Our Own Slow Solstice

As we approach the solstice, the tipping of the Earth relative to the Sun slows, and the first derivative of the length-of-day graph approaches zero. Any math geek has got to love the solstice! Our activities have remained low-key and home-centered as we get over more people's colds. We are all finally well now (knock wood!), so things are starting to pick up again. We've decided to go to an unschooling symposium nearby just after Christmas. I'm looking forward to some in-person time with the unschooling parents who do so much good mentoring on the Always Learning list.

I read an interesting article this week, making the case from experimental evidence that delaying the teaching of arithmetic in schools results in much more rapid learning when it is finally introduced (in the experiment, the experimental group started arithmetic lessons in sixth grade), but also confers an intriguing benefit -- when arithmetic instruction in K-5 is replaced with practice telling stories and otherwise communicating out loud to others (not, I should note, specifically about numbers!), those students are far ahead of control-group kids at the beginning of sixth grade in their ability to solve arithmetic story problems, even though they've had no formal arithmetic instruction. The experimental group didn't do as well on traditionally-formatted arithmetic problems as the control group at the beginning of sixth grade, but by the end of sixth grade, they'd caught up. I love this article. Having taught math to middle- and high-schoolers, I know that story problems give many students nightmares. But in the end, story problems -- using math to think about real-world situations-- are exactly what math is FOR. And even though P and I have done very little arithmetic practice together, when she talks about numbers, I see that she has good number sense, and that she's using numbers in very sensible and sometimes creative ways. I am encouraged. And I should listen more intently when P tells me stories, as she does at pretty much every opportunity!

P sang her holiday choir concerts this past week. She and I rode the bus to her Saturday evening concert and back. It took more time overall, but it meant we had a good half hour on each end of the concert during which our attention was undivided. As P put it, "I like taking the bus with you, because we can talk the whole way, and you never have to focus on driving, only getting us off at the right stop." Our schedule in the new year will give more one-on-one time for both kids with me and UnschoolerDad. I'm looking forward to it, and so is P, who is already planning out how she wants to spend some of those "date nights."

This week, P, T, and I mixed up salt dough, rolled it out, cut it into Christmasy shapes, baked them, and painted them to be ornaments for our tree. This was our first time trying acrylic paints, which takes more work from me to prevent gummed-up brushes than when we use watercolors, but the bright colors are very satisfying. And the time on task fit in with something I've been working on, which is being more present for the kids, and more available to stop what I'm doing and play or explore with them when they ask or a good opportunity arises. It's a thousand little decisions, not one big one, but each time I decide in favor of doing something with them, it gets easier. The house isn't as clean as it has sometimes been, but I think we can cope. Sandra Dodd posted a piece of a poem on the AlwaysLearning list that's helpful here:

    The cleaning and scrubbing can wait till tomorrow
    But children grow up as I've learned to my sorrow
    So quiet down cobwebs; Dust go to sleep!
    I'm rocking my baby and babies don't keep.
         - Ruth Hulbert Hamilton

On the housework side of that balance, the other day, when we were all immersed in our own things, T got up and announced he was going to clean up the living room. He put several toys away and then settled back down again. I thanked him. If I'd gotten up and joined him, he might have done more, but I was too tired at that moment. Here's hoping for more opportunities to combine togetherness and cleaning up!

As we've tried to shake this long cold , there have been several pretty sedentary days with lots of media. P has now watched the entire three-season run of Phineas and Ferb on Netflix. As she watched the last few episodes, I joined her while knitting, and I found the show to be rich in cultural references and awesome vocabulary, much of which is probably going over P's head at this point. I shared those observations with P and invited her to ask me about anything she wants as she's watching. For just one example, the mother remarked to Candace once that she'd gone into the backyard to look at the monkeys Candace told her were there, but instead found "a stunning lack of monkeys." We spent a minute taking that apart, since stunning and lack were both new words for P. P's asked several vocabulary questions since then, either while watching or at other times, seemingly out of the blue. She's invited me to watch episodes with her that she thought I would enjoy (and I did!). She also makes some interesting observations about the show. She noticed the Frankenstein monster in the title sequence, linked it to our earlier discussion about the Frankenstein story, and gleefully reported her find. She also observed out loud that little Suzy (who appears totally sweet to most people but makes a few lives pretty hellish) was an even bigger bully than Buford, as we watched an episode in which Suzy bullied Candace, and in which Buford admitted to Suzy being what he was most afraid of in the world.

P has been doing less pleasure reading recently; this is a little surprising to me, given how voracious she was for a while. She still reads all kinds of incidental things throughout the day and shows a good level of understanding of them. And a couple of times, when I've suggested that getting ready early for bed would give her more time to read in bed, she's jumped at the chance. So I'm taking it easy about the change for now: if I push reading when she's not particularly interested in it, it seems sure to make her even less interested. I'm also noticing that her spelling and handwriting are still improving. Perhaps when Phineas and Ferb gets old, the next cool chapter book will seem a little shinier. P also volunteered that she sometimes reads an article in a magazine I've left out in the bathroom -- I think it's time for some good strewing in that room.

P and I did watch a DVD together this week with stories from several great children's books, some of which P's first-grade class read before she left school, and some of which were new to us. The stories were The Man Who Walked Between Buildings (about the tightrope-walker who illicitly strung a cable between the nearly-complete towers of the World Trade Center and then walked it for hours before he submitted to arrest; his punishment was to perform for the city's children, which he loved doing), Miss Rumphius (about making the world more beautiful, with some side-trips for us into how flowers propagate and how seeds spread naturally), Snowflake Bentley (about the man who spent his life capturing photos of snowflakes; we spotted some wonderful ones in the latest snowfall here and enjoyed sharing them with each other in the same spirit, though we need some magnifying glasses!), and The Pot That Juan Built (which goes into many of the processes for making traditional clay pottery in the Southwest and points south). All were based on true stories and processes, some of which we followed up to find out more afterward. We also watched a The Way Things Work DVD on Floating, which covered both buoyancy and the basics of sailing.

A few days later, I was trying to think of something new to add to our day, and I remembered a bag of corn husks, older than my marriage, that I'd evicted from the kitchen while cleaning up a bit. P said she'd be up for making corn-husk dolls with me (she'd expressed an interest in this before), so I looked up a tutorial to get us started, and we were off and running.

We made these (brother and sister, resting together on a big corn-husk pillow) in about 20 minutes, not counting some soaking time for the corn husks. We reinforced our knot lore. And when P had her two dolls and was ready to move on to something else, I used the rest of our soaked corn husks to make a large corn-husk angel to top our Christmas tree, since our previous tree topper broke last year.

We went to two open gyms in different locations this week, one with both kids and one with just P (T was too young for that one, so he got some one-on-one time with UnschoolerDad). I've started to work more during such events at spotting other kids that my kids are enjoying, finding their parents, and extending myself more to make contact with them and check out the possibilities for play dates -- especially for T, who has no ready-made cadre of former school friends and is getting more interested in playing with other kids. I used to resist this kind of connection because my introverted side feared rejection or other sources of social awkwardness. As I learn and live through more things, however, I am developing more courage to act in spite of embarrassment and emotional vulnerability; and I realized it was time to stop letting my own fears be the limiting factor in my kids' social lives. There's no surfeit of play dates to show for these efforts yet, but I'll keep trying, realizing that not every attempt will pan out, and that making new commitments around the holidays is not high on most families' lists of things to do! In the meantime, the kids and I are enjoying each other's company more and more, and that is all to the good.

Cabin Fever and Its Fruits

Another week and though I'm improving slowly, I'm still sick. I guess I need more sleep. But unschooling carries on, albeit at a somewhat slower pace and with a measure of cabin fever.

In the world of ideas about school: Two different people pointed me to a Washington Post article about a school board member, a very successful businessman, who pledged to take the high-stakes tests students in his district were required to pass for graduation, and to publish his results. Of 60 math questions (to take just one section), he knew the answers to none but was able to guess correctly at 10. This experience raised huge questions for him about who writes these tests, who decides what should be on them, and how the results should be used -- he would have been required to take a remedial reading course based on his results. I recommend the article heartily.

Here's a simple, mama-needs-sleep-soon list of highlights for us this week:

