Ahhh... :)

 

Baby - zillaaaaa

As Crianças e os Brinquedos / Children and their Toys

A galeria aqui / The whole Gallery here (text in Portuguese)

Chiwa vive no Malawi em condições deploráveis: não tem água canalizada nem eletricidade. O seu tempo livre é quase sempre passado com as outras crianças da aldeia onde vive. Chiwa só tem três brinquedos, que foram oferecidos por voluntários quando nasceu. O seu preferido é o dinossauro, que a protege dos animais perigosos.

Jaqueline é filipina e tem uma grande coleção de brinquedos. O seu boneco preferido é a fada Tinker Bell oferecida pela sua melhor amiga. O pai, que trabalha na indústria da moda, costuma fotografá-la com bastante regularidade. O seu sonho é tornar-se modelo.

Maudy nasceu numa pequena aldeia na Zâmbia onde ter brinquedos é considerado um luxo. Desde pequena que tem o hábito de brincar na rua com as outras crianças com quem vai à escola. Maudy e os seus amigos encontraram uma caixa de óculos de sol que depressa se tornou um dos seus brinquedos preferidos.

Orly é de origem mexicana mas vive no estado do Texas com a sua família. Devido à corrupção e violência que se faz sentir no México, a sua mãe espera que o menino nunca visite o território. O seu quarto está repleto e decorado com diversos tipos de dinossauros. Orly acredita que estes animais o protegem dos fantasmas e dos mexicanos que o podem raptar durante a noite.

Let's all be friends with the frilled lizard, or the wonderful Liz Climo does it again :)

As nossas compras na Feira do Livro / What we bought at the Book Fair

Be-a-Ba: mapa-mundi com autocolantes, plesiossauro em puzzle 4D.
Booksmile: A Casa da Bicharada.
Edicare: Dinossauros, Atividades no País Imaginário, dois brinquedos científicos.
Kalandraka: Inventário das Árvores (e o melhor saquinho de toda a Feira :)
Pavilhão dos Pequenos Editores: My First Bedtime Stories.
Porto Editora: Livro de Atividades da Ovelha Choné, Cola e Descola com As Roupas, GRU - Meu Pai, o Supervilão.

4ª Feira de Miniaturas e Casinhas de Bonecas

E a casinha que vai ser rifada, perdão, sorteada :)

The Nature Connection Pyramid

Dr. Scott Sampson - Get outside, get into Nature

Paleontologist Scott Sampson, chief curator of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, is using his passion for Tyrannosaurus Rex and the gang to encourage America’s most indoor-oriented generation to get outside and explore nature.

Sampson—or "Dr. Scott," as he's known to millions of young fans around the world, hosts the Emmy-award-nominated PBS kids show Dinosaur Train. The show is two parts fun and one part science, blending vibrant animation and catchy tunes with a live-action educational segment hosted by Dr. Scott himself. 

“Dinosaur Train encourages kids to go outside and make their own discoveries," said Sampson, during an interview with The Trust for Public Land for the family issue of Land&People. "They’re getting out there and engaging with nature, looking for plants and bugs and birds because they’re encouraged to do so on the show.”  

So what are Dr. Scott's tips to get kids excited about the natural world?

1) "Start in the backyard or the park. Ask your child to pick one aspect of nature that they’re most interested in—it could be anything ... a cloud, a plant, or a bug. Then give them a piece of paper and a pencil and ask them to closely observe the item and draw it—or maybe write a couple of notes about it." 

2) "They’ll see structures they've never noticed before in a blade of grass, or veins in a leaf, the feel of bark on a tree, and they'll write down their observations. Just by doing that, they've started a nature journal. Encourage them to do this for five minutes a day, to sit and write about what they hear, what they see, what they feel." 

3) "Next, make a game out of this activity. How many different types of animals can you see in the next ten minutes? How many different plants can you find in the backyard?”

(found in The Trust for Public Land)

I am in preschool

A Mighty Girl - Girl Empowerment Holiday Gift Guide

Click and go!

We are so much MORE than pink princess maids!

GoldieBlox Toys for Future Inventors

How to jump into a Swimming-Pool :)

Wishlist: Oblo

The Playground, or the art of Grant Snider

At Play in the Field of the Mind

A new book argues that play may be the primary means nature has found to develop our brains.

