BRIO Builder is a unique, wooden based construction system where the child is the constructor!
Junior builders can create sturdy models with realistic details by using the interchangeable play pieces.
Beyond bricks and sticks, Brio Builder make things a child can actually play with!
Real construction, not just simple snap together; comes complete with a hammer, screwdriver, pliers and a wrench. Build a race car, jet plane, construction vehicle and more.
Your adventure is as broad as your imagination
• Helps promote creativity, imagination, fine motor skills and open ended play
• A fun way to practice hand eye coordination.
BRIO Builder encourages children to build their own toys – either from their own imagination or from model pictures. When building, children exercise a number of skills; learning to sort and see patterns, all while making sense of the world around them.
Praxis may be described as a form of critical thinking and comprises the combination of reflection and action.
Praxis can be viewed as a progression of cognitive and physical actions:
Taking the action
Considering the impacts of the action
Analysing the results of the action by reflecting upon it
Altering and revising conceptions and planning following reflection
Implementing these plans in further actions
This creates a cycle which can be viewed in terms of educational settings, learners and educational facilitators.
Praxis has been described as:
“doing something, and then only afterwards, finding out why you did it”
Few educators speak of praxis. While praxis may not be part of their vocabulary, practice, is. What is praxis and why should educators be concerned with it?
Praxis is not simply action based on reflection.
It is action which embodies certain qualities. These include a commitment to human well being and the search for truth, and respect for others. It is the action of people who are free, who are able to act for themselves.
Praxis is always risky. It requires that a person ‘makes a wise and prudent practical judgement about how to act in this situation’ (page 190, Carr, W. and Kemmis, S. (1986) Becoming Critical. Education Knowledge and Action Research)
WARNING – This product contains small magnets. Swallowed magnets can cause complications leading to serious infections and death. Seek immediate medical attention if magnets are swallowed or inhaled.
Brothers Chris and Will Haughey began with the simple notion that Honduras needed businesses which offered living wage jobs. Home to beautiful hardwoods, the country could have been the perfect spot for sustainably manufacturing any number of wooden products.
The brothers were inspired by classic wooden toys. Tegu blocks inspire children while addressing unemployment, neglected natural and human resources, and the need for entrepreneurship in Honduras.
“Children use toys to articulate meaning and substance,” says Will, explaining that blocks are the perfect medium because you can stack them into anything you want.
Tegu is positioned more as a high end specialty toy. “It’s definitely a niche product,” said Chris Byrne, who is known as “The Toy Guy” at a website that tracks the toy industry, “And there’s nothing like it in that niche.”
The innovative toys are “wonderfully tactile” and feel great to touch, Byrne said. ” They are kind of a work of art in themselves”, he said, “Something he would not be afraid to put on his coffee table”.
“Some parents like the idea of teaching their children about social issues through toys”, Byrne said. “In addition to the fun of play, it reinforces global responsibility.”
The blocks, which hearken back to traditional play gifts designed by Friedrich Froebel in their simplicity and craftsmanship, seek to unlock creativity in play by avoiding the overstimulation and prewritten scripts that come with so many elaborate mass produced toys.
The first building gifts designed by Friedrich Froebel
Chris and Will Haughey cite research linking imaginative “free play” to important cognitive development, and they seek to use Tegu blocks to open imaginative possibilities and facilitate long term learning.
Chris Haughey first travelled to the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa in the spring of 2004, to work with a group that was educating children living and working in an unregulated landfill used by the city as a giant dump. Shocked by a degree of poverty he had never witnessed firsthand before, Chris emailed his investment banker and hedge fund analyst brother Will and together they began dreaming of ways to bring a little of the kingdom of heaven to the impoverished nation of Honduras.
“We came from the capitalist mindset and were convinced we could do something to help,” Will noted in a Daily News interview. “Obviously we wanted to make money, but we also wanted to positively impact the local community.”
The brothers set about establishing a factory in Tegucigalpa seeking to bring “world class employment standards” by offering living wages and prioritizing big picture career growth over merely task based jobs to Honduras, the second poorest nation in Central America.
