the tweney review

My daughter and I will be on TV this week, 8pm local time Wednesday night (Nov. 14) on most PBS stations. That’s when our “GeekDad” segment will air, sometime during that night’s Wired Science program.

Wired Science is a collaboration between Wired (my employer) and KCET (a PBS station in LA). I’m not really involved, except that one day a video crew came to our house and filmed stuff as Clara helped me build a UFO-shaped hovercraft out of plywood, a piece of tarp, a leaf blower, and of course lots of duct tape. I also did two other episodes, except with some local high school students instead of Clara. I hear those episodes may be appearing on the Wired Science website, but not on TV.

Here’s a link to the Geekdad: UFO segment (just a preview now, but may have the full segment after Wednesday).

So my daughter’s a star! If you like her performance, send fanmail to wiredscience@kcet.org and ask them to bring her back next season!

UPDATE: Here’s the GeekDad: UFO page on the PBS website, with the video and comments from viewers.

Thanks to repeated viewings of Jimmy Neutron, Clifford the Big Red Dog, and Scooby Doo, Clara is now obsessed with the idea of building a super-duper clubhouse that contains, among other things, trap doors, secret pools, a waterfall, and levers that make things happen (like pop people into the air). But most of all, she wants it to have a flying saucer — that really flies.

KJ and I really want to encourage this obsession but it’s getting hard to figure out what to do with it that will be a) practical and b) satisfying to Clara, and maybe even c) educational and inspirational for her. With KJ’s help she’s made spec lists and has started drawing plans.

I posed my problem to Chris Anderson, who edits the Geekdad blog (oh yeah, and Wired mag too). He was nice enough to pose my question to his readers — many of which have some great suggestions here:

Ask Geekdad: My daughter wants a UFO

Last night Clara was working on her homework, part of which involved math problems — simple addition. (Math homework! In kindergarten! But that’s another post.) 2+2, 2+3, 6+0, etc. Karen set her up with a handful of clementines on the table and her homework folder. For 2+3, Clara put two clementines on one side of the folder, and three on the other. Then she “smooshed them together” and counted the total, which she wrote down on the homework sheet. Once she got the hang of it she was pretty self sufficient, although she needed some help re-locating each sum on the sheet after doing the clementines, since the sheet had about 20 different problems. Towards the end, she had a problem, 2+0, and wrote the correct answer without using the clementines. How did you figure out the right answer, Clara? “I did it in my head!” She proceeded to add a couple more sums the same way, but she checked her answers with the clementines this time.

Clara, after dinner: “Mommy, can I do some more homework now?”

At the start of JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park, near the McLaren Lodge at Fell and Stanyan, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition holds a monthly “Freedom from Training Wheels” event to help kids learn to ride their bikes without training wheels. On Sundays the drive is closed to car traffic, except for the occasional police car or fire engine, so kids have the added bonus of being able to ride in the middle of the street. On Sunday we met Jean, a volunteer trainer and SF Bike board member. Jean is a great trainer, with lots of experience helping kids learn to ride and with a simple, straightforward approach and an easygoing confidence that quickly won Clara’s trust. The fact that she’s not the parent helps a lot too.

So, I removed the training wheels from Clara’s bike and lowered the seat as far down as it would go so her feet could rest comfortably on the ground and support her. Then Jean helped Clara get started, holding on to the back of her seat to push and stabilize her as she got going.

Inside of a minute Clara was yelling to Jean “let go! let go!,” and after a couple of minutes Jean finally complied. (”I’ve never had a kid tell me that before,” she confided later.) Clara’s bike wobbled, then straightened, as she took off on her own for the first time. “Pedal, Clara, pedal!” We shouted. “You’re doing it!” We all started whooping and shouting as Clara, grinning broadly, cruised right down the yellow line in the middle of the road.

Clara went on to make many more successful rides that morning, up and down the low, shallow rise in the road, and one time she rode up the hill, turned around at the top, and rode back down. She fell down a couple times, but recovered well each time and got right back on the back, even when she scraped herself once. By the end of the hour we were yelling at Clara to open her eyes and put her feet on the pedals, because she’d been closing her eyes and lifting her feet up to make the ride more exciting.

As a bonus, in between successful training wheel-free rides, Clara got to take a few rides on the bake of Jean’s bike, which has been extended so it has extra carrying capacity — she might be able to fit six bags of groceries on the supersized rack, and tells us she’s carried as many as four kids on it at one time. “It’s my sport utility bicycle,” Jean said, though it was surprisingly light and stable.

