A Sense of Scale

"Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space, listen..." -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams

Big day! And this is crazy detailed, so don't feel obligated to read the whole thing unless you love getting a sense of astronomical scale as much as I do!

This morning P asked about the relative sizes of the Earth and the Moon. As it happened, I'd just been reading an interesting idea or two for learning about that, and she was game, so we gave the activities I'd been reading about a try. Using a curriculum activity like this is not a very unschool-y approach, but P was loving every step, so we ran with it.

First, based on the suggestions in this PDF, P got out two same-size balls of play dough. She divided one of them into larger Earth and smaller Moon pieces and adjusted them until the relative sizes looked right to her. We weighed them on the kitchen scale, and found their masses were in a 2:1 ratio (50 and 25 g, as it happened, so P's money math came in handy). Then I told her that gravity on Earth is six times as strong as gravity on the Moon and asked if she wanted to re-estimate. She did, transferring about 5 g of dough from Moon to Earth. We put the estimated models on post-it notes, which P labeled. Then, since the Earth:Moon volume ratio is 50:1, we divided the other ball of play dough into 50 roughly equal parts (a nice estimation task), picked an average-looking one to be the Moon, and rolled the rest up into a big Earth. The Earth:Moon mass ratio is even higher than 50:1, so I asked some questions to find out how P is thinking about density. She has a pretty good handle on weight-for-size -- this former physics teacher can work with that!

Based on another fun page, we considered that if the Earth were the size of a basketball, the Moon would be tennis-ball sized, and the Sun would be a sphere that could hold the big house across the street with room to spare, but would be much farther away.

Then I asked P how far apart she thought the model Earth and Moon should go compared to their sizes. She remembered from a conversation on another day that if you could roll the Earth like a wheel 10 times, you would cover the distance to the Moon, but it was hard to keep track of complete revolutions of our model. She positioned the models a foot or so apart, and we marked that distance on the table. Then we wrapped a string ten times around the Earth model, stretched it out, and saw that the correct scale distance was more like 4.5 feet -- just a bit longer than our small dining table can hold! I thought P's eyes were going to pop out. She was hooked.

P had been trying to describe how huge the Sun was with numbers like million, billion, and "tillion." I asked if she wanted to see what the numbers really looked like and what they were really called, and she did. So I googled the masses of the Sun and the Earth, wrote them down in scientific notation, and then expanded them to have the appropriate 31 and 25 digits respectively. I showed her hundreds, thousands, millions, billions, trillions, and so on, and then showed her how scientific notation deals with really big numbers with much less writing and fewer names to keep track of. We were working in kilograms, so we used the scale to find something in the kitchen with a mass of 1 kg for reference. A big can of beans with a lump of play dough on top was perfect. I proceeded to model the Earth/Sun size difference with play dough (since the Sun's diameter is about 100 times the Earth's, the Earth was about as small a speck of dough as I could make without getting out a razor blade), and we talked about how people, compared to the Earth, would be much, much smaller than the Earth is compared to the sun. P gleefully came up with bacteria as a possibly appropriate thing to live on our play-dough-speck Earth. Hooray!

More play-dough play ensued. P made some small pancakes and put them next to her Earth model, and I pretended to freak out: "Aaugh! It's a pancake the size of Africa!" and more in that vein. Much hilarity ensued. P made pancakes for several of the continents' sizes, and then she drew a griddle on the paper beneath the pancakes that was bigger than the Earth! ("Help! Help!") She labeled her pancakes pankacs. Rather than correct her, I wrote out three different ways one might spell pancakes, and asked which one looked right to her. We talked about the different ways they could be pronounced, and I noticed P had changed her spelling to panekacs, so I pronounced it. She busted up laughing, and all three of us experimented and laughed about how we could pronounce breakfast tomorrow -- Pan-cakes? Pain-kacks? Pan-kacks? I wondered if T would get confused, but he was totally clear about it, laughing at mistakes and not at the usual pronunciation. I'll bet the correct spelling will be easier for P to come up with next time.

I found myself humming "Somewhere" from West Side Story. P was interested in the music, so I played her several of the less-racist songs from the movie. We talked about the tense race relations depicted in New York between recent Puerto Rican immigrants and the descendants of not-that-much-less-recent immigrants from Europe. I'm trying to make racism an open topic, in light of recent books saying that "colorblindness" doesn't serve the cause of producing less-racist future generations. From the song "America," we talked about how the Puerto Ricans could see a lot to like about living in the U.S., but at the same time could be angry about how abominably they were treated based on their looks and their accents. I don't feel ready to play the Jets' song for P yet -- the racism there is really in your face and even glorified -- but I'm hoping that by laying the groundwork now, I can help her understand the whole movie, and a lot about the big picture of race in the U.S., in time. P and I may see Gnomeo and Juliet for another perspective on love amidst hate and, incidentally, another entry point into Shakespeare.

After the music, we went on a bus-and-walk adventure downtown, running an errand and then playing in a park and visiting the main library. T saw first-hand how bus stops work and asked questions about the PA system on the bus. P saw up close some of the buildings we had seen from far above last Saturday, and she was happy to make the connection. The afternoon was a wonderful, relaxed time, and we took snacks so dinnertime didn't have to be too much of a schedule constraint. We watched someone fishing, saw lots of ducks, and practiced taking turns with another child on an old-fashioned and very fast slide. At the library P saw, and was dying to check out, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, so now she's stretching her reading level again, without any prodding from me. Life is good.

Spring, Space, and Spicy Language

Our last few days have been quite a mixed bag. But then, isn't life, generally speaking? Unschooling looks a lot like life in so many ways.

There's been reading. P did a bunch of reading to T during one of their more peaceful periods, including a Berenstain Bears book. I read another chapter or two of Sing Down the Moon to P. P listened to a couple of Magic Tree House books on CD, again while cleaning her room. Audiobooks truly make room cleaning painless and are fun and sometimes educational to boot. Why didn't I think of this sooner?

There's been outdoor time. Saturday P and I tried going for a jog together. Her stamina was low, but we did make it to her former elementary school, where we discovered she'd left her coat and mittens on her last day of school. We were able to find and retrieve them because the building was open for construction activities.

