he was interested in. He also found other sources on line to teach him, like Wiki-How and on line forums of users. He has self directed all of this learning and synthesized it into his own creations on Minecraft. He has created a lot of structures on the game, many rollercoasters and temples and entire communities. Sometimes he plays with other users on servers and the games has a chat feature built into it.  So now we have social communication in a realm that I can not create in a hothouse social skills me-made environment. He has a community to work it out with, fight with, make up with and learn from.  This is huge for a person on the spectrum. Gaming on this level lowers social, economical, racial and differently abled My words for disabled) awareness.  Gamers are equalized by avatars and anonymity.  If you build well and can play well you are in a place the levels the playing field. My son is more on equal footing with his peers here in this on line community than an other environment.  Playing with other children he has learned that he can take a second device such as a smart phone or tablet and Skype call kids as they play.  Granted this isn't something everyone can do but when it happened for him he was thrilled.  He did not have to figure out decoding language by typing in CHAT.

A pagoda temple inspired level of the massive treehouse.

Another game my son loves is his mobile device, this is a Sony PlayStation PS Vita hand held system.  This device also allows him to play another version of Minecraft on a hand held mobile device where he can join parties globally and actually communicate with other players as they play game together.  Now with a community comes conflict but with conflict comes problem solving and social interactions and emotional regulation skills and coping skills for my son that I can not teach him.  He must learn like we all did how to get along in the world with others by experiencing it.  Socialization in the 21 century looks like to him right now how to make friends, stand up for himself, how to handle bullies and all the while he is building and learning, and all in a sort of playground justice sandbox which is the gaming community.  My son loves Little Big Planet another non violent crafting game where gamers can create their own mazes and share them with the gaming community on Sony's PlayStation and LBP community hubs.

Book Reviews in the Catagory of Children Reference Books

I love big picture books for kids. The importance of classification in a child's mind of the world around him is to me the cornerstone of education. We are here to make sense of the world around us. To find the joy in that process of classifying and organize the chaos we are born into can begin in infancy with a great picture book.  As a toddler learns language and begins with her own classification process of the world around her we see how engrained into our psyche the cognition of naming things and classifying things in our world is to our comprehension of everything and our place here on planet Earth. One of the books that I found children and adults love is "Animalium" a big book by Big Picture Press.  This book is Currated by Katie Scott and Jenny Broom and is part of the Welcome to the Museum series.

Animalium is a beautiful book filled with hand drawn picture of animals formatted into the classifications in the book as if you are walking through the galleries a a museum on natural history. 

Each catagory of animals is in a chapter of the book.

The illustration are beautifully rendered. The books text is simple enough for a primary or elementary aged child but even a very young child can enjoy the pictures. This book is priced at $35.00. It can be bought at several vendors. If you think of books like this as a reference book for you library that can be passed down through generations of you children to their future children it's not so expensive.  This is not a book I will give away but a learning resource my family can uses for generation. This series is that beautiful.

The next Big Picture Press reference book I wanted to share is "Maps" by Aleksandra Mizielinska and Daniel Mizielinski.

Maps is a picture book of drawings.

The Table of Contents. This is a simplified version of a world atlas for children. 

Each continent is covered and each Nations page dipicts cultural life, national resources as well as geographic highlights. The language is simple but the subject foot notes are in cursive. This can be fun to for learners to practice their skills of language in a beautifully printed book.

The final book I am reviewing in this series of Big Picture Press is "Historium" another Welcome to the Museum children's reference book. "Historium" by or curated by Richard Wilkinson and Jo Nelson is book that shows children artifacts of the world by continent. For over 100,000,000 years human beings have been make and creating objects and art. This book shows a charming introduction into archaeology by allowing the child to classify art objects by continent and time frame.

From scratches on a rock in Southern Africa to the artifacts of Easter Island, your child will have an excellent reference of artifacts and creative materials from around the world. 

This books also has a index of image credits where you can teach our child more in research and credible sources. This could be followed up by virtual tours often found on musuem's web sights and by following the names of the world greatest museums to their web sights for more learning we are teaching all kinds of research and study skills.

Mind Maps and Catapults

Spring has come to Arizona early in February this year.  My garden is growing and the Wisteria tree in the back yard is budding out.

  We have hit the doldrums in many ways, having suffered through a season of colds and upper respiration issues we now are looking for new projects to keep my teenager engaged and learning.

