USB stands for..

One of the new pre bedtime activities with the kids is "Playing" Snapcircuit!

When we were little, our favorite playing was a "mechano-set", which was a bunch of steel parts with screws, nuts and bolts and we could make mechanical models of automobiles, airplanes etc.

Somehow we never got introduced to the electronics plug and play games. Now that I get to relive my childhood with the girls, this is really fun for me as well as for them.

Trying to teach them I = V/R and forward vs. reverse bias on an LED is fun. They like to do more of the mechanical

follow the book

make the circuit look like the picture

turn on slide switch and see what happens

method while I insisted on making them read the instructions first, then build the circuit and read the explanations for what they just did. After figuring out that they were in a rush to finish "making" all 300 circuits, put the brakes on.

Now the bedtime quiz is not what we call "Tamil Mirugam and Ragam" (the bedtime quiz was a hodgepodge of questions that were either about Tamil-English and vice versa translations, animal trivia or Carnatic Music Raga identification) anymore. Every alternate day is Snapquiz!

Questions are like :

What is S1 and what does it do?

What is an IC?

What is the unit of measuring resistance?

If you increase the resistance in this circuit from 100 Ohms to 1000 Ohms, what happens?

etc.

Both the kids are now very receptive to the Snapquiz and are answering the usual questions very fast. Now the question bank is increasing slowly. 

Recently I asked them "What does USB stand for?" after the little one mentioned that "all power comes from USB's!". Guess she is used to charging all the devices she uses using an USB cable and she thinks the B in USB stands for some battery!

Jr.s' answer? "Use it. Succeed with it. Bring it everywhere!" . While that was the most creative BS way of saying "I don't know!" she did crack me up and got a lot of hugs and kisses for making us laugh.

Then when they heard the correct answer was "Universal Serial Bus" the little one goes "What does USB have to with Cheerios?"..

We have ways to go and there will be many more "snapquizzies" in the days to come to figure out the relationship between Cheerios and USB.

Art Lesson

A conversation at bedtime..

Jr. : Daddy I forgot the name of that famous Italian painter..

me : Michaelangelo?

Jr. : No. Not him. The other guy.

me : Da Vinci

Jr. : hmmm .. does he have a longer name?

me : Leonardo Da Vinci

Jr. : Yes. Him. (and goes on to tell me about some painting of his I havent heard of)

Me : do you know one of his most famous paintings?

Little one : Tell me.

Me : Mona Lisa.

Jr. : Is this the one which is a picture of the lady staring at you?

Me : Yes. it is the one where she kind of looks sad and happy at the same time...

LO : Daddy, I know. She is also holding a fruit in her hand.. that one.

Me : (Intrigued by this as the LO is the one that is going to be an artist if ever one came out of this house..) You sure? I have looked at the Mona Lisa so many times, but didnt know she had a fruit in her hand. Always looked at her face and eyes. Will go google it and see if she has a fruit in her hand..

LO : Why do you have to google it? That picture is there on your bedroom wall, isn't it!

Me : (literally rolling on the ground laughing.. seriously I fell off the bed)

That is Raja Ravi Varma's painting called "Lady with Fruit"!

Time to teach the kids some basic "Famous Paintings 101" or take them to the local Museum in SFO!

Adventures in tweenlandia

Jr., all of ten years old went to science camp last week!

She left on tuesday morning and came back friday afternoon. For the first time in her life, she spent close to three full days away from her beloved.....

iPad, iPhone, iMac.. We were not really worried about her missing her parents or her sister. The WiTHDRAWAL symptoms was what worried us. She managed fine, thanks to her wonderful teacher who acted as surrogate iPad and her friends who made up for the iPhone and the few creatures she encountered in the trails she hiked in Santa Cruz like a newt, banana slug etc. rounded off the entertainment.

After she came home she summarized the entire events of 3 plus days in one hour during our bedtime story telling and that got me to a few startling revelations.

They all got up at 6:30 AM because there was "flag".. "flag hoisting". It takes me 15 mintues to get her rear end out of bed starting at 7:30 AM on a normal day and twice that long on a weekend. So, I am planning to put a flag pole in my backyard and make her go do "flag" every morning.

