Art/Science Connection

New Year cleaning up time

During the past few days while on vacation I have been slowly boxing up my holiday “stuff” and putting it away in the attic for another year. I enjoy packing it up almost as much as I like to unpack it in early December. The difference is that not all of it goes back where it came from. I find that the packing leads to rearranging items in my home and make several piles; yard sale, town thrift shop, dump, give-away, and save for my children. I easily get side-tracked and end up sewing, reading, creating, and putting items up on the wall. At the end of each day I go to bed exhausted and wonder where the day went.

My clean-up mode continued today on my computer. Those of you that know me well are aware of my LOVE for “stickies” on my Mac. Yup, I went through and deleted a bunch of them and organized them by color and size. I spent some time on the meartsed blog and made some deletions as well. I found 24 drafts for blog posts. During the next few days I will publish some of the drafts. This is one…

I have published a couple of posts on “doodling”. One was a TED talk by Sunni Brown who leads the Doodle Revolution – a growing effort to debunk the myth that doodling is a distraction. Sunni’s wrtten a book called GameStorming: A Playbook for Rule-breakers, Innovators and Changemakers.

A second post called Doodling in Math Class which talks about mathemusicians. It is not only fun but a great view at how some people learn best through music and math. There is a video at this blog post where you’ll see Vi Hart eating candy buttons like a recreational mathemusician.  If you missed it when it was originally posted on January 6, 2011 I suggest you check it out now. And, of course go to her site where you can learn so many ideas.

The last post on doodling that is archived is a story about Robert Redford and his doodling experience. The post is from July 11, 2010.

So, here is one more on the topic of doodling. It is from an August 26, 2011 blog entry in, Teaching Now, written by Liana Heitin. Research has been done that suggests that drawing helps students understand science concepts, and should be used to complement writing, reading, and talking in science education. The post is called Don’t Forget to Show Your Doodles. I hope you have a chance to read the post. It has many points that you might want to share with colleagues.

I am certainly glad I had the chance to complete this blog post!