From the category archives:

Life and Living

Wordless Wednesday – All Grown Up (ducks)

March 14, 2012 Babies

I haven’t updated since my ducklings hatched, but they are all grown up now. We can’t even tell who had the caesarean. They are Indian Runner ducks but I don’t know how pure they are, they are certainly pretty as they waddle around the yard. For anyone interested in genetics they seem to have silver [...]

Quiz – The Dinosaur Edition

March 13, 2012 Earth and Beyond

After teasing you yesterday with mentions of dinosaurs I thought I’d better do something on them. But what interesting questions to write? Not the usual lists of names! What were the continents like when dinosaurs first developed? What did early dinosaurs eat? The two main types of dinosaurs are grouped according to their hip shape. [...]

Living Things Scavenger Hunt

March 8, 2012 Activities

The girls adore taking pictures, but tend to just snap away and we get hundreds of photos of leaves, or the sky, or their fingers and then they are forgotten. At the same time we keep finding fascinating things outside but not having a way to record them. So we remembered to take the camera [...]

Flower Answers

February 24, 2012 Life and Living

1. It’s very difficult to tell when flowering plants developed, but it was probably before and during the Cretaceous, the last age of the dinosaurs. Like animals, plants were still ‘experimenting’ with the challenges of being on land, where there is no cushioning water to bring you nutrients and carry away your spores. Land is [...]

Night and Day Collage

February 23, 2012 Activities

Little girl is enjoying her time on her own again, especially the time to be creative without being overshadowed by her big sister. It’s hard when someone you adore and want to be just like has such good ideas and the execution is beyond you. Her thing at the moment is cutting, and she’s surprisingly [...]

Sound Answers

February 22, 2012 Energy and Change

Somehow I had a scheduling glitch and the answers to the Sound quiz were never posted. Here they are, better late than never. 1. The loudest animal in the world is the Sperm whale, whose sonar clicks are about 230 decibels. Unfortunately sound works differently in the water and on land, so we can’t [...]

Quiz – The Flower Edition

February 21, 2012 Life and Living

Beautiful and ubiquitous, but they have a serious job. When did flowering plants develop? What do calla lillies and sunflowers have in common? What is the point of flowers? What are bracts? And what’s the picture? Answers here.

Kid Questions: Why do Fingers Wrinkle?

February 20, 2012 Kid Questions

We’re swimming several times a week and the little girl is fascinated that she turns into a giant pink sultana. She has to check each finger and toe when we get out to see how wrinkly it is. So why do our fingers wrinkle? I grew up with the old explanation, but I did some [...]

Cloud Answers

February 17, 2012 Earth and Beyond

After you’ve checked out this post, I strongly recommend a visit to the Cloud Appreciation Society, they have fantastic guides for cloud viewing and a beautiful gallery you can spend hours browsing through 1. Noctilucent clouds are the highest type of cloud and one of the most beautiful. It literally means ‘night shining’ and usually they [...]

Wordless Wednesday – All Around Us

February 15, 2012 Life and Living

I had a couple of examples of interesting life around us on the holidays. The first was the enormous moth above – it’s as long as my finger! It’s a hawkmoth, which comes from the Yeperenye caterpillar and is an important Dreaming spirit in the Alice Springs region. It was just in a corner of the [...]