Stick in the Mud

P was a real grouch for much of this week. She didn't want to leave the house most days, and while home she seemed to spend a lot of time looking for new and better ways to needle T. I pointed out once how much more everyone gets of what they want when we behave as if we are on the same team than when we behave as if we are against each other. That message sinks in a little, I think, because I do see more cooperative behavior and mutual enjoyment for a while; but P may need to learn some lessons the hard way about losing a younger sibling's interest or trust. She likes playing with T, but sometimes she gets too bossy or interferes too much with what he wants to do, and then the play stops being fun for either of them. Or she crosses a line too many times, gets told to give T some space, promises to do better, and learns that after too many of the same kind of transgression, her actions speak louder than her promises.

Fortunately, not every day or piece of learning has been hard. P has been continuing to read a lot, with this week's books including Magic Tree House books (fiction) on King Arthur and Shakespeare, and Magic Tree House research guides (nonfiction) on Rome, Pompeii, and deep sea life (e.g., giant tube worms near mid-ocean ridges). She's listened to the first two Green Knowe books on CD, and she and T went through some of The New Way Things Work after P received it as a birthday gift. One one quick visit to the library to pick up some holds, P also got her own library card. She was pleased as punch to check out her first few books all by herself, having talked through the process with me in the car (she's watched and helped many times before with my card).

Another birthday gift (at P's request) was a geared student clock. She is wanting to figure out telling time beyond the hour and half hour, and this should help. It has the minutes printed in very small numbers around the edge, so you can look closely to find the minute value, or look from farther away to figure it out without that prompt. Being a big sister, she enjoys most the learning that looks like teaching T to tell time. Heck, three is young for that, but he may learn!

We did take one big outing, a day trip to Fort Collins to look for letterboxes there. We hatched the plan the night before, and I scouted out suitable clues for us to try. The letterboxes were placed by lovers of northern Colorado history, so while reading the clues and looking for the boxes, we learned about Auntie Stone and other figures in the Euro-American settlement of Camp/Fort Collins. We saw some houses and a school building preserved from those early days, with construction ranging from hewn logs with mud chinking to clapboards with wallpaper inside. We talked about why folks might have used such narrow, steep stairs to subtract less from the interior living space. We saw period wood stoves, school desks, a working pump organ, a hand-rocked washing machine with wringer, and other remnants of our regional history. Today, perhaps following up on that day, P asked me what it would be like "if there were no power." I asked what she thought first, and that led to talking about different kinds of "power" (electricity, people power, animal power, steam engines, etc.) and how do the same jobs using different energy sources.

There's been a fair amount of physical activity, too, for a week with so much time at home. We did a lot of walking around and playing in Fort Collins, and P and T ran about with huge abandon after P's birthday dinner out with relatives, and at a lake where we went to nab a convenient letterbox that evening. On that brief outing, P also contemplated the perfection of the sunset reflected in the lake, and we saw our first great horned owl in the wild, as it began its evening of hunting. On our way back to the car, we saw people catching fish from the shore, and P was curious about why people fish. (For fun and/or food was the short answer; we also talked about how fish could be a low-cost meal for a family who needed one.) Finally, P started her next session of gymnastics lessons today, and she's still having a lot of fun there while improving her strength, flexibility, and balance.

On the way back from gymnastics class, we saw an Accident Investigation vehicle checking out the site of a recent fender-bender. This led to questions and explanations about the word investigation, liability insurance for drivers, what happens if you don't carry it, criminal charges, how a criminal trial works, and qualifications for serving on a jury. I could tell P was interested when she closed her car window, even though the car was hot, so she could hear our conversation better.

P and I borrowed Babe: Pig in the City from the library and watched it this week while T napped (it's pretty intense for preschoolers). We stopped to talk about what animal control departments do, why a dog might need a cart to hold up its hindquarters, what drug-sniffing dogs do, and about mortgages and foreclosures. We've visited that last topic before, when talking about why we make payments on a house we "own," but it seems to be an elusive target for a seven-year-old.

