Birding! Also, map clues, melons, metastasis, and motivation.

This week P, T, and I went on a nature hike led by volunteer naturalists at a local park rich in birds and other small wildlife. I was a little disappointed that, in carrying out the "I Spy" theme of the walk, the volunteers had planted a number of artificial surprises along the walk -- things like stuffed and mounted wild animals, pelts, bones, and (for our first clue) a fresh pile of live night crawlers. All right, I liked the night crawlers. But I've been in that area before, and it's so rich in real things to see. The walk was aimed at preschoolers, who might have had a hard time finding or appreciating some of them, and T did seem to enjoy it. When the group moved on to an arts and crafts activity that was below P's level and above T's, we decided to go do some birdwatching on our own. There was a flock of American White Pelicans, which could have been migrating or summering here. I saw my first one while the hike was still going on -- a huge (9-foot wingspan), soaring white bird with black wingtips. We saw perhaps 50 of them at the pond. Then they moved on, leaving us to describe them to disappointed birders who showed up later.

We all took turns with the binoculars, staying nearly two hours more. I was most engaged of the three of us in identifying birds, but P was interested as well. Mostly she just wanted to look and to play quietly with T at the water's edge, but at one point she was giving me a detailed bird description as she looked through the binoculars and I looked at the field guide, and a birder standing nearby said, "She's good!" Other species we saw:

• Western painted turtles (which became Colorado's state reptile a few years ago)
• Great blue herons
• Coots
• Mallard ducks
• Cinnamon teals
• Canada geese, some of which may have been nesting on islands in the pond
• Red-winged blackbirds
• An odd, short-billed, dark, diving, ducklike bird that may have been a pied-billed grebe
• A white-billed duck that may have been a ring-necked duck or a lesser scaup
• Common raven
• Unidentified sparrows
• And on the way home, a magnificent soaring raptor. I only got a brief glimpse, but searching the bird book later, I think it may have been a Swainson's Hawk, one of the dominant summer hawks in Colorado. It was definitely not a turkey vulture (by its coloring), but it had a similar, slightly wobbly flight pattern.

Yesterday a message on an unschooling email list piqued our interest in geocaching, and we started talking about giving it a try. Today a followup mentioned letterboxing, and I looked that up. It's an older tradition, lower-tech, and it seems kid-friendly and appealing to P. Letterboxes contain a logbook and a unique, usually handmade, rubber stamp.  If you find one, you stamp your personal log book with the box's stamp, and you stamp the box's log book with your own personal stamp. We bought some artgum erasers today to try carving our own stamps. There are dozens of letterboxes hidden within day-trip range for us; we hope to start looking for them soon. P is working on her stamp design in the meantime.

On a trip to the grocery store, P noticed a bizarre-looking fruit that turned out to be horned melon, also known as kiwano. We bought one to try. Imagine our surprise when we sliced it open and saw this:

Not a fruit I would have described as a melon. And it was okay, but a lot of work to eat! (You eat the green parts, but I found the seeds not chewable, and each sac of green sweetness has a seed in it.) Not every experiment leads to a new love.

On the way to a gymnastics open gym today, P and I started talking about cancer, because a long-term survivor of Hodgkin's disease who is a friend of mine came up in conversation. P was interested in how cancer treatment works (we discussed various forms of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation), in why the cures are not that great yet for many cancers, and in details of treatment logistics, such as isolation during radioactive iodine treatment. Talking about that treatment led to discussing metastasis and the case of a beloved neighbor who died of metastatic melanoma, and also linked up with the nuclear spill in Japan, which we've talked about before.

Open gym was fun. P was working hard on some tricks that call for more upper body strength than she can currently draw upon easily. I've noticed her struggling for strength reasons in her gymnastics class, and I'm sure that doing some pushup/pullup-type exercises at home would increase her ability and enjoyment in gymnastics. She's a hard sell on the idea, so I'm debating offering her a chance to earn something she wants (like another gymnastics outfit) by achieving a reasonable number of pushups and pullups. The thing is, though, that part of the point of unschooling for me is following and feeding my kids' natural motivations, rather than using external incentives or threats to drive learning or performance. It's a tough call, since P doesn't see the benefit of the conditioning, but I think she would once her strength started improving. Maybe she and I could talk with her gymnastics instructors about what they think would make things go better and be more fun for her.

P started a project all on her own recently: she wants to build a swingset for her dollhouse dolls and Polly pockets. She drew her design; I suggested an addition for greater stability, and she lit up, remembering that the swingsets at the school playground have the part I suggested. We started making parts from craft sticks and white glue, and today we bought some quick-set epoxy for the joints that are not flush enough for wood glue. Perhaps we'll have a photo to post soon!