• We set up and decorated our large artificial Christmas tree. P is now strong and dexterous enough to get the branches into place on the trunk, and T can now read letters reliably, so my role has been reduced to fluffing up the branches, mediating minor squabbles, and doing things too high for either child to reach. It was a good exercise in cooperation among the three of us, and we did pretty well. Our biggest wrangle was over playing with ornaments (delicate) as if they were toys (stronger). After gluing several broken ornaments back together, I ended up hanging the precious things high and giving up on protecting things that weren't of great sentimental value to any of us. The subsequent decrease in interest in the ornaments has me wondering whether my reaction wasn't one of the fun parts of playing with them. In any case, one of the things I'm working on is decreasing my attachment to particular objects and ways of doing things, especially where that attachment conflicts with my kids' desires for learning and interesting experiences.
• We rolled, cut, and baked dough ornaments. Decorating them is waiting on a trip to the craft store for acrylic paints. As we measured the flour for the dough, we found it infested with some kind of maggots. We looked them up and found they were probably Indian Meal Moths, common worldwide. We looked at photos of them, read a bit about their life cycle and methods for controlling them, and then proceeded to sift them out of the flour and make our ornaments. At least one was alive and wiggling. Having lived in Northern California, where similar (identical?) critters called orchard moths are everywhere, we already keep most of our vulnerable foodstuffs in airtight containers, but our crafts-only white flour was unprotected.
• We roasted some chestnuts, after looking up different ways to cook them and settling on the method used by New York street vendors, which is to boil them until tender and then just toast them a bit for nice looks. Along the way we looked at photos of chestnut trees, chestnut lumber, and the furry green casings in which the nuts grow. We talked a bit about chestnut blight and how its has almost completely wiped out American chestnut trees, so we're eating chestnuts from Asian chestnut trees, which coevolved with the blight. After speculating a bit about the etymology of chestnut, we looked it up and found it has nothing to do with chests, but is most likely what some English speaker heard when someone said Castanea, the genus name and original name of the tree in many places, across language groups.
• P got out an origami-per-day calendar I gave her a while back and wanted to learn to fold things from it. I'm helping her learn to read the instructions and diagrams and do the various techniques. She gets very frustrated sometimes. This week she was fuming loudly in the spectators' area during T's gymnastics lesson, and I said if she couldn't handle her frustration without bothering the people around us, she should wait until we got home to work on the origami. I was pleased to see that she was able to to quiet down and still work through her frustration to a satisfactory result. Learning something you're interested in is always satisfying generally, but not always fun in the moment!
• I'd been noticing that lots of P's pretend play was about being poor, so on one car ride, I suggested we brainstorm the minimum possessions a family living in very limited conditions (no running water or electricity) would need. P took me up on it. She played along as we thought about things like one cooking pot and a fire ring or some kind of stove to use it on; but she really lit up when we started thinking about toys and books. She thought they'd have a few, but when I told her that many poor families have no toys or books at all, she thought long and hard about what kinds of things the kids would play with, or how they might learn to read if they had the opportunity. We got another angle on poverty on a more typical United-States level when I told her a story I'd just read about a family, living on a very tight budget, who had decided to give each other only one gift each, with a $5 spending limit -- and how that Christmas was the best they'd ever had. We have been burning through savings this year and doing less discretionary spending than usual because we're waiting to see the first income from an independent software project to be released very soon, and I can see from her play that money is very much on P's mind. I'm trying to strike a balance in talking with her about money and poverty, not romanticizing poverty, but also letting P know that not having lots of money doesn't mean a family can't have a good life. The kids and I had planned to sign up to help sort gifts at the Share-a-Gift "store," where families who can't afford Christmas presents can pick out donated toys and books to give their kids; but while I was ill and delaying new commitments, volunteer registration filled up. We'll still sort through what we have to donate some gently-used toys to the program.
• After last week's bullying in gymnastics, P and I talked about what might happen if we spoke to the hair-pulling girls and their parents (with possibilities ranging from the situation being resolved to the girls really having it in for her). Today in class, P made a connection with one of the girls and got her to stop; the other girl wasn't in class. Here's hoping this episode of P's education in dealing with bullies is over.
• After reading a thread about art on my favorite unschooling email list (AlwaysLearning), I decided to increase the kids' independent access to art supplies. We took our arts/crafts basket down from the counter and put it on the train table, which never gets used for trains anyway since the floor is so much nicer for big track layouts. P and I sorted supplies and found containers to make them easy to find and use, and I put just a few things up high so T can't decorate too many walls in an unsupervised moment. There's more ongoing art happening now. P has been writing in pretend Chinese characters -- she loves the concept of ideograms for words. I dug up a postcard from my adventures on PostCrossing.com on which my correspondent had illustrated the steps for writing "hi" (Ni Hao) in Chinese, and put them into a form P can use more readily when she's ready for some real characters. Besides art supplies, we started a container of bits and bobs that could be incorporated into creations. P enjoyed taking apart and reassembling some older, less-efficient sink aerators we recently replaced, asking about what they were for, and then transforming them into buildings in a town, with scrap-yarn roads and an inexplicably tall dentist's office building. P's appetite for making creations has been whetted; now she wants lots of yarn she can use to make giant spiderwebs. It's on the shopping list!

The kids have spent a lot of time on Netflix and at other iPad pastimes while I've been sick. I get glimpses:

• P writing "I Love You" with alphabet-soup letters in the Morris Lessmore app
• Both kids transforming Morris Lessmore characters into characters from famous books and related movies. One was the Bride of Frankenstein, which reminded us of a friend's photo I'd recently shown P on Facebook, of her post-op "Frankenfoot," all gussied up with neck bolts and such to go with the stitches, and accompanied by "Bride of Frankenfoot," her other foot, with the classic tall, gray-templed hairdo -- everything really does relate to everything else somewhere! P was curious, so I told her the basics of the story of the creation of Frankenstein's monster.
• P asking today, out of the blue, what a shrine is. She's been watching Phineas and Ferb, a Disney cartoon series she discovered on her own, and one character built a shrine for another who'd been sucked into another dimension. P described the shrine to me in great detail. I told her a little about shrines on different scales, from a tabletop to a building, and we talked a little about what they're for (reminders of loved ones or religious figures; places to focus, pray, and/or meditate). Thank goodness there's something to be learned from P&F, and P's willing to ask the key questions.

P and I also watched a bit more of Cosmos together. One episode, "Heaven and Hell," covered some ground we've seen before, about asteroid impacts, the Tunguska event, etc., as well as vividly describing the hot, corrosive atmosphere of Venus. I stopped to clarify things, including why the planets' appearances and their distances from each other couldn't easily be shown in the same scale, and how the solar-system model used in the series obscures the fact that an asteroid or comet, zooming through our solar system, has a negligible chance of hitting any planet. The word negligible made for an interesting discussion -- I explained it as "so small you could basically ignore it," which led back to more talk about scale -- how small is that? So small relative to what? We also wrestled a bit with helping P understand Kepler's Second Law of Planetary Motion (planets in orbit sweep out equal areas in equal times) -- we'll have to find some better ways of exploring the concept of area, but I think P got the basic idea.

The other big vocabulary-builder recently has been Dragonsinger, which UnschoolerDad finished reading to P tonight. P asks about unfamiliar words, and when UD isn't sure, he calls me in for my knowledge and my willingness to look words up. Just tonight I gave them definitions of querulous and sinecure, as well as a couple more I've already forgotten. Bless Anne McCaffrey; from beyond the grave she's enriching my daughter's vocabulary along with her imagination.

Sick Days

It's been a slow week. I got sick last Tuesday, and I'm still in the throes of a nasty cold-trying-to-turn-sinus-infection. This has meant a slowing of strewing and outings with the kids, so a bit less to write about. But here we go...

The day I got sick, we had a science museum day. P was acting emotionally fragile in the morning, and after trying to help her with the underlying issue and giving her several chances to clean up her whining and opposition to every step of preparation to leave, I decided to take only T to the museum. The kids are a handful when I'm the only adult with them at the museum, since they usually want to do different things, and I was already feeling a little puny, so I decided not to risk a really hard day for all of us. P was upset, but she had the quiet day at home (with UnschoolerDad working at home and available to help her) that I think she really needed, and she was in good spirits when we got home. T was anxious to see the "T Rex Encounter" exhibit -- he wanted to know what Buddy from Dinosaur Train would really have looked like -- and the dinosaur part of the museum's permanent collection. We recognized two Stygimolochs in a diorama. They had been there on our previous visits, but this time we knew what they were from watching Dinosaur Train. It's one of the kids' current favorite shows, and there's always a bit of real paleontology at the end of each episode, related to what happened in the episode.

T, who has a pretty good command of the alphabet and numerals now, enjoyed pushing the appropriate elevator buttons and looking at some signs while I read them to him, repeating the occasional word and pointing to it himself. He's really working on cracking the code of written language, and he makes visible progress just about every week. I opened up the Starfall website for him after seeing a reference to it on a homeschooling email list. I found it disappointing, in that it's strictly phonics-based and almost as boring as any phonics stuff I've seen before (it has some cute animations with the stories that make it a little more fun); but T enjoyed playing with it for a while, and we'll see if he's interested in going back. After most activities there, there's a question, "Did you like this movie (game, book, etc.)?" and the child can mouse over faces with spoken cues (frown = "Not really," flat = "Kind of," and smiling = "Yes!") and choose a response. T chose "Yes!" each time. The web site is set up well to not require much parental coaching; T figured out the interface quickly. He is a digital native, as they say -- he figured out how to use Netflix on the iPad to find the program he wanted, after watching me do it just a few times. He talked through it out loud, with UnschoolerDad listening from across the room. "I want to watch the first Dora episode. I think it's here.... How do I get to the next episode? Maybe I can click this."

This week I learned P was short on books to read independently, so we went to the downtown library and found some good candidates. She asked for recommendations, and I suggested several based on my familiarity with them, or just their jacket-flap descriptions and a quick assessment of their reading level. She rejected the first couple with barely a look, but when I pointed out that she wasn't going to find many books by asking for recommendations and then not even considering them, she started accepting more and getting excited about some of the possibilities.

Another fun use of reading this week happened later in my illness, when talking without coughing became impossible for stretches of the day, and I'd type on my computer for my end of a conversation. P would occasionally have trouble with a word with counter-intuitive spelling, but she figured them all out quickly using contextual clues. P wrote some notes to friends this week, and I noticed again that her handwriting and spelling are improving steadily, even though she doesn't write much -- much that I see, anyway. Sometimes, when I help her clean her room, I find lists or stories that I didn't know she'd written.

There are two read-aloud books going for P's bedtime these days (T still chooses short picture books for bedtime). UnschoolerDad is reading her Dragonsinger (the second book in the Harper Hall trilogy, which they started after finishing the Song of the Lioness series), by the recently-deceased Anne McCaffrey. P likes me to read her short stories from Fearless Girls, Wise Women, and Beloved Sisters: Heroines in Folktales from Around the World. This book was a birthday gift from a wise friend who had mother-daughter story time in mind, and P loves it. We stop to talk about unfamiliar words and situations, and sometimes we talk about the stories after we finish them, thinking about the heroines' actions from our perspective and trying to put them in context for the cultures the stories come from. A new concept this week, in stories from the American Pacific Northwest, was the idea of a village shaman as healer and spiritual guide for the community. Mouse Woman also appeared in two different stories. She's an interesting character: tiny, but powerful because she always knows and does the correct thing for the situation, defeating less-benign actors through sheer cultural and personal integrity.