T had a great morning today while P grumped and played at home. He and I went to a hardware store for a part for our swamp cooler, and there was an 18-wheeler unloading garden supplies. T has been puzzling about what pallets are for, and today we got to see one in action, used with a pallet lifter to get potting soil into the store. Then the truck driver said hi to T and asked whether he'd ever seen the inside of a big truck. He let us look around inside his cab, which had bunk beds and a fridge and microwave in the back for long hauls. T was dazzled. He's just been enjoying a picture book from the library, The Trucker, about long-haul trucking, and this dovetailed beautifully with that. T's also been continuing to play with the Brain Quest fan-books of questions and answers, and it's fun to see what he has absorbed, and talk with him about unfamiliar things.

This is such a hodgepodge of stuff. Such is the unscripted life -- sometimes the themes all come together, and sometimes it's a dash of this and a pinch of that. If there are big connections this week, my tired brain can't find most of them. But perhaps yours can, the human brain being the pattern-finding machine that it is.

Still Waters Run Deep

It's been a quiet week at our house, mostly. The rain just keeps coming down most days, so we've mostly been at home. Although we're doing some reading, playing, cooking, and watching and listening to interesting things, the days feel slow and not very full. But that reading, in particular, really accounts for a lot of time, knowledge, and reading practice! Looking back on our library records and my notes for the week, it hasn't been as uneventful as it seemed.

We are becoming prodigious library consumers. I feel like an extravagant thief, walking out of the library each time with those huge piles of books, CDs, and DVDs, all with no money changing hands! We use the hold-and-pickup-at-our-branch system extensively, as well as visiting the main library every few weeks. We are good about getting things back on time or early, but our library doesn't charge late fees on items from the children's section, so even the occasional late item is free, as long as we don't lose it. This sort of thing is worth the sales and parcel taxes for the libraries, I tell you.

Some borrowed items we've read, watched, or listened to recently:

• The Way Things Work animated episodes on Wheels and Axles and on Sound
• An animated version of the Greek myth of Jason's quest for the Golden Fleece
• Singin' in the Rain, which provided interesting side conversations about how movies are often made on sets, even when the action appears to take place outdoors; the difference between silent films and talkies; sorting out all the movies-within-the-movie; and suspension of disbelief in movies and musicals ("Why is he not using his umbrella?")
• A DVD on beginning Spanish for kids. I was singularly unimpressed with the attempts at teaching, especially if they're aiming at kids who aren't great readers yet. But P and T watched with interest and picked up a few things.
• A music and story CD called Mr. Beethoven Lives Upstairs, about Beethoven's life, his music, and the odd habits he had while composing
• Other classical CDs from the library, which unfortunately were in the wrong cases, so we didn't have much information on the pieces or composers
• LOTS of books in P's favorite series: Magic Tree House, Magic School Bus chapter books, Fairy Realm, and the Rainbow Magic fairy books. Here's a sampling of topics in Magic Tree House books P's read recently: Leonardo da Vinci, the Great Depression, Carnival in Venice circa 1750, the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, ocean life, the arctic, the Old West, and Ireland in the early Middle Ages (monks preserving written documents, Viking invasion, and a bit about the older Celtic culture). P also has been listening to The Children of Green Knowe on CD while cleaning her room, and she says she likes it. I like it when a new author squeezes in among the series monopolists, though one could really pick worse series than Magic Tree House!

