Encyclopedist detection kit

To determine whether any of your kids are natural-born encyclopedists, install Mediawiki and turn them loose. This morning Sarah asked whether we could have a wikipedia about our family, a "Whitopedia". Knowing it would be fairly easy with Ubuntu, I said yes and spent a few minutes here and there running through the steps between other tasks. Now it's set up and Sarah and Christopher are both clacking away writing initial biographical entries on their computers (old castaways that handle Ubuntu just fine).

I set up mediawiki on my heavy-duty high-horsepower work computer and poked holes in its firewall for theirs. They can get to it by using my computer's name as a web address: http://ubuntu-home/wiki.

For googlers, that's MediaWiki 1.11.0 running under Ubuntu 7.04.

Reason number 355468453 to homeschool

Award-winning books as required reading. The big national children's book awards are typically awarded to oppressive poorly-written crap that's completely inappropriate for children. Naturally, that's what government educators like to assign to kids. In our family they start with the usual toddler's books, move on through the decent pabulum of the Boxcar Children, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, then on to history, well-written fiction and encyclopedias.

Nine-year-old Sarah is a wikipedia maven. She's reading about chess at the moment after spending the morning with bears, cats and kittens.

Nine!

Sarah turned 9 today! She spent most of the day writing a story (in emacs :-) about our visit to Indiana last week and drawing studies of faces. Our birthday traditions include a custom menu for the day and a scavenger hunt through the house for presents in the evening; Sarah's menu for today was French toast & sausage for breakfast, grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch and spaghetti for supper. She also requested a "Tunnel of Fudge" cake from the Pillsbury cookbook and chocolate ice cream. Death by chocolate after supper!