Mysteries, Music, Myths, and More

P recently told me she was enjoying reading for a little while after she went to bed. She was doing this by the overhead light because her flimsy bedside lamp had finally taken one bump too many and broken. I gave her the sturdier clamp light from beside my bed so she wouldn't have to climb down from her loft to turn off the overhead light before sleeping. She really appreciated that! A few days later, P started sleeping until 10 a.m. instead of her usual 8 or so. After a couple of days of that, I put two and two together and thought to ask whether she was reading late into the night. Yes, she said, on some recent nights she'd read entire chapter books -- A to Z Mysteries in these cases -- after going to bed. Mystery solved! We talked about the wisdom of going to bed a little earlier if she wanted to read a lot, and of turning off the light earlier if we had something scheduled early the next day. She's continued devouring books at night, but wake-up is getting a  little more consistent. I used to read voraciously at bedtime, too, though I paid the price the next day in fatigue at school on nights when my parents didn't come to tell me to turn off the light. I'm so glad P can sleep in a little and have whole books and good days, too!

We've done some kitchen observations this week. There was a glass, previously full of water with lemon, that was being used to dissolve some Alka-Seltzer. P noticed there were two lemon seeds in the glass, and that they were slowly rising and falling. We watched them for a while, looking for the causes of both. A seed would sink to the bottom of the glass, get bubbles stuck to it, float to the surface, get most of its bubbles popped when they broke the surface of the water, and sink again.

Also, there was some celery that had gone limp in the refrigerator. I wrapped the bottom of the bunch in a wet paper towel to try to revive it, and then thought of trying a couple of stalks in glasses of water with food coloring. P and T each chose a color (red and blue), and we put the stalks in to soak. After a couple of hours, not much was happening, so I tried trimming the bottom ends of the stalks, as you might with cut flowers. A short while later, we could see colored dots along the bottoms of the stalks, but no color seemed to be making it up higher. We decided to cut off the top ends to see if there was color inside that we couldn't see, and lo and behold, the color had made it all the way up!

We talked about this in terms of plants bringing up water from their roots to supply the rest of the plant (and transporting sugars from the leaves downward to the rest of the plant, though I don't think that part was demonstrated by our food-coloring trick). We also talked about why the celery stalks looked different colors (yellowish-green vs. bright, cool bluish-green) on the outside in terms of P's color mixing experience with paints and crayons.

Our movie-watching recently has taken a social-learning turn, though there are still things to learn from the content of the films as well. P and I watched The Music Man (the 1962 version) in a few stints over a few days. P wanted to know why Marian fell in love with Harold Hill, and I had to admit it was a bit of a stretch given her original, strait-laced character, but we talked about the various reasons someone might like another person; for example, agreeing with their life choices (no in Marian's case, though she eventually helped Harold choose a more honest life), having a lot in common (maybe, especially music), or enjoying the way being around a person makes you feel (yes!). Then P wanted to know why Marian had originally rebuffed Harold. I talked a little bit about the idea that women, especially 50 years ago, were not expected to give in easily to a man's efforts to make friends or get close, and also the fact that Marian had seen a lot about Harold's life choices but not much yet about what they had in common or how he made her feel. I should tie this in with Kiki's Delivery Service, a movie P knows well, in which Kiki refuses even to speak with Tombo because she comes from an old-fashioned village where it's expected a boy and girl should have a proper introduction before he speaks to her.

P had a lot of fun with the musical aspects of The Music Man, especially how two songs could be sung at the same time, as the film did with "Lida Rose" and "Will I Ever Tell You," and also with "76 Trombones" and "Goodnight my Someone." She read an interaction into the alternating singing of those last two by Harold and Marian -- a turning point in Harold's change of heart -- that I thought was pretty insightful. The Music Man has already provided some interesting musical exploration here: I discovered recently that "Till There Was You" wasn't original with the Beatles as I had assumed, and we played the Shirley Jones, Kristen Chenoweth, and Beatles versions for comparison. Then we went on a Beatles listening spree, which led to Chuck Berry, since the Beatles had also covered some of his songs. It was fun to look at how rock musicians could borrow both from earlier strands of rock music and from Broadway!

