An Abhorrent System

I'm posting this for Tim. It's about beauty and art from a blog about music.

And here's an article about New St Andrew's.

Self Made Scholar

This was posted on a message board and I'm saving it for a closer look later.

Self Made Scholar

More on Baby Einstein

"Early screen-viewing has a negative effect on [the brain's] soft-wiring even when the content is baby-safe . . . The question to ask isn’t, ‘What is she watching,’ but, ‘What else isn’t she doing?’"

‘We have succeeded in convincing people that the first years are critical to brain development,’’ said Meltzoff, who is co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington. ‘‘The unfortunate consequence is that it has spun off to build a brainier baby enterprise, where people think they have to use technology to take advantage of this critical window.’’

Read more here.

Baby Einstein Doesn't Work

"The claim always seemed too good to be true: park your infant in front of a video and, in no time, he or she will be talking and getting smarter than the neighbor's kid. In the latest study on the effects of popular videos such as the 'Baby Einstein' and 'Brainy Baby' series, researchers find that these products may be doing more harm than good. And they may actually delay language development in toddlers.
Led by Frederick Zimmerman and Dr. Dimitri Christakis, both at the University of Washington, the research team found that with every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants learned six to eight fewer new vocabulary words than babies who never watched the videos. These products had the strongest detrimental effect on babies 8 to 16 months old, the age at which language skills are starting to form. 'The more videos they watched, the fewer words they knew,' says Christakis."

". . . the only thing that baby videos are doing is producing a generation of overstimulated kids."

Read the full article here.

I'm not the least bit surprised. Endangered Minds by Jane Healy (read my review of the book) says that children have a window of opportunity for learning language, and they can't learn language passively. They learn language from back-and-forth dialog - the kind that mothers do naturally with their kids. God knew what He was doing when he placed children in homes. Science is just catching up and discovering that that's where they learn best, at least at very young ages.

How to Fold a T-shirt

This was posted and linked on a message board I visit. It's a Youtube video demonstrating how to fold a T-shirt.

Modern Declaration of Independence

We like to read the Declaration of Independence every July 4th, but the younger ones sometimes need a little help to get the gist of it. So I did a search online and found this paraphrase.
http://www.mrsrobertson.com/moderndecofind.htm

(Blogger is having a bad hair day and won't let me hotlink)