This monumental book—more than 900 pages long, 30 years in the making, at once grand and intricate, breathtakingly inclusive and painstakingly particular—exhaustively explores the biological evolution of human behavior and specifically the behavior of children. Melvin Konner, an anthropologist and neuroscientist at Emory, weaves a compelling web of theories and studies across a remarkable array of disciplines, from experimental genetics to ethnology. He ranges back to the earliest, egg-laying mammals, discusses topics as seemingly modern as cross-gender identity conflicts, and draws on scientific work examining all manner of species with which humans share distinct characteristics. (In the way we teach our young, for instance, Konner points out that we resemble cats large and small far more than we do our closer genetic relatives, the large primates.) The organization of these disparate puzzle pieces is itself a tour de force. Though the sheer volume of information and the not infrequent appearance of terms like synaptogenesis and N-methyl-D-aspartate glutamate receptor can be daunting, Konner’s style is conversational (if sometimes occluded) and his tone is, well, kind. To read this book is to be in the company of a helpful and hopeful teacher who is eager to share what he’s found.

Dividing the book into four often overlapping “levels of observation”—the genome, the nervous system, society, and culture—Konner assesses the development of the brain from the first vertebrates through the hominins, with their slow-growing, enormous, super-energetic brains. This development depended on a high-quality diet of fruit and then cooked foods, both plant and animal, and particularly aquatic fauna—not to mention the grandmothers and other “helpers at the nest” who ensured that children were fed. In fact, human brains are so large that were they to reach full size in utero, women’s bodies would not be able to deliver them. Much of the brain’s growth occurs after birth: the human brain more than doubles in volume during the first 12 postnatal months, and nearly doubles again over the subsequent 12 months. This means that infants, with their far from fully developed brains, are extraordinarily helpless for a long period after birth. One reason humans evolved into creatures that walked upright may have been so that mothers could carry offspring who could not yet cling to them.

Konner then explores the genetic and neurological foundations of basic temperament and gender identity and of formative behaviors such as infant attachment and the acquisition of language, and he describes the interrelationship between the biology and psychology of puberty. Unlike animals that hurtle from infancy to puberty, the humans who have escaped the risks of infancy but not yet embarked on the risks of adulthood experience a sort of mini-transformation during the “five-to-seven shift,” and emerge with markedly enhanced powers of cognition into a period of slow growth. This prolonged halcyon phase, sandwiched between the confusion of early life and the intensity of adolescence, seems evolutionarily designed to imbue children with the culture that our enormous brains make possible—the culture that our species (almost) alone can claim.

The sine qua non of culture is socialization, a process we share with many other species. For mammals, it begins with an extreme bond between mother and offspring—a bond that has existed since early in the age of the dinosaurs, when even the infants of egg-laying mammals could feed directly from their mothers’ bodies and demand attention by crying. (Mammalian young cried at high pitches that their mothers could hear but reptilian predators could not.) Although the mother-child bond forms the core relationship, we are cooperative breeders. There is “ample evidence,” developed most prominently by the pathbreaking anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, that “human mothers have always gotten help” from fathers, grandmothers, older siblings, and other relatives. Still, some evidence suggests that kinship is not the be-all and end-all it is often believed to be. Research on the !Kung hunter-gatherer society, for example, shows no particular advantage to having a full complement of parents and grandparents, and in cases in which children have few kin, other adults apparently take up the slack, supporting the idea that indeed, it takes a village. Crucially, the many years that human females live after menopause confer a unique advantage on the species, in that grandmothers are almost always involved in child care, allowing their children, particularly their daughters, to produce more and healthier children.

Konner is especially interested in play, which is not unique to humans and, indeed, seems to have been present, like the mother-offspring bond, from the dawn of mammals. The smartest mammals are the most playful, so these traits have apparently evolved together. Play, Konner says, “combining as it does great energy expenditure and risk with apparent pointlessness, is a central paradox of evolutionary biology.” It seems to have multiple functions—exercise, learning, sharpening skills—and the positive emotions it invokes may be an adaptation that encourages us to try new things and learn with more flexibility. In fact, it may be the primary means nature has found to develop our brains.

Finally, Konner argues that even if culture is as subject to the laws of evolution as other aspects of physiology and behavior, it is, in its complex forms, unique to our species. (He does emphasize, however, that humans share with other animals a host of qualities and emotions—love, grief, altruism, heroism, loyalty, shame, dignity, awe, thought—that have wrongly been ascribed to humans alone.) Humans may not be the only ones who teach, but we alone create and build in a cumulative way, and we alone suspend ourselves in “webs of significance we ourselves have spun,” as Konner, borrowing from Clifford Geertz, elegantly puts it.