P and I watched a couple of episodes of Cosmos on Hulu this week. I wasn't expecting her to be that interested; I just turned it on while I was folding laundry, to see if anyone would be drawn to it. P was pretty riveted, as it turned out. Carl Sagan's explanations aren't exactly aimed at a seven-year-old, but his presentation held her attention, and we stopped sometimes to clarify things. What we watched covered the concept of a light year (and thus why it would take so long to travel to other planetary systems), the "cosmic calendar" (looking at the time since the universe began as if it were one year, and placing events on Earth in that perspective), the name and structure of our galaxy (P: "Our galaxy is just the Milky Way?"), how Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth (we also checked out a picture book about this, The Librarian Who Measured the Earth, which we read together today) how natural selection works, the role of sexual reproduction in driving evolution faster, DNA as the instructions for life, and how life may have arisen in the first place (the experiment with running a current through a gas matching the atmosphere of the early Earth, and thus creating the building blocks of proteins and nucleic acids). This last question was one P had asked recently, before we started watching Cosmos. She had also asked, in a voice dripping with skepticism, whether we knew for sure that evolution was how humans had come to exist. Sagan addressed this directly, explaining the mechanisms of natural and artificial selection and giving enough examples of evolution in action that I think P believed him when he said, "Evolution is a fact, not a theory. It really happened." I have discussed with P how scienctists should always be open to new evidence that might refine or revise existing theories, so she has that perspective already, and it might be where her skeptical question came from. It's all good!

In other science-related stuff, both kids have been trying out a demo version of the game World of Goo, which came recommended by other homeschoolers. It's a physics/construction game with a kid-friendly user interface and delightful graphics. The game dynamics quickly get across the principles of making structures strong while conserving building materials. And unlike similar games we've seen elsewhere, this ones uses materials that are flexible and bouncy. Sure, steel beams may be closer to fully rigid than they are to World-of-Goo flexibility, but it's nice to see a game acknowledge and build on (groan!) the fact that even steel beams are flexible and can bend, buckle, and break, so good engineering must take this into account.

Just as I was writing this bit, P asked me, "Five times two, plus two, is twelve, right?" I said yes, and she cried out, "Then six times two is twelve!" I never know when she's going to bring up math, but I like the thinking she shows when she does.

We took a few steps down the path toward starting an aquarium a bit this week, by buying a water test kit and testing the pH and hardness of our water, to find out what kinds of fish would do well with it. We also priced aquarium setups and checked out some fish species at the local pet store; I think we'll buy our fish elsewhere, after seeing how many dead fish were floating in their tanks. We're considering whether we should buy a used aquarium to save money, when we won't really be able to see if it works until we get it home, and we'd need to clean it thoroughly. When P and I made a list, the day before Thanksgiving, of things we were thankful for, "Getting fish soon" was one of P's additions to the list.

One night when I was helping P clean her room, I was thinking about her nametag at church. Each kid can add a bead to the shoelace their nametag hangs on each time they attend, but P has always chosen not to do so. It occurred to me that this might be because P didn't know any knots that were easy to tie and release. So I showed her how to tie and release a square knot, using a shoelace I had handy. She got excited about this. I showed her a lark's head knot too, and it turned out she had figured that one out on her own. I also demonstrated a couple of other knots with different purposes, though we didn't pursue those that night. The next day I showed her how to use well-placed half-hitches in embroidery floss to make a friendship bracelet, the way I learned when I was in high school. She learned that easily and has been adding a few rows per day to a simple bracelet I helped her start. I made a slightly more complex one for her, and she's been wearing it and talking about it happily.

It's signup time for classes at the local recreation centers, and P needs to decide whether to be in gymnastics for the next session. She's been getting scared and/or frustrated with some of the things she's being asked to do in Group 2. I spoke with her instructor after a recent lesson, and she suggested P might like to go back to Group 1 to build her confidence a bit more on the basics. I asked P about this, and she said she'd like to try it. Today I sent her with a note asking to make that change, and it was made. A couple of girls in P's new group pulled her hair repeatedly (Grrrr!), which upset P, but we talked about how she might deal with it if it happens again, and by this evening she was saying she did want to sign up for the new session. P and I have also talked about what kinds of things it would help for her to practice, and we continue working on them together in open gym sessions, with happy results. The rec center where she takes gymnastics has just started doing open gym times, which P is looking forward to trying out.

The slowness of the week, and my need to rest a lot, has borne some interesting fruit. P has been volunteering to put T down for his naps by reading to him, as I used to do. They both seem to like it, and it gives me a break to rest more or get chores done earlier in the day, before I'm too tired. P has also been looking for ways to help on days when I'm really dragging, such as picking up clutter on the floor when my sinuses are too clogged for me to bend over without pain. Her ability to empathize and act compassionately, in short, is showing more than it has in the past. The compassionate behavior comes and goes, but it's good to see it; and it's been lovely to have a daughter who is sweet to me, at least some of the time, while I've been sick. I don't know whether it's the fruit of my recent efforts to be kinder and gentler with the kids as I work toward a more mindful parenting style, or a new developmental stage, or both, but it warms my heart either way.

Life Can Be Yummy

Recently, I've felt a fair amount of despair about feeding my family. T, my 3-year-old, is in a very picky stage of his eating life. (Someone I respect said that this preschool-aged pickiness could make a lot of evolutionary sense -- at three, early human kids would have been old enough to start going along with adults who were gathering food. Being too quick to try an unfamiliar food could have had deadly consequences. So I try to be patient.) P is more willing to try new things, but also difficult to please. Even UnschoolerDad has more food aversions than I can deal with very happily, much of the time -- and he'd like dinner to look like a meal, whereas the kids and I can be happy with some pretty ad-hoc stuff, like scrambled eggs, bread, and peas for a meal, or edamame now and soup later. And I'm gluten-intolerant, so my diet can be challenging too. 

I identified something from my heritage recently that made a lot of sense. Someone more familiar with England than I am told me that food there is considered primarily a source of nourishment rather than pleasure. I'm sure this is an overgeneralization, but it rang true for my primarily-British-heritage-on-both-sides family. When I was growing up, I don't think there was much tolerance for picky eating. (My mom reads this blog, so if she tells me my memory is off, I'll post a correction here!) Good food was on the table every night, and we were expected to eat it. It's frustrating sometimes that the family I've built hasn't bought into that utilitarian, stop-complaining-and-thank-the-cook view of food. Money was also a bit scarce when I was little, and waste was frowned upon. In my frugal young adulthood as an underpaid teacher, this translated into a resistance to eating expensive foods regularly or in large amounts -- a feeling that I need to save them for special occasions, sort of like fine china, only more so since they actually get consumed!

So here I was, finding it difficult to meet all our needs and desires with reasonably nourishing food, even after letting go of the more extreme nutritional goals I was striving to meet pretty recently, before T started rejecting so many foods. This week, when I went to the grocery store (by myself after the kids were in bed -- I could get used to that!), I decided to try to get only things that could be part of meals or snacks that I (and my family, I hoped) would call "yummy." Focus on yummy. I tried to get savory yummies (artichokes -- yes, we like them -- interesting cheeses, chicken to barbecue, etc.) as well as some sweet ones. And I got some foods that were more expensive than I usually buy. Since my frustration about cooking has often led to going out to eat more than we can really afford, I tried to base my buying decisions more on a comparison to the cost of restaurant food than a comparison to the cheapest nutritionally similar food available at the grocery store. Even at $5/pound, brussels sprouts (all of us except T love these, roasted with olive oil and salt, and maybe he'll come around after a few more times of seeing the rest of us enjoy them) made more sense than a side order of broccoli at our favorite restaurant, where it works out to something like $12/pound. The meals and snacks made from this shopping trip are meeting with some pretty good receptions so far.

P brought me a recipe recently. She had painstakingly copied it out of a book onto a piece of paper, and she really wanted to try it. It called for spreading frosting on mini-marshmallows and putting sprinkles on top. Sugar on sugar, with more sugar on top, said my nutri-freak brain. But I didn't say no, partly because I wanted to honor the effort she'd put into the recipe. And on this week's shopping trip, I bought the marshmallows and the sprinkles. I couldn't find a prepared frosting that wasn't loaded with trans fats, so I got some spreadable cream cheese instead. P saw the ingredients the next day, and she was delighted! We tried the recipe that day after lunch. Both kids enjoyed it, and they also ate quite a few marshmallows plain. The next day, after having a couple more marshmallows, P said to me unprompted, "I think maybe I am stopping liking marshmallows." I'm noticing this happening as I am freer with sweets than before -- we still have the peppermints, lollipops, and bubble gum that have been available for weeks, since I decided it would be okay to have some sweets around the house more regularly. P still has a few mini-marshmallows or a lollipop now and then, but she isn't eating lots of them. She also reacts with less complaint if I ask her to defer sweets until after a meal or until the next day.

On that same shopping trip, I also bought some cheap imitation-maple syrup to complete the ingredients for an exploration of density that I'd seen on the Dragonfly TV web site. One day after lunch, I just started putting the stuff together -- this caught the kids' attention quickly. I poured some syrup into a big Mason jar, then some oil (which floated on top of the syrup). Then I got some water ready to pour in and asked what they thought would happen. P predicted the water would go on top of the oil and was pleased and surprised when it ended up between syrup and oil. Then I brought some small objects to drop in, and we guessed where each one might go before trying. T loved actually dropping them in, and the kids suggested a couple to add to what I already had. We ended up trying a piece of cork, a piece of plastic, two different kinds of wood, modeling clay, a chunk of apple, a raisin, and a paper clip. We poked each one down to eliminate surface tension and bubbles, and then observed at what level it came to rest. We drew a picture showing all the liquid layers and where each chunk floated or sank in them. I think I'll save the picture and see if, at some point, P is interested in looking up or directly measuring the densities of some of the materials. When we were done with that, P wanted to have a bowl of syrup so she make a model ocean with modeling-clay icebergs. She liked the way modeling clay floated in syrup much as ice does in water: mostly submerged, but with some sticking out on top. Then she asked for some of the cheap syrup to taste; she's had mostly maple syrup at home. She said it tasted really different. I asked if she thought she could tell the difference blind, and she thought so. So UnschoolerDad and I set up a double-blind taste test (I filled and labeled the little bowls and warmed them in the microwave, since the maple syrup had been in the fridge; UD presented them to a blindfolded P to taste.) P could, in fact, tell the difference under double-blind conditions. When she opened her eyes and saw the two samples, she was confused, because she'd expected UD would give A to her first, then B, and the way they looked to her was the opposite of how they tasted, assuming that was the case; but he'd given her B first. She wanted to know why we made it so complicated, so I explained briefly why scientists would use double-blind conditions, to tease out the real differences between things without worrying that the expectations of the test subjects or of those administering the test would influence the outcome. UD and I smelled the two syrups, and we both agreed that the imitation syrup smelled like childhood, and the maple syrup smelled like adulthood!