We also watched the Jim Henson: The Storyteller version of "Theseus and the Minotaur" recently. There were plenty of opportunities to talk about ideas like human sacrifice, tribute from one country to another, the Greek propensity to include human/divine and human/animal interbreeding in their mythology, and other more mundane ideas along the way. When the story ended, P wanted to know why Ariadne had encouraged Theseus to kill the Minotaur, her brother, whom she loved. This telling had shown her turning from trying to make the Minotaur's existence meaningful and bearable, to believing the Minotaur could never be happy, so I talked about the idea of putting a person or animal out of their misery when their existence has become too horrible to continue. For some real-life context, we talked about euthanasia for pets. And I brought up the opposing view that even a miserable existence can be worth continuing, either because one values life too much to end it, or because there is hope that things might improve. Ariadne seemed to hold all these ideas as she changed her mind back and forth about whether she wanted Theseus to kill the Minotaur. We also talked about how, when Ariadne fell for Theseus, her loyalty became divided. (Theseus, apparently loyal only to his own ambitions, apparently had no such problem.) P also wanted to know why Theseus had abandoned Ariadne on Naxos. Bacchus/Dionysus did not come along within the scope of this telling, so there was no happy ending for Ariadne. That led to a discussion of tragic flaws -- problems that can lead to a person making the same mistakes over and over -- and how Theseus's tragic flaw seemed to be that he made promises too easily and had a hard time keeping them. He promised Aegeus he would raise a white sail on his return, but he didn't, and Aegeus killed himself in despair. He promised Ariadne he would take her with him when he left Crete, but he abandoned her. He promised his mother he would return to her, but he never did, doubtless leaving her heartbroken after her earlier abandonment by Aegeus.

Today we went to our local unschooling park day and enjoyed learning first-hand about irrigation ditches, culverts, miniature cattails, skate park etiquette, and angular momentum, as well as just having a good time playing with other kids and moms. T had a first, as he moves from parallel, structure-centered play to beginning to have some pretend and other play with other kids his age (that is, without an older child leading the way). He told me about an interaction with another child his size, who he called a baby when he described her to me. I told him her name, and he said, "I like she. She my best friend." I think that's the first time he's described anyone as a friend, without an adult prompt. Hooray! Now to conquer the objective case, third-person, singular, feminine pronoun. Hey, a week ago I don't think he had she, so it's all good.

The Science, Myth, and Music of Rebirth

Lots of little things have been happening here. P, who has been trying for weeks or months to learn to snap her fingers, came to me a few days ago and announced that she'd done it! Sure enough, she can snap left-handed, but not right-handed yet. I remember a similar process when I was learning. P has also started reading before bed, on nights when she's not too tired. She's working her way through Charlotte's Web. Today she picked up a booklet she'd been creating at school on the seasons, and she added some text and pictures to it about winter.

Recently P came to me, asking if I knew where the little cheat-strip for her toy piano was -- the strip that identifies the notes, so she can play specially coded music without actually being able to read musical notation. I had no idea what had happened to it, so I offered to teach her the basics of reading music. She said no, thanks. I just sat down and started drawing a basic key to treble-clef piano music: A keyboard diagram labeled with note names, a scale labeled with note names, and the full tune and words for "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," because I know she can play it by ear. I didn't ask her to look at it or do anything with it, but P was sucked in and watched the process of scoring the song with interest, and now it's in her room by the piano. I've been doing that a fair amount lately. I'll offer to show her something, and if she says no but I really believe she would like whatever it is, I'll just start doing it independently. She almost always ends up interested. A part of this can feel wrong -- as if I'm ignoring what she says. But so far it's working out well. She doesn't complain about any of this as long as I'm not coercing her participation, and often something fun comes out of my little diversions. It's one of my current ways of strewing the kids' paths with interesting stuff. I've considered not asking, just starting the thing on my own -- but for some things the questions help draw attention to something P might never otherwise notice was happening.

Yesterday a lot of little things came together into a big thing -- the day took on a spring theme. We were planning to go to a homeschoolers' park day, but the weather was chilly and damp, so we decided to stay in. T and P were both excited about dyeing eggs, so we did that. I dyed one by wrapping it in yellow onion skins and then in aluminum foil before boiling it, and P asked why that made it turn colors, which led to other good questions like, "If someone were dying cloth orange, would they wrap the cloth up with onion skins and foil?" I've been learning about natural dyes for fiber from guild presentations and magazines recently, so although I haven't tried it yet, I was able to answer her questions.

After the eggs were all dyed and put away, I gave the kids some lunch. As they were winding up eating, I pulled up some animations on YouTube about why the Earth has seasons. The ones I found were either aimed at adults (but with lots of good information), or aimed at kids and almost totally lacking in understandable content, but fortunately this is a topic I know well, so we stopped the video a lot so I could explain things in a more helpful way. P asked why the Tropic of Cancer was named that, and since I had no idea, we looked it up. It turns out that the precession of the equinoxes has made the name inaccurate, since it was originally named for the constellation in which the Sun was located at the June solstice, when the Sun is directly overhead at that Tropic (were it named using the same rule today, it would be called the Tropic of Taurus or the Tropic of Gemini, depending on whether you like to listen to astronomers or astrologers about where the Sun is), but P's giggle at the idea of the Earth wobbling like a top in extremely slow motion was priceless. Later last night, as I was writing this, I learned more about what causes axial precession: gravity from the Sun and Moon pulling on Earth's equatorial bulge. I also learned that the orbits themselves precess, so that the longer-term diagram of planetary orbits might look more like a flower-petal design than an ellipse.

