How the World Works

Aaaand we're back! There's been a lot going on, so how about a really huge list of what I actually remembered to write down at the time?

How the World Works (Science)

• T asked about how long ago Pangaea was. We looked up some maps, still and animated, to get him some answers. We also looked at how plate tectonics works, with spreading centers, subduction zones, and places where two plates abut forcefully and make mountains. We found places on the world map where each of these had happened or is still happening. Now both kids ask questions about how various features formed, often mountains or islands, and we can talk about volcanic hot spots (e.g., Hawaii) vs. volcanoes in subduction zones (e.g., the Ring of Fire around the Pacific) or spreading centers (East Pacific Rise, Mid-Atlantic Ridge) vs. mountains getting pushed up by plate impacts or compression (Rocky Mountains, Himalayas).
• We watched a video about how natural selection works. This led to another video by the same creators, about how fracking works and its risks to climate and human health. There is an anti-fracking initiative coming up for a vote in our city, so this was highly relevant to current events in our area.

• T and I read together a Magic School Bus book about butterflies, covering the differences between butterflies and moths, metamorphosis, molting, hazards to butterflies, what they eat, and how to help them. (P has read this book on her own in the past.)
• We watched a video about Jellyfish Lake. We wanted to know what kinds of jellyfish those were, so we looked it up and learned that the golden jellyfish, which have evolved there in isolation after drifting in from the ocean when sea levels were higher, host algal symbiotes that feed them, so the jellyfish follow the sun back and forth every day. Divers aren't allowed to use scuba gear in Jellyfish Lake because there's so much hydrogen sulfide dissolved in the water in the anoxic layer below 15 meters deep that it could kill them by absorption through the skin.

• Another video showed us two of the world's largest organisms: one nicknamed the humongous fungus, and the Pando aspen grove, which is roughly the size of Vatican City.

• T and I read another Magic School Bus book about microbes -- different kinds, their functions in the environment, how they spread, and more.
• We watched a video about gravity and how the orbits of satellites work, including geosynchronous orbits.
• A great video covered the life cycle of salmon, with a special focus on what eats them after they die following spawning. Although the main scavengers shown were ravens, eagles, bears, and maggots, this also tied in well with our reading about microbes.
• Other videos showed how trash is burned to produce energy in Norway (where they have to import trash from other countries to meet their energy needs!), and showed the relative sizes of the planets in our solar system by picturing them in our sky as if they were the same distance away as our moon.
• We talked about how seeds get dispersed. This came from watching birds eating berries off the vines in our backyard, and from seeing lots of milkweed fluff in our yard from milkweed plants in the neighbor's yard. I brought one of the milkweed pods inside and put it in a bowl on the counter, so anyone could pet it when passing by, or build small structures with it. I loved feeling it and noticing that it was so soft, it was difficult to tell whether you were touching it.
• We read a library book about the water cycle, including how water gets purified naturally by filtering through soil or swamps, problems caused by pollution, and how to conserve and protect water supplies.
• We watched some videos about octopuses. Both kids watch some of these, but T is especially fascinated. T spotted an octopus puppet at a store where we were shopping, but decided not to buy it. Later we saw more videos: an octopus stealing a video camera while it was recording, and octopuses going through very small openings (T has asked several questions about whether we could do that sort of thing if we had no bones, and made comments about how our bones make us different from octopuses).

• T chose a very fancy dinosaur pop-up book on a Costco trip and has been having me read parts of it to him. P also reads it with him.
• T enjoyed a video of Grover doing some science experiments.
• A question about how fireworks are made led to some good videos about firework production, safety measures during production, (some steps are done in concrete bunkers, and tools are chosen for their anti-static properties), and how fireworks shows are choreographed.

• We read a very basic library book about fire, which led to some discussions about fire safety.
• We watched a video on how to start a fire with a bow drill.
• P and T found a crawdad in the creek one day at our local unschoolers' park day. They were so excited!
• P and I watched SciShow videos on what happens when you stop eating (stages of starvation), on sleep deprivation, and on why pigeons bob their heads back and forth as they walk (they're actually holding their heads still as their bodies move, which gives them better ability to detect motion of predators or prey).
• I was singing some folk songs to P one day, and one of them was about the bomb in Hiroshima ("Cranes Over Hiroshima" by Fred Small, covered here by Jim Couza). She asked about what a nuclear bomb is, and we talked about nuclear fission and how it's used in a controlled way for power, and in an uncontrolled way in bombs. We also talked about how things go wrong at power plants sometimes (e.g., Fukushima), and how that can lead to uncontrolled reactions at power plants (meltdowns). The kids bring nuclear ideas into their pretend play as well.
• T was playing with a cardboard tube, stuffing socks and other objects into it with a pen for a ramrod, then blowing them out with his breath or by pushing them back out with the pen. I drew him some pictures about how that relates to the loading of old-fashioned rifles (as described in the Little House books, which we read some time ago). He wanted to know whether cannons were loaded the same way, and how a fuse could set off a cannon as he'd seen in cartoons, so we talked about those, too, with pictures, and the difference between how gunpowder burns in the open and how it burns in enclosed spaces (these related back to our fireworks videos).

How the World Works (Math, Spatial Reasoning, Logic)

• T spent some hours in Minecraft, seemingly trying to do everything one could possibly do with mine carts and tracks. He'd do very deliberate experiments, building a setup with powered tracks, for example, and then replacing one block at a time of track with unpowered track and testing the results each time. One such experiment involved a dip in the track, how much momentum the cars needed to make it back up the other side of the dip, and how this varied when the number of cars was changed.
• We watched a video about impossible objects and were tickled to see that most of the letter in the logo for The Kid Should See This were impossible objects.

• P mentioned one evening that she knew how to count by 25s. I asked if she learned that by thinking about money (which is how I think about it), and she said she learned from Plants vs. Zombies! (You get sun power in increments of 25 in that game.)
• P and I played with finding places on the world map by latitude and longitude (finally, a way into coordinate systems!) We tried plugging our rough estimate of our home's location into Google Maps, and found it was actually quite close, at a location we drive past regularly. Then we played with the numbers until we found the exact location of our house, just a few minutes/seconds from our original rough estimate.
• The kids found a video showing how to build a toilet in Minecraft that could actually flush and wasn't super-sized. It exploits one of the less-realistic aspects of how water and lava behave in the Minecraft world. P quickly built one in her Minecraft world and one for T in his world. T has since built his own version. Both kids have had fun with lighting their toilet areas to take advantage of the glow that comes from the lava, through the water, when the flush valve is open. P arranged it so that the flush lever turned off the room lights!
• We've made a few short stop-motion videos using iPad software. One day, on the way home from buying some new Lego sets, we worked up an estimate of how long it would take to make a stop-motion video of a Lego minifigure building one of the new sets from beginning to end. Our estimate of the least amount of time that could take was about 5 hours, based on the number of seconds it would take to set up and shoot each frame, and the likely number of frames per brick in the Lego set. We knew it would probably take much longer than that, because of time for planning sequences, fixing mistakes, and so on.
• Both kids, but especially T, have gotten really interested in Minecraft mods and the content packs that go with them. UnschoolerDad installed one mod they really wanted, but then he was busy, so I had to learn how to install additional content packs. It's not that hard, but the documentation available for how to do it is very spotty. I had to get help from UD for one obscure step. It's good for me to keep exercising the technical parts of my intelligence -- it's easy to let UD take care of it because he's so much faster at most such things, but when I figure it out, I can help the kids better, and they see me in the process of learning challenging things, rather than relying on experts all the time. That's important, I think.
• P continues to work on her empire in Dragonvale. She is amassing huge amounts of money in the game, and a few weeks ago I heard her reading out the amount to T. It was $12,192,691, and I asked to see what she was reading and verified that she was reading it out completely correctly. She has mastered place value (at least in the whole-number range) without much instruction from me -- I've spent a total of about five or ten minutes over the last couple of years, answering questions and providing brief explanations when she asked for them.
• T asked me recently if infinity really exists. We talked about the idea that the universe may be bounded, and thus not infinite in size. That might mean there's no actual, physical infinity out there. But we talked about how infinity is still an interesting and useful idea in mathematics -- the fact that there's no number so large that you can't produce a bigger number, and also the fact that you can imagine an infinity of fractions between any two numbers on a number line (density property of rational numbers).
• P has been building things on quite grand scales in Minecraft. Occasionally she takes me on a tour. Sometimes I have questions, like "How can the people get to the different animal stalls in the petting zoo?" P sometimes responds by remodeling to fix the issue. She builds quickly, seeming to have a plan in her head sometimes (e.g., how many floors, and thus how tall the exterior walls should be), and other times seeming to improvise and embellish on a simple original idea. T likes to see her creations, and sometimes he emulates them in addition to coming up with his own ideas.