Yesterday P and I went on a spring nature hike for kids at a nearby park. It was a very steep trail, and she got tired quickly -- it looks like we need to get out on foot more often to replace our daily walks to and from school -- so we ended up leaving the group hike and going at our own pace for a while. P got her first relaxed aerial view of our whole town from the high hill we climbed, and we talked about what we could see and how P knew those places. Maps may make more sense after that experience. I wish I'd thought to suggest making a drawing while we were up there or taking a photo -- but it wouldn't hurt us to go again! We saw a bark-beetle-killed pine tree and took a look at what that kind of damage looks like. I showed P the difference between ponderosa and piñon pines. She asked a lot of questions about why the trail was designed the way it was, so we talked about erosion and how trail builders try to minimize it. And when our hike ended because of a need to get to a restroom, we talked about how backcountry hikers would handle their potty needs.

Today T and I took a walk around the neighborhood after dropping P off for a play date at a friend's house. With spring just beginning to bring out the buds on the deciduous trees, I showed him the difference between evergreens and other plants. We looked at buds, some just appearing and others beginning to open into flowers and leaves. We checked on the construction progress at the school, where some portables were torn down last week, leaving big holes in the ground. I wish we'd been around to watch that! We saw a police officer stop a speeder and talked about how speeding tickets work. We saw some birds' nests, left from last year, examined the shape and construction of one within my reach, and talked about why birds would build nests in the shapes they do. Finally, we compared needles and cones from spruce, fir, and pine trees. T was engaged and asking about things all along; it was a fun walk for both of us.

When we weren't outside, usually the kids were reading or playing elaborate pretend games together. They play well for a while, and then opportunities arise to help them find ways to play that they both enjoy, and to problem-solve when there is conflict. While there's more of this peacemaking to do now with P home all day, I also think we may be making more rapid progress, since we have so much time to practice!

And then there's video. Yesterday P and T watched the last Magic School Bus DVD from the library, learning about the water cycle, erosion, and buoyancy, while I got some work done on the video game we're trying to get out the door.

Today all of us together watched the first half of Apollo 13, which is one great opportunity after another to stop the movie and answer the kids' questions about interesting things. There was the obvious material about the space program: the basics of rocket propulsion, rocket stages (P was very concerned that the first Saturn V rocket stage was allowed to fall into the ocean, but agreed that it was probably better than letting it fall on land), lunar and command modules, pressure suits, and the roles of mission control staff and telemetry equipment in manned space travel. Then there were the health aspects: the importance of peak physical health for astronauts, the fact that having had measles is protective against getting it again (we talked about vaccines too), the use of electrodes to monitor heart rate, and why astronauts don't smoke. (P, born in the age of widespread smoking bans, wondered where all the smoke in mission control was coming from, and she was a little shocked to realize that so many people did smoke in 1969.) We got a look at the emotions that astronauts and their families experience before and during a mission. And the language! The movie includes a sprinkling of adult language, certainly not shocking by today's standards, but stronger than most of what my kids have heard before. I love the fact that, when one of the astronauts realizes he's been cursing on an open mic, he is deeply and genuinely embarrassed. There's a great lesson there about there being a time and a place for everything, and what happens when behavior is out of its appropriate time and place.

While writing this post, I read up on gimbal lock and the part it played in the Apollo 11 mission. We didn't talk about it during the movie, partly because I didn't know enough about it to explain it. I still think it would be a tough concept for a 6-year-old without a gimbal model on hand, but I'm glad to know why the mission control folks were so concerned about it, and if it comes up again, at least I'll know where to start.

What's playing at our house

Aside from our open gym outing, it's been a quiet couple of days, with a lot of the learning mediated by, well, media. Here's a sampling of what's been viewed or read in the last few days, all but the first checked out from the library recently:

• Fairy tales on cassette tape. P enjoyed these, found in a closet, with a play date friend and on her own. Which led me to check out the audiobook and DVD section at the library, where we found the next two things...
• Magic School Bus episodes about ants, bees, butterflies, the digestive system, the immune system, and the musculoskeletal system.
• Magic Tree House book on CD about ancient Japan. When P needed to clean her room last night, listening to this made the task go a lot faster -- and then she stayed in her room after it was clean to finish the book.
• A book for children about life in Japan. I checked this out because there's been so much on the radio about Japan lately; there's also a book in the library bag about Libya, but it's aimed at an older audience and much drier, so I'll be happy if some of the pictures get looked at and maybe discussed.
• The first few chapters of Sing Down the Moon, an historical novel by Scott O'Dell about the fates of a Navajo band at the hands of Spanish slavers and American soldiers come to relocate them. I read the first chapter aloud to P, and she read me the next two in the car on the way to open gym. The book is a reach for her reading level, but she is taking it on, and when she reads it aloud to me, it's easy to notice which words she doesn't yet know, and help her (if she wants) with their pronunciations and meanings.

One interesting effect of all this is that P is becoming much more conversant with the controls of cassette, CD, and DVD players, which both makes things easier for me and creates a slippery slope into lots and lots of media. But it doesn't take much, most times, to attract P and T into more active play after they've watched for a while. 

I'll make sure we get outside play and exercise time and other non-media learning opportunities too, but there are a couple of movies I hope to bring in soon: 

• Fly Away Home, a movie about a girl who helps a flock of geese migrate by working with her dad to build and fly an ultralight aircraft they can follow -- based on a true story, it's a very un-schooly movie and should be an interesting look at bird migration, ultralight flight, and the power of young people to make a difference in things they care about.
• Spirited Away, a Hiyao Miyazaki film with a strong, smart female protagonist who starts off whiny but rises to the occasion when she needs to take responsibility for matters beyond herself -- we've owned this one for a while, but we thought it was too scary for P when she was younger. She's getting very good at not being so scared by movies now. I think she's ready.

