Archives: March, 2008

This is fabulous! BigBrainz have turned learning times tables (drudgery, rote learning, miserable faces etc) into a Playstation style game - and it’s free to download.

Although the game has “scary trolls” like the one above, there’s no violence apart from getting squirted with goo if you make mistakes at critical points. Each level has keys you need to find to get out of them, and each key is guarded by trolls (big or small) who are there to make sure you don’t get the key unless you really know your tables. You start at the two times table, and then progress up. Rather than testing just the twos and then just the threes, though, you need to remember everything you’ve learned on the previous levels.

Source:Crystalina

[Caution: Possible rant ahead]

Emergency Childcare asked for a link. In a way they’re ‘competition’. But they’re good at what they do. So we linked.

Personally, I don’t have any problem linking to useful services. The more options parents and families have to find what they need, the better. Full stop. And to help that, I think we need to be open. So yes, you’ll find links to netmums, mumsnet and other established sites here.

• More than a Mum? A free event for mums who want to change their lives– Family Relationships Blog
  “When I finally overcame post-natal depression and workplace bullying, there was no one place to go to find out what to do next. This is how I came up with the idea of More than a Mum”
  Tags: event York mums

This sounds a bit technical, and in some ways it is, but Doug Cornelius has an interesting (and doable) approach to organising things in the home.

One of the goals of my current paternity leave was to try to get The Daughter into a schedule for sleeping and eating. As any parent knows the more regular the schedule, the happier the child.

So I needed a way to track The Daughter’s activities during the day. By tracking the information, hopefully I could find a common pattern. Also, The Wife wants to see how The Daughter’s day went. So I would need a way to deliver the information to The Wife. If I could use a web-based tool, I could deliver a live feed of information to The Wife.

This post outlines how mums can be classified as “Queen Bee”, “Sidekick” “Starbucks” and more … maybe worth a flick through?

Queen Bee Moms appear to have perfect lives. They’re often very charming, and they really, really like being in charge. They’re often coaches, class parents, or heads of the PTA. The hallmark of a Queen Bee Mom isn’t that she’s in a leadership position (not all class parents are Queen Bees); it’s that she has to be in control. Here are some other telltale signs:

• Mind Hacks: Kiddie psychopaths and the database nation
  Gary Pugh has sparked controversy after he suggested children as young as five who display ‘future offending traits’ should be placed on a DNA database so they are more likely to be picked up if they commit crime in the future.
  Tags: children crime police just_plain_wrong
• Using Flickr photos to decorate your kid’s room | Parent Hacks
  Lately, trucks seem to be the most interesting thing in life for him, so I printed and framed a few …choice photos from the “most interesting” photos tagged with “truck”. My son is already raving about the results.
  Tags: children parenting home flickr decoration bedroom

Is it me or is this just a little grotesque?

As one reviewer says, though,

“But we dress children as pirates without explanation of what true pirates did.”

Below is one of a series of entries to a contest at Worth100.com. The aim was to design good ol’fashioned adverts for modern-day products - Playstations, Segways and the like. They’re fab!

From JP:

“The book [The Singer]criss-crosses between the late Seventies and the early 21st century in dramatic fashion. In passing, Cathi refers to the hoodie generation as “children brought up in front of the CCTV”. Children who knew how to keep their faces averted away from the camera, who used their hoodies and baseball caps to best effect.

The overlap between the Hoodie Generation and Generation M is one worth thinking about. It’s the same generation, intensely public and intensely private at the extremes.”

There have been a couple of instances like this recently, where people have spotted a mistake on Little Legends, and wanted to report it rather than sign in and correct it themselves.

To make that process easier, we’ve added a little page to help. On each item listing there’s now the option to report a mistake.

It’s overdue, but hopefully it’ll help keep things current. Likewise, do let us know if there’s anything functional that would help you that we haven’t added yet and we’ll get on to it.