NutureShock book review

Normally book reviews are on my technical blog, but I am reading a book about how kids develop. The first part of the book focuses on "the inverse power of praise" and specifically how it is important to provide praise for the process not rewarding the finish. Research shows that frequent reward does not develop persistence and leads to people being "praise junkies". I may be in that camp to some degree.
Not telling your child they are smart leaves it up to them, and robs them of the chance to learn that for themselves.

The author hits on other subjects
* Sleep - it is important for them/us
* Race - it is complicated to get the kids to not have bias, it is sort of counterintuitive in some cases
* lying - promoting truthfulness leads to more lying and they learn from watching their parents. just remind them of expectations
* tattling - it is the era of holding info back if you tell them you don't want to hear it.

I am halfway through the book and looking forward to reading the rest.

HAPPY Chinese New Year - Year of the golden dragon

Abby wanted to know why people worship (or celebrate) dragons, so today we went to the Chinese Garden in downtown Portland. It is the year of the Golden Dragon which means that there is prosperity for everyone in the new year.
We are going to talk with our friend Ann Xu tomorrow to learn more about this and beforehand we decided to brainstorm some questions. Here are the questions she came up with.
How many chinese dragons are there?
Why are dragons important to people.
What do Chinese dragons eat?
What is your favorite color chinese DRAGON?

After getting back home from the Garden today, I asked her what she saw. The list includes:

a fantastic chinese dragon

people with fuzzy pants ( performers ) 

Groups of fish

lanterns of all sorts

The Chinese have a lot of great traditions and one of them was hanging riddles from the ceiling to exercise your mind.
Abby impressed us with her ability to decipher a few of them including: What building has the most stories? AND What has four legs, but never moves? Answers at the bottom.

 We ate puffy rice bars, sugar mango and the traditional Moon cakes. The flavors the kids tried were the mung beans and red beans variety and they were both very sweet! The kids also had tea; Abby had the Orange Cranberry, which was very good and Amelia had peppermint.

Dinner with Grandpa and Grandma

We had a fantastic time last week with Grandpa and Grandma sharing dinner, stories and our new favorite game Wig Out!

It is fun that we're at a point where we can all play the same game and it is very enjoyable for the kids and grown ups alike.

Amelia's getting to be a better reader and has a good pointer finger that helps her sound out words.

Grandpa and Grandma read a bit of Return of the Dragon to them both, they are both fascinated with dragons, so that is a big deal in the Koonce household right now. The books are actually entertaining for everyone too, so I guess that's just a sign of the times until the kids get to a point where they specifically don't like what we do (ha!)