How the Written World Works, What's Fun About It and What We Can Learn From It (Reading/Writing)

• T asked what the word "lizard" means. I gave him a quick description and some examples, but he seemed unsatisfied. So I tried giving him an etymology, since I often explain words in terms of what their parts mean. That was more satisfying, though it didn't have multiple roots or affixes to disassemble, which seemed to disappoint him. I like that he's in the habit of wondering why words mean what they do!
• We read the third and fourth books in the Theodosia series, Theodosia and the Eyes of Horus and Theodosia and the Last Pharaoh. The latter gave a glimpse into class divisions and conflicts in Egypt while the British were there in a colonial role.
• UnschoolerDad and P have read another two books in the Ranger's Apprentice series. There was an extended sequence in The Icebound Land about drug addiction (a drug was used to control one of the main characters when he was made a slave) and the process of detoxification. The Battle for Skandia gets into aspects of military strategy, including nuisance raids, choice of terrain for battle, and an ingenious method for the rapid training of a large force of archers.
• P wrote a brief pamphlet about fairies, asking for the spellings of some words. It turned out it was brief because she didn't have much to say about fairies! I've noticed her spelling has taken a turn for the better recently. She's remembering more spellings that she's asked about in the past, and she seems more aware of when she doesn't know the correct spelling for a word.
• The three of us read a bunch of picture books from the library, including two Jan Brett books (The Umbrella and The Three Snow Bears), another bilingual book (Mamá and Me), and an alphabet book with a different kind of boat for each letter. We had fun talking about nuclear submarines (a relative used to serve aboard one) and about why lightships and lighthouses are less essential now than before GPS came into broad use. Later we read another bilingual book about monarch butterflies, their life cycle, and their annual migration to Mexico. T likes to hear the Spanish first and then the English.
• T has been having us read the same few books over and over again. He seems to be working on reading some of the words himself. He can supply missing words from memory if I pause for some reason while reading.
• One of T's repeat books is Fox in Socks, which P also likes. P, UnschoolerDad, and I spent some time the other day thinking about what makes tongue-twisters hard, and trying to construct our own.
• T, who so far doesn't pronounce L or R sounds, tried L for the first time recently. He was trying to say something about a ladder, and I was hearing "rattle." I showed him how I said "ladder," with my tongue showing a little at the beginning, and he tried it! He's not been willing to try this before, so this was a nice step. He seemed pleased with himself. It hasn't translated to clearer speech in general yet, but the door is open. I think it was not a coincidence that this happened at a time when we were cuddling and feeling quite close and relaxed.
• P and I read Holes together. She loved it and is interested in the sequel, but the sequel is written for somewhat more mature audiences, so she agrees maybe we should wait a while and read other things in the meantime. I read most of the book out loud to her, but sometimes when I was busy she'd read to me, and sometimes when we were both eating, we'd read silently side by side. Holes addresses racism pretty directly, and has black and white characters relating to each other in both friendly and unfriendly ways.
• P and I are in the middle of Ella: Enchanted and enjoying it a lot.
• P has powered through the first couple of Geronimo Stilton books. These came as hand-me-downs from a neighbor. I started reading one out loud, but T and I were enjoying it much less than P, so I begged off reading it for a couple of days, and finally P dived in independently and read the first two books in a couple of hours one day.

How the World Works (History, Civics, Geography)

• See above for latitude and longitude, Egypt, fracking and its politics, and race issues.
• Prompted by Theodosia, we read a bit about the fire at the library in Alexandria, and also about hieroglyphic writing works.
• T asked whether there were real ninjas, so we did some reading and looking at pictures about real ninjas in Japanese history. It was interesting to find out that ninjas didn't dress in any particular way -- they dressed to blend in with the populace, since their purpose was to achieve their objectives without being noticed.
• We watched an animation of how political boundaries in Europe changed from the seventh century to the present. It was fascinating to watch the empires grow, shrink, and sometimes recover again; and to see the huge number of city-states in some periods of history.

• The government shutdown happened. I was watching and reading a lot of news about it, and P and I talked about why it was happening, what it meant (we had some relatives and friends furloughed), how Republicans in Congress were resisting the health care law, and how we expected the health care reforms to benefit us and others.
• We watched a video about what money is and what makes it money (stored value, accepted medium of exchange, divisible unit of account). 
• When UnschoolerDad traveled to Iceland for work, we talked about great circle routes, comparing where it looked like his plane would go (using yarn to mark "straight" routes on the world map) to where it would actually go (using yarn to mark great circle routes on the globe).
• When UD got home from Iceland, we saw some photos of the terrain there, which is pretty young volcanic soil and rock. We talked about what kinds of plants get into an area like that first, and how later succession leads to the kinds of terrain we're used to.
• While UD was in Iceland, we Skyped with him a few times, when it was afternoon for us and night for him. That led to some talk about time zones and why we have them.
• We used a web site that shows you a random point in the world. Most of those we landed in were in the ocean. One on land was near Ekimovichi in Russia. We looked up how many people live there and found out their principal industries: flax refining, cheese making, and a fruit combine. We had to look up "fruit combine," not an easy phrase to find on the Web, and then try just "combine," to figure out that probably meant a collective business of fruit producers and sellers. Another random place was in the ocean near Reunion, and the undersea terrain to the south of it looked like a spreading center, so we looked it up and found it was, at the edge of the African Plate. Hooray for connections!
• In our book about boats, the description of Viking Ship mentioned Scandinavia, and P figured out that this was what Skandia (in The Battle for Skandia) referred to. We talked about the other place names in that book -- Gallica is clearly France/Gaul, with a French-sounding language. Araluen and Tomujai are harder to peg, but I noticed another language sounds German-derived. UnschoolerDad and I spent some time with a real map and P half-listening, thinking about whether the actions in the series mapped onto the real-world map of France, Germany, Denmark, and perhaps some other nearby places. We decided it probably wasn't exact, but certainly drew inspiration from that region.
• We read about the foster-care system. Some friends of mine recently adopted a son who came to them through the foster-care system, and P and T have been curious about why kids end up in foster care and how that works. The book we found didn't get into the problems with the system, but described it in a way that would be helpful to kids involved in it themselves.
• I watched Ken Burns' The Civil War over several days while working on a knitting project. P listened in to some of it. I noticed that something like the battle maps used in the series popped up in her pretend play.
• After we went to buy the kids some new shoes (their old ones had gotten tight, and we thought P had grown three sizes until we realized that youth and adult sizes overlap by a couple of sizes), we talked a little about footbinding. The discussion didn't go far because I realized how difficult it is to answer P's "why?" questions in a way she can understand. It gets into eroticism, patriarchy, class structure, and other things that we can touch on, but that are hard to reach a good understanding of from her present point of view. That's one to keep working on.
• T enjoyed some videos on the days of the week and the months of the year.

Other Things About How the World Works

• One of our cats died. She had been in a slow decline for a couple of years, with a great number of physical problems, and things started getting worse more quickly. Last time we put a cat down, P was mad at me for a long time. I wanted to avoid that this time, so she and I had a long conversation about what to do, and we came to an agreement that if the vet didn't see a possibility for a good recovery (which she didn't, on a house call the next day), we would give our cat the best few days we could, and then have the vet come to our house to put the cat down. P stayed with me and the cat for the euthanasia,while UnschoolerDad hung out with T in another room. We both cried a lot during that week (T seemed to understand what was going on, but not to be distressed about it, as he's not much interested in the cats), but it was a good chance to say goodbye, come to terms with what was happening, and have some concentrated quality time with the cat before she died. P and I also got to think together about what the considerations are for the end of a pet's life. Does the pet understand what's going on? How much pain or distress are they in? Are there ways we can help them with those? Are those actions sustainable in our lives for the long term? Is a good recovery possible? With what probability, and at what cost in time and energy? Might things get worse soon? Considering all that, what's the kindest thing we can do for the animal, within our abilities in the short term and the longer term?
• Both kids, but especially P, are noticing that while their default preference is usually to stay at home and inside, they do have lots of fun when they get outside. When the leaves started falling, we left a restaurant one evening to find its deck unoccupied by people but full of fallen leaves. The kids started kicking them into piles. I was enjoying watching them very much, when it occurred to me I might have even more fun if I joined them. I was right, and the kids were energized by my participating, too. We made a big pile of leaves and lay down in it. This was one step in a process I've gone through recently, of relearning how to play in the ways the kids enjoy. Sometimes it seems so hard, but when I just make myself try, it's usually not so hard, and we have a lot of fun and sometimes hit some great learning places in our games.
• We made it to Park Day after being absent for many weeks. The kids both enjoyed how much running, climbing, and other hard play with friends they could do there. I think we'll be back for more Park Days in the future, especially now that we've re-outfitted for winter play at the kids' new sizes. (We bought some warm stuff when we thought we'd be doing a camping trip in October with snow on the ground; we missed the trip because of illness, but now we have really warm things!)
• Seemingly out of nowhere, T has started talking again about foods "joining the party" in his stomach -- something he picked up a couple of years ago from the only episode of Yo Gabba Gabba we ever watched. He uses the phrase when he's eating something different from what he ate previously, especially something healthy. Recently he asked for carrots with no prompting and made most of a meal of them. 
• P is picking up melodies easily. I was listening to several versions of a choir piece on YouTube, looking for a good one to share, and she picked up the piano introduction that went with the piece in each clip. She's also getting better at holding her own with harmonies. She likes singing rounds ("Make New Friends" and "Row Your Boat" are two favorites) and is getting better at holding her part in them. T doesn't sing as much as P did at his age, but I'm noticing him occasionally picking up tunes as well, and he hears the words of songs -- sometimes if I pause in a song because I'm having a hard time with the guitar chord, he supplies the next few words to remind me!

