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Do you love Egyptian hieroglyphs? If so, check out Great Scott’s Hieroglyphs web site where you’ll find online lessons on how to write and translate hieroglyphs. There, you can also purchase a cheap e-book to complement the site and hieroglyphic fonts for windows and mac. Also, there are a number of great links from the site for budding Egyptologists.

Doug Kornfeld, a Boston-area artist, seems to get a lot of commissions for public art from Colorado. We have one of the leftover tiles from his rest room signs for a Denver bus station. At his website he gives a little peek into the fabrication of his latest sculpture to be installed in June at the Colorado School of Mines called “Gordian Knot.

The amazing, essential and tricky thing about sculpture of course is how it all balances! Just solving that must have been a Gordian Knot. Kornfeld explains the title:

“The Gordian Knot comes from a legend associated with Alexander the Great. In 333 BC, wintering at Gordian, Alexander attempted to untie the Gordian knot. The legend said that whoever untangled the knot would rule all of Asia. Finding no end to the knot, or a way to unbind it, Alexander cut it in half with a stroke of his sword, Alexander went on to conquer Asia, fulfilling the prophecy.

The term: “cutting through the Gordian Knot” is often used as a metaphor for an intractable problem, solved by a bold stroke.”

Incidentally, Kornfeld is acknowledged as one of Peter Reynolds’ art teachers in the inspiring children’s book Ish.

Well, if Oprah can get people to read, why not us? Last year I posted a retrospective on what my elder daughter’s book club has read. Today I’ll just offer what my current 3rd-grader is reading for our parent-child book club, but I’ll post again soon with updated retrospectives from each.

For May the 3rd-graders are reading Camille’s pick: Ruby Holler by the wonderful author Sharon Creech.

Kudos to Katelyn Gibbs, a ninth-grader (!) at Great Falls High School in Montana, who followed some tips from a veteran earth science researcher and–with a great deal of dedication and digging–unearthed evidence that a comet or meteorite hit Montana about 13,000 years ago and had a huge impact on animals living there. She has presented her findings to conferences of professional geologists. Read more about her curiosity and perserverance here.

In honor of Earth Day, I’d like to reprint here DoSomething’s suggestions for Greenifying (read Updating) that teen ritual called prom:

Five ways to make the big dance environmentally sound
1. Dress for eco success. Go organic, go vintage.
2. Borrow the blooms. Stay local with the flowers. Or better yet rent a plant.
3. Travel with your posse. Arrive like the stars: in a hybrid. Or, at the very least least, carpool/limopool it.
4. Provide a delicious AND healthy dinner. Get organic local produce for the meal, and look into hiring eco-caterers.
5. Go paperless AND save trees. Use an evite or facebook event.
6. Make prom matter. Give some proceeds to charity, donate used prom dresses, give extra food to local soup kitchen.

This volume of Future Of Children focuses on children’s use of electronic media.

The table of contents includes:

• Trends in Media Use by Donald F. Roberts and Ulla G. Foehr
• Media and Young Children’s Learning by Heather L. Kirkorian, Ellen A. Wartella, and Daniel R. Anderson
• Media and Attention, Cognition, and School Achievement by Marie Evans Schmidt and Elizabeth A. Vandewater
• Media and Children’s Aggression, Fear, and Altruism by Barbara J. Wilson
• Online Communication and Adolescent Relationships by Kaveri Subrahmanyam and Patricia Greenfield
• Media and Risky Behaviors by Soledad Liliana Escobar-Chaves and Craig A. Anderson
• Social Marketing Campaigns and Children’s Media Use by W. Douglas Evans
• Children as Consumers: Advertising and Marketing by Sandra L. Calvert [children under 8 are especially vulnerable, but new ’stealth’ marketing techniques undermine consumer defenses of older children and adolescents as well]
• Children’s Media Policy by Amy B. Jordan

Also check out the “Outreach” section of the Future of Children homepage. There are videos to watch, NPR clips to listen to, and if you’re in the Princeton area, events to attend.

The Autism Research Institute has published the results of their survey comparing drugs, supplements and diets used in treating autism. Antifungal and seizure medications had mostly positive results, but ADHD medications yielded more negative outcomes than positive ones. Most supplements showed a high percentage of improvement and only small numbers of children whose behavior worsened.

The fewest negative effects, though, were reported for the diets. Both the Feingold Diet and Candida Diet helped 56%, the Gluten-Free/Casein-Free Diet helped 66% and the Specific Carbohydrate Diet helped 69%.*

Interestingly, a Gluten-Free/Casein-Free Diet or the Specific Carbohydrate Diet is also often used to address ADHD. The Feingold Diet’s avoidance of synthetic additives also probably ameliorates hyperactivity. See American Academy of Pediatricians on Food Additives; my family, unbeknownst to them, has also enjoyed recipes from The Kid-Friendly ADHD and Autism Cookbook: The Ultimate Guide to the Gluten-Free, Casein-Free Diet.

*First two paragraphs adapted from Pure Facts, the newsletter of the Feingold Association of the United States.

I love that high school football players in my city are tutoring kindergarteners! We are multidimensional beings, and I love seeing the football players being smart, nurturing, gentle…since little kids often look up to them. It’s part of a Play It Smart program sponsored by the National Football Foundation. It helps the athletes as well as the little pupils.

Raw honesty and a no-holds-barred writing style uncommon to parenting blogs have made 32-year-old Heather Armstrong the nation’s top-ranked parenting blogger. Dooce.com (rhymes with moose), in which Armstrong blogs about everything “from potty-training to postpartum depression,” receives 4 million page views each month and stays well within the Technorati top 100 blogs. Armstrong has learned some hard lessons over the years about what to blog (her 4-year-old daughter Leta and her dog Chuck) and what not to (her parents’ religious views and her own sex life), but continues to keep her readers rapt and active, often receiving hundreds of comments on a single blog posting.
[ via The Wall Street Journal ]

April 13-19 is National Environmental Education Week, timed like a countdown to Earth Day.

Have I said here before that if I decided to design a school I would use Place-Based Education as the basic model (with foreign language and more art added in). I love that Place-Based Education considers not only the environment, but the community of people whose lives and livelihood depend on it. I love that it would integrate children into the more realistic multi-age community of all residents.