Odd Parenting Hack #842

This is something that will only work if you are a certain kind of mom (silly) with a certain kind of kid (silly).  I am, so I'm throwing this out there.

Choclo recently told me, with great delight, that he had discovered a fast and easy way to put away his clean clothes. "I find the emptiest drawer, and then I put the whole pile in.  And then I'm done!"

I have long suspected that a number of my children use this method, but he was the first to tell me about it.

At the time, we were only a week away from the clothing shift, so I only commented that it might seem faster, but it wasn't a good long term solution.

Last Saturday, I did the big seasonal clothing shift.

Choclo is still young enough (8) that I do most of the work for him, and just call him when it's done.

As we were walking up the stairs to see his new exciting wardrobe (he went up to size 10!), I explained the importance of caring for pets.

When he had a pet, he had to make sure to feed it exactly what it needed.  If he fed it the wrong thing, it might get sick!


Then I introduced Choclo to his new pet: Bureau.

Each drawer is carefully labelled with exactly what it needs to be fed!

Choclo thought it was hilarious.

We'll see how well Bureau gets fed...
 

Hacking the Non Educational Obsession Round 2

It was a moment of half rationalized weakness.

The Wii was so great at keeping the kids moving, that a standard video game where the kids really jumped and moved would be terrific.

Well, it would be. This isn't it.

It's basically a joy stick game played with the Wii tools. Great exercise for thumbs... too late to put the genii back.




They've been asking for some time for a Super Mario Day, and today was The Day!







In the picture below, Zorg is Mario, Klenda is Rosalinda, Mxyl is Luigi, and Leena is Princess Peach.


We started out with Mad Libs. These are really easy to make up yourself to suit any occasion. Ours went like this:

One day, Mario and Luigi were at work fixing (pl noun) mushrooms. Suddenly, Bowser appeared and began to (v) spin and say (silly noise), " Wha-aaa!" He was holding the (adj) fat Princess (fruit) watermelon in his (body part) nose.

Perhaps that is as much as you need to read...

We went on to Spelling Bee Mario (there is a part in the game where Mario turns into a bee) using game related words like galaxy, princess, pound, etc adjusted to the level of each Zoomlian.

Math problems were easy to come up with for all 4 operations since the game uses coins as well as "star bits" that you feed to hungry star creatures called Lumas. An example for Mxyl would be: You find 5 Lumas that need 213 star bits each. How many star bits do you need to collect? I also let the kids come up with questions to ask me.

I was going to write a collective story, but we ran out of time.

Science was a must because the Super Mario Galaxy game actually uses galaxy to mean system. Adding insult to injury, some of their "galaxies" are planets orbiting very close to black holes... So we did some true false science with the kids correcting the mistakes of the game.

Last but not least, I found an excellent Super Mario activity book on line here, so I selected the best activities and pictures and printed out copies for each kid. I did have to put them through my photo program to clean them up (put the contrast to 100% or you will use a lot of ink!).

I suppose the actual last thing is the kids all cooperatively playing the game for the rest of the afternoon while I blog!

Hacking the "Non-Educational" Obsessions

I live in the shadow of giant robots. After years of carefully screening everything our kids watched, bought, or read, Transformers slipped in under the cloak of The Fight between Good and Evil. Well, it is about the fight between good and evil and the good guys win by being good and the bad guys lose because, well, they're bad.

It's not bad, really, it's just that the kids will live and breathe it to the extent we will allow. It would be great if they were this into Lord of the Rings, or Little House on the Prairie, or Ancient Egypt, or learning Latin, Greek and Hebrew.

After waiting a year or so for the obsession to die down or mutate into something "educational," I decided to hack into it. We were lagging in the math department due to pregnancy/new baby stuff so, over the summer I became: OPTIMATH PRIME!! (For the blissfully ignorant, Optimus Prime is the leader of the good guy Autobots). Mxyl was Sumblebee (Bumblebee) and Klenda was R squared (Arcee). They saved planets by doing long division! They conquered Decepticons by reducing fractions. They all did word problems involving how many blasts it would take to knock out (X) bad guys if each bad guy took (Y) blasts to knock out, and how far a sentry would walk around a (regular polygon) building if the side was (X) meters. Remarkable progress!

I branched out into spelling: Bumblebee's Spelling Bee was a hit. How about writing? Dictation or copywork or creative writing about giant robots? Best enthusiasm and longest writing ever!

I have to admit, Transformers did 2 great educational things on their own: 1 my kids now have spatial relationship skills which surpass my own (my friend, Bill, a brilliant engineer, is the only adult I know who can figure out how the toys transform) and 2, drawing incredibly detailed giant robots has done wonders for their art skills. I guess you could also consider the allowance-to-Transformer-toy calculations as a math and budgeting benefit.

Incidentally, I in no way endorse the recent Transformer Movie. My kids will not be allowed to watch it. The people involved should be ashamed at what they did to a movie that should have been for kids.