Floods, Egypt, and Good Questions

It's been an eventful couple of weeks here. The Front Range just got about a year's worth of rain in about four days. We were fortunately dry and warm in our house, but the roads were dangerous, so we holed up at home for the duration -- glad to have electricity, clean water, and enough food on hand -- and kept up with friends and acquaintances who were evacuating, digging out, and drying out.

I think this is in central Boulder. Here's the original, but be aware -- it will start a video automatically.

The flooding led to some interesting learning around here. T and I played an imaginary game in which he accidentally dropped a magical bucket of water that flooded the whole world. We played at being, and talked about, squid, sea snakes, some of the smallest sea creatures (plankton and coral), some of the fastest sea creatures (tuna), and how we'd be better off breathing with gills. T also asked where the ocean was deepest, and where in the world giant squid lived. We found the Mariana Trench and the Challenger Deep on our world map. We looked up giant squid and found out about where they've been seen (all over the world, pretty much) and how they swim. We also found the first video captured of a giant squid in its own habitat. The scientists in the video were hugely excited, and so was T!

When we were able to drive around again, we were at a Park Day, talking with friends displaced by the floods and seeking interim housing, when another thunderstorm rolled in. We quickly got to the car and started home. On the way home, as we had on the way, we watched for areas that were still flooded or showed signs of flooding (P spotted so much debris caught on one barbed-wire fence that it looked as if it were made of hay bales!), and we talked a little hydrology -- what runoff is, and how it starts to happen faster when the ground is already saturated from previous rains, which was why we were driving home instead of waiting the storm out at the park. We also talked about what to do in a flash flood situation -- getting to higher ground as quickly as possible, which for some people in the canyons meant grabbing only their shoes and each other and climbing a hill in their pajamas before their houses washed away.

We've been reading a lot from the Theodosia series of books about Egyptologists and Egyptian magic in Edwardian London. In those books and online, we read some details about how the ancient Egyptians made mummies of their dead. We talked about the concept of desecration, as we read a part of the story in which a mummy was unwrapped for the entertainment of guests at a party. The story compared this to digging up and undressing one's deceased grandfather. Perhaps the richest thing about the Theodosia books has been their unstinting vocabulary. In the past two weeks, P has learned an enormous number of words from context and from my explaining them as we read. Here's a small sampling, from the times when my notebook was nearby to jot down the juicy words and phrases (while most of these are from Theodosia, a few are from the Ranger's Apprentice series, which P is reading with UnschoolerDad):

* fete * champagne * desecration * lorgnette * ensorcelled * wreak/reek * codger * scrutiny * wrath * stroke * apoplexy * frippery * poltroon * stevedore * treason * sherry * sarcophagus * lavatory * comportment * contravention * impertinent * loathe * glower * discern * simper * disabuse * attributed * grimoire * understatement * mortification * dudgeon * rue the day * tumult * charlatan * wizened * calling card * score (20) * macabre * lumbered * gin * listed * ajar * nonplussed * supercilious * demur * dressed above his station * spats *

I had to look up a few of these myself! Fortunately we're reading library e-books on a Kindle, so definitions for most of them are as easy to find as pushing a few buttons, and the flow of the story is hardly interrupted.

Here's a sampling of what else we've been up to, by general subject areas:

Math, Spatial Learning, and Logic (and a little Reading)

• Both kids have been playing a lot with Minecraft. UnschoolerDad (UD) had some time during the floods to set up a server where they could play together, and he included the ComputerCraft mod, so they can also program "turtles" (like almost everything else in Minecraft, they're cubical) to dig, farm, tunnel, or do other tasks. So far they've mostly seen what UD could make the turtles do. The kids themselves have been continuing to experiment with roller coasters made from mine carts and mine-cart tracks, including ordinary tracks, powered tracks (which can accelerate or brake the carts depending on whether they're on or off), and detector tracks (which are nice for setting off huge piles of TNT blocks and creating new valleys in which to build coasters!). T in particular has been experimenting in very detailed ways. I watched him build a stretch of track between two stops (blocks placed across the track) that used a dip in the tracks to accelerate carts toward and away from one of the stopping blocks. When he had a train of mine carts behaving one way, he'd replace one section of track at a time with a different type of track and see how it affected their behavior. This investigation is completely self-driven. When I watch him I'm reminded of some research I recently read about regarding toys and how kids use them. Apparently when researchers instruct kids in the proper way to use a toy, the kids play with it less and rate it as less enjoyable than when the approach is more discovery-based and open-ended. Minecraft is an incredibly open-ended set of tools and toys, and T is enjoying it and using it a lot! 
• On the reading side of things, T found out about using slash commands to change his game mode mid-game (from survival to creative and back again), and he's learning to recognize and type the appropriate commands. I tell him the letters to type when he asks, describing their position on the  keyboard if he doesn't already know where to find them -- so he's getting some right-left practice here, along with letter recognition and learning some written words. He's asking me a lot to read him the names of items in his inventory so he can find the specific items (often potions, which mostly look alike) he wants to use, and he seems gradually to be recognizing some of the words himself. 
• T has been asking a lot of questions about adding small numbers, and also about doubling numbers again and again. I think many of these are motivated by watching the numbers of items change as he crafts items in Minecraft or organizes his inventory. P answers some of his questions, and seems to enjoy doing so.
• T has also been enjoying making his character in Minecraft invisible (so only his armor shows) and then watching himself in third person while he builds things. This new point of view seemed a little challenging at first, but he's taken to it quickly and now gets around almost as easily with the third-person, varying-angle point of view as he does in first-person view.
• P is building a lot in Minecraft, too. Recently she designed a cruise ship (grounded). It's very large and includes a secret door to a secret-agent office. She used sticky pistons to open the door.
• Once or twice recently, P asked me for some practice at adding 2-digit numbers in her head. She did well, including with carrying (e.g., 68+17).
• P was looking over my shoulder when I saw a friend's Facebook post of a 5-pointed star drawn using an equation in polar coordinates. She asked about it. I started explaining Cartesian and polar coordinate systems. She moved on quickly to other things, so she doesn't really get it yet, but we sowed a seed, I think.
• Both kids played Robo Rally, a board game, with UnschoolerDad. I have not played this game personally, but he says it involves skills in common with programming (and since he makes his living programming and was largely self-taught, he should know). T asked to play it again a few days later.

Science

• T has been asking for Magic School Bus chapter books pretty regularly for bedtime reading. He likes to interrupt with his own ideas and questions about the story and the real-life things it tells about. His recent reading has included books about food chains and food webs, and about dinosaurs and fossils.
• With all the recent thunderstorms, we've had some good conversations about lightning. P and I talked at length about lightning rods (how they're constructed and why they work), and about why being inside a house or car is pretty safe in a lightning storm, as long as you're not in contact with the conductive elements of either. I talked about how both houses (because of their plumbing and wiring) and cars (because of their metal frames and body parts) act like metal cages, and how people have used metal cages (I couldn't think of the term Faraday cage at the time) to isolate people or objects from electrical hazards.
• The kids and I watched a video about skeletal preservations (for museums and such). This included using dermestid beetles to clean all the flesh off the bones. This came up in a book I was reading, in a conversation with a taxidermist about how flesh-removal has progressed from boiling to beetles, so I told the kids about that too. I know all this made an impression on T, because he asked me to remind him of the name of the group of beetles, days later.

• Another video showed us a blue button jelly which, though it acts a lot like a jellyfish, is actually a community of small animals serving specialized purposes. We compared this to coral colonies. And we enjoyed a video about basking sharks, the second-largest fish. This one blew me away -- their mouths are so big, you could almost fit a piano inside!

• Another video was about the nature of pain: nociceptors, plus a lot of variables, including subjective ones like mood and previous experience.
• We also watched a video about optical illusions, specifically those that make things of the same color appear to have very different hues or values.
• A SciShow video told us about Evolutionary Life History Theory, which says that we have limited energy to spend on reproduction, and each species or individual must strike a balance between spending that energy on courtship and mating, and spending it on caring for young. Apparently a recent study has showed an inverse correlation in male humans between the size of a man's testes and the energy he spends caring for his children. SciShow's often on the colorful side with the terms used, so be warned if you're watching this with kids around:

• Another SciShow video described three inventions or discoveries growing from work done on the International Space Station. One of these had to do with microbeads, which related back to my exploration with P of how color-changing Polly Pocket hair works!
• And, of course, see above for science related to flooding.

History, Civics, Geography

• We read a right about the Civil Rights movement in the United States, emphasizing cooperation between African-Americans and Jews. We talked about some of the things that were being protested, such as poll taxes and literacy tests, and about how new Voter ID laws can have a similar effect on the ability of people of color and poor people to vote.
• P perked up when Syria was mentioned in our Theodosia reading (in an ancient context, there) and immediately identified it as a place with current conflict. We talked a little about why everyone is talking about Syria -- the regime's apparent use of chemical weapons, especially against civilians, and why chemical and biological weapons are taboo.
• P and I had a brief conversation about the custom of wearing white at weddings. I mentioned that traditionally, wearing white was a symbol of purity or virginity for the bride. We went on to define virgin, and to talk a little about why virginity has been valued more for women than for men (because without modern paternity testing, it's much harder to determine who the father of a child is than who its mother is, because her having only one sex partner makes this simple, and because this becomes important if a man is expected to care and/or provide for his children but not for the children of other men). 
• And of course Theodosia gives us nice tidbits of English and Egyptian history and customs, sometimes explicity, and sometimes more implicitly, in the ways that characters treat each other.