Rules, Resistance, and Working the System

Today we went to an open gym time, geared primarily to homeschoolers, at a local gymnastics center. There were more kids there than we've seen when attending in the past. I recognized one young man, perhaps 11 years old. He came to my attention because he wasn't responsive to the requests of gym staff that he follow safety rules. Sometimes he argued with the staff while continuing to disobey; other times he just went back to breaking the rules as soon as the right back was turned. I've never figured out who his parents are. I don't know whether they drop him off, or just keep a low profile during open gym. (Most parents don't hang out with their kids in the gym. I'm in there because T is young enough that the gym wants me close by him to help keep him safe while he plays.) This boy seems to fly just below the level of defiance that would get him banned from open gym -- that's a guess, since I've never seen someone ejected, but judging from the staff members' demeanor, they're near an edge with him.

It got me thinking about part of the socialization aspect of homeschooling. People accustomed to school often wonder how homeschooled kids learn to get along with other kids or live by the rules of the world. Homeschoolers and unschoolers often counter that school doesn't exactly teach that lesson well, to judge from the bullying, ostracism, and other social strife that exists and persists in many school situations. They also point out that school is not much like most non-school situations in the real world (unless we aspire for our children to hold jobs where they are told exactly what to do at all times, with very little chance to use their own initiative, work collaboratively, define the tasks they are working on, or otherwise contribute their own thinking to shaping their worlds), so learning to deal with the rules of school doesn't necessarily prepare one for work or other adult realities. Also, school is a highly artificial situation in which kids spend most of their time in very narrow age groups, whereas the real world involves lots of interactions beyond one's age peers, with people associating based on common interests, goals, or other characteristics.

Parents have many different approaches to discipline, obedience, manners, and so forth as they rear their children. Teachers have some variation in this respect too, but having been both a classroom teacher and a parent, I've seen that teachers, more than parents, require a high level of compliance do do their jobs. Parents can deal, if they choose, with a range of conditions besides total obedience, but with 20-30 kids or more and a lack of compliance in the classroom, chaos is the result. So perhaps a lot of homeschooled kids have had less experience with adult expectations of immediate compliance, and this leads them to respond less readily to adults in the world telling them what to do.

This doesn't have to be a bad thing, if the kids have some kind of appropriate response other than immediate compliance, such as politely asking the reason for the request or rule, or agreeably making a suggestion about another way to achieve the goal of the request or rule, and being willing to listen if there's a reason their suggestion is not going to work out. Real people in the real world do these things. But I do think kids need to know that some requests require compliance. If a police officer or other public-safety person is giving you a direct order, the situation will generally call for compliance first and discussion later, if at all. And if a staff member in a gym is telling you not to stand on top of a pile of mats, getting down before arguing will get you further toward what you want than the reverse, unless what you want would not be okay with the staff member under any circumstances.

And maybe that's what I'm seeing -- not a child who doesn't know how to navigate the world of external requirements, but one who is in rebellion against those requirements, and willing to push harder than I would be to get what he wants. I guess my own choices reflect a belief that working within the system -- going along to get along, in a way -- will get me more of what I want than openly flouting the system. This could be because my parents and others were willing to listen to me and be flexible when I was persuasive, or when they realized their initial approach might not be the best approach. Perhaps this boy's parents don't show that kind of flexibility, so open disobedience is the only way he knows to get outside the little box he's in most of the time.

Whatever the case is with him, some things I'll be explicitly teaching my kids are that various parts of the world have rules and authorities that require compliance, even if their rules are not the same as the rules of our own household; that I do expect them to comply with instructions from adults in whose care I have placed them, unless those adults are being abusive or unsafe; and that often the best way to get what you want is to work within the limits that external rules and authorities impose. Yes, discuss and question the rules if they don't seem right; but when you can, do it in a way that doesn't position you in open defiance, because that will make the people in authority much more defensive and resistant to reasoning with you.

The thing that bothers me about this stance is that I do believe in the value of civil disobedience when laws or governments are unjust. So I'll have to work on sprinkling in stories of resistance to unjust authority. Thinking about this has piqued my interest in a question I can't yet answer, though -- have successful resisters, revolutionaries, and disruptive thinkers in history generally been the product of the system (and therefore needed to know how to work within it as well as against it), or outsiders and resisters more or less from the start? Or have they combined elements of both? I welcome your comments and pointers to useful stories.

The Spaces Between

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.

You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.

More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.

     -Marge Piercy, from "The Seven of Pentacles"

Today as I began cooking dinner, I needed to double a recipe for cooking millet. I just started talking out loud about it to P, who was hanging out nearby. "I want to make a double recipe of millet. One recipe calls for three-quarters of a cup."

     I didn't really expect her to try the math, but she did: "Then you need six quarters!"

     So I asked, "How many cups is six quarters of a cup?" She said she didn't know. So I asked, "If you had six quarters, how many dollars would that be?"

     She came back pretty quickly, "One dollar and fifty cents!" Before I could ask what that would mean for the recipe, she called out, "So you need one and a half cups!" I couldn't have been more pleased.    

     As I was jotting notes for this blog entry, I said to her, "I remember you learning something interesting today, but I can't remember what it was. Do you remember?"

     She responded, "I used money math to double your recipe!" 

Good stuff.

A few days ago, I signed on the the effort to finish the casual video game UnschoolerDad is developing for smart phones. His original producer had to leave the project for health reasons, and he hasn't found someone ready to step into her shoes yet. I've been developing specifications for sound effects. Tonight the kids wanted to see how the game is coming, so I played some levels in the test build I have on my computer, and they watched. I noticed issues with the game, so I started an email to UnschoolerDad detailing these possible bugs for when he's ready to address them. P followed along, reading some of what I typed. She asked why I was writing, and I explained that Daddy would want to know about these problems we were seeing, since he was the one who would fix them, and that I needed to describe them with good details so he would know just what I was talking about. She helped me watch certain details in the game so we could describe their behavior better. Once in a while she'd ask the meaning of a word or abbreviation I used in the bug reports. It was nice to see her interest and curiosity, and she got to see something I suspect not many kids see: one of the way-behind-the-scenes parts of developing a piece of software. And next time we do this, she'll get even more, since tonight UnschoolerDad taught me how I can fix some of the issues I'd noticed, right in the Lua code files where they originate. So she'll get to see not just QA tasks -- the entry-level grunt work of game development -- but a bit of programming as well.