Another food adventure this week was making Jell-O for the first time with the kids. They've had it at restaurants, but they were very excited to try it at home. P linked dissolving the mix in hot water with our earlier experiment dissolving peppermint candies. The next day; T couldn't remember what it was called, but he persisted in describing it ("I want that thing I don't know what it's called. It's red and squishy. It squishes in your mouth.") until I realized what he was talking about and got it out to eat! It disappeared quickly. We'll see if it gets requested again. Maybe we'll try making it from real fruit juice with pectin next time; I have a recipe for that.

We also tried new foods: Artichokes with a new kind of dipping sauce; pasta with browned butter and mizithra cheese, as UD and I used to enjoy it at The Spaghetti Factory; blueberry-broccoli sorbet, which was a little weird, but much tastier than it sounds (T finished his; P, who saw what went into the blender, did not); and more. And since there are several foods everyone likes that can be made in a slow cooker, but my sad, cheap old Crock Pot from 15 years ago was ruining some of them, we bought a new slow cooker this week. Much better!

Not everything we do is related to food or candy. We bought an electricity "invention" kit a while back, when there was a sale at Barnes and Noble. Recently P's been asking to make things with it, and we found time to build a telegraph clicker (elecromagnet plus switch plus paper clip close enough to click over to the electromagnet when the switch is closed). I talked with P about how, if we left the circuit closed for a long time, the D cell we were using to run it would run down quickly, since there was very little resistance in the circuit. When we'd exhausted the considerable fun of playing with the clicker, trying it as an electromagnet, learning a few letters of Morse code, and playing "name that tune" by clicking rhythms, we tried putting a small light bulb in series with the clicker. The light lit up beautifully, making it easier to distinguish dots and dashes in Morse code. Then we noticed that the clicker didn't work when the light was in the circuit. I realized this was because of the added resistance of the bulb, and explaining this to P meant talking about how an incandescent light works, which has come up since then when P asked about what different kinds of lights existed. Later in the week, UD tried building the radio in the set (a simple LC oscillator hooked up to an earphone) with the kids, but it only picks up a little static, and only in what seems like an unlikely position for the adjustable capacitor. We may try rebuilding the capacitor in a different size, or with a different dielectric (UD chose black construction paper), or just debugging the circuit for unintended electrical contacts. We also wonder whether the diode provided has too high a resistance for the non-powered circuit; but we haven't tried any of these solutions yet.

A few days after the radio attempt, P and I were driving near a railroad track and saw a train with many different kinds of cars, including some empty ones whose purpose wasn't clear to us. One turned out to be a lumber car, as we found out today searching online. The other one was also a lumber car, but with an odder design, including lots of oval holes. P mused aloud, "Maybe the empty train cars are carrying electricity to make the train go." This led to a discussion of ways electricity works, with electrons flowing from one point in a circuit to another and creating heat and/or causing work to be done along the way. Having made the telegraph clicker was a good point of reference for that.

P has also been asking to practice math lately. She and T found a memory game played with addition facts (e.g., match "3+4" to "7"), and they both liked that. T asks, "What's three plus three?" and P answers, or I answer; or P and T play the game together. P was very excited to find that game. She's also starting to think about multiplication, asking me multiplication facts from time to time to check her guesses. From what she tells me, I'd say she's building up an idea of multiplication as repeated addition, and it's pretty accurate.

UnschoolerDad scored a coup recently, when he discovered that the game Scribblenauts, formerly for Nintendo DS (which we don't have), had come out for iPad. He immediately bought it and loaded it on our iPads, and all of us have been enjoying it. In Scribblenauts, you can create almost any object you can name. Want a hungry giant? Type it in -- but watch out: he might eat you! Want to fly? Try making a jetpack or a Pegasus to ride -- or P's favorite, giving your character wings. Want to get a lion to go somewhere? Try conjuring some meat for it to eat. Feed a love potion to a monster if you like. Create a bulldozer to push heavy things around, or a backhoe to dig. The coup here, besides the considerable fun, is that this is one of the first things that has both kids wanting to know, asking, and remembering how to spell things, without anyone needing to convince them (as in the past) that using standard spellings might be a good idea. They're also learning the QWERTY keyboard, which is coming in handy in their lives much earlier than it did in mine. They enjoy the puzzle levels, but they play even more gleefully in the freeform sandbox level, where you can create whatever you like and play with it as you choose. Today Petra dug herself an underground cave with a backhoe and shovel. She tried to make it deeper with a jackhammer (she was delighted to know that the first part of that work was the name Jack, as in Jack and Annie in the Magic Tree House books), but she ran up against a limit of the game there.

I've watched a couple of documentaries recently while folding laundry. P and T orbit and play while I do this, sometimes coming to rest and watching for a while. One was an episode of The Planets called "Terra Firma." It covered volcanism and similar planetary activity, such as ice geysers on Europa and plumes of an as-yet-unidentified substance on Triton. This series is written for adults, so when the kids are watching, I stop it frequently to re-explain something that I think they'd find interesting, if they didn't already understand it. Io's constant volcanic activity caught P's attention. After thinking about how very active it was, she asked excitedly (correctly interpreting something the narrator had said), "You mean you could never make a globe of Io that would be good for more than a day?!" Then today she tuned in to a TED talk I was watching about near-earth asteroids, what kinds of damage they have caused in the past, and the tactics, crude and subtle, that we could use to divert a near-earth asteroid that looked like it would actually hit the Earth. She was a little concerned about this possibility, but after I said it was extremely unlikely, she enjoyed listening to the descriptions of diversion methods.

In gymnastics this week, P got scared and shut down for a while when she was asked to hop along the high balance beam. I flagged down her assistant teacher and asked if she needed to come out for a while; she did. I just held her for a few minutes while she cried and talked about wanting to quit after this term, and I reassured her that many gymnasts take a while to get good at things, and that my regard for her doesn't depend on what she can do. She rejoined the class just as it was ending. After class I mentioned to her teachers that she was really frustrated and talking about quitting. They considered some possibilities, like moving her back from group 2 to group 1, but when I told them she'd said she wanted to be able to try things on the low beam before doing them on the high beam, they said they thought they could accommodate that. The next day there was an open gym time available at another local gymnastics school, and when I asked P if she'd like to go, she enthusiastically agreed. At her suggestion, we alternated between working on the beam and playing fast-paced games of her choosing, using a timer for both. She got a lot better at hopping along the high beam, after practicing on the low beam several times. It was great to see her smiling as she did it, and transitioning from wanting me right there, close enough to grab if she lost her balance, to wanting me to stand so far away that I couldn't possibly help, but only watch and cheer her on. I'm hoping that this kind of support will decrease her frustration and enable her to continue with gymnastics if she wants to, since there is a lot she enjoys about gymnastics. We shall see! 

Road Trip!

Here we go with some things we learned and experienced on our family road trip! I made zero notes during the trip, so this is sure to be missing things, but here, at least, are some highlights.

We started off with a lot of driving, since we were headed through some very sparsely populated areas of New Mexico with not much to stop and see. On the way, both kids were interested in looking at maps of where we were going, which our road atlas provided. We brought out some electronic toys we'd bought for our last road trip two years ago, which played games for learning letters, shapes, phonics, and a little spelling. T didn't remember them, and they fed his current interest in letters, the sounds they make, and how words he knows are spelled (he'll look at a stop sign and ask, "How you spell stop?"), as well as a general interest in gadgets. Though P's already learned most of their lessons, she liked playing with them and helping T learn to use them.

And honestly, they fought over them quite a bit at first. Road trips are crucibles for dealing with squabbling and conflict in general, and the first full day on the road (we got away mid-afternoon the first day) was pretty rotten. One thing we learned was to put the toys away in the morning, when the kids were fresh -- interestingly, this brought no objections from the kids -- and look out the windows and talk together, or occasionally listen to a book on CD together. In the afternoon, when the kids started to wilt, we'd have some quiet time so T could take a nap (P would read, doze, look out the window, or write a note to a friend at home), and then if we were still driving after the nap, we'd get out the electronic toys -- with an agreement about how to share them -- or a video both kids could watch. We loaded up the iPad with episodes of the kids' favorite PBS Kids shows, and the ones that got the most love on the trip were Martha Speaks (lots of fun vocabulary development and storylines the kids enjoyed), Wild Kratts (an adventure show about animals and their "creature powers," which has led to some very detailed pretend play about being draco lizards, monarch butterflies, bats, etc.), and Dinosaur Train (which mixes time-traveling fantasy and family-oriented stories with lots of real information about dinosaurs, including some that's new to me).

Besides shaping the day to the kids' energy levels, the best thing I figured out to do was to ask the kids to think, in the morning, about what kind of day they wanted to have. (This was particularly fruitful after that first rotten day!) I'd remind them that what we all did would set the tone for the day, and encourage them to think about what they could do that would help make the kind of day they wanted to have. That, plus an occasional reminder that we all could affect how the day went, made a big difference toward compromise, peaceful conflict resolution, and general not-yelling-at-each-other. Other good developments in getting along: P got a little better at remembering she's not the only one in the family with desires and needs and trying to think of or agree to win-win or at least compromise solutions. For one specific example: Before the trip, P said she didn't want to share a bed with T at all, even though we might be getting some two-queen rooms for the whole family in order to pay for one room and not two. So we brought a sleeping pad she (or T, if she could convince him) could use to sleep on the floor. When it came down to it, she decided to try sharing the bed, and both kids ended up enjoying the night and morning cuddling and the waking up happy together. Fortunately their needs for nighttime sleep are very compatible right now! After the trip she told me she'd like to share a big bed with T some more at home, and T has asked P to help him get down for his nap twice.