When the hour was up, Clara asked to have her training wheels put back on — to make it easier to ride to lunch. There’s riding for fun, and then there’s practical transportation.

Clara came home from the library yesterday with a copy of The Brain, by Seymour Simon. Last night she and I sat on the couch as she flipped through the book, showing me what the brain looks like dissected, in MRI, in models. I pointed out different parts of the brain. Karen quizzed her on the cerebrum and the cerebellum.

Then Clara stopped on one page and just started reading. She read a sentence and a half almost entirely by herself, then finished the second sentence with only a little prompting from me (on words like “nerve,” “impulse,” and “response”). This is as much as I’ve ever seen her read at one go, and I was amazed and impressed.

Then she stopped. “Daddy, can I taste a brain some day?”

No, honey, I hope not.

“Zombies eat brains.”

Why yes, yes they do.

“BRAAAAAINS!” she moaned, coming at me like a zombie. She put her hand on my head. “My hand is an octopus! It’s eating your brain!”

Uh oh! Now I’m a zombie! Let’s get Mommy!

“BRAAAAAINS!” we both moaned as we lurched over to KJ to eat her brain.

Then I chased Clara upstairs to get into her jammies, moaning “Braaaaains!” the whole way.

Where do kids get this stuff, I wonder?

Clara, last night: “Daddy, do you know what the best part of Halloween is?”

“No, Clara, what’s that?”

“The part where the candy goes into your bucket.”

She confirmed that she likes that part even better than the part where you actually eat the candy. I have to say I agree.

sycamore,
uploaded by bitmapr.

A month or two ago, we were walking through a parking lot on our way to Fresh Choice when we walked by a young sycamore tree. There were a few sycamore seed pods lying on the ground: Small, round, hard green things with spikes sticking out all over.

Clara said: “Look, a Katamari!”

Mind you, this kid has seen (and helped play) Katamari Damacy maybe twice, and that was back in January. It obviously made a big impression. There must be something in the game that locks into our brains, like an enzyme clicking into a protein or something.

She picked up her “katamari” and carried it with her through the salad bar and buffet line at Fresh Choice. I briefly considered encouraging her to use it by rolling up peas, corn, lettuce, and other tidbits, which abound at Fresh Choice. But I restrained myself. I didn’t want every trip to Fresh Choice turning into a foodie game of Katamari Damacy. But maybe that’s just my parental conservatism showing through.

BTW, the picture on this post seems to be a more mature seedpod. The one Clara picked up had fewer spikes, and they were hard and pointy, like little thorns.

More evidence of Katamari brain control: xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe

Two weeks into her Spanish-language immersion kindergarten class, Clara already knows at least three songs, ten separate color words, how to say she needs to go to the bathroom, how to count to thirteen, and the days of the week. Her pronunciation, while still quirky, already has more in common with a native speaker than you’d think: For instance, she says “d” in the Spanish way, with the tongue far forward between the teeth. And she’s been teaching us the songs, and saying “Un applauso!” when we get them right — after which everybody claps, once.

It’s amazing to me how quickly her young mind is able to absorb this language. Sure, we all learn a language more quickly when we’re constantly surrounded by it — and by people who are attentively helping us to learn it. But there’s something about the speed with which a five-year-old can pick up a language that is astonishing to me.

Clara’s latest obsession is the Magnetic Fields song “The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side,” which also happens to be my favorite. She heard the very beginning of it yesterday, just as I was switching it off, and demanded to hear the whole thing. Then she listened to it a few times. Last night she and I listened to many other songs from 69 Love Songs, and danced and sang to a bunch of them. But I noticed one thing: Several of those songs are just not appropriate for a five year old. “How Fucking Romantic,” for instance. And “Let’s Pretend We’re Bunny Rabbits.” On the other hand, “Punk Rock Love” is lots of fun. Time to make a new playlist: “67 Love Songs.” Actually, I better check them all, now that I think about it.

Just a note for those of you who are family members or especially interested friends: I’ve been posting photos in two places lately, Smugmug and Flickr. Here are the links to see the latest pictures (along with corresponding feed links, in case you’re using a news reader).

Tweney photos on Smugmug — [RSS feed - Atom feed]

Tweney photos on Flickr — [RSS feed - Atom feed]