Skip That, Read This: Weekly Round Up

You know what? I wrote a ton of posts for Babble last week. Here's the annotated versions with quick links for your reading pleasure.

My favorite post from last week is probably this one about Atticus Finch.  It's full of quotes that will inspire you to be a better parent. I posted it on 9/11 feeling it was a subtle and beautiful tribute to all that is right and good and equitable about America and thinking that the post would probably go viral. Not so much. Things that go viral on 9/11 tend to be tagged with the words "terrorism" or "9/11."

When I was growing up we had this wall hanging called "Children Learn What They Live." It had 70s illustrations on it which were--like everything in the 70s--a variety of brown tones. I blogged about it here, but the picture I posted is much more colorful. The one we had was only brown--many hues of brown. At any rate, it gives some good advice but I'm not sure it's accurate. Please comment if you'd like to question my logic on this. Blog comments are really turning out to be a great forum for showing what you learned in Philsophy 105.

One day on Babble I posed the question, "Are shy kids better?" I'm just going to say it. Yes.

If you're in the mood for some fun links, check out this subscription from The Rumpus where you can sign your kids up to receive letters from authors like Lemony Snicket or this animated short from the awesome StoryCorps project.

I thought my Teacher's Wishlist slideshow was actually pretty useful. It's a round up of links to urgent, high poverty needs from teachers which can be funded through Donorschoose.org. Happily, many of the projects received funding over the weekend. I'm going to keep updating it. It's really fun to follow these teachers and see their creativity and initiative be rewarded.

Use Superheroes to Teach Your Kids Science is, of course, close to my heart. I think it's fun. I wish, actually, that there were a "superhero beat" at Babble and that it belonged to me. More than that, I wish I were invisible. More than that, I wish I could fly.

Wait. . . There's more!

Will this trick used by pollsters to get out the vote work on your kids? I don't know. Why don't you try it and see!

And finally, my other favorite is this, Raising Misfits. We try so hard to keep our kids from becoming misfits but the truth of it is we are misfits--and we turned out OK, didn't we?

Whoo! That's a lot of posts. If you think it's a lot to read, try writing them. But if you only have time to read one, read the last one. And if you have time to read more than that, maybe read the one about Atticus Finch--but if you've got that much time it might best be spent reading To Kill a Mockingbird. Love ya.