After lunch on the second full day out, we arrived at Carlsbad Caverns, our first big destination. We did the self-tour of the Big Room with the kids' version of the audio guide, since T was too young for the ranger-guided tours. The audio guide was more information than the kids wanted to digest, so I'd listen to it and give them the highlights. We learned about how the cavern developed in the first place, how its many decorations were formed, and the history of its exploration, including the first explorer (who began at age 16) and the first female explorers (teenage daughters of other expedition members). It was T's naptime, so we ended up carrying his slumbering body through the second half of the 1.5-mile hike -- quite a workout in 95% humidity, and we were profoundly glad for the occasional bench. The things that stuck with me the most about the caverns were P's awe and wonder at a still-forming feature (this was near the end of the walk, and she already knew enough to understand what she was looking at and marvel at how those tiny drops of water were creating such massive forms), and the fact that some 4500-year-old bat guano was probably the youngest natural feature of the Big Room.

We had a wonderful time in the Carlsbad Caverns bookstore, which fortunately we found before the gift shop. T found a deck of photos of animals that he enjoyed playing with in the car. P got a couple of picture books about the desert to peruse. And best of all, we bought a field guide to cacti and other arid-lands plants. For the next day and a half, as we drove through West Texas, this helped us learn new plants and find out a lot about them, as UnschoolerDad, P, and I read sections of the book aloud. Saguaros and other giant cacti, which we didn't see but read a lot about, are particularly amazing in their details. (Oddly, I found that twice the right name for a plant occurred to me, even though I didn't think I knew the plant's name, and since I was driving for this whole stretch, I hadn't opened the field guide. The plants were staghorn cholla and mesquite trees. I am 100% certain I didn't learn those in school! A friend guessed that I'd read enough about the Southwest, especially in Barbara Kingsolver books, that I'd stored the names away then without realizing it.) As we drove through burned and unburned areas near Carlsbad, it was interesting to see the differences: which plants survived the burning, and how things were re-establishing themselves in that dry and rocky land.

We spent a long day driving across more of West Texas, watching the slow change in vegetation from yucca and cactus to mesquite and cactus, with more and more live oaks as we approached Austin. At a rest stop, I got out a ball to kick around. P wanted to play catch, saying, "I don't know anything about soccer." I said we didn't need to play soccer, and that kicking a ball around could be a lot like playing catch, only with your feet, so she gave it a try. Soon we were defending trees and picnic grills as goals and dribbling the ball around with great glee, which was a good prelude to a nap!

In Austin, we visited with family and spent a lot of time outside in the beautiful weather. We took a sunset cruise one night to see the bats leave their roosts under the Congress Avenue Bridge. The guide shared lots of interesting information about the river, the bridge, and the bats. The bridge was redone in the 1980s to make it better for the bats. Whereas before it was inhabited by a motley crew of male bats, now its deep expansion-joint recesses are so attractive that the pregnant mama bats have kicked out the guys and made it their summer nursery, housing nearly 2 million bats. The bats like having room to drop, which they need to do to get flying -- bats rarely land during an evening of flying and feeding. We saw some of them drop, but the most amazing thing was their agility in flying around tight corners. These creatures weigh about the same as a nickel. The evolutionary engineering to get something so slight to achieve and endure such tight cornering boggles the mind. We also enjoyed hearing the audible portions of their vocalizations as we passed under the bridge, though some of the babies on the boat with us seemed pretty distressed, possibly by higher frequencies only they could hear.

While we were in Austin, P's uncle, a Half Price Books fanatic, chased down a copy of the third book in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, so P could continue reading the series to herself as we drove. She chose several other books while she was at the bookstore. After we got home, P told me one evening that she was ready to give away her Magic School Bus books (as she's already done with most of her Magic Tree House books). When I asked why, she said that she'd already read them, and that they were now below her reading level. When I asked what she wanted to be reading now, she answered, "You know, longer books with smaller letters." She's caught on to the industry indicators of intended reading level, all right! In the same evening of conversation, she told me offhandedly that she was reading Little House in the Big Woods to T. Did you hear that sound of my heart singing a little at the initiative and the sibling harmony, not to mention the advance in reading level? And she still begs some nights to stay up late and read. (We still draw a line, albeit a blurry one sometimes, on bedtime, since T wakes up early no matter when he goes to bed, and more sleep makes better days. P, who can sleep in after a late night, gets a little more leeway.)

Our time in Dallas brought more family visits and some interesting experiences and potential future experiences. The kids learned that my parents' dog was failing quickly from a recently-discovered, aggressive cancer. He had some good days while we were there, but had to be put down shortly after we got back home. This went right by T, who doesn't show any understanding of the concept of death yet. P was very solicitous with the dog while we visited, and had a very dark day the day he was put down. She remembers a cat we put down a few years ago -- an early start to her real-world experiences with death. She does, in fact, still want to keep fish -- I broached the subject, and she kept us researching for most of an evening about the kinds of fish we might start with. I have the feeling there will be further experiences with death along that path, but also a wealth of learning about small ecosystems, water chemistry, predation, life cycles, and more.

We also visited my only living grandparent, my dad's mom, who gave me my choice of a wealth of genealogical records and photo albums to bring home. (She would have given me all of them, but space in the car was limited!) I tried to choose some that would provide many stories I could share with her and with the kids, so there should be some fun glimpses of history to be had there. P has enjoyed stories I've told her so far from family history gleaned on my mom's side of the family.

T and I had a quick adventure one afternoon in Dallas, riding the newish light rail system. One-on-one time with the kids is a blessing when it comes; T has so many more questions when I'm alone with him than at other times, and I like being able to go at his pace more of the time.

On the way back from Dallas, we stopped in Wichita Falls and checked out the River Bend Nature Center. It was a slow morning there, and the kids got a lot of attention from a volunteer, who took out several snakes for them to see and touch and told them what she knew about these particular snakes. There was a milk snake (a species often confused with coral snakes), and we learned the rule that if red touches black, that's a nonvenomous milk snake, but if red touches yellow, that's a coral snake and deadly. There was also a snake in for rehab who was not being handled, so we talked about the different reasons an animal might be in a nature center, and why different reasons would mean different treatment for the animal. We played outside on some covered wagons, noticing the springs under the seats and how they worked and relating this to the lack of shock absorption in the wheels and axles. There was a sandbox with lots of real bones buried in it; these seemed to be mostly horse bones. We dug up one or two dozen bones, noticing the shapes of the jaw bones, the porous and networked texture of all the bones, the shapes of the molars, and how some of the shapes made good digging tools. We talked about what sorts of tools people might have made from bones like these. We articulated a femur and pelvis that seemed to belong together, checking out the ball-and-socket joint with hands on and envisioning the ligaments that would hold the joint together in a live animal. We also went over our experiences with bones, trying to figure out what color bones would be in a live animal, since the ones we were looking at were all sunbleached. And we talked about the phrases "long in the tooth" and "look a gift horse in the mouth" as they relate to horses' molars continuing to grow well into adulthood. Finally, we stopped by the pond and checked out the structures of lily pads, with their sturdy stems and clinging roots.

At the Nature Center store we bought a couple of books of Mad Libs, which were new to our kids. Within fifteen minutes back in the car, P had the more common parts of speech (nouns, plural nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) sorted out and was enjoying the random hilarity as we filled in the Mad Libs together and read them out.

We took a rest day in Amarillo, getting some down time hanging around the hotel room and then checking out the Kwahadi Museum of the American Indian in town. There we saw arrow and spear points made from stone; different kinds of flutes and shakers; animal pelts of various species, including faces and feet; different kinds of beads and beadwork; people in the process of designing beadwork and weaving on inkle looms; and youth practicing theatrical versions of ceremonial dances. All the people were part of a scouting program, and none were Native Americans of any description. (One of the scout leaders told us this; it wasn't just our assumption based on appearance.) That felt odd to me, and made us wonder how faithfully things there were interpreted; but it was an interesting time nonetheless.

The rest of our trip home was very unscheduled and ad hoc, which was delightful. We stopped when something looked interesting and when it seemed a stop might be nice. An unassuming little museum in Dumas, TX, turned out to be a gold mine of artifacts from 100 years ago, give or take a decade or two. It was set up in many small areas, each focused on a different area of life or a different trade or business. We saw and talked about an old phone switchboard (we discussed how calls were connected then and now), a check cancelling machine from a bank (how checks work), a dry-goods store display with fabric and trims for clothing (similarities to modern fabric stores and the limited selection long ago), a doctor's office with herbal remedies as well as early pharmaceuticals and an ether-based anesthesia machine, a Victrola (P saw a vinyl record and asked, "What's this?" and we talked about what it was and how it worked, and I felt old!), a set of McGuffey readers (we discussed how few books an early schoolhouse would have had, and how students learned many subjects by reading and memorizing in these readers), a wall of post office boxes, a huge collection of toy and real tractors and other farm implements, and a shelf of court docket books, among a great many other things. I bought a pocketknife for P, who I think is ready for one -- I was reminded by Gever Tulley's TED Talk, "Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do," that I was already whittling at P's age, and didn't quite manage to put out my own eye doing so. Later that day I showed it to her, and we started on some verbal safety lessons about where and how to use it safely, including an account of my near-blinding experience. The hands-on lessons haven't begun yet, but she's eager to start, so we will soon.

We stopped in a few places in southeastern Colorado. One was a ranger station for the Comanche National Grasslands, where T and P scored a lot of free goodies from the friendly ranger staffing the counter. The best: a field guide to prairie birds, which P has spent a lot of time with since then. Sometimes she's reading it or incorporating it into pretend play ("This is a packet showing all the birds I sighted this morning on my birdwatching expedition!"), and sometimes she's relating it to birds she has seen. Another stop was a railroad depot in Kit Carson, where the museum was closed, but the kids still enjoyed climbing on a real caboose parked by the parking lot. The scale of a real train car is hard to fathom until you stand right next to it, and they finally had that opportunity.

And then there were things that happened all along, or didn't depend much on where we were:

• We kept track of the numbers of engines and cars in each train we saw, if someone was available to count them at the time, and we worked out the ratio of cars to engines for each, using mental arithmetic and sharing a few estimation tricks with P. All the ratios came out between 30 and 35, regardless of the type of train or whether its cars were loaded or empty, except for one train that was stopped and looked like it might be in the process of being reconfigured. 
• We watched The Weather Channel and Animal Planet several evenings in hotels, since it seemed to hold the kids' interest better than other available fare. We saw lots of riveting stories about tornadoes, floods, venomous snakes and lizards, invasive foreign animal species, and more, but even these lost their shine after a while. This was one of the first experiences our kids have had with broadcast TV and the idea that "what's on" is limited and often not that interesting. This almost feels like a history lesson, given all that's available on demand now!
• We talked a little about caffeine as both a common stimulant and an addiction. When I explained once that we were stopping so UnschoolerDad could get some iced tea, P asked why he wanted it, and I  explained that he had been using it enough that he was getting some withdrawal headaches without it. P immediately asked the right question (to my mind): Why did he start using it in the first place? He had some good reasons, but P came away with what seems to me like a healthy suspicion that using habit-forming substances may not always be worth the short-term pleasures or benefits.