Morgan Stanley to Rate Employees With Adjectives, Not Numbers
Morgan Stanley told its staff on Thursday that it was overhauling how employees are assessed in several ways, including discarding a numerical scale that rated them from 1 to 5 in favor of lists of up to five adjectives.
Evaluators will now be asked to list up to five adjectives that describe the employees. The aim is to give more direct feedback and better steer staff members toward areas of improvement.
“It’s about giving people more information and something they can do more with,” Peg Sullivan, Morgan Stanley’s global head of talent management, said. “It’s more candid and memorable.”
“We don’t just think about what they’ve contributed commercially,” she said. “We think more holistically: their risk management, their leadership skills and what they’ve contributed to our culture.”
“While I think the millennials will like it, it wasn’t targeted at them,” Ms. Sullivan said.
The move away from numerical scales toward adjectives was rooted in the practices of James P. Gorman, the firm’s chief executive, who has sought in recent years more effective ways of evaluating prospective and current employees.
His experiment started several years ago, when he began asking job candidates to name five of their positive attributes.
Harvard undergrad and later Harvard & MIT mathematics professor Tom Lehrer penned this tune in 1945.
He admonishes the athletic team to fight fiercely. He was a first class satirist as is demonstrated by this tune. The Harvard band now plays the song at halftimes and in concerts, as though it were the traditional Harvard song.
One of Tom Lehrer’s live performed songs, “Fight Fiercely, Harvard”, is part of Tom’s second published live performance album, “Tom Lehrer Revisited” and included in “The Remains of Tom Lehrer”, which was released in 2000 and “The Tom Lehrer Collection” CD+DVD, original recording remastered released in 2010.
The most famous football game in Ivy League history – the 1968 Harvard-Yale game – is brought to life in this exhilarating documentary.
Harvard mounts a stunning comeback, scoring 16 points in the final 42 seconds to tie the game and tie Yale for the season championship. Although the final score was tied, the miraculous comeback prompted the Harvard Crimson to proclaim in its headline, “Harvard beats Yale, 29-29”.
His uniquely depraved wit has been forced again on an unsuspecting public’ via Tom Foolery, the stage revue based on his trenchant observation of the American scene.
This new songbook, with old favorites unavailable for years as well as never-published songs, is the most comprehensive ever assembled. It contains the words, tunes, piano accompaniments, and guitar chords for these thirty-four classics:
The Langlois Bridge at Arles is the subject of four oil paintings, one watercolor and four drawings by Vincent van Gogh. The works, made in 1888 when Van Gogh lived in Arles, in southern France, represent a melding of formal and creative aspects. Van Gogh leverages a perspective frame that he built and used in The Hague to create precise lines and angles when portraying perspective.
Contrasting colors, such as blue and yellow, were used to bring a vibrancy to the works. He painted with an impasto, or thickly applied paint, using color to depict the reflection of light. The subject matter, a drawbridge on a canal, reminded him of his homeland in the Netherlands.
Langlois Bridge at Arles depicts a woman holding an umbrella as she crosses the Langlois Bridge, following a horse and buggy that just crossed the bridge. The water in the canal subtly reflects the bridge and the few clouds in the sky. Van Gogh uses impasto paint and color to reflect light, much as we would see it in with our eye. Two tall cypress trees and a white house flank the drawbridge which has a moveable center section between stone abutments. The painting is currently at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, Germany.
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York launched major retrospectives early in the rehabilitation of his reputation, and made large acquisitions.
The description Tom Lehrer himself made about the song:
“for further details of the life of Alma Werfel, the reader is referred to her autobiography ‘And The Bridge Is Love’.”
Of all the colorful figures on the twentieth century European cultural scene, hardly anyone has provoked more polarized reactions than Alma Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel (1879–1964). Mistress to a long succession of brilliant men, she married three of the best known: the composer Gustav Mahler, the architect Walter Gropius, and the writer Franz Werfel.
Her admirers regarded Alma as a self sacrificing figure of inspiration to great artists, many of whom indeed exhibited a remarkable devotion to her.