P took a bath this afternoon while T took a nap. This is significant because she usually puts up a fight. Today she started to get that surly look on her face, and I explained that I know she likes to have company during her bath, and that T's nap would be my only chance to stay with her today, since UnschoolerDad would be out after work this evening. Usually this would just be the beginning of a longer argument or the prelude to my forcing the issue. But today, she said she'd come when she finished the story she was listening to on tape. Yesss! I noticed this as a theme today -- I let her finish things, or get to a good stopping point, before insisting that she switch gears to something else. And given that bit of extra slack, she cooperated. (I'd feel more like cooperating with someone else, too, if they let me choose when to stop my current activity first!) During dinner she was downright solicitous. It feels like she's starting to notice and respond to my efforts to be more of a partner to her and less of a mule driver. It sounds awful to say it that way, but it's how I often felt while enforcing school-related schedules and routines.

The relaxation in our pace the last few days has been delicious. I would have a hard time stating with a straight face that we were having four contact hours of learning time, which is the requirement for home schoolers in our state, 172 days per year. But the schools are on spring break right now, and we have all spring and summer to get in the hours remaining in this school year's requirement. This period, right after leaving school, is what unschoolers often call "deschooling." It's a time to leave behind the trappings of school as much as possible. A time to avoid tight schedules and anything that's structured as a class or looks like school, unless the child really wants to go to it. A time to take a vacation, whether away or right at home. Some unschooling parents state, as a rough guideline, that it will take about a month of deschooling for every year a young person has spent in school, before they're ready to engage actively in driving their own learning processes and get the best that unschooling has to offer.

I already see P jumping on some opportunities for learning, and, creature of the educational system that I am, I relax. Her leaps remind me once again that learning is inescapable -- it happens all the time, on purpose, by accident, in the interstices of life as much as at the pinnacles of peak experiences. And to that I say, Amen.

Park Day and Potluck

Two days, so many things... here goes!

Yesterday P asked to watch Happy Feet, so we did. I hadn't seen it before, and found it a little distressing how much of the movie is about mating (this doesn't come across in the Commonsense review), with associated raunchiness. I mean, yes, animals spend a lot of energy on attracting mates, but the movie really played it up in anthopomorphic style, with macho guys bragging about how much the girls wanted them. But most of that seemed to blow right by P and T, and there was a lot of cuteness and some good messages about self-respect and valuing differences. The kids got their first exposures to elephant seals, an icebreaker ship, and the fact that there are penguins in South America. Since the icebreaker in the movie comes through in a confused blur, we looked up photos of real icebreakers afterward.

Later, P was busy and T was asleep, so I decided to watch an episode of Grey's Anatomy and fold laundry. Lots of laundry. P gravitated to the TV episode, which I should have predicted. In this particular episode, the sexual content was fortunately well-veiled, so instead P learned the definitions and some symptoms of stroke and heart attack, what a defibrillator is for, the location and function of the aorta, what a cardiopulmonary bypass machine is for in open-heart surgery, and what a surgeon has to do when she loses a patient (call the family and break the news). Most of this was brief first exposures (I stopped the show a few times to help her understand what was going on), but hey, everything needs a first exposure, right?

Later, the whole family went to the hardware store because we wanted to have a magnetic wall board that we could also write on. Magnetic white boards are expensive, so we looked at various DIY ideas before settling on buying a piece of sheet steel and painting it with chalkboard paint. My goal is to use this for magnetic poetry, with the option to write notes or additional poetry bits. Our fridge doors are more than fully committed already! While we were at the store, P found a trinket she wanted to buy for $2.75, but she didn't have her allowance money with her (she's decided against buying binoculars for now), so she got a loan from UnschoolerDad. This morning she paid him back. She gave him two dollars and went to get three quarters, but he suggested she give him another dollar and he give her one quarter back. P found that confusing, so we did some more money math, with a little hundreds-digit action and a first exposure to borrowing in subtraction. P was game. We also talked about why the dollar sign looks like it does. Apparently I got that wrong (there's what I learned while writing this post!). Ah, well -- more learning opportunities later, if we like.

Off to the grocery store this morning, where we learned what whole papayas look like. They didn't smell like fruit, though, so we didn't buy one to try this time. Anyone know how to choose a good papaya?

This afternoon we went to the weekly park day for a group of unschoolers in our county. T has gone with me twice before, but this was P's first time to be out of school for a park day. On the way there we slowly passed a freight train and I talked to P and T about shipping containers and what they're for. We read the labels on them to see if we could see where they originated. Tonight we looked up some of the companies; we saw lots of photos of container ships and online tracking systems for container numbers. Maybe next time we can write down a number or two and see where those containers go!

At Park Day T played mostly independently as usual -- he's a little young yet for really engaging with playmates, but he loves playgrounds. P was shy and played on her own until I facilitated a couple of introductions to other kids. She was still hanging back, so the three of us went down to take a look at the stream bordering the park. We fished out some trash and looked at how the grasses growing around the stream were holding up the stream bank, and how one tree, apparently quite healthy, was growing in a J shape from an overhanging edge of stream bank. Then we saw some other unschoolers making their way to a nearby footbridge and car bridge to play, and we joined them. They were trying, unsuccessfully as it happened, to capture a "gardener" snake (I'm guessing garter; I never saw it, though P caught a glimpse). Having given up on the snake, one of the boys started climbing up a storm-drain pipe that emptied into the stream. (Another adult and I checked for the origin to make sure there wouldn't be unexpected flow in the pipe.) Several others followed. P opted out of the tunnel crawl, but thoroughly enjoyed tracking their progress and looking and listening for them at the streetside origin of the drain. I was nervous about all the potential falls and other injuries, but I didn't see a lot of serious hazards, so I just kept watch for any more seriously foolhardy behavior. At school P usually played with girls, mostly doing less active forms of play, so I was glad to see her climbing around with a mixed group and getting a little dirty. My favorite place to play when I was her age was also a creek at a park near my house, where it went under a footbridge and a railroad bridge -- and the large pipes where it went under the neighboring road. This felt like sharing a happy piece of my childhood with P. T tromped around under the bridge a bit, too, with me helping him on the steep parts.