He has gravitated like many young men his age to gaming and is interested in creating more story lines for his Favorite Game, Sony's Play Stations crafting game "Little Big Planet".  This is a chance for my son to collect and show what his creativity can do.  It may be Vloging or some format of film making along with his many drawings of his concepts for the story line.  He hasn't really figured out the how.  This is a life's work in progress.  A chance to learn how to blend multi media into his own plan.  He is working on this ongoing project of marketing himself.  How to package what he can do, present it and contribute in his own way. My son is already thinking about protecting his ideas and asking the important question of how do I protect my intellectual properties.

One of the tools that working with SelfDesign Global people has taught me is that of Mindmaps. A map of goals and bubble ideas of where a learner is and where a learning can go.  A tool for mapping out my son's ideas and all the many mini projects that go into the  journey to finally connect all the dots to finish a big project. A mind map takes a lot of little ideas and draws them into to one big picture.

So he is going to start working on this.  Focusing and clearing his lens of what he wants to do with each idea to make a collective whole.  This is his first time he has come to me and told me he wants to do this "Thing".  It's totally his idea. So I want to help him find a way to organize his thoughts, his talents, his story and make something.  I will keep posting on this big project.
One of the catapults of inspiration for this projects has been my reading of Resa Steindel Brown's book of The Call To Brilliance" Here.  Resa is an educator who homeschooling her own children.  What makes her so different is she knew how to lead and direct her children to the right pathways to do and achieve amazing things.  Her book has just inspired me "to go for" this paradigm of learning with my own son and help him make "His Creative Dreams Happen".  Why not? Our February catapult is now into the world of story design Little Big Planet's Very Big Project.

My son has been drawing pictures of his ideas for a story board for over a year, so a Mindmap of how he can organize these drawings and use film or other media of the game to create a big project to present his ideas is the next step here.

He has also been working on programming and has been logging hours on the free sight on Code.org   Anybody can learn to code is their slogan and this open sourced web sight uses a sort of MIT's Scratch click and drop block formatting with a simple learning centered lesson.  Easy to follow lessons that bring learners right along in what can be rapid self directed pace

While my 14 year old is now in high school I recently was lucky to find a Montessori AMS trained educator who will work with my son teaching algebra using the Montessori Adolescent Algebra Album by Micheal Waski for 12-18 year olds.   workshop for this work here 
I am very glad to find an educator who can and will do this for us.  The Album is wonderful in context and conceptual flow and I know when I need help and thank God I found a tutor who fits this plan.

We are still doing biology and chemistry with along with Marsed.ASU.ed supports in astrobiology  with lesson available online.  We just did the "It's Alive Lesson and the dog really did eat his homework. Specimen B a mixture of sand, sugar and yeast is evidently delicious as my Great Dane and Mastiff seemed to have consumed the remainder of the experiment that was left out over night on my potting work bench.  The empty baggy was spotted on the lawn shredded and the dogs found licking the grass where I found the remainder of the mixture of the "Alive" lesson and very tasty it was.

We are also jumping into the next step of robotics with a Arduino program using "30 Arduino Projects for the Evil Genius" book and a Dream of a kit by Duniokit.com.  Lots of projects and staples to keep us engaged and learning this spring.  Mr. C. our STEAMS tutor is leading us with more out of the box projects.  After a short dabble into creating a Lego Mindstorm version of Theo Jansen's StrandBeast they are branching on into Zoomtools and free flow, figuring out where they are going to go next.

Robotics with Mindstorm and Creative Learning

The Lego Mindstorm Robotics System has been around for quite some time.  Legos are imaginative and creativity and in it's own inner changeable brick system of engineering it inspires and motivates learners to create and explore. No lesson plan needed organic learning. Part of the open endness of Lego's NXT and EV3 bricks is you can just put them out and let the kids go and they will learn.  For many teachers this allowing of authentic learning is difficult.  Plenty of well meaning educators take an open-ended item like Legos and use it to force a set of lessons and projects on kids. While there is value in following a curriculum sometimes forcing or structuring creativity limits the learning. Allowing for authentic learning puts the controls of the objectives in the hands of the learner. I love to set up the environment and get out the way.  If the kids need help programing or finding a part I am there for them.  Other wise I let my son go.  Sometimes he may want to try a project but usually he just does his own design. You have to see that learning happens through play and allow for the child to unfold and learning through their own process of trial and error.  With Lego the control is built into the widget you make.  If it works or if it fails to you learn. 

