Raising Future Engineers

When I woke up yesterday morning, I found my husband showing our three-year old how to light up a LED using a breadboard from his Raspberry Pi. If that statement makes absolutely no sense to you, think about how I feel! My three boys (the hubby and the two preschoolers) have been playing with this new-fangled contraption called Raspberry Pi which apparently is just basically a miniature computer.

The Raspberry Pi is the green board. The breadboard is the white one, and there is a miniature robot in the back from a previous project.

They have hooked it up to a breadboard and used some of our snap circuits to make it do cool stuff. The even did some soldering - a term I had to have explained to me by my five year old (I couldn't even figure out at first how to spell the word to write this blog post!). In addition, my not-yet-kindergartener is taking this Pi and using software called Scratch to do some simple drag-and-drop programming. This is waaaay beyond my understanding, but it is so cool. I love seeing my husband and kids getting excited about this.

Buddy playing Scratch

It is so amazing what they can learn when they are excited about something like this. Phil's enthusiasm is contagious.

Comments

About Me

Hello! Welcome to my blog. What you will find here are my attempts at sorting through my ideas and implementation of homeschool curriculum and activities that I have pursued with my own two boys. The Beginning I began this blog in 2008 when my oldest was only a year old. It began as a family blog chronicling our adventures as a young family in Seattle. We decided early on that we wanted to homeschool our two sons. Honestly, now, I don't remember why we decided to do that, but we did it nevertheless. We began teaching our children as soon as they could walk and talk. We made many mistakes along the way and so learned to follow the lead of our children in what they were interested in. We focused on delight-directed learning with a lot of outings and fun things to do. When things got rough, we learned to adapt and switch things out. Moving To Thailand In 2015, our family moved to Thailand. We started another blog for our time there, but alas it was not a good fit for us. We had int...

How I'm Approaching... Geometry

N will be taking Geometry this year. A Little Bit of Background His last year was split between taking his first semester of Algebra I at the local middle school as an 8th grader and his second semester being homeschooled. Khan Academy was a fantastic resource for him to make sure that he didn't have any gaps in his learning. We also used IXL to supplement. He took a math diagnostic right when we started homeschooling, and then took the personalized lessons to make sure he wasn't missing anything from even earlier math. N likes math, but it isn't an obsession for him like it is for his brother. I'm a huge fan of the Art of Problem Solving's courses especially since we loved their elementary series, Beast Academy, when they were younger. However, AoPS is extremely rigorous and expensive if you take their online courses, so they are better suited for students who want to focus a lot of their attention on math. However, they do have a FREE online learning platform for...

New Zealand Week

Overview: Window on the World : New Zealand New Zealand Fact Sheet Flag from Expedition Earth Workbook Map Worksheet Coloring Page People Maori Coloring Page Children Just Like Me book Travel Kids: Maori Haka Travel Kids: Kiwi Videos Tourism Video National Anthem Crafts Weaving Necklace Poi Craft Video Science Seasons - NZ is in the Southern Hemisphere, so we learned about why they celebrate Christmas in the summer! Crash Course Kids Seasons and the Sun Earth's Rotation and Revolution Seasons Interactive on the Computer Animals Kiwi Dot-to-Dot Video of one hatching Sheep Craft Video of them herding Math Skip-Counting by 10s Skip-Counting Maze Bible Verse: I Corinthians 10:31 Some things we didn't do, but might be fun for at home: Various NZ crafts

Cultivating Childhood

Search This Blog