On the way home we talked a little about pagodas (we saw one near the park), car transport trucks (ditto), what happens when you run out of gas on the highway (didn't happen, but it came up when P guessed that was what the car transport truck was for), and the meanings of a couple of road-sign symbols.

And then we cooked amaranth for the first time, as part of dinner. It makes a nice porridge, which T is now enjoying, having awakened (after the rest of us ate) from the nap that started on the way home from the park. Everyone else liked it, too, so it was lucky there was enough left for T!

Could P have encountered all this in a couple of days while enrolled in school? Perhaps, if we'd had an active weekend and encountered some interesting playmates. But not likely. The park days help me move a little beyond my comfort zone. (My own upbringing did not include being allowed to play in storm drains, at least once my parents found out that's what I was doing!) Also, I'm being more liberal with access to video  than I was before. That's partly because there's more time in a day when most of it isn't filled with school, so using a couple of hours for a movie feels like less of a loss to family time and more active play. It's partly because I'm approaching video as a learning tool and not just entertainment or babysitting. And it's partly because I'm trying to let greater access deprive it of its privileged place in many kids' lives (here's a little bit by Pam Sorooshian on TV and the economic theory of marginal utility), so video can take what I see as its rightful place, as just one of many potentially interesting things a person can choose to do with her time.

Flamingos, yo-yos, and great music

Just a couple of quick notes tonight in my wakeful period between falling asleep with T and making it into my own bed. I was remembering that when I asked the sleepover girls to turn the overhead light off before bed and settle down to something quiet, they used the reading lamp to read to each other from P's dictionary. I couldn't hear much of what they were saying, but it was high hilarity for at least a few minutes.

This afternoon, P asked to watch Fantasia 2000 (which is totally worth a look if you haven't seen it.) T whined that he wanted to do something else, but he got sucked in right away, and they both watched the entire feature. T asked a lot of questions at first about what was going on, and then got quieter as the art became easier to understand. I still heard exclamations from time to time: "Peacocks!" when the flamingos came on, for example. (A flock of flamingos does a precisely coordinated dance to the finale from Camille Saint-Saëns's "Carnaval des Animaux"; one disruptive iconoclast plays with a yo-yo, to the consternation of the rest. Guess who gets the last laugh?) We told him they were flamingos, and he rolled the word around a few times, enjoying its sound. After the flamingos piece, I played them this video of real flamingos doing a mating dance.

I ran across this when a Facebook friend posted it last year. When I first saw Fantasia 2000, I didn't realize the lockstep flamingo dance was based on real behavior, so the YouTube video was both hilarious and an eye-opener.

When P first started enjoying Fantasia and Fantasia 2000 a couple of years ago, all orchestral music sounded the same to her. Whenever she heard orchestral music on the radio, she'd say it was the music from Bambi, or something from Fantasia. But with repeated viewings, she started being able to identify some of the music quite accurately. She can pick out Stravinsky's Firebird well before I can now -- I don't recognize it until the main motif rolls around -- so I know she's really taking in the music, not just the images. I wish Disney had stuck with their original plan for Fantasia to be a frequently re-released movie with ever-changing pieces included. It's such a fun way to introduce young ones to great music.

What I learned while writing this post: "disruptive iconoclast" is, more or less, redundant. Also, Flamenco in Spanish (my working title until I looked it up to check), if Wikipedia can be trusted -- which is a valid question given the lack of sourcing on this particular matter -- doesn't mean flamingo, but Flemish (and may refer to gypsies). I feel better now about the lack of similarity between Flamenco dance and flamingo dance. I still wonder (but not enough to look it up in the middle of the night) about the connection between Flanders and Gypsies/Romany people.

Maoris, music, first sleepover, cooking and cleaning

Yesterday P and I finished watching Whale Rider. We watched it in two sittings, when T was asleep, since I thought parts of it might be a little too intense for him. I love this story of a girl who loves and respects (it seems, from my perspective) the heart of her traditional culture while confronting its sexism and showing the kind of leadership that brings out the best in everyone. And there are many tidbits in it to learn about Maori culture, how traditional cultures can change when they collide with modernity, whales, and probably more I'm not remembering now. I'm glad we watched it, and P liked it.

I noticed that in the hours after we finished the movie, P did a lot of singing in a bold, full voice that reminded me of some of the singing and chanting in the movie. I hadn't heard such a strong, supported tone from her before. Talk about unexpected learnings!

Tonight P is having a friend, Q, for a sleepover for the first time. Q is polite and reasonable to be around, but she's a very picky eater. I fixed a healthy dinner based on foods P thought Q liked, but Q ended up eating perhaps a tablespoon of food. P was cranky and didn't eat much either. UnschoolerDad and I enjoyed thinking throughout the evening about how to help the girls have a fun, peaceful time with each other and how to get some food into them. When things got kind of tense and frenetic at one point, we proposed watching a video, which brought the energy down nicely and provided an opportunity for me to put various kinds of finger food in front of the girls and T without saying anything (a strategy I picked up from Sandra Dodd). It all got eaten. When I thought it was probably time to transition from video to winding down for bed, I offered all the kids the choice of another cartoon short or a little ice cream. They chose the ice cream, but P and Q were too full to finish theirs. Tummy and transition victories achieved! Sleep hasn't quite arrived yet, but they're winding down and P is actively agitating for quiet, so perhaps it will happen soon. Hopefully Q won't think P is too much of a stick-in-the-mud. I'm trying, mostly successfully, to keep my cool and help the girls keep theirs. [Edit later: Sleep came quickly, and not as late as I thought it might. Getting ready for bed and winding down seem less difficult when there is a friend to share them with.]