No Flag? No breakfast! That should work..

Second, my darling now has an identity! As the narration was going on..

Jr. : We had these cabins which had like 10 people in each cabin and you know most of us desis were in one cabin and on and on and on..

Me : (did I just hear her call herself a DESI?!) Who were all in your cabin?

Jr.: Me, kid1, kid2, kid3,... and rattled off a list which included kids who had at least one Indian parent..

This is the first time I have heard her call herself a Desi !! So much for science camp. My daughter goes away for three days and comes back accepting her Indian-ness?

Last but not least, she took some really good pictures. Unfortunately she was not in a single one of the pictures. Guess she takes after dad for that one. We are waiting for her friends to share pictures of her.

Needless to say.. the first thing she did after coming into the house?

Look for the iPad!

Another wonder that happened? The little one admitted she did indeed miss her sister.. a little bit.. during afternoon playtime!

ps. San tells me that she looked for the iPad only after she had recited the one hour story after coming into the house.. we need more science camps!

Learning

Yesterday I was trying to teach the little one Chess after she saw me playing a game with Jr. 

So we tried to start with placing the pieces on the board. Before the first sentence was out of my mouth, she said "I Know daddy. I know.." and started placing the pawns in a row.. after that she was stuck. 

Jr. does the same thing. She knows everything! If they do not listen to any instruction completely how will they ever learn anythign?

The google generation defintely has a challenge when it comes to developing listening skills! 

Given that, seriously think that teaching Yoga to this generation will be a lot more challenging than teaching the previous one.. and that in itself is a challenge. 

A yoga teacher knows what his brain is telling his body to do and how it reacts. Given every body is different slightly but has the same features, he has to take that thought and transfer it into your head so it can make your body to the exact same thing.

In geek terms, this is like taking a piece of code on a windows machine and putting it in a Mac which has almost the same processors, memory, logic etc.. and making that code do a similar thing on a different machine.

The instruction has to be very clear and specific. As in an earlier post Jim Kallet managed to pull this off for me. 

Also there is a picture on the BYSJ site. Someone had taken a cell phone photo. Thank you! 

Somehow my body trusted his words better than it trusted my own brain and that is interesting. Why? 

Will figure it out in time!

Had signed up for six months of Unlimited visits. Today is the last day of the six month period. My attendance was not that great for the last six months. 64 classes here and 7 in Austin. That is 40% attendance. The travels continue with the new job and manage to go 4 times a week these days. 

Have never been able to beat the attendance that my MIL and me had last year. We went 91 days in the first 100. 

All said and done the deal with San to renew the commit was "at least 50 classes in 6 months" to keep this going. Passed that test!

Kids crafts

The kids have been celebrating their brithday multiple times.. with classmates, family, family friends, grandparents only special, dinner at their favorite restaurant on their actual birthday etc. 

Here is a photo from yet another celebration at home!

Wish I had lighting like this at the bowling lanes...

They got  many gifts most of which are arts and crafts stuff. 

Jr. loved this dairy which she promptly bling-ed (guessing that is the right term for it?) 

Today they started working on decorative bangles where you do the decorating yourself. After 30 minutes of going nowhere, they asked me to come help. They were trying to "glue" the ribbons to the plastic bangle and the whole thing was a big mess.  So I asked them to wash the bangles and start from scratch. 

Me : Where is the instructions? 

LO : We threw it out!

Me : GO and GET it, NOW!

Jr. : Here it is. 

Me : (after reading the instruction and figuring out that you are supposed to start with the double side sticky tape before doing anything with glue). You have not even opened this packet with the tape! Why?

Jr. : We don't need the tape.

Me : Says "who?" It says here in the instructions that you have to start with the tape.. why didnt you read the instructions?

LO : It has TOO MANY WORDS!  Who will read that many words. It is not simple instructions!

We finally did restart the project and they did a great job of following the instructions step by step. 

This is what happens when your kids get used to EULA's which run pages long and they just get used to clicking "I agree" on the one hand and have instructions that are "Step 1: sticky tape. Step 2: wrap Step 3: Glue".. 

Today my job is done in this house. Have taught kids something very important.

Always start with the instruction manual!