We've also had chances to learn through everyday experience and curiosity:

• We replaced some batteries in a toy, so both kids got a look at battery-placement diagrams, how to recognize the plus and minus terminals on a battery, and how to get batteries to fit in their spots.
• Today when P had a lot of her folded laundry to put away and T kept following her into her room and slowing her down, P had the idea to bring out her toy cash register and play "store" with T. She was buying her clothes from him in the living room, one small pile at a time, then sorting them out into her dresser drawers and coming back for more. T would type a number on the register and P would read it to him (she's getting pretty good at place value up to 3 or 4 digits) and pretend to pay him appropriately. After the laundry was put away, they sorted out the play money, and P showed T what all the different kinds of coins were. Since P just recently got that worked out herself, it reminded me of the medical school mantra, "See one, do one, teach one." I also noticed when I was a tutor, and then a teacher, of physics and high school math, that nothing solidified a piece of knowledge for me like having to teach it to others, especially others with learning styles different from my own. So you can imagine the silent applause for this sibling-initiated game!
• P noticed moisture on the outside of her cup of ice water and asked about it. I explained condensation (relating it to relative humidity and molecular energy through phase changes, though not in those words), and she got it. Later we made toasted-cheese sandwiches, and P commented that the cheese became a liquid. We talked about observations that would validate that idea (e.g., the cheese flowing downhill or re-solidifying as it cooled), and she was right on. P commented after assembling another sandwich for toasting, "I used my quesadilla skills too." There's nothing like a little metacognition to go with your learning.
• On our one sunny day, we went to a nearby park where there are paddleboats. P and I went for a ride with her aunt and cousin, and we got a chance to do same pedaling, see the rudder and paddle wheel at work on other boats, and talk a little about how they worked. 
• T keeps working at his jigsaw puzzles, with and without help, and his spoken syntax is really shaping up beautifully.

And just now, P brought me the cash register with a decimal number on its screen, wanting to read it to me and find out what the numbers after the decimal point meant. Mama like.

A Week a Weaver Could Love

Many strands of learning are active these days. Thinking about how the strands pick up, leave off, and resume at different times, and how they twist and weave together in our lives, reminds me of Norse and so many other myths about spinners and weavers of fate, and of playful weavers of my own acquaintance.

There are fine motor skills: After several previous attempts at knitting in which P needed me to be hands-on on a continual basis, this week she picked it up and owned it. She still loses track sometimes of where she is in the four stages of making a stitch, but she's getting better at figuring that out, too. I used a rhyme I learned from another knitter, long after I learned myself: "In through the front door, dance around the back, out through the window, and off jumps Jack." P is amazingly happy to be knitting without constant supervision and exclaims often about how incredibly good at it she is. I imagine that her knitting self-image will ride a few roller coaster hills before it settles down. For now, I just let her know I'm really pleased, too, and I knit with her whenever I get a chance, occasionally showing her something in my own knitting that she may want to use when garter-stitch rectangles get old.

There are gross motor and strength skills: T is working on doing headstands with support and has somersaults down cold (except for the part about making sure you have room to complete the somersault without falling off something or running into something!), and P continues her handstand pushups and other strengthening exercises. We still don't have a bar for pullups, but we've discovered that she can do pullups on my forearm, as long as she's careful when letting go -- since otherwise I whack myself in the face. We'll figure it out.

There's Helen Keller. We watched The Miracle Worker recently, but we were disappointed that the story stopped so early in Helen's process of learning to connect with the world. On our next trip to the library, we found a book about the friendship between Helen Keller and Alexander Graham Bell that covers both their early lives in some detail, and I've begun reading that out loud to P. It's a nice little look at telephone technology so far, and I imagine we'll touch on several communication modes for deaf and blind people as well.

There are the last few chapters of Genesis. After we returned The Miracle Worker, our next Netflix movie was Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I hadn't seen it before, and I found it quite odd. We paused for plot clarification a lot, since the all-songs structure of the movie didn't make things very plain for a six-year-old. I was curious about how closely the movie hewed to the original story, so we read it afterward. I looked up the most accessible translation I could find, and we read from Chapter 37 to the end of Genesis, glossing over or summarizing passages where the plot wandered or the text became repetitive. P listened indifferently at first, but when I paused, she asked me to keep going. I hadn't realized that the end of Joseph's story wove so smoothly into the beginning of the Israelites' captivity in Egypt and thence to the Passover story (which P learned during this past Passover). When I last read Genesis and Exodus straight through, I was about 11 years old, and it was the King James translation, with predictable results for my understanding and recall.