Having discussed the science behind spring, I offered to tell P the Greek myth about why we have seasons -- the story of Persephone. "No, thanks." "Okay." I sat down and found a web site where the story was told in brief, kid-friendly language, and which also linked to a 4-minute video depicting a modernized version of the myth. T, and then P, got sucked into that video. I read P the story, since the video told it differently. P asked for another Greek myth, and I thought Orpheus and Eurydice might be a good segue, also being about an attempt to get a soul back from the Underworld. The web site with the Persephone story didn't offer Orpheus, so we went looking and stumbled across YouTube clips of the series, Jim Henson: The Storyteller. These Greek-myth episodes are dark and somewhat stylized -- not what I would have expected to draw P in -- but we were all three mesmerized. The storytelling is much more Grimm than Disney, and I've been thinking that was a direction we should be exploring. P was eager for more, so we also watched the Storyteller version of Icarus and Daedalus. We're looking forward to checking the full series out from the library and seeing more. Over dinner, I told UnschoolerDad that we'd been checking out some Greek mythology today, and P asked why it was called mythology. That led to a brief discussion that tied up today's explorations with each other nicely -- the idea that myths are what the people of a culture use to explain what they see in the world, which is what science has been increasingly able to do with the passage of time.

Out of the blue, P found Pike's Peak (which we recently visited) on the world map hanging in our hallway, a freebie from Doctors Without Borders that happens to use the Mercator projection. I showed her Greece and Crete on the map, since those were the settings of the myth-based videos we'd watched earlier. P remarked that Greenland was the biggest island she had ever heard of. She has a globe, so I pointed out Greenland there and P learned a little about how flat maps, especially Mercator projections, tend to exaggerate the size of high-latitude features.

Finally, P and T were playing with some bird calls yesterday afternoon. T was playing a duck call, and P was trying to describe what he sounded like in terms of animals -- duck, cow, etc. I said I thought he sounded like a crumhorn. P wanted to know about crumhorns, so we found a photo of some and a video of two musicians playing a duet on crumhorns.

P loved the musical style, so we went looking for more Renaissance music to listen to. P noticed that the church in which one of the videos was set had no pews, so we talked a bit about the Catholic and Eastern churches and their histories. (As it turns out, the church in the video is a Protestant church with removable seating!) We mostly found motets rather than madrigals, so the content wasn't specifically Spring-y, but the idea of Renaissance as rebirth tied the day together nicely.

Legos, Lifting, Legumes, and More

Earlier today I was thinking that I didn't have much to write about and feeling more like SlackerUnschoolerMom. And then P came in with a box of Lego constructions she'd made while I was getting T down for his nap:

As she played with them on the kitchen table, lining them up, stacking them, and arranging them with a large (Duplo) "mom," I noticed that this might be a chance to look at tesselations after all. So, after I promised I'd help put her Lego guys back together afterward, P helped me make this:

Rock on, tesselating Lego men! Well, P got interested in the whole tesselations idea, and she gleefully came up with one on her own:

I tried seeing if I could make another complicated shape that would still tesselate (tile to cover the space with no gaps), and I came up with this (pay no attention to the gaps caused by the Lego bumps; tesselations are fun, but not worth destroying the future play value of the Lego collection):

Then P came up with this tesselation:

And some non-tesselations -- gappy tile patterns, if you like. Here's one:

Back to Lego in a minute. But first: A couple of days ago, P and T watched a short video with me, the "Pulleys" episode from The Way Things Work, a series based on the David Macaulay's book of the same title. We had checked the Pulleys DVD out from the library last week. The 13-minute video was moderately interesting, but what was really great was the YouTube odyssey it sent us on as we explored some ideas introduced in the video. Production lines were mentioned but not described, so we found some videos of auto and bottled-water production lines, and P and T were fascinated with these views of how things get put together. We also watched some production-line clips from Laverne and Shirley and I Love Lucy, just for fun and a little chance to talk about what assembly lines were like when people, instead of robots and machines, did more of the assembling. Forklifts were also mentioned in the Pulleys video, so we found some videos showing forklifts in action, what pallets are for, articulated forklifts for narrow warehouse aisles, etc. One video showed what happens when you use a forklift to pick up a load for which the forklift has an inadequate counterweight!

There was also a video showing a farm forklift of sorts, stacking bales of hay ten at a time. That sent us on another search for a better view of the workings of the hay grapple that made this seemingly anti-gravity feat possible, and we found a good one:

Well, today, after P tired of tesselations, she arranged her Legos into an assembly line for rainbow-order stacks of blocks. It's always nice to see ideas from previous learning getting integrated!