Reading, Language

Lots of reading has been described above. Here's what's left over:

• T ended up with a copy of Diary of a Spider as a prize from the library summer reading program. We enjoyed reading it, and his appreciation of it was enhanced by our recent reading of a Magic School Bus book about insects and spiders. He enjoyed the pictures -- there's something funny or interesting to notice in them on every page, independent of the text, so the book is very engaging.
• One day T asked how to say "two" in Spanish, and P answered him correctly. That evening I read him a library book called Gracias, Thanks in both Spanish and English. He asked me to point at the words I was reading so he could see the Spanish and English text. He liked it more than he has liked bilingual books in the past. He also picked up on the theme of being thankful for everyday things small and large, and we talked about people and things we appreciate.

Other Things

• T continues using the mini-trampoline a lot, especially on days when are stuck inside or otherwise not exercising in other ways. 
• We've had a couple of big pillow fights between me and the kids: we have a bag of small, light pillows that are great for throwing, and this gets us running around to pick them up as well. Sometimes I start a pillow fight when the kids are crabbing at each other, because I can usually get them to team up against me, and this shifts their interaction with each other positively.
• P is taking a new (to her) recreational gymnastics class. It was touch-and-go at first in her new class, which takes place at a much noisier time in the gym than her previous aerial dance class. She's sensitive to very noisy environments and is more easily upset in them, and the first and second classes were emotionally very stormy for her. But after crying with me through most of the second class time, she had a good conversation with me about what was going on for her. I hadn't been aware that noise was such a big part of the problem. We talked about what would help, and now we try to make sure she's well rested and recently fed when she goes to gymnastics, and that she has some quiet time in the hour or two before the class, so she isn't already fed up with noise before she gets there. So far, so good -- after her most recent class she was very excited to have made a leap forward with her cartwheel skills. She's also looking much more confident on the beam than I've seen her in the past.

We've Come a Long Way

I've had the feeling, several times recently, that I've come a long way with my parenting since we started unschooling. Usually it's hard for me to put my finger on what makes me feel this way, and sometimes even when I can, I don't remember very long. Unfortunately it's always easier for me to see what's going badly than what's going well. I do have a long way to go in some respects, but it's good to recognize progress, too. So here, to aid my memory and for your perusal, is a sample of what's going well.

A friend wrote recently that she'd been in a huge fight with her preschooler about what to wear. It was a chilly, windy day, and he wanted to wear shorts instead of pants. She struggled with him for 45 minutes, including a time-out that left her with bruises, before finally leaving the house with him still in shorts, because otherwise they were going to miss another child's appointment.

Looking back, I can remember having this kind of struggle. I used to be much more controlling about what my kids wore, what they ate, and what time they went to bed, and we did have big struggles on all three fronts at times, from which we all emerged exhausted and often with a good deal of ill will toward each other. Parenting was a lot harder then!

Now, if one of my kids wants to wear shorts when it's cold, I'll tell them what I know about the weather forecast, or ask them to step outside and see if they still think that's a good idea. If they still want the shorts, I just pack something warmer along with us (or send it with them, if I won't be with them) so that when and if they change their minds, they can change their clothing as well. They usually do want the additional warmth before they get home, but sometimes I'm wrong and they're fine without it. Either way, it doesn't stress our relationship.

Similarly, if fruits or veggies aren't going over well one day, I now have enough experience to know that they probably will the next time I offer them. Sometimes my 5-year old subsists on mac and cheese or variants on that theme (quesadillas, toasted cheese sandwiches) for a couple of full days, and then breaks his dairy-and-grain fast with a large bowl of carrots. His body eventually tells him it needs some variety. I encourage the variety when I can, but I don't force the issue anymore.

And with sleep, we just try to get a pleasant bedtime routine going at a reasonable hour, and things usually wind down naturally; not always as early as I'd like, but usually as early as I've actually planned effectively for (being proactive really helps, but sometimes I'm too tired to be at my most proactive). Every once in a while one of the kids is so into an activity that they don't want to stop. But eventually they do, and usually it's before I really was going to be in bed myself. They might fall asleep somewhere in the middle of something and just get covered up where they are or carried to bed; or they might call a halt and go to bed more or less on their own when they are tired enough. (One of my unschooling role models, Sandra Dodd, when people used to ask her what time her baby went to bed, would usually answer, "About half an hour after he goes to sleep.")

All of these issues are about having control over their own bodies, which I know all kids want. I remember wanting it, too. Sometimes they might want or need some guidance, but mostly they would like to be the ones to decide what goes in their mouths, what gets put on their bodies, and when they sleep and wake, as much as possible. Fair enough -- so do I, even now!

There are several other concepts at work here. One is another idea I've heard from Sandra: the suggestion that parents behave as if we have a coupon book full of "NO" coupons, with some large but finite (and I would add: unknown) number of coupons, and that at some point they will all get used up. We'll lose our ability to effectively stop our kids when that happens, and we can only try to ensure that they're making good decisions on their own by then. In other words, we have to choose our battles as parents. Or better, in terms of a partnership model with our kids, we have to use our influence wisely and refrain from advising or directing sometimes, or everything we say will start to sound like "Blah, blah, blah." If we restrict our advice to when it's truly useful and necessary, or when it's specifically requested, our kids will be much more likely to continue listening.

Another key concept, which I started realizing as a classroom teacher, before I had children, is this: We only have control over other humans when they are sufficiently small and/or cowed to believe we have that control. My seventh-grade students were (mostly) like elephants tethered by strings -- completely capable of taking over the classroom should they decide to, especially if they cooperated with each other, but mostly consenting to follow my plan, or at least not to derail it. The social contract kept me (mostly) in control, but I knew that control was illusory, and if the kids caught on, my classroom routine would be toast. In classes where I had one 7th-grade elephant who had broken his string, it was much harder to lead the other students effectively. So I tried to be reasonable, a benevolent leader, and I hoped for the best. And I was so scared I couldn't keep breakfast down on school mornings. Really. And this was not in a rough neighborhood or school. When my kids were babies, I could mostly control them with little struggle, because they were so small and helpless. (Their bodies, that is -- their voices were another matter!) But when they were toddlers, I began to realize that my control over them would rapidly come to resemble my classroom authority, and that someday they would be as big and strong as I was, if not more so, and I'd better have figured out some other way of maintaining peace by then! That got me thinking about choosing carefully what was really worth a struggle, and working toward resolving conflicts without resorting to my greater mass and strength.

The last concept, and I think the most important, is that my job as a parent is to help my kids learn whatever they will need to know to be able to make good decisions once they are on their own or I am gone. And I believe that the best way for them to learn to make good decisions is for them to get to make lots of decisions (not just blue-pants-or-brown-pants decisions, but pants-or-shorts-or-fairy-costume decisions too) and experience their consequences. Natural consequences only -- I still use my own experience to soften the mistakes when I can. I don't actually want them to get hypothermia if they're under-dressed, so I pack warm things whenever I think it's a good idea. (But if I forget, we might have to cuddle and shiver for a bit; and I do insist we all have jackets around our waists when we go hiking in the fickle Colorado weather.) The point is not for them to suffer real harm or misery. The point is for them to be able to make decisions, make mistakes sometimes, and learn how to fix those mistakes.

How's it working out with the kids? They're learning. Now that those jackets have come off the hips and been used during a few hikes, I don't get much pushback on taking the jackets in the first place. And after feeling cold and changing a few times, they usually listen when I say I think today's weather forecast calls for pants, not shorts. They eat less variety than I hope they will someday, but when you look at the long-term trend, it seems to be toward a reasonably healthy diet. They get enough sleep most nights -- and if they don't, they go to bed earlier the next night pretty willingly.

Eek! That last paragraph makes it sound like I think they're learning because their decisions are looking more like the ones *I* would make. To some extent I guess that's reasonable: I have more life experience, so some kinds of decisions will converge on similar territory. But perhaps one of my next steps will be to find a different way to see progress and learning: to see paths that diverge from mine as potentially wonderful on their own merits. Or to judge my kids' decisions less and just try to understand and enjoy them more.

I can't predict now where I might be headed on that score. But I suspect that as we get some basic-survival stuff (avoiding hypothermia and fatal car accidents, say) out of the way, it will get easier to appreciate paths that are different from what I would choose. For now, I appreciate that there's far less stress and conflict and more visible caring and kindness in our lives than there used to be, and that my kids are trusting my advice more when I do give it, and learning a lot about the world and how to live well in it.

Camping Rocks!

This week we had our first camping trip as a family! I was pretty stressed about the preparations, but things worked out well. While we were at the camp, on day two, I finally had one of those moments when I realized all the necessary work had been done and that I could relax. (As you might imagine, these don't often happen at home; there's always something I could or should be doing!)

This was a group camping trip, and the kids had been enjoying playing with other kids, but it still seemed like they were missing the comforts of home (iPads, etc.) more than they were enjoying the camping trip. So I talked with a new friend who had grown to love camping as a child about what she had loved. And I remembered the good things about my camping trips as a Girl Scout. Having and helping build campfires was a big one. Being entrusted with a knife and learning to use it was another.