There's World War II. As I wrote before, this started with The King's Speech and continued through the documentary on the discovery of the planets. Today, as it happened, there was a free concert at the library by a group called Reveille 3, which does an Andrews-Sisters-style concert (complete with costumes and choreography), interspersed with touching, entertaining readings of letters to and from the front, which I believe were based on real letters from WWII. This morning I played P a couple of the Andrews Sisters' songs. On the bus on the way to the concert and while we waited for it to start, I talked with P about the basics of enlistment, the draft, food rationing, scrap drives, war bonds, the USO, "loose lips sink ships" (and the fact that the Allies also had spies in Europe) and some of the social issues for families and lovers separated by the war. The concert went a little long for the kids, but they both enjoyed it, and it was at a good level for P to understand a lot of what was going on. T just had me sing "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree" about five times in a row and still wanted more, so I think he's enjoying it on some level as well.

Before we left the library, we checked out Number the Stars for reading aloud. I think that focusing first on Denmark, where the Jews were mostly hidden from the German occupiers by Gentile friends and neighbors, or smuggled to safety in Sweden, will be a good path into the Holocaust part of WWII for a young child. So many approaches to the Holocaust are fraught with despair; Anne Frank has her place (a little later, I think), but I want to make sure P learns about brave, successful resistance as well, and hears of situations where Gentiles saw Jews as inextricably linked to themselves, not as "others" or dispensable from society. I'm looking forward to playing Fred Small's song, "Denmark 1943,"  for P once we've read Number the Stars. (A free sample and a paid download are available at that link, and I don't get anything out of it; it's simply one of my favorite true-story songs.)

We also talked about the involvement in WWII of three of my relatives who were in the U.S. military (one of my grandfathers was killed in action; two others survived their service). I briefly described the internment camps where Japanese-Americans were imprisoned. And at some point we'll talk about UnschoolerDad's side of the family for another perspective -- his family's town was in German-occupied western Poland during the war and then Communist-ruled Poland afterward.

There's reading in general: P is reading chapter books, especially Magic Tree House books, as fast as she can get her hands on them. I'm trying to intersperse some high-quality books by other authors as read-alouds so she won't feel too bereaved when she finishes all the available MTH books.

And there's some physics: P noticed today that her reflection in the inside of her spoon was upside down and asked why. I dredged up my memories from learning and later teaching optics, and the diagrams I was able to draw seemed to make sense to her. We talked about flat mirrors first, and equal angles of incidence and reflection. Since light reflects just like balls bounce (disregarding rotation of the balls), that's not hard stuff. After we talked about reflections in calm lakes, P generalized nicely to how reflections in ripply lakes are distorted and look ripply themselves. Then we took on curved mirrors. I love it when kids get engaged with physics before anyone at school would have bothered teaching it.

But wait; there's more!

I forgot some things from last week, and there are some new things from today. (Blogger was down for maintenance when I finished this post, so today isn't today anymore, but there you go.)

P and I have been talking a lot about metaphors. I point them out from time to time when one of us is reading aloud to the other. On the way back from the zoo, P mentioned that the sunlight was spilling into her lap. I said I liked that metaphor, since it made the sunlight sound like a liquid. P pointed out that foods, as well as liquids, can be said to spill. I agreed and said, "The sunlight spilled into my lap like a pile of hot scrambled eggs," which got a laugh. That reminded me of an article UnschoolerDad and I read, in which the author said all successful humor was some form of benign violation. I told P that, explaining that a benign violation is a situation where a rule gets broken, but nobody really gets hurt. P thought a moment and then pointed out that when you say a rule gets broken, that is itself a metaphor (a rule being a noncorporeal thing). Don't look now, but I think she's getting it.

I recently stumbled across a video simulation of the formation of a human fetus's face, which among other things showed how the front of the lip and palate are just about the last things to get joined up properly. The video narrator said, "This happens in the womb between about two and three months, and if it doesn't happen then, it never will." 

