Fostering curiosity in kids (and their parents) since 2011

Posts by Shala Howell

The 5 best books of The Nine-Year-Old’s year (so far)

This weekend, I found The Nine-Year-Old in her reading nook puzzling over a stack of books. Every once in a while she’d put one in her mini steamer trunk. The rest she scattered over the sides of couches, across the floor, and next to her bean bag. In a valiant attempt not to derail whatever magic was going on in her brain with an untimely shriek of “Are you going to pick those up?”, I asked her what she was doing.

“Picking out my five favorite books of the year,” she replied. Now that was a project I could get behind.

The medieval sundial looks like a hole in a stone wall surrounded by scratches in a circle at regular intervals.

“Did clocks even have minute hands in 12th C France?”

As you may remember from my original post on the oddities of tennis scoring, Billie Jean King believes that the reason tennis is scored Love-15-30-40 may have been because the clock hanging over the indoor tennis court was the handiest tool available for keeping score. When I shared this theory with my husband, he immediately shot it to bits. “Did medieval clocks even have minute hands?”

This week’s book chat, in which The 9YO and I talk about censorship

I still get a little thrill whenever I see my daughter walk into the house with a Judy Blume book. Back in the before times, when I was just a young kid in Texas, there was a bit of a dust-up about Judy Blume’s book, Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, which resulted in my school librarian banning all Judy Blume books. It was my earliest experience of censorship (and its limitations), but it wouldn’t be my last.

Ancient stone building with lovely gardens.

“What was the significance of the number 4 in medieval France?”

That tennis post I did last week keeps generating questions. One reader noted that it seemed weird that the 6 sets in medieval tennis contained only 4 60-degree games each, especially if tennis scores were meant to represent the 360 degrees in a circle. Mathematically speaking, it would make more sense to have each set contain 6 games. Which raised the question, why 4? Was the number 4 significant in some way for medieval tennis players?

What’s The Nine-Year-Old reading this week?

Our mostly-weekly survey of the tidbits that cross The Nine-Year-Old’s desk. This week, The Nine-Year-Old reviews Missy Piggle-wiggle and the Whatever Cure by Ann M Martin, Mammoths and Mastodons by Cheryl Bardoe, and Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sachar.

Illustration shows two men playing a version of tennis that doesn't use a net.

“Why is tennis scoring so weird?”

The other day while driving past a neighborhood tennis court, the subject of scoring naturally came up. Everyone in the car agreed that the standard Love-15-30-40 scoring system used in tennis was pretty bizarre. Oddly specific, too, in that way that hints at an interesting story. So I looked it up. Why is tennis scoring so weird anyway?

Dinner at Caterpickles

Mommyo, anxiously: “Oh dear, I think these green beans may be just a tad overdone. What do you think, The (then) Eight-Year-Old?” The (then) Eight-Year-Old, using…