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.