Getting ready for Q's arrival was interesting. I had asked P to help me pick stuff up so I could vacuum. She wasn't interested in doing that, but she could see that I had a lot to do in the kitchen, so she did do quite a bit. Then she launched into her favorite chore, spot-mopping the floors with a rag. When she tired of that and I was still finishing up with cleaning the kitchen, she asked if she could work on prepping a monkey platter for snacks/the first part of dinner. She did almost the whole thing (cheese, olives, boiled eggs; I cut up some cantaloupe). Her prep skills are really coming along. I appreciated not having to do all the food prep myself. And it's nice for me to notice that P can be very helpful, voluntarily and cheerfully, if I let her take the lead in how she wants to help.

Oh, and everyone ate that food.

It's lovely how, if I don't try to force a particular outcome (eating a particular food, doing a particular chore, etc.) but instead just leave the door open, the kids will find their way through the door far more often than I might expect.

Duck butts, money math, and more

This morning the kids and I went on a guided nature hike at a local pond, reclaimed from a gravel pit 40 years ago, that has become a major bird habitat. I was briefly upset when P, half an hour in, decided she wanted to go home. The pace of the hike, with frequent stops for explanations, wasn't working for her, and she couldn't hear the naturalist very well. I had caught a fair amount, though.

As we began to walk back to the car, it occurred to me to ask whether P would like to go on a walk on our own. She said yes, so we did. Not much happened for a while, but on the way back to the car, we stopped at a spot on the boardwalk across the marshy margin of the pond. It was a great place to watch and listen to the many ducks, geese, coots, red-winged blackbirds, and other birds at the pond. P visibly and audibly relaxed and settled into the peaceful atmosphere, and we stayed about an hour. (T was easygoing throughout all this.) P regained interest in what the naturalist had been talking about, so I passed along what I remembered of what I'd heard. Here's some of what we learned:

• We learned how to tell the difference between squirrel nests and bird nests. Squirrels are very messy nest builders and use a lot more leaves than birds.
• We learned that ducks can be divided into diving ducks and dabbling ducks. Diving ducks go all the way underwater in search of their food, and their legs are positioned far back on their bodies, so they dive easily but walk very awkwardly. Dabbling, or surface, ducks, have their legs farther forward for better walking but aren't good divers; they just dunk their heads underwater, leaving their "tutus," as the naturalist called them, on display. With P and T, it was more fun to call them "duck butts."
• We saw an oriole nest hanging from a tree branch. It was neatly built, but incorporated some fishing line, which can be hazardous to birds.
• We got a close-up look at lots of cattails.
• We heard the noises that dry marsh grasses make when the wind blows them.
• We learned the call of a red-winged blackbird, which sounds like an old-fashioned screen door (the kind with a spring joining it to the door frame) opening.
• T learned how to handle binoculars without getting his fingers on the optics. P learned to use the single-eye diopter adjustment. P now wants her own set of binoculars. I was relieved to learn the compact kind we were using today don't cost much. P will be able to afford some with her allowance next week!

I think a field guide to the birds found around here might be in order soon. We picked up a bird checklist for that particular pond area from the naturalist.

On the way home, I suggested we figure out what P's allowance should be, based on 75 cents per year of age. With a little support, she did the math (three quarters times six years equals eighteen quarters; then she subtracted 4 repeatedly to figure out how many dollars that was). I realized four ones and two quarters are often hard to find around here, so we talked about buying rolls of coins from the bank and did some mental arithmetic to figure out how many quarters are in a $10 roll, or how many dimes in a $5 roll. Next up: interpreting three-digit numbers. P is fine with two digits already, but a little fuzzy on the hundreds.

P came home and decided to practice handwriting in her handwriting book, which she brought home from school this week along with her other school supplies. Now she and T are both painting with watercolors.

A space journey in our living room

This afternoon P and I were looking at descriptions of books on the Scholastic web site, which we may be able to order from as home schoolers. That led to looking for some of the books on the library web site, which led to reading a description of Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator on Amazon.com, which led to a question about what the "space race" meant. I talked about Sputnik and the Apollo program. We watched some video snippets from Apollo 11 on YouTube, which led to photo montages from Apollo 11 and Apollo 12. From there P spotted a video called "Cosmic Journeys: The Asteroid that Flattened Mars," which turned out to be 20 minutes about why Mars may be the way it is now, even though it was probably more Earthlike in the past. I stopped it at a few points to fill P in on things that had gone by very quickly. P and T were both riveted. There was lots of footage, both actual and artists' renditions, of various Mars missions. Then UnschoolerDad came upstairs from his office and said he'd just seen a graphic of all missions to Mars, including a large number of failed missions. The Internet is an amazing phenomenon.

I look forward to more of this kind of journey as we have more time. My guess is that next time P sees a book or movie about the space program or Mars, it will be more interesting than it would otherwise have been. And maybe next time we're in California, we can visit the USS Hornet in Alameda and check out the replica Apollo 11 vessel there. (I can't remember whether it's the lander or the part of the orbiter that splashed down.) I just queued up Apollo 13 in case we feel like a true-story riveting space drama sometime soon. It has some adult language, but I think P can handle it.

By the way, I refer often to Commonsense Media, which reviews many movies and other media that kids might be interested in. The site gives details about things that tend to concern parents, like language, drugs, sex, violence, the quality of the messages the film puts across, and things parents might want to discuss with kids who are watching a given film. If you haven't seen the site, I encourage you to check it out. They err on the side of prudishness, but I'd rather have more information than less, and parent reviews on the site often add additional perspective. Commonsense calls Apollo 13 "on" for kids 12 and up.

Welcoming my little monkey home

Today P is at school for the last time, at least for this school year. T and I are home, preparing favorite foods to share this afternoon when she gets home. They'll be arranged on "monkey platters," or big plates with an assortment of finger foods. Monkey platters can be meals, snacks for the moment, or sustenance for all day. The idea of a monkey platter came from Sandra Dodd, who writes tirelessly about unschooling and whose yahoo email list, AlwaysLearning, has been a big help to me so far. Her first monkey platter was inspired on a trip to the zoo, when she and her kids saw zookeepers bring out a big platter of sliced fruit for the primates. Here's Sandra's page about monkey platters; it has dozens of photos of monkey platters many unschoolers have made for their families.