After we got back, P volunteered one day, "Sometimes I think I might want to go back to school, but then I think about it." I asked, "What thought stops you from leaning that way?" She replied, "I like being able to go places and learn about stuff I'm interested in."

And mama smiled.

Of Contour Maps, Candy, and Cargo Cults

Whew! We just came back from a two-week road trip as a family; I'll write about that in a different post. This material is from notes I made before we left, which preparations for the trip kept me too busy to write up.

I forgot to write before that when we were on our way back from our trip to see the elk bugling, we were driving down a winding mountain road that roughly followed a river. P asked "Why do you think this road is so curvy?" We got to talking about why it's good for roads not to be super-steep, and I said the designers of the road were trying to follow the elevation contours as closely as they could. Earlier that day we'd seen a map of the national park, with contours shown in relief. If you looked closely, you could see that the contours were built up with actual flat layers of material (or perhaps the map was made to look as if it had been built up that way) -- so the contour lines were obvious in the fine texture of the map. We looked at some contour maps online when we got home, relating the concept to places familiar to us.

Also on that trip, P asked whether it was hard to tell aspen apart from pine in the summer, when the aspen weren't gloriously gold as they were on that autumn day. We talked a little about the lighter shade of green, flatter texture, and tendency to flutter in the breeze as distinguishing qualities of aspen leaves.

In an unfortunate example of experiential learning, P accidentally swallowed a peppermint hard candy whole while we were coming home from a restaurant. She was quite miserable with that big, hard thing stuck in her esophagus. We had her drink sips of water. She reported that each sip hurt as it reached the candy, but then the pain level went back to normal. When we got home I gave her some warm water to sip, and she said that seemed to speed up the process of dissolving the candy. In a little while the candy slipped into her stomach and stopped hurting, though her esophagus was still sore when she ate or drank for the rest of the day. We talked a little about the process of dissolving, and why P wouldn't see the whole mint in her poop. The next time I went grocery shopping, I bought a bag of peppermints. Then, as we were finishing lunch one day, I set up three bowls of water -- cold with ice, room temperature, and hot -- the kids got very curious as I did this without explanation (I answered their questions rather than laying it all out) -- and put a mint into each. We stirred each about the same amount with a chopstick and watched what happened until the differences were clear: the one in hot water was dissolving a lot faster. There didn't seem to be much difference between the cool- and cold-water bowls. We ate the mints and drank the water from the bowls. P noticed that the mint flavor in the water tasted strong in the ice-cold water. We wondered whether the cool tongue feel of the menthol was intensified by the cold of the ice water.

One day, P was pretending that she lived in a pre-electric society, but that she had heard of electric lights and had made something that looked like a light fixture and stuck it on her bedroom ceiling. This reminded me of cargo cults, so I told her about them and pulled up some photos online of pre-industrial Pacific Islanders who, after WWII ended in the Pacific, had built control towers, runways, and (nonworking) radio gear out of locally available materials, hoping that doing so would bring back the airplanes and their useful cargo. We talked a little about how, when people don't understand a technology or phenomenon, they sometimes try to replicate it in an attempt to make it work for them anyway. Richard Feynman described "Cargo Cult Science" in one of his famous talks.

This playing may have been related to another recent event. There were some great rebates available for energy-efficiency home improvements, so we had our home checked out by an energy auditor. As a result we've made covers for the swamp cooler vents and had insulation added to the attic and some sealing of our home done. I explained what was going on to P, who was annoyed at all the racket in the house (though she and T loved coming up with games to play with the leftover mylar/plastic insulation from the vent covers). We talked about how getting our house better sealed and insulated should allow us to spend less on energy and have less of a detrimental effect on the environment. After thinking about this a bit, P asked if sometime soon we could go a week using no energy. We talked about what that would mean -- we wouldn't be able to heat the house, use our electronics, turn on lights, cook food, etc. She was still interested in a more limited version (no electronics/lights for a limited time), so we may try that soon.

A few times recently, P has asked me what I was doing when I was looking at online petitions, trying to decide whether to participate. Some recently have been very general online petitions, without enough detail about how the organizers wanted to achieve their goals. P was curious about what petitions were for, so we talked about online petitions, recall petitions, and other means for lots of ordinary people to try to effect change in things beyond their direct control. The particular petition that sparked her questions was about student loan forgiveness, and P wanted to know about student loans, so we talked about those and loans in general. P wanted to know why I wasn't sure about the petition, so I talked about my concerns about where the money would come from, and how current and future college students could plan. Would they expect their loans to be forgiven also? It might make more sense to increase government funding available for education in a way that would allow realistic financial planning for all involved.

P, T, and UnschoolerDad went to a fall festival at a local farm. Not much learning of any schooly subjects was reported to me, but the kids had a lot of fun climbing on stacks of giant tractor tires, driving pedal-powered race cars, and screening pails of mud for semiprecious stones. (Size, not density, was the screening method, so there wasn't a chance to relate this to panning for gold.)

But speaking of schooly subjects, P continues to read chapter books on her own, and the other day when we were doing a very rushed set of errands, she went through a pile of coupons as I drove, looking for the one for the store we were headed to. She found it on the first time through the coupons, so I'd say her reading speed is doing great. She's also been asking occasionally to "do math." I ask her what kind of math she wants to do, and then write some arithmetic problems to suit her desires. If they're challenging, we do some together, and I gradually pull back until she's doing them mostly or completely on her own. For stuff that's more familiar, she likes me to write down several problems and then sit nearby while she works them, checking her answers when she asks me to. Our most recent problem set was addition facts to 20, including doubles and problems with unknown addends (e.g., 3 + ___ = 11, or subtraction/algebra in disguise). She's done more advanced, multi-digit addition and subtraction, but she seems to be recognizing that stuff like that is easier if you have many of the more basic facts memorized, and she's actively working on them.

T is learning to add small numbers (up to five or so) and read 2-digit numbers. He asks frequently how to say a 2-digit number (such as the page number in a book being read) and how to write particular letters, and he's enjoying some Android phone games I've downloaded that let him practice some of these skills.

In a happy accident recently, T chose an early-generation Transformer toy on a thrift store trip with UnschoolerDad. He thought it was just a car, but when he showed it to me, something about it seemed to want to move, and I started the process of making it into a robot. We discovered its full range of moves over the next day or so. This is just about the perfect toy for T, who really enjoys figuring out how things work and then making them do their thing, over and over again.

P continues to spend her allowance on things she wants, mostly small toys. On that same rushed set of errands, though, we were at the fabric store, and I told her I'd buy her some small pieces of fabric for her sewing/crafting. She picked out a couple of holiday calico prints to make holiday dresses for her dolls.

Here are some highlights of learning from recent media, from the PBSKids iPad app and library DVDs:

• What a metal detector is and how to use it (Curious George)
• What "scrub the mission" means (Curious George; I paused it to check if they understood, and then I looked up and shared the origin of the term, from when lists of plane flights were made in pencil and could be erased or "scrubbed" when canceled)
• "Leaves of three, let it be" (Curious George; I added and explained, "But if it's hairy, then it's a berry")
• Dentists and what kinds of things they help with (Berenstain Bears; this was new material to T, who's been along for P's visits but hasn't yet been himself)
• Why people move house sometimes, and what's good and hard about the process (Berenstain Bears; P remembers a little bit about our last move, but not much; T was only 6 months old then)
• Snobbish/arrogant behavior and its effects on social relationships (Berenstain Bears)
• Ways of looking for different perspectives when things look bad (Berenstain Bears)

And finally: P wants fish. She's been asking for lots of different kinds of pets for a while now, most of them likely prey to our two cats. Fish, though, I think we could manage, with good precautions to keep an aquarium lid secure. P wanted fish NOW, before our road trip, but I said we could look at it seriously when we returned. P decided to make a fake fishbowl in a mason jar, with some rocks, tap water, and a fish made of aluminum foil. First she cut out the fish shape from the foil, but it just floated on the surface tension of the water. I suggested she try molding a 3-D fish from foil, and that floated because of trapped air inside. We tried squeezing it tightly, but it still floated until we poked some holes with a skewer to let out the bubbles. Then it sank to the bottom, but rested on its nose there, almost neutrally buoyant. The next morning, it was floating again, and we saw that there were tiny bubbles all over it. Shaking the jar dislodged those, so it went to the bottom again. During all this, P started showing some insight into buoyancy, and we talked about Archimedes' principle (a floating body displaces its own weight in water). We tried floating a small glass bowl in a larger bowl of water, which worked fine. We imagined crumpling up the glass bowl into a hunk of solid glass and decided it would sink, as indeed the bowl does when you put it into the water sideways. But if you put it in bottom first, it displaces more water, since the airspace inside that's below the water line also displaces water, so it floats. In a tie-in with her recent pottery lessons, P noted that a hunk of clay would sink in water, but if you made it into a pinch pot, it could float.

I'm still trying to decide whether to bring up the real fish again, or wait until P mentions it.

When Does This Ruckus Die Down?

Yesterday I spoke with a parent of another child in P's choir, and she mentioned going recently to nearby Rocky Mountain National Park to see the aspen in their fall colors, to see the elk in rut, and to hear them bugling. We didn't have anything scheduled today, so this morning I proposed a day trip and the kids agreed. After lunch we took our warm clothes, snacks, water, and a take-out dinner, and headed up to the park.

On the way, we talked about other things: Why kids can't have credit cards of their own (because they can't legally sign contracts promising to pay on time). How interest on credit cards works. These came up because of an Arthur clip the kids watched on the iPad shortly before we left. Then, as we got out of town, P asked what the difference was between mountains and foothills, and we played around with that, talking about possible ways of making the distinction. Then we talked about National Parks -- why they exist, and how their rules are different from those of city parks (for instance, that those who run the parks leave things closer to their natural state, and that guests aren't supposed to take things away from National Parks), and that there are usually park rangers who live in the National Parks.