There was a campfire-building in the works for that evening, so I talked to the guy building it about bringing in interested kids on the experience, and he was game. We showed the kids (including P) how we were splitting cordwood into kindling and tinder with a hatchet. They didn't want to do that, but they enjoyed helping building the tinder/kindling structure of the fire. When it came time to light it, we gave each kid a thin wooden splint we'd split for the purpose, and then we lit the ends of their splints (none of them wanted to tackle cardboard matches this time, and I couldn't blame them, between the difficulty and the wind), and they lit the tinder and got the fire going. They all enjoyed that, and some stuck around to continue feeding the fire as it grew.

Also that afternoon, UnschoolerDad supervised as P used her pocket knife to strip the bark from a long, dead stick and smooth it, discovering the color variations beneath the bark and generally noticing about how the wood grew and what that meant for how it could be used. Some of P's friends came by the campsite and watched and talked. They were surprised that P had her own knife. I wonder if some other parents will be getting requests for sharp objects soon?

The kids' highlights from the trip had to do with sleeping out in a tent, being outside a lot, playing with friends, and having more attention from family and friends who were not as busy as usual. We also went on a modest hike, built fairy houses, and saw different ways people were cooking their food outdoors. We are considering one more trip before the winter sets in -- we'll see!

So, here's more about what we did and learned during the week:

Math and Spatial Learning

• Both kids did a lot of Lego building this week. Some of the instructions were a little challenging for T, but he worked through his difficulties with occasional help.
• The roller coaster building has continued in Minecraft, with variations including more powered tracks and powered mine carts (which burn coal to move on their own). The kids have also been watching Minecraft videos for inspiration, including a massive cube of TNT (decorated with other materials to make it look like the largest-ever single block of TNT) being built and detonated; a giant Earth globe; giant jet airplanes and sports cars, and probably more I didn't see at the time.
• I've overheard T a few times, counting out loud while building things in Minecraft. I think he was going for specific dimensions on something he was building.
• In a game of numeric one-upmanship on the way home from camping, both kids were using "infinity" as a number ("Mine is infinity times five!") We talked some about how infinity is more of an idea than a number. When T asks me if there's a number bigger than infinity, I reply that infinity is the idea that no matter how big a number you think of, there is a bigger one. But in the car, I couldn't resist getting into the game, so I said, "Mine is infinity to the fifth power!" Then I had to explain what I meant by that: an introduction to exponents. Now I'm hearing them crop up in the kids' conversations.

Social Studies (History, Geography, Civics, Economics)

• I read an online primer on the current situation in Syria to UnschoolerDad. P listened and asked a few questions.
• Around Labor Day, we watched a video about the origins of Labor Day as a holiday and what labor unions have done to improve working conditions for everyone. This comes up occasionally as we see updates on our local grocery store's attempts to organize, and on Wal-Mart's union-busting and other unfair labor practices.
• T read One Hen again, about microlending and its role in building small businesses and self-sufficiency.
• P asked for help finding Hawaii on the world map. She also asked about how to pronounce the names of several South American nations, wanted to know exactly what was meant by "America" on the map (we talked about a few different ways it's used), and wanted to know why world maps aren't round (we talked about what would be hard to see if a world map were simply a photo of one side of a globe). 
• As we drove back from camping, T wanted to know if we were back in our state yet. I explained that we hadn't left it; we'd only been in two counties, I think. When we got home we used Google Maps to look at our trip on various scales, from a map of the whole country, to a map of the state, to a map showing our route at full screen, to zooming in on our campsite and finding where we pitched our tent (and then doing the same for our house). I let him be in charge of the zoom level, because I know it's disorienting to me when someone else is zooming about faster than I can understand what I'm looking at.
• Also see Reading below: Theodosia is keeping us learning.

Reading and Writing

• We finished Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos. This included some bits of early-20th-century culture in both Egypt and England. We read about open-air markets, beggars calling for baksheesh (alms), and about how archaeologists from colonial powers like Great Britain were accustomed to finding artifacts in other countries and taking them back to their home countries for display. We also talked a little about how some countries, more recently, have begun trying to get back their historical treasures that have been appropriated in this way. 
• P and UnschoolerDad finished The Burning Bridge, the second book in the Ranger's Apprentice series. 
• T enjoyed the rest of a Magic School Bus book about electrical storms.
• On the camping trip, we started a Magic Tree House book about early explorers of the ocean on the HMS Challenger.
• P wrote a short story to put in a book in Minecraft. She asked for spelling help when she needed it. She seems to care more about standardizing her spelling than she used to.
• T and P both played with Scribblenauts, asking for spellings when they needed them. P is able to help T with some words. Both kids continue learning their way around a keyboard in this way, too.
• T asked me about several words from Minecraft and what they really mean. These included ghast, blaze, and creeper. I was surprised that ghast is actually an English word (a transitive verb), albeit not commonly used.
• We saw an old Schoolhouse Rock video about verbs. We tied it into a song I often sing to the kids at night: "Sing When the Spirit Says Sing." T likes to substitute action verbs (especially build) into this song. That gave us many more examples of verbs.

Science

• In the Magic School Bus book on electrical storms, T learned about how lightning forms, what thunder is, how to count the distance to a lightning strike, lightning safety, and lightning rods, as well as a bit about atomic structure and electrons. (P's familiar with these from reading the same book before and from other experiences.)
• A hummingbird hawk moth showed up in our front yard recently, enjoying some flowers. UnschoolerDad and I had never seen one, but it stuck around long enough for us and P to get a good look. We looked it up and found it was probably a white-lined sphinx moth, and that it was an example of convergent evolution with hummingbirds and some other groups of birds.
• Several science videos were interesting this week: the Moon Illusion (covering many theories about the moon illusion, but not my favorite, so I explained that one too), first-ever footage of a deep-sea squid, how a pin-tumbler lock works, how bodies adapt to microgravity (and how that makes life hard upon returning to Earth gravity), and envisioning the age of the earth (compared to a calendar year, or to the life of a child from birth to the first day of high school).
• While we were camping, the kids enjoyed finding different kinds of rocks and pounding some of them to powder, getting different colors of powder out of different rocks. They also learned why we shouldn't scrape or otherwise damage tree bark (the trees have a hard enough time with the elk scraping them). We speculated about why trees in thickets have more snapped-off branches, higher up their trunks, than trees standing alone or at the edge of the woods (trees may shed their lower branches when other trees are blocking sunlight reaching them, and focus their energy on the higher branches, which can get sunlight and produce food for the tree). We saw many kinds of mushrooms and talked about the need to know a lot more than we do about mushrooms before considering tasting any of them. We saw chipmunks harvesting, nibbling, and carrying off some of the mushrooms and not others, and wondered whether humans and chipmunks could eat the same kinds of mushrooms (and whether any harm would befall those chipmunks from experimentation, or whether they already knew their way around the local mushrooms). We saw and talked about how campfires start and burn, including the need for plenty of air (but not too strong a wind in the beginning) and smaller fuels to start with. We also covered campfire safety, including keeping fuels and ourselves clear of the fire and keeping a big bucket of water nearby. The kids had gone to bed by the time we were extinguishing the fire, but they've seen that on previous campfire occasions at church.
• On the way home from camping, T spotted some kind of factory by the side of the road. He remembered a video we'd watched about how charcoal briquets are made and said the factory looked like it could be a charcoal factory. I had to agree that looked like a possibility based on the materials and machines we saw -- the kid has a good eye!

Odds and Ends

• We enjoyed a bike ride one evening.
• One day when I was practicing guitar, playing a song but not singing it, I heard P humming along with the right tune and even some good harmonies.
• Both kids loved a video of Rowan Atkinson in a live performance with an invisible drum set. A linked video of Jerry Lewis using an invisible typewriter fell flat, even after an explanation of how old typewriters worked. Atkinson showed much more attention to detail and variety in his performance. I had to agree he was funnier than Lewis.

Six-Second Science Fair and color-changing Polly Pockets spark an eventful week of exploration and learning

Starting two weeks ago, I decided to try an idea gleaned from a local homeschoolers' email list, in a discussion about record keeping. One mom used a teacher's plan book to keep track of her kids' studies -- one column per kid. I used teacher plan books for four years as a secondary teacher (one column per class), and I'm comfortable with that format. The next day I saw a teacher plan book on the $1 rack at Target, so I bought it and gave it a try.

I set things up with one column per general subject area, so I could see how our activities and learning were balancing out across subjects. The first problem I noticed was that teacher plan books only go Monday-Friday! That's okay -- I had a column left over, so we use that for overflow: Saturday and Sunday activites, and anything I can't fit in the regular columns for the week.

I leave the plan book on a coffee table by the couch where I frequently take little rests during the day, so it's easy to jot down whatever's happened most recently. This is also nice because instead of being in front of my computer in the kitchen when I'm making notes, I'm closer to whatever the kids are doing, and off my feet!

So this week, my summary will be loosely organized by subject. Some things overlap -- we Read about Science or History, for example. It's all good.

