In the Kitchen: If I Could Do Anything

Clementine won a Wii for her Google doodle. Even better she'll get a T-shirt with her design on it. Right now she is planning to sell her Wii and use the money to fulfill her longtime dream of raising quail for eggs. We'll see what happens when she has the box in her hands.

The theme was If I Could Do Anything.

If I could do anything I would save the Rain Forests of the world. In my doodle I show a Madascar pygmy mouse lemur, a red-eyed tree frog, a green vine snake and a quetzal.

What is the California Mammal Project?

My girls and I have decided to try to see all the mammals in California. There are 197 native mammals. We started August 11, 2010.

So far we have seen 33:

Artiodactyla:

Black tailed deer
Roosevelt elk

Cetacea:

Blue Whale

Humpback Whale

Pacific White-sided Dolphin

Northern Right Whale Dolphin

Risso's Dolphin

Rodentia:

Beechey's Ground Squirrel

Western Gray Squirrel

Douglas Squirrel

Lodgepole Chipmunk

Siskiyou Chipmunk

Golden Mantled Ground Squirrel

Merriam's Kangaroo Rat

Deer Mouse

Carnivora:

California Sea Lion

Harbor Seal

Ringtail

Raccoon

Striped Skunk
Coyote

Common Gray Fox

Mink

Northern Elephant Seal

Chiroptera:

Pallid Bat

California Myotis

Big Brown Bat
Townsend's Big Ear Bat

Western pipistrelle

Little Brown Bat (Evelyn)

Lagomorpha:

Brush Rabbit

Audubon's cottontail

Jackrabbit

Didelphimorphia

Opossum

Soricomorpha

Ornate Shrew

Tracks and Signs

Black Bear footprints

Desert Wood Rat nest

Desert Kangaroo Rat

Angel Island Mole mound

Kit Fox Tracks

Mule Deer scat

Curating

The museums in DC are so inspiring. It makes me want to curate my own exhibit when I get home. I asked the kids if they wanted to make a small museum in our house and they said, Noooo! But I suspect if I just start on my own, they'll hop on board.

I can't decide if this will be a virtual museum or a real one. Maybe a little bit of both.

I have noticed a trend in some museums toward flash with minimal content. Not so here. The exhibits were sometimes flashy, but so deep as well.

They all start with a pithy title like:

Or Written In Bone. Written in Bone was the most absorbing exhibit I saw.

If you can't make it to DC, try the book Written in Bone: Buried Lives of Jamestown and Colonial Maryland (Exceptional Social Studies Titles for Intermediate Grades) or this article.

It was especially interesting to us since we had just visited Jamestown.

When you read about The Starving Time at Jamestown and see the graves it tells the story the usual way.

But when you see, in Written in Bone, the piles of horse, dog, cat and rat bones the colonists butchered and ate, it tells the story in a more intimate way.

My favorite part of the exhibit was where they identified colonists' occupations just by examining the bones.

Tailor's notches: chipping of the teeth and characteristic grooves made from holding needles in the teeth identify the owner of this jaw as a tailor.

So many places now have cell phone tours. You just dial a number and listen to the tour. You can often find these numbers on the web and listen. You could even find pictures on the web to go with your tour.

The Library of Congress is making a huge push to digitize its collection and make it available to the public. On their website you can sign up for myloc.gov and make your own collection of books and documents housed at the LoC.

The National Park Service is going multimedia, too. They have virtual tours. I liked the flipbook documenting the construction of the Lincoln Memorial.

If you get inspired to curate your own exhibit, please share it with us and put a link in the comments section.

Saturday, June 26, 2010

If I Could Do Anything

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