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.