Science

• One morning, P brought me a small Lego construction: a buoy with a flag on top, easily recognizable. We tried floating it in a bowl of water, and it floated on its side. Throughout the day, both kids and I tried different things to try to get it to float upright: adding more weight on the bottom, etc. P found that it would float upright if she removed the sideways-pointing part of the flag, which was making its weight distribution asymmetric.
• P asked me how her Polly Pocket's hair was able to turn pink when warm and purple when cold. I didn't know, so we looked it up online. We found two possible mechanisms: thermochromism and halochromism. P was game for an explanation, so I drew diagrams to talk about different colors of light having different wavelengths; constructive and destructive interference resulting in crystals looking the colors they do, and how a crystal whose plane spacing changes could look different colors as the path length difference for diffracted light changes. These were in ascending order of complexity, and I think P grasped about the first half. Then we looked at halochromism and looked up the materials typically used and their relevant stats, especially the melting point of dodecanol, which turns out to be very close to that of coconut oil! When the dodecanol is liquid, salts in the halochromic microcapsules are dissolved, which changes the pH of the package and results in the protonation (or loss of a proton) by a dye molecule, which changes color as a result. I put a small lump of solid-at-room-temperature coconut oil on P's fingertip, and we watched it quickly melt; so it was easy to see how a transition from ice water to warm breath could change the color of a doll's hair if it had halochromic microcapsules on board. Again, I think P grasped the melting point and solubility parts, but the finer points of pH-driven reactions are a bit beyond our current level.
• We all watched a great video, which we found on thekidshouldseethis.com, full of 6-second science fair videos. One bit showed putting eggs into vinegar and dissolving the shells, so the eggs end up squishy sacs of yolk and white. P and I decided to do that, and watched the bubbling surfaces of the eggs. I know calcium carbonate was a major constituent of eggshells, so we also put a Tums in some vinegar to see if it would behave similarly, which it did (until the reaction stopped, probably because there wasn't enough vinegar in the little bowl we were using -- this led to a little talk about limiting reagents in reactions). I looked up the chemical reaction between calcium chloride and acetic acid, and P and I talked some about that, drawing diagrams of the molecules and noting which parts would dissociate or connect. The partial charges on the ions in the reactions needed more explanation, so I drew some atomic-shell diagrams to talk about why an atom might be inclined to gain or give up an electron. I used the ionic bonding of NaCl as an extreme example of this, and we found a cool video showing NaCl dissolving. The shape of the NaCl crystal in the video as it dissolved, first becoming pitted and then coming apart more completely, was reminiscent of what we'd seen in the dissolving antacid.

• Meanwhile, we kept an eye on the eggs. They were brown eggs, and we were surprised to see that the brown color didn't go all the way through the shells, but was the first part to dissolve away, while there was still plenty of hard shell left. We wondered whether tasting the solution the eggs were in was okay, so we looked up the reaction products and researched the one that wasn't familiar, calcium acetate. Safe enough, we decided. The next day, when the eggshells were fully dissolved, I tasted them (we had one hard-boiled and one raw; I cooked the raw one first) and, based on my review of the experience (yuck; vinegary, but not in a pleasant way), P decided not to taste them.
• We all read some Magic School Bus chapter books this week, about insects (predation, digestion, spider webs, compound eyes, speedy motion, and more) and electric storms (T only for this: cloud formation, types, and evolution; buildup of charges at top and bottom of a storm cloud; formation of hail).
• P and T watched Magic School Bus videos about decomposition, eggs, and dinosaurs.
• One day when he tired of Minecraft, T sat down with me to look at our big anatomy book. He wanted to see the heart, then the brain. We looked at the cardiac cycle and at the brain's sensory, motor, and language functions. Each time we saw a brain region on a diagram, I'd touch T's head in the corresponding place. He was telling me about some of the areas himself before we were done, so he was clearly engaged.
• In conjunction with our atomic-shell diagrams, P and I looked at the Periodic Table of the Elements and talked about why it has the shape it does (outer electron shells accommodate more electrons, so more different elements go by as you fill them) and what it would look like if it didn't have to fit on a standard-shape piece of paper (lanthanide and actinide series inserted, making the table much wider).
• Inspired by another 6-second science fair bit, P drew an arrow and wrote her name backwards (mirror-image) on a small piece of paper, and we held it behind a glass full of water, seeing how at short distance it magnified, while at greater distances the images were reversed. That called to P's prior experience with magnifying glasses.

Math and Spatial Skills

• Both kids did a lot of building in Minecraft this week. One day I went to the basement for maybe half an hour to deal with laundry, and when I came back, both kids had built rather impressive roller coasters with mine carts! They spent hours over the next few days embellishing these, adding new shapes and underground sections, adding powered track sections to boost speed, playing with block foundations to adjust slope, and so on.
• Both kids have also been experimenting with TNT in Minecraft. Simple experiments result in near-simultaneous explosions of multiple blocks, leaving a very satisfying hole in the ground. After watching a video about TNT cannons, P built one, using redstone wiring to produce a simultaneous explosion of a ring of TNT blocks, propelling her character (on a stone block in the center of the ring) straight up, well above the clouds. They do these tricks in Creative mode, so their characters don't get hurt by the explosions and so they'd have a ready supply of TNT.
• T asked me one evening, while I was reading to him, to say what the page number said. It was 79, and he seemed amazed it was so high. In the days since, I've asked him about a few two-digit page numbers, and he has interpreted them correctly. For 41, he also thought about what it would be if the digits were reversed, but he needed me to tell him that 14 was fourteen.
• P and I made a number line for T from string and construction-paper rectangles. It goes up to 21, which is his favorite number. We used paper color and other markings to facilitate skip-counting of evens, odds, fives, and tens. T likes it and has gone to it spontaneously a couple of times to count out loud and look at the numbers. We hope this will help him through the teens, which are a little hard to remember how to write, and where he usually skips a number or two when counting out loud.
• When P and I were talking about constructive and destructive interference of light waves, we discovered she didn't really know what negative numbers were. So I drew a number line that went both ways and showed her how to add positive and negative numbers on it. She quickly grasped this, so I also showed her subtraction of positive and negative numbers, both on the number line and in algebraic notation. She got it easily. We also looked a bit at algebraic notation for variables (e.g., the many ways to write multiplication), and how to write and evaluate simple expressions with variables. During this whole process, I could see P getting excited about these concepts in the same way I remember doing when I first learned them. It was so much fun to share concepts I love and have P share the feeling! 

Reading and Writing

• We finished reading out loud the Olympian Gods section of D'Aulaire's Greek Mythology. Both kids still listen closely to this.
• We checked out an e-book version of Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos from our local library. P was delighted that we could do this late in the evening, when the library was closed, and without going anywhere. It's a book about the daughter of two Egyptologists who own a museum of antiquities in London, around 1900. We get snapshots of life in that period, bits of the political scene in Europe, bits of Egyptian history and mythology, and some British slang along with this interesting story. P was also delighted to see that my new Kindle has a built-in dictionary lookup function, so if a word is in its downloaded dictionary, we can just look it up as we're reading. There's a lot of good vocabulary in this book, so I pause to check if I think a word is unfamiliar to the kids, and give them a definition or explanation if they need it. Sometimes they ask, too, about unfamiliar words. Interestingly, Theodosia does not go to school -- her parents don't pay much attention to her, and when she didn't return to boarding school after a dreadful term there, they didn't force the issue. She is now an autodidact, well versed in Egyptian writing and magic from her readings in the museum library, and learning as she goes about Egyptian history.
• P read quite a bit of Theodosia out loud as I was giving T a bath this week. I haven't heard her read out loud much recently (though she does read to T beyond my hearing sometimes), and I was pleased to hear her fluency and expression as she read.
• UnschoolerDad has been reading more of The Burning Bridge to P.
• See Science for Magic School Bus reading this week.
• A local unschooler, considering buying tablets for her kids, asked about the differences between Minecraft versions for PC and tablet. P knows a lot about this, so she helped me write an email about the most important differences. The information was very useful to the person asking the question.
• When we were having sandwiches for lunch with my parents visiting, and I was dealing with dietary differences for many people, P wrote a list of what she would like on her sandwich so I wouldn't get confused.

Social Studies: History/Geography/Civics/Economics

• See Reading for what some of what we learned this week in history.
• UnschoolerDad was on a business trip this week, so T and I took a look at our world map to see where he was compared to where we were.
• One one longish drive home, P asserted that she already knew the rules of the road and just needed to learn how to drive when it was time. I asked if she would like for me to quiz her on that, and she said sure. So I did, and it turned out she still had some learning to do, though she has absorbed quite a bit. She enthusiastically talked laws and defensive driving with me the rest of the way home.
• On the 50th anniversary of MLK's famous speech at the March on Washington, I didn't get it together to show them the speech, but at bedtime we talked some about what people were fighting for, and I sang them "We Shall Overcome" as one of their bedtime songs.
• In connection with checking out e-books, P wondered why only one person could check out a given copy of an e-book at one time. We talked about the economics of publishing, and how publishers who have been making money on printed books still want to make money on library books (which they do, since the books can be lent to only one person at a time and eventually wear out and require replacement), and how those publishers have made e-book deals with libraries that mirror those for print books, because they're afraid they'll lose their revenue stream otherwise. We also talked about how, technically, e-books could be much more widely available, and how this would be desirable from the consumer's point of view, but might lead to problems for publishers.

