Natalie: Have you ever had a Dutch Baby? Pamela: Is it one of those pancakes that puffs up really tall for a second? Natalie: Yes! I found a recipe I want to try. May I make one for our Sunday tea? Pamela: Of course!!!! 🙂 🙂 🙂 Natalie (looking up from cookbook): The cookbook writer (Rosanna Nafziger) says she made them when she was my age. She used to wake up on a Saturday morning and make a Dutch Baby. A friend and she would play wholesome educational board games while it baked, counting every minute with growling tummies. When finally the Dutch Baby emerged, they smothered…
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My Tapestry of Words
“Use your words.” Thoughts struggle for translation, hover just out of reach, waiting, waiting for realization—a musical note balanced on the horizon, ready to take flight. The gentle nudge, a summer’s breeze. “Use your words.” Growing and shifting, they may have stumbled, leaves tumbling from trees, but the words came. They always did, each time my mother or father encouraged me as a young child to find them, to gather them and release them tenderly from my grasp. Language flutters against the kitchen curtains, flows from room to room, glowing on the walls and dancing delicately in the air, settling into the shelves between books like golden dust. I remember…
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A Treasure Hunt
I went on a delightful Easter treasure hunt this morning. A string of clues on green index cards led me from the house, to the schoolhouse, to the garden, each clue leading me to another one, until finally…I arrived at the ultimate surprise! Underneath my dad’s birthday card hand-drawn by Andy McEwan (a Scotsman’s airplane), I found another clue, which read: I am with the original Mr. Pickwick… Between the pages of Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers, I found another hint: I am a maker of images for children — you will learn all about me here… 🙂 in Applewood Schoolhouse, the poster I…
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Love is Being Read to…
I remember kneeling before my shelf at age four, running my hand across the spines of my picture books, letting my fingers rise and fall as they travelled from story to story like boats upon the surf. With five of my favorites cradled in my arms, I scampered down the hallway to find my mother, bangs in my eyes, feet pattering against the wood floor, each step augmenting my excitement, widening my smile a little further. A rocking chair, bathed in silver light. As I settled down beside her, nestled into her arm, my mother opened one of the covers. The gentle rustle of pages, the musty presence of…
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Holiday Chemistry
I love chemistry! Ever since sixth grade, I’ve been fascinated by the patterns and intricacies of the microscopic world. This year in AP Chemistry, I’ve been able to delve further into the many wonders of the periodic table. Here are two holiday chemistry experiments I have conducted over the past couple of weeks: one at home and one at school. The Mirrored Christmas Tree Ornament (above) captured our holiday family portrait! My entire chemistry class had fun doing this experiment. Always wearing our protective goggles, we started with plain glass orbs from an art supply shop. We rinsed the interior of the orb with acetone (added through the opening at…
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“I Believe in Curiosity”
This is my essay titled “The Gift of Curiosity” that was published on the website for “This I Believe: A Public Dialogue About Belief — One Essay At a Time.” Go to http://thisibelieve.org/essay/134229/ to see my essay and read others. I believe in curiosity. When I was twelve, my parents and I travelled to Avebury, an ancient stone circle nestled into the rolling hills of England. A cool breeze blew as I wandered from stone to stone, around the wide, grassy field. I paused, and running my hand across one of the narrow boulders, felt the toll of time in its surface, the stone worn by thousands of years in the…
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Inspired by Words and Notes
A lovely essay titled “Piano Lessons” appeared in the Los Angeles Times on Mother’s Day. I was fascinated by the way in which Professor Greene’s essay intertwined music and the beauty of words, revealing the similarities between playing the piano and writing, two of my passions. Music and literature share rhythm, composition, and story, so that a piano piece can tell a story as vividly as a novel, and a novel can crescendo like a piece of music. Words are like notes, and sentences like musical phrases. As Professor Greene’s essay illustrates, they both have the power to inspire. The subtitle of the essay is: Music saved my mother. Her…
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Laugh About Math
This is a picture of me in sixth grade. I’d been sitting at the kitchen table puzzling over the pre-algebra problems in my textbook, which was very good at asking ridiculous (but supposedly relevant) questions, but wasn’t ever able to answer my question “WHY?” WHY is a negative times a negative a positive? WHY is multiplying by a fraction’s reciprocal the same as dividing? WHY does cross-multiplying work? After half an hour of reading the same problem over and over all I could do was cry. My dad came to help me answer the questions and looking at the word problem, said, “Is Fred crazy? What’s he thinking cutting a…
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Dear Teachers,
Note from Pamela: I recently found these messages Natalie wrote to her teachers at the end of sixth grade, when she was leaving the elementary school where she had been a student since kindergarten. She composed the notes in her computer and then she selected cards to handwrite her message to each teacher. I’m so glad we can go back and read them, as each note conjures up a memory of a specific and lovely learning moment. They also remind me that kindness, reassurance and confidence-building are just as important as science, math, and reading. Do you have a memory of a special teacher and the special something you learned…
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Natalie’s Immune System Comic Strip
Understanding your complex immune system in seven simple comic strip panels (inspired by the world of “Harry Potter”)
