Articles

At this time of year crates of enticing, aromatic orange orbs appear in grocery stores. Clementines are known and loved for their intensely sweet flavour, small nature and wonderfully strong scent.  They fit delightfully into a coat pocket, liven lunchboxes and have that excellent ability to be peeled easily in one long, springy coil. About clementines Clementines are hybrid crosses of sweet orange and willowleaf mandarin oranges, the first example of which is believed to have occurred in Algeriain the late 1800's. These small, sweet oranges are named after Clément Rodier, a French missionary on whose trees they were first...

According to Statistics Canada, a quarter of all households across the country have a bird feeder. This 25%, current as of 2013, is probably considerably larger in 2020 given the surge in interest of backyard birding during the pandemic.Bird watching is fascinating and wonderful, so it's not surprising that more people are discovering how enjoyable it is to see birds up close. As the fall months turn from cool to cold, the nightly frosts give way to snowy dustings and all the leaves have left the trees, our bird feeder comes alive again.  Clouds of chickadees, nuthatches and woodpeckers swoop...

Recently, my highly imaginative son began describing areas of his mind detailing where he stored various bits and pieces of information, where things were 'buried' and where others mysteriously 'got lost'. I found this so interesting, that he was actively trying to surmise where and how this thoughts resided inside his head. I enjoyed this 7 year old description a lot and determined shortly after he'd finished pointing to various places on his skull, that I was going to set to work on a 'Brain Unit' to teach him. Like many, I bit my figurative nails down to the quick...

Over a month ago, anticipating the nebulous arrival of spring, I started a plant hardiness zone colouring map. This was to add to the complement of colouring maps and mapping worksheets I'd been making.Alas, despite the best intentions of having it finished within a week, quarantine homeschooling has been absorbing every morsel of my time. I'm sure many of you can relate. As cartographer Daniel Huffman observed following a cartography live-stream event where women were under-represented, a probable cause was that women were otherwise occupied taking care of children, doing household tasks and homeschooling their kids as all the schools...

Our children love books. Reading has been a large part of their lives, even from their earliest days. There aren't many things more lovely than having a little cheek pressed against your own as you bring stories to life or witness their amazement at the incredible inner workings of a planet, the complete camouflage of a moth, or as in a recent instance, the fact that a single teaspoon of neutron star weighs more than the entire population of the whole world. This boggling fact comes from a Smithsonian book (published by DK) simply called Stars. It's part of a...