Why make monkey platters? Many, though not all, unschoolers, choose to "unschool" food, meaning they give their kids a great deal of choice and power in deciding what to eat, and they handle meals without resorting to bribery or coercion. As I understand it, the idea is that if parents aren't stressing out about what kids eat, the kids will have fewer food issues relating to control. One study after another shows that young humans, when offered a wide variety of foods, will choose to eat a reasonably healthy and balanced diet. By offering food on monkey platters, which can hold anything from candy to broccoli but generally offer several healthy choices, unschoolers have found that often the fruit, veggies, cheese, nuts, etc. disappear before the marshmallows. And they report that when the food is offered without direction or coercion, their kids eventually try things they have resisted or refused in the past. I've offered monkey platters in place of regular meals several times now, and everyone here loves them, so it seems like a great way to celebrate the start of our unschooling journey.

Our platters today will have more than my usual 4-6 choices: cheese cubes, olives, apple slices, edamame (we depart here from Sandra's guideline that everything on the plate should be edible, because my kids LOVE shelling their own edamame), boiled eggs, melon pieces, banana chunks, red bell pepper slices, popcorn, baby spinach and lettuce leaves, hummus, corn-tortilla quarters, carrot sticks, strawberries, and gluten-free blueberry muffin chunks. All but the last three are P's requests; T asked for the carrot sticks. Here's a photo of round one (the stuff I got done before P came home). Later: popcorn, apples, and greens.

We're also decorating with stuff P started making earlier this week: paper chains, colorful signs that proclaim (in a variety of spellings!) "I am out of school," flowers on the table, and perhaps we'll make a Welcome Home sign to put on the door.

P stayed up late last night, writing and decorating cards for her teachers (first-grade teacher, plus music, art, and P.E. teachers) to take to them today. It's feeling like a good transition. I'll be glad to have all my monkeys together now, for some good times at home and some adventures in the wider world.

What we're learning: This morning P asked what the radio was talking about. It was a discussion of the current status of the nuclear power plants in Japan. So she got a quick primer over breakfast on nuclear fission (we've talked about elements and protons/neutrons/electrons before), nuclear power, what is normally done to keep nuclear power plants safe, and why that isn't working right now in Fukushima. Those last two are new for me this week, so I'm just steps ahead of P. I'm also learning about IRS rules for small-business expense deductions, and how to get QuickBooks to do my bidding. T has been focusing on concrete and various forms of damage to it, which are plentiful here because of ice, snowplows, ice-melting salts, etc. He's also been watching and helping with some cooking -- he measured, sorted, and washed garbanzo beans (he says their name over and over because it feels good!) yesterday, and he'll probably help make the hummus today. He watched with interest when an egg we were boiling this morning burst, and the egg whites squirted out and poached in the boiling water. Right now he's testing the sounds he can make by talking and making other noises into an echoing steel water bottle, and finding out what happens to crayons when they break.

Challenges we'll face

Not everything about leaving school is easy for me to face. There are some challenges I can anticipate from my current vantage point:

• Deciding how/whether to set/enforce bedtime, once mandatory early wake-up isn't motivating it (and the corollary, getting time alone with UnschoolingDad, which up to now has mostly happened once kids are in bed)
• Ditto for naptime
• Getting time to myself -- P and T do often play together more peacefully, which gives me some breaks, but when they'll come and how long they'll last is unpredictable. The same currently goes for T's naps, so this may not be that much of a change.
• Helping UnschoolerDad draw good boundaries when he needs them for work time (he works at home), without school giving us a built-in structure for our week
• Being the main person in charge of facilitating P's learning and exposure to the wider world. 

This last one feels like the biggie to a lot of people contemplating home schooling in any form. New music, historical information, new art techniques, civics lessons, the three R's, and so on -- she'll learn them all, at least for a while, from resources I provide or help her get access to. Some homeschooling parents choose to use a set curriculum, to make sure their young ones get exposed to the prescribed range of information about the world. We'll be going more free-form. I really think that a lot of curricula, while they may get across the desired information, do so in a way that deadens the innate desire to learn that we are all born with. And I suspect this happens whether the curricula are used in a school or at home. Whether's its doing math drills, reading books that are chosen more for which phonemes or sight words they contain than whether they have anything interesting to say, writing spelling words and using them in sentences, or learning history or science from some of the deadly-dull books I've encountered in my own educational journey (as student and teacher), the way it's done in school doesn't seem like the best way.

But the rub here is that no one can package "the best way" for my kids in a way that I can use. There's no short cut. I just have to strew interesting stuff in their path, be alert to what they want to do, and help them do it. A lot. From my current vantage point, this seems both infinitely simpler and far more complex than trying to follow a course of study with P (and eventually T).

I think it's possible to get bent way too far out of shape, worrying about this aspect of things. One of the most useful things Sandra Dodd has to say (for me so far, at least) is, "Read a little, try a little, wait a little, watch." So, no more agonizing. Starting now, I just have to face any demons that get in the way of connecting awarely with my kids, as much as I can figure out how to do.

Unschooling could be my precious and thus-far-elusive ticket to the present moment, and thus to my kids having a more real connection with me than any so far. Rather than focusing on the challenges or difficulties we may face, that's where I want my mind to be.

And I recognize that blogging is not being in the present moment. But I do want to keep you, my interested friends and family, in the loop. And I do want to assuage any anxiety about what I will have to refer to if the district asks for documentation of what we've been doing. Soooo... present moment first. Blogging to savor and reflect on it afterward. A little compromise I hope will be worth making.

Things I don't think I'll miss about school

In the future I may have cause to eat my words. But now, from a fairly hopeful point of view, here's a list of things I don't think I (or anyone else) will miss about school:

• Waking up at 6:40 a.m. regularly on weekdays
• Pushing hard for early bedtime because I know P will be surly in the morning if she doesn't get her sleep
• Hurrying to get P to school, or to get me and T to school to pick her up in the afternoon
• Trying really hard to get T down for a nap in the time frame allowed by school pickup
• Trying to get P to do homework that she doesn't want to do, or doesn't want to do now
• Hearing about social bullying at school and worrying whether/how it would affect P
• Making a box lunch every day
• Worrying about P getting gluten-containing food at school that will make her sick (although she's actually quite good about not eating stuff she knows she's sensitive to, sometimes it's hard for her to tell)
• Having to plan family trips and other special activities around the school calendar

A lot of the above fall under the rubric of "Spending relationship capital to enforce schedules and routines that our family didn't have a voice in creating." I'm hoping that unschooling will mean we have more investment in what we are doing on a day-to-day and hour-to-hour basis. It may not make things easier overall, but I hope it will make our efforts feel more worthwhile because the goals we are working on are chosen by us.