Oh, and the pulleys? I'm hoping to get us some not-too-horrendously-expensive pulleys and try some experiments with them with the kids. Or maybe we'll spring for some real pulleys and make a block and tackle that can hoist the whole family! (We already have a sturdy wooden frame in the garage that we could all sit on for such a feat.) Or maybe I'll follow P and T's lead on what we should do next. :)

Other tidbits from the last few days:

• P saw a bird Thursday evening while out and about with UnschoolerDad. She made some observations good enough to use our new field guide to birds, and we determined it was probably a female house sparrow.
• Both kids went grocery shopping with me, and I started P on making price comparisons. Her multi-digit math isn't super-fast yet, so we focused on same-size packages of similar products and found that the product on sale was actually more expensive than an equivalent product, which we bought. We also talked about how to decide how much of something to buy: How quickly do we use it? Do we have any at home already? Is it a good price compared to what we can usually find?
• While we were shopping, P asked if she could get some snap peas to snack on. I showed her how to select good ones from the rather picked-over selection, and she found a few handfuls of really beautiful ones. P was proud to share the fruits of her labor for our lunch, with hummus for dipping.
• P got to practice multi-digit subtraction, complete with borrowing, to figure out how much allowance I owed her after deducting the cost of the snack she wanted to buy at the store.

Play Dough, Park Day, and Passover

It's been a pretty fun few days. Tuesday morning we made homemade play dough. P and T each got to choose the color for half the recipe and help cook it. They played happily for a while. I tried making some snakes all the same length and making them into different shapes. P and I compared the areas of the different same-perimeter shapes and found the circle "held the most space." Then I laid several circles next to each other and asked P what she thought of dividing up land that way -- what would happen with the little spaces in between the circles? Now, I meant to head for a little bit about tesselations, but P's answer was so cool I didn't have the heart. She gently took the circles and overlapped them so there were no spaces between but small shared areas. She said, "Those are where they get together for parties and dances and meetings. These [the unshared areas] are where they go when they want to be alone."

We'll find another way to do tesselations! It'll make a fun collage project sometime.

P's overlapping circles reminded me of Venn diagrams, so I drew some overlapping circles and labeled them girls, people with brown hair, and children. We proceeded to put a bunch of people we know in their proper areas on the diagram. Then I asked what set would include everything we'd written, and P came up with People We Know, and then wanted to enclose that within Things We Know About. She had a ball brainstorming things to put in that outer set, and when I got tired of writing them down, she picked up the pencil and wrote another dozen or two. When she showed them to me, I pronounced them as they appeared, which led to some spelling corrections with good humor.

The play dough play continued with experimentation with different building and shaping techniques, and addition of a garlic press spiced things up some more.

Wednesday morning, UnschoolerDad and I needed to do some work together, so the kids watched a video P found at the library called Shalom Sesame, a Sesame-Street gloss on Passover. I didn't see much of it, but heard a familiar song or two.

That afternoon we went to our local unschooling Park Day, which was good fun. I helped P and T get to know a couple of dogs that are usually there; T in particular is pretty scared of big dogs, but he came away willing to be licked a bit rather than crying and wanting to be picked up whenever he saw the dogs. P learned from experience (with the dog owner's blessing) that while dogs can get very excited about kids tossing them sticks and twigs to chew up, they eventually learn that nothing tasty is coming and get less interested.

At the park we were at this week, there was a curious slide, with no way that I could see of approaching the top without climbing over fences. I finally saw some other kids climbing the artificial rock face next to the slide and realized it was designed to be climbed. After trying it myself, I encouraged P to climb up. She was very anxious the first time, but then she climbed a few more times on her own and enjoyed the accomplishment. Then, to my astonishment, T (he's not quite three yet!) not only wanted to climb too, but accomplished it with no physical help from me (though I did spot him in case of mishap). He was totally unfazed by the height (8 or 9 feet), the need to find finger- and toe-holds, and so on. The kid's a natural. Now to find places where a three-year-old can climb! I'm a rank beginner myself, but rock climbing is really popular around here, and I'll bet I can find some good spots to try.

On the way home from Park Day, the napless T passed out immediately in his car seat. I asked P how she liked the Passover video. We got to talking about the Passover story: what the elements of the story are, the gratitude expressed in the Seder and the song Daiyeinu, how a person who doesn't take the story literally might understand things like the ten plagues, and how Passover is celebrated by modern Jews. I am a Unitarian Universalist (a non-creedal religion that draws on many sources of inspiration but does not see any one religious text as paramount in understanding the world or the right way to live), and so it's important to me that my kids learn the basics of the key beliefs and celebrations of major world religions. P has enjoyed learning some of this already from a kids' book on world religions that I bought her last year. She often brings it out and asks to be read parts of it.