Then we reached the visitors' center just outside the park, and the fun gained momentum. We briefly checked out the displays on seasons in the park and saw stuffed local fauna: weasels and ptarmigan in their winter coats/plumage, a badger (P asked if it was related to a skunk because of its stripy markings; we agreed to look it up later), a chickaree, a marten (cute!), and others. We looked through a Discovery Room with local clothing and artifacts from three eras: When the Utes and Arapahoes were the humans living here, the early period of white settlement, and the present. P tried on a sunbonnet and realized why Laura Ingalls always wanted to pull hers off to get her peripheral vision back. We petted pelts from elk, beaver, and squirrel. We smelled beaver castorium (yuck! But it must smell good to beavers), used to bait beaver traps during the settlement era. We felt replica spear heads and arrowheads and saw an atlatl. We checked out a raised-relief map of the park showing alpine tundra, subalpine forest, montane forest, and riparian biomes. We talked about treeline and how it marks the boundary between the first two.

Then we drove into the park and found a good place to watch an elk harem or two do their mating-season thing. I don't think we actually saw any mating take place, though it wasn't for lack of anyone trying. The alpha bull was too busy chasing away satellite bulls to get busy with the cows, most of whom were probably already pregnant anyway, since the mating season is almost over. One bystander said that alpha bulls lose a lot of weight during the six-week mating season, since they have very little time to rest or eat, especially if they have large harems. The one we were watching most was trying to keep upwards of 30 cows to himself, and he had his work cut out for him! I got to listen in on a naturalist speaking to a group of people he'd brought in, and I passed along interesting tidbits to P about:

• Harem size (from a few cows to the larger group we saw): in larger harems, more cows are mated by non-alpha males, which increases the genetic diversity of the herd
• Dominance (alpha male tries to pass on his own genes; other males sneak in to mate if they can get away with it)
• Scent marking of females by males (the males pee on their own front legs, and then mount for the sole purpose of rubbing those legs on the females' flanks. This would explain some of the smelly reputation elk have, I guess!)
• Cows get to decide whether to allow an approaching male to mate them; most cows try to get pregnant early in the season so their calves will be born earlier in the year and size up better before the next winter.

We also talked about aspen, since we could see some beautiful stands of them, some still with their golden foliage: How they are fast growers but individually not very long-lived; but how this doesn't matter much, since they send out runners and spread so successfully that an individual aspen organism can have hundreds of trunks. Some of our neighbors have aspens in their front yards; we'll check next time we walk by for nearby volunteers. We talked about pine bark beetles, about which there were many informational displays in the park, and about how we may have to remove our Ponderosa pine this winter, since it appears to have become infested (we should be able to tell for sure and get it removed before the next generation of beetles flies and endangers neighbors' trees). The ranger on hand talked to us for a while. I asked her if there was an hour when the elks' ruckus tended to die down. She said nope, she lives in the park, and those guys bugle all night long.

Oh, the bugling. It's quite an eerie noise. My mamma mind kept switching between enjoying its strangeness, filtering it out as if it were the sound of kids playing a rowdy game in the distance, and being startled at the apparent sound of someone getting mauled by a bear! Last night when I was hatching my day-trip plan, I searched for YouTube videos posted in the last week of elk at Rocky Mountain National Park and found one posted just two days earlier. When I played it, after the kids were asleep, UnschoolerDad was nearby but not watching my screen. He just about panicked, wondering who was screaming bloody murder in our house and why.

On the way home, after a joyful time browsing the gift shop, we discussed high-beams and the etiquette of using them, as well as the uses and geometry of reflectors. We stopped at a dark pullout to check out the sky, and we saw the Milky Way, which we can't see in town. Aaaahhhhhh.

This was definitely our densest day of learning this week, but there have been several other highlights. Here are some:

• P went through a couple of days of scanning maps, finding places she wanted to know something about, and asking me questions to research online: "How many pyramids are there in Egypt? What can you tell me about the Congo? What kinds of animals live in South Africa? What kinds of houses do people live in in Australia?" We found pretty good answers to those, though she moved on quickly to other questions. Another map examination was punctuated with, "Hey, did you know there are two Russias on this map?" (Like most world maps, it wraps at the International Dateline, so there's a bit of Eastern Russia up there by Alaska.)
• P is sewing up a storm, crafting odd little things with lots of buttons to satisfy T's button mania, and making plans for bigger and more complicated things every day. She wants to sew by hand, not machine, and rejects many of my suggestions, but she's making very interesting progress without much guidance. Halloween costumes are in the bag with pretty much no input from me, which is a nice change!
• P is interested in helping T finish learning his letters; he's a highly motivated learner right now, as he starts to recognize and/or sound out the occasional word. This is prompting a certain amount of regularizing of her own writing, as I gently point out places where she's substituting a capital for a lowercase letter, writing something backwards, etc. P went through a period of not wanting her writing to be governed by outside rules, but she understands why I'd want T to be exposed to a less eccentric version of writing. I enjoy the fact that real-life considerations are motivating her to change where my earlier exhortations could not.
• At pottery class this week, the teacher gave T a lump of clay to play with on the way home when we picked P up from class. P enjoyed showing T some of what she's been learning and wants to get some play-dough going at home again so they can try it all out together. T loved the feel of the clay, and the difference the next day when it had dried and hardened, and getting to play with some of the fired items P's been bringing home.
• T checked out more than half the books on trucks, airplanes, and cars from the kids' section of our branch library this week. He has me read him the steps of the diesel-engine cycle over and over. I think there's something he's missing that he keeps trying to find there: he keeps telling me, "No! Read the whole thing!" even when I've read every word, and sometimes provided additional explanation where it seemed helpful. Perhaps we can find or build a model of an engine (or at least a cylinder and piston) we can play with, or barring that, an animation we can run and stop and talk about as much as he likes.
• P had two good play dates this week with friends from her former school, which was good, since we decided to skip Park Day because of a potty-training snag. Fortunately, things are getting better again with T's potty use. Knock wood!
• Both kids enjoyed a Magic School Bus DVD from the library. It included nice episodes on athletic performance (the relationships between oxygen, lactic acid, muscle performance, and the jobs of the heart and lungs); forces (types of forces, friction, and what life would be like without friction); and archaeology (how archaeologists use available information to form hypotheses about artifacts and then test their hypotheses using logical deduction and additional information).
• The kids discovered another show to love on the PBSKids iPad app. It's called Wild Kratts, and it's a fun exploration of lots of animals and their special "powers." The imaginative play between the kids has taken a turn toward the spandex-clad and superhero-themed recently, and now animal powers have been added to that mix.
• Both kids are enjoying shadow play with flashlights and hand shadows. T is finally starting to get the hang of tracking down the origins of scary-looking shadows in his room at night, as the concept of shadows-as-areas-of-blocked-light gets more solid for him.

I'm beginning to think this ruckus is never going to die down. And that's fine with me!

P.S. I ran across this blog post, which does a nice job of gathering together thoughts on why one might decide to unschool, what it's like, and why we might reasonably expect it to successful and way more fun than school. Also, this other post is a great explanation of why "child-led learning" is a misleading characterization of unschooling. Going to hear elk bugling today was not my kids' idea. It took a little selling to make the trip sound attractive enough that they wanted to go. But everyone was glad to have gone, and so (I hope!) my stock as a suggester of cool experiences, rich in learning opportunities, goes up.

A Complex, but Robust, Balance

A little over a week ago, I was waiting during P's gymnastics class and sitting next to a parent I know and his daughter, who's in third or fourth grade. She was working on a school assignment, and he was clearly anxious for her to make as much progress as possible during her sister's gymnastics class. He was pushing hard, and when she resisted (she seemed tired and not interested in the assignment), he moved on to belittling statements and questions. I was feeling really awkward, since I don't know this family well enough to have a good defusing intervention ready. I was glad when a relative of his came along, saw the stress, and talked to him long enough to give his daughter a break. But during that interaction, a funny thing was happening. I had an unschooler's voice in my head with an answer to every word out of his mouth. A lot of the answers had to do with this assignment being too involved for its purpose. She was supposed to draw several pictures representing events in a chapter book she'd read, then write several sentences about each picture. And he was having her do a rough draft, in preparation for a more perfected final draft later. This project, taking hours of her life, would probably have an audience of one -- a teacher, probably bored with grading 25 similar assignments. This girl was tired and in no way primed to be doing creative work, especially on a project not of her own choosing. Oh my gosh, I could go on and on.

But the other thing happening was that I could hear myself, a year ago (before I started thinking about unschooling our kids) and in some cases more recently, saying many things similar to what this dad was saying. It was painful to hear, both that way and in the moment for the daughter's sake. But it helped me see how far my thinking had come on what was useful for learning. It made me intensely glad I wasn't having to flog my own kids through long, involved school assignments in which they had no interest -- this seems like the surest way to produce adults with no interest in reading, writing, creativity, or whatever is being forced. And for the first time, I felt a deep sense that we were on the right path. I was high for days, and it was hard to tell anyone, since most of the non-parents I know wouldn't get it, and most of the parents with kids in school would feel bad. I finally got to tell it a week later at an unschooling park day, where it made no splash -- these parents already know this stuff -- but it felt good. I feel I'm finally starting to find my balance and stride as an unschooling mom. And as the rest of this entry will reflect, it's a balance with a million little parts, like a huge Alexander Calder mobile. It looks like it shouldn't work sometimes, but it's actually quite sturdy, and the whole picture created is so beautiful.

Today I read a John Taylor Gatto essay, "The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher," in which Gatto enumerates the soul-crushing, conformity-enforcing lessons of school that make it an efficient way of producing interchangeable parts of a permanent underclass. The essay built on the feelings of that gymnastics-class episode, and added the feeling that my evolving beliefs about how learning happens have ruined me as a future classroom teacher in any conventionally structured school. This is probably fine. But if I'm looking at going back into education (I taught public and private school for a few years here and there), I'll be interested to read more about Gatto's free school, and whether what he does there reflects a very different vision of school.