We'll trade these for some new challenges, I'm sure. I'll save those for another post. :)

Gearing Up?

Going already is more like it. My daughter P's last day in first grade at the local elementary school is still a week away, but it feels like our unschooling journey is already underway. Two nights ago, P had a homework assignment that called for looking up words in a dictionary. A brief foray into dad's collegiate dictionary led to tears, and online dictionaries were no more helpful -- regular dictionaries are not designed with early readers in mind! -- so we hit the bookstore looking for kid-friendly reference books. We bought a Macmillan Dictionary for Children and a DK First Dictionary, as well as a Scholastic Children's Encyclopedia. This was, of course, complete overkill for the assignment, but the books were intriguing to both kids (daughter P, 6, and son T, 2), so I figured they'd be great to have on hand. The DK dictionary, instead of ordinary dictionary definitions, has much more helpful entries for early readers. For example, where most dictionaries define sensible as "showing good sense or judgment," the DK dictionary says, "Someone who is sensible does the right thing, and does not do silly or stupid things." It might not be the most exact definition you'll ever read, but it's a heck of a lot more useful to someone reading at second grade level who doesn't have any clearer idea about the words sense or judgment than she does about the word sensible.

Anyway, I came here to write about learning more than to do book reviews. So let's go this way: both kids spent hours yesterday browsing through these books. I thought the encyclopedia might be more intriguing, but the Macmillan dictionary has amazing photos and short sidebars that sucked both kids right in. I spent some time paying bills on the computer while the kids browsed, making mental notes of what P exclaimed about or called me over to look at -- the strongest theme was bones and fossils, but she also wanted to tell me about a geyser, a page about rodents, and an American Pika (we had a good time last week finding out whether a rabbit is a rodent, which led to learning the differences between rodents and lagomorphs, and to listening to clips of the calls of pikas, which along with rabbits and hares constitute the order Lagomorpha).

One of the essential skills for unschooling parents, as I've been reading for several weeks at AlwaysLearning, a yahoo list for unschoolers moderated by Sandra Dodd (author of Moving a Puddle, which I hope to read soon), is being alert to their children's interests, so that the parents can help provide access to the experiences that will fuel those interests. It's not unit studies, where the parent finds or designs a curriculum block or course of study on a topic that seems to be of interest to the kids -- it's more about helping the kids get access to things, information, and experiences that the kids want, and which they might have a hard time accessing on their own, given how limited being young can be in this world when it comes to getting what you want. Another important parent practice is "strewing" the kids' paths with potentially interesting stuff and experiences -- to give them more of a window on the wide world of things one might be interested in if one knew about them -- while taking note of which strewings lead to interest, but remaining emotionally unattached ("Oh, I hoped they'd want to learn to weave, darn it!")

The assumption with unschooling is that we don't need to explicitly teach our kids most things. By providing a peaceful and loving family setting, answering their questions when we can or helping find the answers when we can't, and helping them get access to lots of what the world has to offer, we help them learn what they are interested in learning. Things like reading, writing, and math skills, being essential so so many human endeavors, will naturally become skills they will want to acquire in pursuit of other goals. For most people in the world, the three Rs are not goals in themselves, but tools. Kids can use them this way, too -- and many unschoolers report that their kids have learned these skills rapidly, with excellent understanding, and with very little activity that looks like the teaching you'd see in school -- when the skills become important in the pursuit of the kids' own interests.

I think it's time to get our hands on some owl pellets so we can check out some real rodent bones. A few weeks ago P and I went on a parks-and-rec nature walk about great horned owls, and there was an opportunity to dissect an owl pellet afterward, but P was too involved in chucking snowballs down a hill to take much notice. She said later that she would like to try it, though.

Another interesting question I've fielded from P in the last few days is, "Can ants smell?" They can, as we found out easily, using receptors on the hairlike structures of their antennae. And they build amazing underground structures, as we saw in this brief video clip.

Two-year-old T, for his part, liked looking at pictures of dinosaurs in the dictionary, and loved the diagram showing the major systems of a car. While we were at the bookstore, he picked out a book called You Can Name 100 Trucks from the sale table. He asks me to tell him about the trucks in the book often, and I think he's well on his way to fulfilling the title's promise! T's been avidly doing jigsaw puzzles of 35 or 60 pieces (or 100 pieces with some help) for a few weeks now. And I mean for hours at a stretch sometimes. With just a little help from me, he's shown amazing growth in pattern recognition, fine motor dexterity, and other puzzle skills.

I never thought much before about how much skill is involved in testing the fit of a puzzle piece. You don't want to press too hard, lest you bend or deform the puzzle pieces, so you have to learn just the kind of touch that the particular puzzle needs, and how closely its pieces normally fit. The hands' motor and sensory apparatus are deeply involved in rotating, sliding, pressing, lifting, and testing whether the final fit feels right, and then of course there's whether it looks right. Do the designs and colors continue as expected? Does the result look like the picture on the box? These skills translate into some wider-world ones, too -- figuring out how to replace batteries in a device comes to mind. How does this thing come apart? How hard should I pull on this part? Am I going to disassemble it successfully or break it? And now that the pieces have flown everywhere, how do I get it back together? T is actively interested in these parallel problems, though his access to batteries and things with small parts is limited, given his persistent tendency to put small objects in his mouth. Sometimes we'll sit down and work closely with him on a normally forbidden object, so he can give it a try while we make sure he isn't getting hurt.

What I learned while writing this blog post: the plural of apparatus is either apparatus or apparatuses. Not apparati. Cool.

(This post was reposted because of technical issues with the blog. One comment was lost. Sorry, Mom!)