Everything Else: Art, Music, PE, and Miscellaneous Learning and Exploration

• With UnschoolerDad out of town and calling us most evenings, both kids have finally learned how to carry on a conversation on the phone! It's easy to forget how weird this situation is for little kids. It requires not only thinking about a person they can't see, but also thinking a little about that person's perspective: what would they be interested to hear about? What can they sense, and not, about your surroundings as you talk with them? P was pretty good at it already, but she's getting better, too.
• P started a new weekly gymnastics class and is enjoying it.
• T has been making good use of our mini-trampoline, jumping often when he has excess energy to burn.
• I've been playing guitar and singing at bedtime most nights. P has been joining in as she learns songs, and also starting to harmonize a bit.
• With my parents visiting, we rented a canoe and a paddleboat at a nearby lake and went boating for an hour. We saw little trees that had grown in the spring and early summer while the lake was empty, some of them now far out in the lake. We saw fish jumping and speculated about why there are many bubbly places in the lake -- oxygenation for the fish, perhaps, or maybe that's where the lake gets filled? P learned a little about how to cooperate in paddling a canoe.
• P did some nice drawings while I read to her, working on shading to produce some three-dimensional effects in drawing hair in particular.
• T came up with an original (I think) idea in Minecraft. Since some blocks stick to others sideways while others fall when unsupported beneath, he built a tall shaft for crushing things (chickens, mostly). It has windows on one side for putting in whatever he wants to crush. He puts a sticky stone block with some sand blocks on top of it near the top of the shaft, and then he destroys the stone block so the sand falls all the way down.

Spanning a Summer

Whew! It's been a long and mostly pretty lazy summer. I have not been keeping notes. When the local schools started back in, I bought a teacher plan book and have been using it to keep a diary of what kinds of things we're up to. So this entry will be an experimental amalgam of a few notes left over from May and my first-week-of-the-school-year notes. Enjoy!

Reading

• T is doing an interesting thing with Scribblenauts. He doesn't know how to spell many words, so he asks for us to spell them or type them in for him. But the memory holds the last 5 items typed in, and I think, from watching him play, that he can read at least some of those words, from seeing them and using them repeatedly. He'll scroll through to SHOVEL, for example, and say, "I'll delete SHOVEL" (to type in the word he now wants). Something I thought odd until now about the game is that while the keyboard is labeled in capital letters, what you type shows up in lowercase letters unless you capitalize it. So there's a subtle nudge to identify capital with lowercase letters, which seems to be working out for T.
• I was looking at the Union for Concerned Scientists' top 12 political cartoons for the past year. P saw them and was curious about what they meant, so we talked about the issues they covered: global warming, climate change deniers, and the tendency for politicians to deny climate change or move slowly to do anything about it. We talked about what kinds of things cause climate change, and P decided on the spot to bike instead of driving to her gymnastics lesson, which required a speedy departure to be on time! I jogged alongside and got a nice workout, and we both enjoyed it.
• Both kids and I signed up for our local library's summer reading program. A lot of our reading has been out loud, though P does some reading on her own. We're powering through the end of the Little House series together. I've also been reading Barbara Kingsolver's latest and some Neal Stephenson -- the latter mostly out loud to UnschoolerDad, who also loves Stephenson. He and I learn new words frequently, as Stephenson never skimps on the vocabulary he uses in his writing. Even my downloaded dictionary doesn't go far enough, so we search the web and ask friends in relevant fields to try to track down what the heck we're reading about.
• We finished the summer reading program, all of us reaching the top goals for the program. We read the rest of the Little House series, several American Girl books about history around WWII, a book called Willow Chase (a fictional diary of two days in a journey by wagon train from Ohio to Kansas in the 1860s), and much more. The kids, in exchange for logging 1,440 minutes of reading time, got some cool prizes, like books to keep, passes to a local amusement park and free frozen yogurt. I, in exchange for reading at least 1,440 pages and writing three book reviews, got my name entered in a drawing for a Kindle, which I won! That was a good day. I've been reading a book about the history of Islam on my Kindle.
• UnschoolerDad has been reading the Ranger's Apprentice series to P. Having finished The Ruins of Gorlan, they're now on to the second book, The Burning Bridge.
• I read the kids a poem about vultures after we watched a great video about vultures -- see Watching below.
• T continues to show signs of reading. When he asked what RUSSIA said on the map and I told him, he immediately spotted the other RUSSIA at the other side of the map. He also read a sign in Minecraft that said, inexplicably, "PLEASE ENJOY YOUR FOOD." His self-expression is also getting very precise. I asked him the other day if he was all dressed to go out. He said clearly, "I have on night-time underwear, but I can handle that." 
• We've read some Magic School Bus books recently, covering fish (coral reefs, camouflage, defenses, ecosystems, damages from fishing, coral reproduction, global warming, cleaner fish); sharks; and insects (exoskeletons, predator/prey relationships, coloring as warning and as camouflage, the differences between insects and arachnids).
• We've read about half of D'Aulaire's book of Greek Mythology, which I found very strong recommendations for on homeschooling sites and then on Amazon. The book is in accessible language, but it's not dumbed down; it's a rich text for kids and adults both. Both kids seem to enjoy it quite a bit. We've read about all the Olympian gods now, and some of the stories connected with them. We still have minor gods, nymphs, satyrs, and so on to read about.
• T and I enjoyed the book The Moonlight Kite from the library together. 
• With P, we also read First Day in Grapes, about the child of Latino migrant fruit pickers, how life was for him in school, and how he dealt with bullying from kids making fun of his ethnicity and food. We talked about how, during the Great Depression, some of my grandparents worked picking fruit.

• We all read One Hen, a story about microfinance in West Africa and how a small loan allowed a family to grow an egg business into the largest in Africa.
• One morning when UnschoolerDad was out of town, I woke up before the kids and wanted to run on the treadmill in the basement. I wasn't sure they'd realize where I was, so I wrote a note and put it where they'd see it. P read it easily of course. T didn't think he could, but he figured out some of the words when we looked at it together. I had added a couple of drawings to help him figure it out if he woke up before P. He liked that -- I think I'll be leaving more notes.

Doing 

• P and T have been playing with Marble Math on the iPad, the multiplication version. T is still learning to recognize all the numbers, so he needs someone to tell him what numbers to find and roll his marble over. P is learning some multiplication facts through playing the game. She asks for lots of answers, but not all of them. They also play Rocket Math together, with P doing most of the math, T entering the answers, and me supplying the rapid-fire answers in one stage of the game.
• P went to a week-long Girl Scout day camp with a focus on things related to the movie Brave. She's been having fun with archery in particular, but also on offer have been Irish dance, rock climbing, needlework, cooking, and more. This is her first time at Girl Scout camp, so she's also learning songs, customs, etc. related to scouting.
• P got a generous birthday check from a grandparent. Without any prompting, she decided she wanted to spend a good deal of it on a Heifer International donation. We perused their online catalog, and she decided on a flock of chicks. Then she spent the rest on a Lego set for herself and was happy.
• There's been lots of Minecraft playing here. P and T figured out they could play in the same world if they used their iPads on the same wireless network. UnschoolerDad also set up a Minecraft server so they could play together (and be joined by their cousin) on the PC version of the game. P has been a fast and prolific Minecraft builder for some time, and now T has joined her. I'm awed by what he comes up with and executes. It's creative, beautiful, and large! And there's some reading going on; he can tell me what many of his building materials are, partly based on the names that appear when he mouses over them in his inventory in the game.
• P and T are both playing Dragonvale on their iPads. They are getting some experience with reading large numbers (into the tens of millions) as they keep track of their gold and gems and what they can buy with them.
• T went to the rec center for badminton with UnschoolerDad a couple of weekends, and T helped look for the right locker number when they were done. Locker numbers there are three-digit numbers. T doesn't really understand three-digit numbers yet, but he's working on it. He's been asking about two-digit numbers in his Lego instructions, and I think those are starting to make some sense to him. P and I made him a number line to hang on the wall so he could see what the numbers look like in order, with odd and even numbers on different-colored paper rectangles, and special markings on multiples of 5 and 10 so we can start skip-counting when he's ready. 
• Both kids are doing a lot of building with Lego, and buying Lego when their allowance builds up high enough. They are thinking about numbers in terms of what they can afford. Sometimes I pay half the cost of an item, such as something I might have bought them anyway, but it happens that they want a fancier, more expensive version. P easily figured out that her share of a $5 headband would be $2.50 plus tax.
• P and T have each ridden their bikes to church with me at least once this summer. It's about 1.5 miles one way.
• Both kids, but especially P, have enjoyed hitting badminton birds around with UnschoolerDad at home and sometimes at the badminton gym.
• We now have a mini-trampoline in our living room, and I often see T jump on it for a while, when bouncing would feel good or when he has some excess energy to burn off. P uses it too, though less frequently.
• I've been paying more attention to the kids' pretend games, especially when I know I will soon need to ask something of them. Often we can accomplish things like cleaning the living room or brushing and flossing teeth by incorporating them into the games. We had a particularly successful living-room cleaning session as peregrine falcon fledglings tidying up our nest.
• P continued her aerial gymnastics classes through the summer. For the fall, she's switching to more traditional gymnastics, because the aerial program is moving several miles farther away, and P likes riding her bike to the gym, which is less than a mile away. 

Making 

• Inspired by our Lego store visit (see Visiting below) and her new door acquired there, P made a Lego house for her Lego Friends figures. It's quite a creation. Some of the furnishings are made in the same ways as in kits she has built, but others are quite original. 