In other school-related thoughts, I read something this week on my favorite unschooling email list (AlwaysLearning) about how kids in school often learn to bluff their way through, appearing as though they know more than they really do -- and that this translates into being reluctant to ask questions. This resonates with my own experience of school (though I also sat near the front and asked lots of questions by the time I got to grad school, having decided there was something I wanted from school other than looking good to my instructors), and it totally fits with my observation that P has become more willing to ask questions -- about all kinds of things -- the longer she's been away from school. I love that she asks questions, and it shows; I'm sure that helps. Now the value in bluffing by avoiding questions is gone, unless she's so engrossed in something (a good story, say) that she doesn't want to interrupt it with a question and answer. When I listen to the rhythms as UnschoolerDad reads to P from the Song of the Lioness series, which they are both enjoying and have almost finished, I hear lots of pauses for questions about unfamiliar words or about why the story is unfolding the way it is.

These last two weeks have been curiously lean on notes to add to this blog, and yet I have the feeling that learning is happening at a terrific pace. It's an odd feeling, probably rooted partly in the fact that both kids have sources of information beyond my direct knowledge and control, including books, videos and games they're experiencing without me right by their sides. Sometimes that learning surfaces, as when P spotted the title of a sci-fi novel I'd just picked out from the library (Galileo's Dream) and asked about it -- it turned out that the PBS Kids show Martha Speaks (note: this link makes noise!) had included a segment on Galileo, from the apocryphal point of view of his dog, who'd inadvertently inspired some of his discoveries about physics. We talked a little on the walk from the library back to the car about Galileo's contributions to science, and also his heresy trial, and we talked about how the Galilean moons (the biggest four moons of Jupiter) were all eventually named for people Zeus (aka Jupiter) had abducted or otherwise misappropriated -- we looked them up later at home to find the story of each. Unlike P's knowledge about Galileo, some of what the kids are learning may never become obvious to me. Still, though, there's been a lot of learning I could observe and participate in.

On a car ride somewhere, UnschoolerDad was saying something about Sputnik, and T asked what a satellite is. We talked a little about natural and human-made satellites, and about how some satellites send pictures of the earth from above. In a short internet search for information about satellites, I ran across a photo of an infrared astronomical satellite whose data I had crunched a bit during a summer astronomy internship in college! Later, the kids and I used Google Maps' satellite view to look at a lake nearby where we've played, at our house, and at the houses of some family and friends. We followed our walking routes on streets on the map, from our house to places nearby that we knew, using what we knew about each place to find exactly the right houses -- a beautiful way to relate maps to reality. Then, at T's request, we followed the railroad tracks from where we usually see them to the southeast until we found a train. That took a while! T has continued asking where things are on maps -- he now has Colorado located on the huge world map that was a gift from grandparents this year, and several times a week he asks what something on that map or some other map is. P has asked fewer questions about geography so far (though as I edit this post, she is poring over maps and asking me questions about places she sees on them), but she follows along, and sometimes she and T make up adventures in which they sail or fly between distant points on the world map, following tortured routes. I think I'd like to find some maps at different scales showing where we live, from the city level to the region, so we can trace our travels together on a finer scale than a world map provides.

While we were mousing around Google Maps, we were also building a matchbox-like container from cardboard to be a dresser drawer for a doll (this involved drawing patterns on graph paper and estimating how much extra size the outer layer would need -- we estimated a little tight, but P adapted the technology to make many doll-size treasure chests and wastebaskets with lever-action lids, which T gleefully filled with tiny bits and bobs) and letting white glue dry on the pad of my finger so the kids could see the fingerprint after it was peeled off. They liked seeing the stages of drying and feeling the roughness of the fingerprint-impression. This mixed-up day was one of the best in my memory for following the kids' desires where they led.

Last night we spent the evening at the library, as P read the last third of a chapter book she really wanted to finish that was due that day, and T played with the puzzles and looked at board books in the kids' area. I got more time than usual to browse the kids' books for interesting stuff, and came up with three books I thought would catch P's interest. They were all quite successful; P was engaged, making links to prior knowledge and taking in new information, even pointing out inconsistencies between text and illustrations that were relevant to the stories.

• Giants in the Land is about the giant pine trees that used to grow in New England, and how they were harvested to make masts for the British navy. At the end of the story, 1775 brought the end to the shipping of American mast trees to England; this meshed with Revolutionary War on Wednesday, a Magic Tree House book P recently read on her own.
• Shibumi and the Kitemaker is a wonderful view of the class disparity in an imaginary feudal society similar to imperial Japan, and how the emperor's daughter decided to change the squalor and suffering in the city surrounding her walled garden. P and I talked briefly while reading it, about how feudal society was structured, and how there is still class disparity and concentration of wealth under capitalist systems. 
• Songs from the Loom: A Navajo Girl Learns to Weave gave a culturally-grounded view of some of my favorite crafts, spinning and weaving. It included some of the Navajo stories related to weaving and described the processes at a perfect level for P to absorb (though I, as a weaver, wanted more detail about how the loom worked -- but that's information I can find!). It also included a brief history of the Navajos' being expelled from and later regaining the rights to their ancestral lands in the Four Corners region, with associated information on Navajo-U.S. relations and tribal governance. In several more years, P may have a chance to go on a yearly trip to tribal lands in this region with youth and adults from our church. I hope that some grounding in Navajo and Hopi culture will make that a welcome and rich experience for her. [Note Oct. 15: just noticed and corrected some sloppy editing in this paragraph. Sorry about that!]

In my previous post I wrote about P wanting to set up in the driveway and sell stuff. One Saturday morning recently, she decided she wanted to set up a free face-painting booth in the driveway. We were in good shape to hang out, so she did. I showed her how to clean the face crayons with alcohol between faces to prevent passing germs; she made a sign and gathered her materials, and then she went out to sit. I took a book out to her to pass the time on our oh-so-out-of-the-way street, though mostly she looked around at squirrels and such so she wouldn't get too absorbed in her book (her phrasing! I love this kid!) and miss a person going by. T went out to sit with her after a while. As no one continued to come by, they got interested in crushing rocks to powder with harder rocks, and drawing on the driveway with rocks, to see what kinds of colors they could get. After a couple of hours and zero potential customers, P decided to close up shop. She'd had a good time, and she hasn't yet asked again to set up a garage sale. It felt good to me to support what she wanted to do without trying to reshape it too much (but after being her ally by telling her what information I could about what it might take to succeed). And the little geology lesson was an unexpected bonus. We tried mixing the rock powders with water and found the resulting paints unsatisfactory. We may try making milk paints or oil paints from crushed rock at some point.

Other recent highlights:

• P spotted an articulated bus and tried to point it out, but she ended up saying "crenellated" instead. I said "articulated" so she could remember the word she wanted, but then it led to a discussion of medieval fortifications, with photos on the Web when we got home. In an unusual moment, P said of crenellated, "Thanks for teaching me that word, mama!"
• P asked for some big paper to put up on the wall so she could write down word families to show T. She misspelled some of them, but she let me write the correct spelling of one word per family so she could correct them all. It was fun brainstorming words in each family and noting some homonyms (e.g., code doesn't belong in the family with toad and road.)
• T continues to ask lots of questions about what sounds letters make, what words say, how to spell words, and how to write letters. I gave him a composition book with big triple lines for writing. He can't use the lines very well yet, but he likes it when I take story dictation from him and write it down, and sometimes he asks me to guide his fingers to write a letter. Today as we settled down for a nap together, I was reading a novel, and T asked me to read it out loud to him. He seemed to enjoy it even though I was pretty sure he didn't understand much of it. At a couple of points he pointed with his finger, following along as if pointing at what I was reading, though he was on the opposite page. I took his cue and pointed where I was actually reading. He asked about the page numbers and how to say them (e.g., 63 is sixty-three), and also about how to pronounce combinations of letters he could see on the page. He also loves Super Why (noisy link), a PBS Kids series about letters, spelling, and reading.
• Both kids are enjoying watching Word Girl on Amazon video. Recently P watched several episodes while I folded laundry and watched with her. After some episodes we'd check and reinforce the meanings of the words emphasized. Some of these check-ins also led to discussions of civics concepts like candidates and elections (one episode included a student council election and a local election for District Attorney) or literary contexts like a school Shakespeare play.
• Both kids are also enjoying Sid the Science Kid (another noisy link), which we find on Netflix. It's very schooly, but they find the information interesting, and some of it (the importance of brushing teeth and balanced nutrition, for example) is helpful in the family.
• UnschoolerDad found the Toontastic app for iPad, and P has been making some of her own cartoons with it. It prompts for different parts of the story arc and provides music choices authors can pair with their cartoon scenes. It's fun to see the kids becoming multi-literate in different computer platforms -- touch-screen tablets, laptops, iOS, Windows, Android -- I get the feeling they'll be more comfortable than I am with a lot of technology before long.
• P and I did the experiment of filling a bowl to the brim with ice and water, and then watching the water level as the ice melted. It stayed the same -- water really expands a lot when it freezes. We'll see more of that in our environment as winter comes; yesterday I winterized the swamp cooler, and P asked why, so I talked about water pipes bursting or the swamp cooler reservoir cracking if we leave water in them during freezing weather.
• P and I found about four different ways to think about the question, "How many cups are in six quarter cups?" (we've done this before, but we found more ways this time) as I was cooking some quinoa recently. She's doing these little math-storms with me much more willingly than she used to, with almost no anxiety. It's good to see.

And then there's daydreaming. P recently said she'd like to have a whole room full of cool stuff she could use to learn. With a gate on it to keep T out. T has mastered baby gates, so that's not going to happen, but I sympathize with the desire to have more stuff -- electrical parts, microscopes, Cuisenaire rods (whether they use them for math or not, these were great fun for me as a kid for their catapult-building potential, and I still think of short distances in centimeters easily because of them), more kinds of building toys, and whatever else we can think of. It's fun to daydream of what we can do when we have an income again. Until then, there are bargains, libraries, free museums, and many possibilities afforded by our existing possessions. T's current favorite is a hand-cranked popcorn popper with conical gears on top for turning the stirring rod. Good stuff.