Ultimately, Konner is attempting to construct a sort of theory that encompasses all of human life. The evolutionary processes he describes are the way in which at every level—the genome, the nervous system, society, and culture—we, who carry along information accumulated over billions of years, continually interact with the environment, and thereby learn and change in response to it. Children, who are shaping and organizing their very selves, experience this most powerfully. And it should not be surprising, he speculates, if children—in the midst of the most exploratory phase of human life, thanks to “their huge, fast-growing, thoroughly dynamic brains”—have throughout the history of the species often been at the vanguard of cultural innovation.

This book is the flower of an astoundingly productive and innovative period of scholarship on evolutionary behavior; it sums up a generation’s worth of thinking and research. But although a work of singular importance, it’s not flawless. Konner’s efforts sometimes flag: his writing fails to sustain a consistent precision and focus. Relatedly, at times Konner seems overwhelmed by the encyclopedic nature of his project. When he sifts and assesses evidence, he’s always judicious and often brilliantly imaginative. Too often, though, The Evolution of Childhood reads like a compilation of research and findings rather than a work that distills that material to create an elegant synthesis—this book hasn’t been subjected to the rigorous and comprehensive editing that a work of such significance demands. But only a book of such staggering ambition can be faulted for failing to achieve consistent greatness.

Dot to Dot Wallpaper

Any age of child, teenager or adult will love this unusual wall covering. Just paste this original wallpaper to your walls in the usual way, then use pencils or pens to join up the dots to their heart’s content. You’ll all be amazed as the pattern begins to emerge!

Cox and Cox

Teatrinhos de Papel

coleccionados por Lucía Contreras Flores
(graças ao Papel de Lustro, obrigatório ;)

Fatiotas para o Halloween

E viva o consumo! Mais uma festa para os petizes se divertirem :)

In Fashion Kids

(because Daddy does it ;) Learning to juggle grows brain networks for good

Juggling boosts the connections between different parts of the brain by tweaking the architecture of the brain's "white matter" – a finding that could lead to new therapies for people with brain injuries.

White matter describes all areas of the brain that contain mostly axons – outgrowths of nerve cells that connect different cells. It might be expected that learning a new, complex task such as juggling should strengthen these connections, but previous work looking for changes in the brains of people who had learned how to juggle had only studied increases in grey matter, which contains the nerve cells' bodies.

Now Jan Scholz and his colleagues at the University of Oxford have discovered that juggling changes white matter, too. They gave 24 young men and women training packs for juggling and had them practise for half an hour a day for six weeks. Before and after this training period, the researchers scanned the brains of the jugglers along with those of 24 people who didn't do any juggling, using a technique called diffusion tensor imaging that reveals the structure of white matter.

They found that there was no change in the brains of the non-jugglers, but the jugglers grew more white matter in a part of the parietal lobe – an area involved in connecting what we see to how we move.

The same transformation was seen in all the jugglers, regardless of how well they could perform. This suggests that it's the learning process itself that is important for brain development, not how good you are.

Learning matters

Arne May of the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany, who led the previous work on juggling and grey matter, finds this result "fascinating". "It suggests that learning a skill is more important than exercising what you are good at already – the brain wants to be puzzled and learn something new," he says.

Like May, Scholz's group found increases in grey matter, but differences in the size and timing of the grey- and white-matter changes suggest they are independent. Nevertheless, both are probably necessary to learn how to juggle, argues Scholz.

"More white matter on its own might mean you can move more quickly, but you'd need the grey matter to make sure your hands were in the right place," he says.

Don't use it, don't lose it

The group scanned the jugglers' brains again after four weeks without juggling. They found that the new white matter had stayed put and the amount of grey matter had even increased. This could be why, when we learn a new skill, we retain some ability, no matter how long ago we last practised.

"It's like riding a bike," Scholz says. "Either you can juggle or you can't. It takes a lot of training to learn, but once it clicks, you don't forget it."

Scholz also hopes that it might be possible to develop juggling-based training programmes to help people with brain injuries, or that further study of how juggling changes the architecture of the brain may lead to the discovery of drugs that could boost this plasticity. "If we could use training or drugs to help stroke patients regenerate damaged parts of their brains, that would be fantastic," he says.

New Scientist

Fora de Lisboa, pois então: Festa da Marioneta