P wanted to play Set with me last night. Last time we played she got frustrated and burned out on it, but this time she had a good time with it. It's fun to stretch those mental muscles.

Something I've learned this week: That the missing 7 tons or so of oxygen in Biosphere 2 were absorbed by the concrete of which the enclosure was built. I watched a great TED talk by Jane Poynter, one of the scientists who lived in Biosphere 2 for "two years and twenty minutes." P is starting to recognize the sound of a TED talk and come over to look when I play one on my computer. Good stuff.

Ducks, Dad Time, and (just a little) Deconstruction

She is gentle! She is wild!
She's a riddle! She's a child!
She's a headache! She's an angel!
She's a girl!
     -- Rodgers and Hammerstein, from "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria," The Sound of Music

It's been nearly a week since I posted, so of course I probably have forgotten 60% or more of what we've done. But here is a nice sampling!

I'm continuing to volunteer in P's former classroom most weeks, since there was not another parent prepared to take my place. I've been a teacher, and I know what it's like to be left in the lurch! Last time I was in, I was assigned to play a homonym game with the students, putting together mini puzzles with pictures of homonyms. We had fun with the game and finished a little early. Normally the students are supposed to do independent reading when they finish early, but some of them wanted to draw instead, and I said they could. Two of the girls drew nearly identical scenes of a flower with a sun overhead. I whispered to them, "Can you think of a homonym for your drawing?" Both could, and one tried drawing it. I brought that story home to P, who grooved on it. She's really starting to enjoy puns, and she immediately recognized the link between homonyms and pun humor and proceeded delightedly to make new puns for quite a while.

On our trip to the science museum last Monday, I bought a field guide to Colorado birds. Tuesday we tried going to another local home schoolers' park day, but no one else showed up (good thing we have our more active unschoolers' park day!). P spent a good deal of our time at the park watching some mallard ducks. First she told me her observations of their size, posture, coloring, setting, and activities, which were some of the suggested observations in the field guide's introduction. Then the ducks settled down to sleep on the creek bank. P wanted to go sit by them, so I coached her a bit on birdwatching ethics -- that if her presence was changing their behavior, she was too close -- and she was able to settle down and watch them from about six feet away for perhaps half an hour until a less quiet child disturbed them and they left. She's had great focus since she was a baby, but I felt proud nonetheless.

This past weekend we took a weekend trip as a family so that I could attend a physics symposium at my alma mater. I loved having the chance to hear talks (on Saturn's magnetosphere, radiation oncology, scientific contributions to ending the Macondo gusher caused by the Deepwater Horizon failure last year, and recent developments in the hot-spot theory of island formation and the forecasting of volcanic eruptions) by my fellow alumni who had gone on to research careers, stretching my physics muscles again to take it all in. I also connected with some folks who live near us and work in local scientific facilities where they can help us find appropriate tours and other learning resources and opportunities. I think it speaks well of my physics department's focus on learning (and not just the knowledge gained thereby) that everyone who learned I had begun home schooling my kids was glad to hear it. Those who also learned that I was using an interest-led approach rather than a standard curriculum were even more pleased.

While I was at the talks and receptions, UnschoolerDad was hanging out with the kids. They enjoyed some new foods that they were skeptical about at first (some Ethiopian dishes and smoked gouda spread), saw Pike's Peak, and learned how mesas form (we drove through a lot of meseta-rich terrain, and I shared what I remembered from college geology about their formation). Dad also taught P to play checkers and how to set up and make the basic moves in chess. After we returned from our trip, I got out my chess set, which was my dad's when I was little. I've never been much of a chess player, but I know the basics, and as a child I adored setting up the chess pieces in standard and fanciful arrangements. It turns out that P and T also love doing this. Even T is starting to pick up the names of the pieces and parts of how to set them up and move them. We also used the chess pieces as props to try a logic problem I suggested. P enjoyed thinking about it, but she needed some help to figure it out. P loves checkers and has asked to play again several times.

Finally, we had a great time yesterday and today watching The Sound of Music. The kids had never seen it before, and it had been a long time for me. Several times when I looked to see how P was reacting, I saw her face positively aglow with enjoyment, much more so than with most movies. She watched the entire 3-hour movie with rapt attention, and then watched part of it again today, with commentary turned on. T was not quite so spellbound, but he also really enjoyed it. We took opportunities to pause the movie and talk about metaphor ("She's a headache!" from "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" was a great example), sex roles ("Sixteen Going on Seventeen" is pretty cringe-worthy by today's standards, but it's a great illustration of some of the things that have changed about the world, and the choreographers clearly understood some of the irony of the song in 1964), history (Hitler and the expansion of his power in Europe before World War II), nuns (convent life, dress, etc.), and other tidbits of interest.