My son has had free range over Mindstorm for 5 years.  This year we hired a tutor who show us some programing  on NXT Lego Mindstorm brick.  While my son is very creative and able to design Lego projects his tutor has been able to teach him some basic brick programming with the Mindstorm software.  My son wanted to make a claw grabber and had a book that helped him.  Our tutor didn't want to do this but did turn it into a programing lesson.  The instructor was stuck on having my son do his created lesson and had a hard time letting go of his learning plan and allowing my son to create his own projects.  The Tutor did adapted a bit and was able to show Conor more programing on the projects that Conor found meaningful. They have used many learning concepts of programming the sensors and experimenting by adjusting the robot to react to light by picking up with a claw which has a sensor in it to grab an egg and releasing it.  The claw robot's sensor has to be adjusted to the reflected light off of the egg and react to different lighting outside in order to clamp down. This activity took time and work to get right.

Here they are learning about programming the NXT brick and controlling the sensors.

Building the claw robot and learning about taking risk and how mistakes in design teach us how to get things right.  Our tutor was not use to the autistic mind but was fairly patient and seems to enjoy this process with his learner.

To understand learning creativity takes time and playing with your design is important to the process of making.  Yes as an educator I can step in and fix a design, making the project mind in the process, but what is my fixing the mistake teaching the kid?  The goal is for the learner to be involved in the process.  A great educator knows when to step back and allow learning to happen.

The goal isn't just the Widget, it's the process of making.

Every week this tutor brought a cool project over.  My son didn't always want to do what his tutor brought over for him.  Sometimes they had fun. Here they are building a structure out of newspapers and learning what shapes support the structure and how form and balance are required in adding one more section.  This project was part of a marble run made from newspapers and tape.

Here my son is problem solving by taking apart the claw robot to fix an area that needed restructuring to work.  More learning through mistakes. This project took a few weeks.  Below is Conor's marble run,  made with box, tape and straws, brought over by the tutor. Later below more building to happen over Thanksgiving weekend with older sisters visit with partner.

Out came and old marble run toy and the marble run structure continued with more building.

The original marble run project made of boxes, tape, straws and paint chip samples.

More learning with great open ended tools in an environment and let them go.  They are their own teachers.

We all learn by playing.  My adult children all remarked on how they would have loved to have learned this way, and how their life's would have been so different if they had had this learning space and an educator who let them learn this way.  They plan to give this gift of learning style to their children.  I think as an educator that recognition means more to me than anything.  Smiles and engagement in the activity mean the joy of learning is happening in our school room.

Unfortunately these structures got thrown way when the garage got cleaned out but the possibilities of it were limitless and the project can be recreated again. Imagine, create, play, share, think, recreate and play some more.  Our never ending spiral of learning creativity.

The mineshaft climber was another project created. Often these projects are abandoned after a short while but there is value in every step of the process of learning. It all matters.

I am grateful for and thankful for our grant through the Arizona State's Empowerment Scholarship Program that makes buying these materials possible.  My son and my life will be forever altered by this grant.

A Big Slice of Life with Autism on the Side

I don't like labels.  Silly words we use to classify and sort ourselves and others in to little neat packages to put ourselves into tidy little slots.
I am a reader and fastidious researcher.  I have stayed up researching all night long sometimes just for fun.  I like it.  I tend to dive into researching and when my son was at four years of age diagnosed with autism I was a researcher on a mission.  I went at it in a multi-layered way. I read medical journals, joined Aspies for Freedom forum, went to conferences, and read books and combed search engines for any information.  It has taken me years to gather and understand what is autism and how to think about "autism" and what that means with my son now.  He keeps growing and changing and showing me more things that are so much more than a one word label for who he is.  Many of the things I see him do few other people ever see.  You can't ever assume you know what is going between another person's ears.  No one can say I am an expert in autism and objectively say they understand autism in all it's shapes and forms.  Austism continues to blow me away with all its many facets and nuances.
 I myself had been labeled as learning disabled so I came from a first person narrative of what it is to be labeled with a negative tittle.  Dyslexia was something I knew I had but not something I really suffered from like a disease or condition.  Like being left handed it just meant I had to adjust and find an alternative ways to get from point A to point B.  I knew teachers didn't know what to do with me.  I knew I did not test well.  I knew I frustrated them and they did not think I could read and comprehend what I read.   I had a hard time showing them on paper what I knew as a child.   I also knew I could read and loved the written word and had a almost photographic memory of what I saw and heard.  I just could not remember how to spell.  I knew what the educational system thought of me was not even close to a reflection of what was going on between my ears at a very early age.  I learned early that people who are supposedly experts in education are very limited in their understand of how we learn. No one can see what is happening cognitively in another persons head and meta cognitively we are all very different. Not only are our brains different chemically but we all learn differently too.  I grew up in a time when educators didn't know much about different kinds of learners or differentiated      learning /multiple intelligence and I was just ignored and dismissed. I knew they couldn't see me and that change my perception of the experts being capable.  When my son was given a diagnosis of Autism by a developmental psychiatrist I didn't feel like that was a horrible thing.  I never thought of myself as disabled and it never occurred to me to think of my son as anything but who he was, and still is, a beautiful boy.
Through the years this philosophy of seeing my son as differently abled has taken me to some very interesting places. Sometimes I have left quickly and walked away because the table isn't ready for us or even the more hurtful we are not wanted at the table.  More and more I find we are happier and more fulfilled at our own table creating our own happy and doing our own thing.