The house, with sleeping mat upstairs, new front door from the Lego store parts wall,
jewel used as front porch light, and tree trunks forming one corner of the building. That's a bit of a
dojo-kit wall by the sleeping mat. P tells me that she is pretending the Chinese characters say "Sleep Tight."

The back of the house, showing the flower doorknob and
salvaged cafe-kit parts for window and wall portions.

• T has created a small Lego wheeled creature he calls Speedster. Speedster "helps" T when things need to be put away. Speedster's form changes from one day to another, but he always comprises a small Lego platform or chassis of some kind with a single wheel.

Writing

• P has been writing little stories in books in Minecraft, populating the libraries of the grand homes and churches and schools and hotels she's building. She's also been playing Scribblenauts a lot, and helping T write words when he's playing the game.

Watching 

• We enjoy the YouTube channel SciShow. Especially wonderful recently was a video about vultures' defenses: acid, poop, and vomit. We watched it together a few times and greatly enjoyed the parallels between vulture poop (which they poop down their legs on purpose, so its low pH can kill germs on their feet and the ground) and hand sanitizer, as well as mental images of acid projectile vomit.
• P and I watched a TedEd video on gas laws (Boyle, Charles, and Avogadro). We talked afterward about some scenarios with balloons, and she understood the majority of what the videos were saying. I was fascinated to realize that hot air balloons are inflated not by blowing air into them, but by heating the small amount of air in them so that it expands and draws more air inside to be heated, etc. P actually realized that before I did, from the video.
• The kids watched several Magic School Bus videos on photosynthesis, rain forest ecology, erosion, recycling, air pressure, cells, wetlands and their positive contributions to human well-being, and the types and life cycles of stars.

Listening

• I bought a new guitar recently, and so along with lots of reading out loud, bedtimes now usually include some guitar music. We had done this before, but the new instrument is very motivating for me to keep it up. We have a couple of songbooks we've been referring to, and P is reading along with some of the music. Both kids are learning lyrics and tunes and sometimes singing along, which is how I learned to sing and harmonize, so I love to see that happen. When I play a new song T likes, he often asks the title so he can ask for it again. He's been requesting songs in Spanish a lot. He also asks questions about the songs. In John Prine's "Paradise," Mr. Peabody's coal train keeps getting mentioned. T wanted to know where Mr. Peabody got his name. He was thinking of peeing. I said I thought that probably wasn't what it meant, and I'd look it up and get back to him (since it was late and I wanted him to be able to get to sleep). I found a good web page with some probable etymologies, and we talked about them the next day.

Talking 

• When I have one-on-one time with either kid, it often turns into a good opportunity to talk. T is much more voluble when P is at camp, and he asks lots of questions and tells me about things he sees and his thoughts about them. He's a pretty insightful guy -- often he has things pretty well figured out when he tells me what he's thinking. Sometimes I can offer more information that makes the situation clearer, and he listens and incorporates the new information, sometimes taking the same subject farther the next day.
• After hearing a radio report about the implementation of Obamacare, P and I talked about how health insurance works.

Visiting

• One night, I learned of the existence of Lego stores. We found one in our area, and the next evening we went to check it out. The salesperson I spoke with was a Lego enthusiast herself and told us all kinds of things about the store and activities there. P and T had spent most of their allowances already, so we didn't buy anything, but they had fun window-shopping and building wish lists from the huge inventory -- much more complete than anything we've seen in toy stores. Since we were using my Amazon app to build the wish list, it was easy to notice which products were more or less expensive in the Lego store than online. P asked to buy a single part from the Pick-a-Brick wall, but the salesperson gave it to her, choosing to interpret the reason P said she wanted it as "missing part" and invoking their policy of replacing missing parts for free. P is sensitive these days to the idea that she is getting stuff free or at a discount "because I'm cute," and she doesn't like that idea. She told the salesperson she would feel guilty about taking the part without paying anything for it. Fortunately the salesperson had given me the same answer earlier about buying individual parts, so we could both corroborate that as the general policy, not just a favor to P in particular -- and the salesperson added that she didn't have any way to scan individual parts into her register, so even if she wanted to charge for it, there wasn't really a way to do that (except by requiring P to purchase an $8 container of bricks, she graciously omitted to say, though I had told P that earlier). We talked a little on the way home about how stores use such policies to build loyalty among potential customers, so even if it costs them a little money, they usually gain from it in the long run.
• The mall in which we found the Lego store was also pretty fun. There was a carousel, a train that carried people around the mall, a food court, and stores and kiosks with lots of fun things to look at and get demonstrations of. There's an RC helicopter kiosk we might well revisit when more money is available! The indoor mall near us doesn't work nearly as hard to attract kids, so that was a pretty new experience for P and T. P asked why they would have a carousel in a mall, and we talked about what kinds of things could get people to come to the mall often and spend money -- such as kids wanting to ride the carousel or train, or eat ice cream or other food-court food, or parents liking to have a place they could rest their feet while their kids had fun. We never found out if the train was free or a paid ride, but T took off after it, and when he caught up, he walked purposefully behind it all the way to the Lego store, which was enough of a draw for him to give up the chase. Next time maybe we'll find out more. (We did -- it's a paid ride.)
• On the way home from errands in the next town, we saw a sign at a fire station about an open house that was just about to begin. We turned around and went to the open house. T and P loved sitting in all the fire trucks (two wildland trucks and one city truck; the ambulance was absent). We looked around the station inside and saw the kitchen and dining area, the computers where firefighters write up their reports after each call, and more. T said he wanted to be a firefighter when he grew up, so we asked one of the firefighters what kinds of things one needed to know or be able to do to be a firefighter. There were quite a few: chemistry (for types of fires and how to fight them), math (for budgeting and such), building construction, medicine (they're all EMTs), how to use all the equipment, and to be in excellent physical condition. We learned that the firefighters are 48 hours on and then four days off, year round, though they can trade shifts if they need a specific day off. We also asked why we so often see fire trucks at the grocery store, and we learned that firefighters often make one grocery trip per shift to get what they need, and they take along the truck and the equipment they would need to drop everything and go on a call if necessary. The firefighter who told us this said she'd had ice cream melt in the truck more than once because a call came before they got back from a shopping trip.
• We've been helping out a nearby relative who is going through breast cancer treatment. One afternoon when her son X was already playing at our house, she called me, stressed because some friends had decided to visit for dinner that evening and the house was a mess. After checking it out with her, I talked to the kids and said we were going to go over and help. I helped clean, and after a little while, P and X got involved, scrubbing floors and cleaning glass furniture. (I had offered to pay them a little if they'd help out.) They earned their negotiated pay, and my kids and I split before the company came. P said afterward that she hoped we could do that again soon. I said, "So you want to earn some more money cleaning?" She replied, "No, I'd be glad just to get paid in fun. That was a lot of fun!" T wasn't an active helper with cleaning, but he did keep track of what he played with while there, so we could make sure all of it got put away before we left.
• The kids and I have had some really pleasant, spontaneous outings. One day I took a wrong turn on the way home from the chiropractor, and we ended up pointing toward a different town than I'd meant to drive to. The kids really wanted to go there, so we did, and had lunch out and a little toy-shopping trip. They were very resilient and willing to change plans as the situation evolved; they even decided not to stop for frozen yogurt on the way home, which I'd promised we could do if they did an errand I wanted to run; they wanted to get home and weren't that hungry.

Thinking, Asking Questions, Planning...

• Scribblenauts is the source for interesting exploration sometimes. Recently T looked at the word "UFO," which was in his Scribblenauts cache, and said, "That's like F-F-O, off." I said that off was actually O-F-F, but he wanted to try typing in FFO, so he did. We were offered "did you mean?" options, including TAHO, which I'd never heard of. So while T tried out the other options (FOE and TEA, I think), I looked up "Taho," and we found out about a Philippine snack made of silken tofu, brown rice syrup, and sago pearls, which, to judge from a search on Amazon, are often confused with tapioca pearls, or perhaps are considered the same thing depending on where you live. It might be fun to make this at home, though I suspect P and T would like the taste and abhor the texture.
• As homeschoolers and night owls, we usually sleep until everyone wakes up naturally in the morning. I try to keep bedtime happening at a time that will allow me to get enough rest before morning; letting it go as late as anyone likes turns out with me very grumpy and underfunctioning as a mom. But that can still be pretty late compared to many schooled kids' bedtimes. P's camp week was an exception -- we needed to be up about 7:30 a.m. to get her there on time, which meant bedtime around 8:00 (before dark, as T reminds me every evening) to allow for reading, music, and enough sleep. Both kids have made progress over the week in getting up and doing what needs to be done to get going, and also in understanding that getting to bed on time is helpful for making early mornings more pleasant! One morning T was dragging his feet more than usual, and I said that this kind of trouble getting ready was why I had not yet signed him up for a Lego camp this summer that meets in the morning. He perked up and took notice; he would like to try that Lego camp! I guess it makes complete sense -- both kids are more focused when they're preparing for something they're really interested in doing. As it turned out, I offered T a different option instead of morning Lego camp: I would set a budget and he could pick out Lego kits at the Lego store, which he and I could build during the afternoons when P was at Lego camp. This worked beautifully, it cost less than camp, we didn't have to do early mornings, and T got to keep his Lego kits, which would not have been the case at camp: win-win-win.