On to more. Stay tuned.

All the Time in the World

I have no time for heedless hurry
I have no time for the hustler's bluff
I have no time for restless worry
I have all the time in the world for love
     -Fred Small, from "All the Time in the World"

Two things in the last two days have stood out as fun learning experiences. First, P and I watched Fly Away Home together. T joined in when he woke up from his nap. It's a movie rich in information unfamiliar but accessible (with a few explanations) to many kids: how birds imprint on the first living thing they see, how geese learn to migrate, how government "wildlife services" juggle protecting animals and catering to the preferences of humans, how the U.S. protects its borders, how land developers and environmentalists often come into conflict over wildlife habitat, and a bit about how ultralight aircraft are built and flown. P was horrified when she saw the bulldozer tearing up trees near the main character's home in Canada. I hadn't expected that level of reaction, but in hindsight, when you haven't grown up with the fight against clear-cutting, it really is horrifying to see healthy trees in a beautiful area torn apart and pulled up by their roots!

Yesterday all three of us spent the day at a local nature and science museum. I briefly debated whether to buy a year's membership, and I'm so glad I did. Beyond saving us money if we go more than a few times per year, it allowed me to be completely unfazed by the idea of taking an hour to go the first 50 feet into the museum. When you're trying to "do" a large part of a museum in a day, you miss so much! This way, I figured, if we only saw 1% of what the museum had to offer, that was just fine -- we could come back anytime, and the kids would get a chance to drill down to what was fascinating for them. We had all the time in the world.

Here are some of the things they found interesting:

• A collection of insect specimens, showing representative sizes and types for a dozen different classification groups
• A display on the life cycle of butterflies (To look up: what's the difference between a chrysalis, a pupa, and a cocoon in other metamorphosing animals? The display didn't have the level of detail we wanted on that.)
• A display of a few local animals, stuffed and beautifully displayed with artists' depictions of them alongside
• A window into the workings of the escalator -- We could see signs of past repair work and make guesses about how the parts we couldn't see might work.
• A display, with helpful explanations by a museum volunteer, of meteorites (The partial melting of the meteorites tied into what we learned about atmospheric re-entry from Apollo 13.)
• A machine that demonstrated impact crater formation, with some great photos of craters on the Earth and elsewhere
• A demonstration with a bell jar on how liquids boil in near-vacuum and actually cool off a bit in the process -- the demo was intended to show the effects on a human of a leaky space suit ("Space can really make your blood boil!"), and the presenter was a retired Lockheed engineer who worked on equipment that was used on the space shuttle. We had fun talking shop a bit after he finished his demonstration.
• That there used to be an ocean where we are now (just east of the Rocky Mountains)
• How the continents moved from a clustered shape (Pangaea) to their present locations
• How wood gets petrified
• That you can match up rock/fossil strata from different, nearby locations to form a more extensive regional fossil record
• That rocks have a low level of natural radioactivity (display with geiger counter)
• How natural selection works (We discussed this while watching a video loop of mudskippers and other fish who can move over land from one puddle to another if theirs is drying up or food is scarce, and who thus survive and reproduce more successfully than other fish who can't get around as well. The first fish who had the beginnings of that ability would have had a serious advantage over their less able kin, leading eventually to speciation.)
• That animals need oxygen and produce carbon dioxide, and plants do the opposite, so they can live together in closed systems (There was a model of an experiment with a mouse and a green plant.)
• How the formation of the ozone layer allowed for the development of life more complex than the original microbes that generated the oxygen that reacted to form ozone in the first place
• Handling some samples of dried peat -- these were on display with some mammoth fossils, because the fossils were found in wet peat. (This tied into the harvesting and use of peat as fuel, which we saw recently in The Secret of Roan Inish. We do watch fanciful movies sometimes, but even in them we usually find something to learn!)

I learned some of the arguments scientists have made to support dinosaurs having been warm-blooded: they lived in groupings typical of modern warm-blooded animals; they traveled pretty quickly and were quite active compared to modern cold-blooded animals; they cared for their young; and they grew quickly during their juvenile periods, like modern warm-blooded animals. The kids, to be honest, weren't that interested in this bit yet, but they were fascinated by the stegosaurus fossils found in Colorado when I was finishing college nearby. Who knew?

We stopped in the museum shop before leaving. P bought a necklace with color-changing "mood" beads. T picked out a bundle of rubber snakes. It will be fun to learn how the mood beads work and what kinds of snakes we are now harboring! I picked out a field guide to Colorado birds and The Big Book of Brain Games, a book of puzzles at many levels and in many areas including art, math, and science. We had a good time with the puzzle book after dinner last night. I think P has a knack for topology puzzles. A sidebar in the book quipped that a topologist is a person who can't tell the difference between a donut and a coffee cup. Can you see how they are the same? It took me a moment. UnschoolerDad pointed out that a human would also fall in that group of objects. We've both had fun playing with topology -- I heard about it from classmates in college and brainteaser books in high school, but I don't remember it being covered in any courses.