Actress Mayim Bialik (who plays Amy Farrah-Fowler on TBBT) was being interviewed by Neil DeGrasse Tyson when he asked her about the speculation of Sheldon's label. She gave a response that Radio Times lauded as “Brilliant”. She said,
“All of our characters are in theory on the neuropsychiatric spectrum, I would say, Sheldon often gets talked about in terms of Asperger’s or OCD. He has a thing with germs, he has a thing with numbers, he’s got a lot of that precision that we see in OCD. There’s a lot of interesting features to all of our characters that make them technically unconventional socially…
I think what’s interesting and kind of sweet and what should not be lost on people is we don’t pathologise our characters. We don’t talk about medicating them or even really changing them.
And I think that’s what’s interesting for those of us who are unconventional people or who know and love people who are on any sort of spectrum, we often find ways to work around that. It doesn’t always need to be solved and medicated and labelled.
And what we’re trying to show with our show is that this is a group of people who likely were teased, mocked, told that they will never be appreciated or loved, and we have a group of people who have successful careers, active social lives (that involve things like Dungeons and Dragons and video games), but they also have relationships, and that’s a fulfilling and satisfying life.”

It is one thing to see yourself as whole and well.  It's is harder to get the world to treat you as being whole and well. Life isn't a carefully constructed TV show  with a safe set and actors who are not on the spectrum  acting like they are.  I love the perspective. Life, camera, action in the neuro typical world isn't choreographed for such a seamless existence.   Label or no label I and my son are different.  Our learning styles, our sensitivity and our perspective makes us different not broken.  Part of the journey for any human is survival, pursuing happiness and self improvement.  So basic needs and desires are the same for us as they are for anyone.  While my son learns to live with his shape and shade of personhood and adjust to life in all it's rapidly changing incarnations he will have to come to his own terms and identity as to what his life with autism on side will look like for him. It is my job to support, encourage and hand him more paints and brush if he looses his way. He gets to paint the picture and it can and will be anything he chooses to create.

How to Have Fun and Learn- Christmas Break Extended Learning Projects.

My biggest job as an educator and parent is to create and model the joy of learning to my students.  One of my most  favorite courses that I took at the university level was Massachusetts Institute of Technology's “Learning Creative Learning” class.  This was a free online course at MIT”S Open Courseware.  Here’s that link for anyone interested in taking the course. HERE

What really made an impression on me about learning creative learning was that learning is playing and having fun.  Professor Mitch Resnick, one of the courses creators used a model of a Life Long Sandbox of learning and spoke of that when we open the walls of our classroom and raise the ceiling to allow more learners in we create a space for the joy of creative learning. This is part of MIT’s Lifelong Kindergarten idea that changed the way I thought about learning.  This course shows a diagram of how we learn creativity but this model works for more than just creative learning.  It carries over to all subjects that are project based or group lead.  It goes well with the Bloom’s Taxonomy described HERE

In a nut shell.

We learn in these steps.

Imagine:  We think of an idea, we conceptualizes, we imagine an idea.
Create:    We make the idea, we draw, we build, we make.
Play:        We use the idea or the object we make and we experiment how it works.
Share:      We show it to the group, peers or our family, we get feed back, we let others help create.
    
    Sometimes our project doesn’t work and/or it gets knocked down which leads us to the next step.

Reflect:     We think about what went wrong and what worked and what we can do better
Imagine:    We recreate fix and make our ideas better.
 