Historian Oliver Hilmes drawing on a trove of unpublished material, much of it in Alma’s own words, succeeds in evoking the atmosphere of intellectual life on the Continent during the first half of the century.
Hilmes goes on to describe life in émigré communities on both coasts of the United States following the Nazi takeover in Europe.
First published in German in 2004, the biography was hailed as a rare combination of meticulous scholarship and sensational gossip. The whiff of scandal surrounding this reputed muse of geniuses helped make the book a runaway best seller.
X-ray and chemical testing confirm this dagger, found on the body of Tutankhamun, contained high levels of iron and nickel as well as cobalt, leading researcher to conclude it was consistent with the make up of meteorites.
Tutankhamun has become famous since the discovery in 1922 of his tomb.
The iron blade puzzled researchers because ironwork was rare in ancient Egypt.
The high quality of the blade suggests that Tutankhamun, who lived during the latest stage of the Bronze Age, was supported by skilled ironworkers.
Cover girl: An intimate portrait of the Queen appears in Vanity Fair Credit: Annie Leibovitz/Vanity Fair
The picture is being published on the cover of the latest edition of Vanity Fair on Friday, to mark Her Majesty’s 90th birthday.
Sitting with the Queen are her two corgis, Holly and Willow, along with Vulcan and Candy, her two ‘dorgis’. This is the crossbreed the Queen developed when one of her corgis mated with a dachshund that belonged to her sister, Princess Margaret.
“I was told how relaxed she was at Windsor, and it was really true. You get the sense of how at peace she was with herself, and very much enthralled with her family.”
‘The cocoa is too hot, I cannot drink it!’, Charlotte exclaims during morning tea.
Emily, her teacher, smiles and responds ‘I am not sure what to do. Do you have an idea how you could cool it down as fast as possible?’
Ben suggests: ‘Why don’t you stir the cocoa really fast? This always helps when I do it.’
‘I have an even better idea!’, Ben’s friend Julia says, ‘You could blow into it!’
‘Well, I think these are some pretty good ideas!’, Emily says, ‘Charlotte, why don’t we ask the other children about their ideas and we try to find out what works best?’
Learning opportunities like this arise in early childhood settings every single day. Based on the strong belief that children need to have early opportunities to discover the world, the ‘Little Scientists’ professional development program supports education and care services in integrating inquiry and exploration into daily activities.
‘Little Scientists’ strongly advocates that every child should have access to hands on discovery in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics – on a daily basis.
To enable a sustainable implementation, the initiative offers a professional development workshop program for early childhood educators. During the full day workshop, teachers and educators explore various opportunities to playfully address the many exciting questions that arise within a child’s experiential world.
Through hands on, practical experiments and group activities, the educators experience education on an age-appropriate level and learn how to support children in finding answers themselves. All workshops are built around using existing, everyday materials, to make experimenting and exploring at the education and care services as accessible as possible. Once completed, teachers can then – step-by-step – implement the activities with the children in their care.
The ‘Little Scientists’ program includes:
A long-term program of currently 9 different workshop topics.
Hands-on workshops with several rounds of practical experiments which are done with everyday materials and can easily be adjusted to the work in centres.
Having fun while exploring given materials in small groups. Participants experience the stages of surprise, asking questions, coming up with hypotheses, testing these in further experiments, documenting findings and discussing the outcomes, much like what the children will experience.
Getting to know and use the ‘Little Scientists’ Inquiry-Based Learning Cycle, a scientific method which helps to give structure and purpose to experimenting and lays the foundation for further investigation.
After every workshop, each participating centre receives a set of laminated cards with a wealth of ideas for experiments and scientific background information as well as a booklet with the educational content addressed in the workshop.
The holistic approach of the program not only encourages scientific exploration, but also aims at ensuring the development of basic competencies for sustained lifelong learning.
German educator Friedrich Froebel opened the world’s first kindergarten in 1837. Froebel’s method inspired and informed the work of Maria Montessori, Rudolf Steiner, and others, who adopted his ideas and adapted his materials according to their own work.
