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.