This model of how we learn is flow chart that continues in a circle or spiral.  While you work on the activities below refer back to the Imagine-Create-Play-Share-Reflect-Imagine model.   Remember playing is essential to learning and allow yourself to do something you might not have ever thought of as learning.


The least thing I liked about Christmas break as a child was the packet of worksheets my well meaning teachers sent home for me to do over the break.  No matter how they package them or wrapped them they were still worksheets and frankly boring.
Learning should be joyful, if we are to create life long learners we need to find activities that make the majority of learners want to participate. so here are a few activities to try this break.  Have fun and never be afraid to mess up.  This is how we learn.  Keep at it, don't quit and don't worry if it is silly or not perfect.  This is how learning looks.


MATH PATTERNS:  Decorate a Christmas tree on paper or the real thing using patterning and show your work.  Use ornaments, strings of popcorn or garland or pine cones and follow a pattern of color or shapes or texture.  Ask someone to see if they can see it and get your family to help.

MATH PROBLEM SOVLER: Come up with a formula to determine how long of a shoelace you need and show how you figure this out.  Research the relationship between shoelace length and shoe size.  Show your work in a graph or drawing or algebraic formula.  What are some of the variables?  Do the eyelets matter?  Do the way you lace up your shoes matter?  Part B:  Design a new way to lace up your shoes.

SONG WRITER:  Come up with a new story for the 12 Days of Christmas using all new items and characters.  You can write it, sing it, dance it act it out or story board it.  One Ipad beeping, Two Xbox dinging, Three puppies yelping....

CARTOONIST:  Write a cartoon where you are the hero and save the world.  This is where writers learn to story board and this can carry on to all kinds of creating.  Make us your own super power.  Design a costume, a hide out, or a side kick. Draw it, make it, create it in another way like acting it out and filming it.  Some ideas: I am the Super Hero Fuzzworth and my super power is I can freeze time and move around fixing bad things right before they happen by moving victims out of the way.  My disguise is an old lady because no one ever suspects them. The people I help only have a fuzzy recollection of what happened, hence my alias.

BE A CHEF:  Make up your own recipe for a salad, sandwich or any meal, using nothing but left overs.  Record your work and interview who ever eats it.

BE A REPORTER:  Interview someone about what they got for Christmas.  Try to ask investigative questions like: Did they like it?  What did they really want?  Then try and recreate the event to layer your news story using friends for actors.

BE A CONCEPTUAL CREATOR OF GAMING:  Write a conceptual idea for a computer game.  Story board it or show it in a way that is meaningful to your creativity.

DESIGNER:  Make a marble run out of items in the house such as cardboard, tissue boxes, paper towel rolls BUT HERE IS THE SECRET SAUCE:  Make the marble or ball go slowly down the structure.

TEACHER:  Make you own tutorial of something you can make or do well and share it.  Teach it to your parents.  *** Example: How to survive the 1st night on Minecraft.

BLOGGER:  Make a Blog or Vlog about something you are interested in.  Even if you cant film it your can do this in the mirror.

ARCHITECT:  Make the highest structure possible out of marshmallows and dry spaghetti. Ask questions,  What made it stronger?  What shapes did you make your building blocks out off.  What worked?  What didn't word

PLAY WRITER: Create a play, design the set, make costumes perform it for family and friends.

INSTRUMENT MAKER:   Make your own musical instrument. 

COMPOSER:  Compose a song and perform it.  Ask your family to sing it with you.   See if you can do harmonies to your own melody

LINGUIST:  Create a new language out of symbols or pictures.  Teach it to someone.

SCREENWRITER:  Write or conceptualize a new episode of your favorite show and show it to someone. See if you can rewrite it with a different ending.

SUPER NINJA:  Make an your own America Ninja Course out of snow or soft items in your environment and run it and time yourself.  *******Don't do anything dangerous.

THEME PARK DESIGNER:   Make a roller coaster on Minecraft using only the natural landscape.  Don't use blocks to build but only mountains and digging down is okay.  You can use tracks.

MATHEMATICAL GENIUS:  Create a new model of the Multiplication Table using cartoon drawings.  Look at this chart below for ideas.

Summer Learning

In the summertime when Arizona weather is so hot we stay inside. We take mini vacations, work on projects, take care of animals and the garden and focus on the joy of learning. It isn't so much a lesson plan or recipe book of activities we use as we just following our families life's interest.