As I write, both kids are painting with watercolors. T just created a stunning, boldly-colored piece, very different from his recent all-linear color studies. I can't quite capture the full depth of color with my point-and-shoot, but here's my best effort:

Increasing the Peace

It's been several days since I posted last -- I've been finishing up our taxes, working on our filing system, and trying to keep up with the kids, who want to be outside now that the weather is getting really pleasant.

We haven't had any major adventures in this time span, though UnschoolerDad put up a swing in the backyard tree yesterday. Both kids are thrilled! He made the swing while P and I were at her gymnastics class. T didn't want him to use any power tools because of the noise, so he used a hand saw, a drawknife, and a file to shape it, and then the drill press (his quietest power tool) to make the holes for the ropes. T got to see some good old-fashioned hand tool work, and he was excited to tell me about it when I was helping him get to sleep last night.

There have been some spontaneous explorations. A few days ago, P drew a fish that looked like a flounder to me. I showed her some pictures online of flounder and we talked about their camouflage and how their eyes migrate to one side of their heads as they grow and metamorphose, so they can lie on the ocean floor and escape the notice of predators. Another time, P came up with the rhyme, "Prince Quince," and asked what a quince was. We found photos and talked about similarities and differences with apples. P has also asked the meanings of several words. Hesitate was one of them. I think she heard it in a book on CD; she's been listening to The Mouse and the Motorcycle and some Magic Tree House books.

We went to our unschoolers' park day this week, and there was lots of good play time for both kids. T finally got his hands on a sit-upon sand-excavator tool that he could actually use, and he stayed with it most of the afternoon. Ever notice how they're generally much too large to be usable by the kids who most want to use them? P spent some time climbing around with other kids and some time swinging as high as possible on the swings. We took food along so both kids could eat when they were hungry, and that worked out well. I got to connect more with the other moms there, who seem like a congenial and interesting bunch. Sometimes there are dads as well, but this time it was all moms.

I finished watching Apollo 13, though neither child chose to watch it with me (they watched videos from the library on dinosaurs and weather), except that P watched some of the very end, when the command module was entering the atmosphere, going through radio blackout, and splashing down. P asked why there was a radio blackout during descent, and I had to look it up. It turns out that because the command module is descending much faster than the speed of sound, the air molecules in the atmosphere can't get out of the way, so besides creating a sonic boom, they pile up in front of the module and get superheated and ionized. The sheath of ions around the command module blocks radio transmissions and telemetry in or out, so Mission Control has no information until the parachutes are deployed and the module slows down to non-ionizing speeds. I broke this down for P, and then showed her a tiny sonic boom with a whip made of a rolled-up bandanna -- something I learned in high school, but not in class!

While looking up sonic booms, whips, etc. to make sure what I was demonstrating really was a sonic boom, I encountered my own fun tidbit, which I never learned in school, but which is apparently taught in some high school math classes: if you square an odd number and divide the result into two sequential integers, those two numbers and the original odd number are the legs of a right triangle. This is the sort of thing I can't rest until I've tried to prove, so I did. It was fun dusting off my algebra, which actually wasn't that stale, since I taught various forms of algebra for four years after leaving college. It's amazing what having to think something through from multiple directions, to accommodate different students' ways of learning it, does for one's recall.

What feels really good in this past week or so is that the kids are learning to play together more peacefully. When P was in school, they didn't have a lot of time to play together because so much of P's time was taken up with school, getting ready for school or bed, or doing homework. Now they get lots of time together. And because I'm less occupied with all that school stuff, I have more free attention for helping them get through their moments of friction -- not just telling them what to do (though sometimes that comes first), but helping them learn how to handle similar future situations with less stress and greater consideration for each other. On Thursday we had one of our most peaceful days ever. The kids played on the deck, asked for pans of water and played with those, asked for food and had a picnic, and then just enjoyed the springtime sun on the deck for hours, with scarcely a hint of conflict. Meanwhile, I provided water, food, and towels when they were needed -- and got our taxes done! Since then it hasn't been quite that amazingly harmonious, but it's still less conflict-ridden than just a couple of weeks ago. The kids are expressing more affection and acting more kindly and helpfully toward each other and toward me. It's a marvelous feeling. We still have our moments, but they're fewer and easier to handle.

With these improvements, I feel more willing to take the kids on adventures, knowing they have greater capacity to handle them without melting down. Adventure, here we come!