We began June with a short trip to Colorado. a 14 hour trip by car from our home to my old home in the northwest corner of that state. The journey takes us through the desert biomes of Arizona's Sonoran Desert on to Monument Valley in the Navajo Nation, to the Utah Canyon Lands and up into the western high Rockies mountain biomes.  We drive it in one day and it is an adventure. Here are some photos .

The Navajo Nation is a wide open desert with these iconic southwestern images of rocks that rise like cathedrals out of the flat desert landscape. We talk about how wind and sand form this place and how they people have lived and adopted to life here in Monument Valley. Last summer we drove over a different route of reservation area coming down from Cortez, CO in to Farmington, New Mexico and down to what is left of Route 66. This gave my son more scope to the width and diversity of this large area of these reservations in the Four Corner Area.

We got to our friend's house who lives at about 8000 feet above sea level on a beautiful ranch in the high mountains. Here is a hay barn where a Mamma fox had her pups or kits.  We tried to get photos of them but we were too loud and they ran away.  Still what a great place to raise a littler of babies. There were many different kinds of rodents too. Whistle pigs that look a bit like ground hogs had tunnels all over the ground and smaller ground squirrels and mice. The high passes surrounding us still had deep snow on them so summer was just beginning and the world was ten million different shades of green.

There were two Bulls in this pasture. They have been turn out with all the young females.  This is called rutting season. The bulls can be unpredictable and we left them alone.  In the morning the females would come up to the house and stand in the morning shade of the trees that surround the house that were planted so long ago by a rancher in the 1800's.  They are the only shade for them and they enjoy the mornings long shadows of the trees into their field. They wander away at around 10:00 AM.  Sometimes they moo at us as if to ask for oats or a treat but they have a whole valley of green to eat.

Here is a picture of the big trees planted so long ago. They are Cottonwood trees.

We also learned about sustainability housing by visiting an old friend of mind who has been designing, building and creating his own green home. Our friend Lock used straw bales and steel frame structure, facing south and using convection heating methods in the lower floor. It is a massive structure and the hay bales were not hobbed over yet but even as it is, he lived in it this year and it is coming right along.  Lock also designed a wonderful spiral staircase with a supporting sixteen sided pillar out of wood with no nails. It wasn't done yet as it had no hand rail.  We were all very impressed with our friend's ideas and work.  Conor loves Lock's designing skills.

Conor was very impressed that Lock had two TV's over his bed. These two creative builders has much in common.  Lock gave us a tour and we were off to see more.

We only had a week with friends in Colorado and it was back to Arizona. This was the sun's rays coming up over the ranch house.
We drove all the way back in one day.  I don't know why I do that?
Since we have been working on learning about astrobiology and using the ASU MARS ED NASA Curriculum I have blogged about in the past, we have been thinking about creating a colony on Mars and building a model.  Conor and his friend Ben have been using a geology map, I have from a Mars Ed ASU teacher's conference, as a mat surface to build sub stations and green houses.  They have created vehicles for Mars mission.  Also robotic helpers and a mining operation all out of Legos and Zometools.  They also made a polar sub-station to collect water and refining the atmospheric methane and oxygen with H20 to make jet fuel for the ride home.  We have talked about all kinds of possibilities of living on Mars.  I collected resources and made a Pinterest Board called Mars Ed HERE .   One of my friend's son has also joined us on our mission making his own station for colony to sleep in and eat.  His bunker substation can be found on the Pinterest Mars Ed page.
I was speaking about our porject with our Educator/Mentor Michael Bender, who is with SelfDesign Global (you can find out about that HERE) and he suggested using that group's Minecraft Server to create a Mars Colony out of a desert Biome.  I shared my Pinterest Board with him and his wife, Lori who lead a Self Designer group of Minecrafters and Michael has created a red sand and sandstone biome and the students have now created a building code. So big things are happening with learners in this group on the server.  Conor has survived a few days and nights on Minecraft Mars.   He made a first shelter, planted a garden, started tunneling and found an abandoned mine and water. His group decided on glass domed habitats and air locking doors.  Minecraft survival biomes, like our Mars are teaming with the un dead after dark.  There are Zombies and skeletons spawing in the mine. Who knew about all this undead life on Mars?  We have a rocketship around the portal so there is the idea of what you bring with you and what you can use while there and how much would it cost to go back to EARTH for a bucket of water in real life?  I'll keep updating on this project.  My son is aslo wanting to create MC biome models of the moons of Io, Europa and Titan too.  You can see the Pinterest resources board for that HERE.

Here is a little Zombie looking in at us from the outside of the glassed in habitat.