I showed this to P and explained that this meant some babies' faces didn't quite get finished, so they'd end up with a cleft lip and/or cleft palate, which could be connected up with surgery. P surprised me by asking if we could watch a video of a cleft repair surgery. I told her I was willing to look for one, but I wanted her to think about whether it would be disturbing to see a surgeon cut into a person's face, because that bothered some people, though I didn't mind it much. (I used to watch surgery videos back when we had satellite and TiVo, and once when I taught seventh-grade life science, I gave an after-school showing of one of them for interested students, after showing them in class the lead-up in which the surgeon used a model to explain the surgery. The after-school surgery video was well attended.) She said, "No, of course not." So we looked. We found diagrams that explained the steps of the surgery and a video that showed just a tiny portion of the actual surgery. She seemed satisfied with that. She didn't show any hint of being upset by seeing the surgery, though she was confused about what body parts we were seeing because the surgical setup hid so much of the face from view.

Today, after going to park day, all of us watched The Miracle Worker together. T wasn't riveted, but he was content to play nearby. P was spellbound. We stopped the film to talk about plot points, the rat-infested asylums (described in the movie) that used to pass for mental-health care and a bit about how things have changed, and the spectrum of vision impairment along which one might find a normally sighted person, Anne Sullivan with her weak vision, and Helen Keller with her total blindness.

Around dinnertime, I was holding P, and I flipped her over, as we often do, so she was doing a handstand on the ground and I was holding her legs. Since she's been working on her arm strength, I suggested she try lowering herself to a headstand and then pushing back up to a handstand. I supported part of her weight by holding her ankles, and she did it easily. Then she asked me to keep balancing her feet upright, but stop pulling up on them so she could try the pushup without help. To my utter astonishment, she was able to do two or three pushups that way! I tried having UnschoolerDad hold my legs while I tried the same thing, and I couldn't even come close to getting off the ground. I told P so, and while she was pleased with herself, she said, "It's probably because I'm lighter." Three cheers for physics intuition!

Tonight I read aloud from A Cricket in Times Square while P cleaned her room and T drew pictures. We got to the part where Tucker mouse gave Chester cricket some of his life savings to get him out of a jam. The book listed off his savings as two half-dollars, five quarters, two dimes, six nickels, and 18 pennies. I asked P if she wanted to add all that up and see how much money it was. She did (money is very salient to her these days, with her newly increased allowance and the expectation that she buy more of the non-necessities that she wants!), so we proceeded to do a bunch of coin-value multiplication and then some three-column addition with carrying. I started off showing her how to do it, but I turned the process more and more over to P as we went along, and she caught on quickly. I showed her how to figure out how many dollars you get from large numbers of quarters by counting out the number of quarters while drawing dots in lines of four and then counting the lines -- this made a lot of sense to her -- so now we've set the stage for learning multiplication and division visually. She wanted to do some more math before bed, so we made up more similar problems about found money, and this time we added them as decimals (e.g., $2.93 rather than 293 cents). She clearly has the basics now, and she had fun learning them. She doesn't have many basic addition facts memorized yet, but I see them slowly accumulating (and her enjoying that) as we do this sort of thing and she gets to use them more, and in the meantime she's learning tricks to make what she knows go further, such as adding 9 by instead adding 10 and subtracting 1. I hate to memorize things if I don't have to, so I've stored up many such tricks to share; and I still learn new ones from time to time. I will say that I did memorize my addition and multiplication facts in school, that they are still firmly in place, and that I'm glad I know them; so I'll be on the lookout for opportunities for P to learn them in a way that brings her joy along with her knowledge.

Just today, at park day, I found myself talking to another mom who was not part of the homeschooling group, but was at the  park with her preschool-age son. When she learned we were homeschooling, she said it must be a lot of work. I said that if we did worksheets at the kitchen table all day, it probably would be, but that since we were instead watching for and creating learning opportunities guided by what attracted the kids' interests (and our interests, where they overlap), it was a lot easier. I gave the example that a child who is interested and ready to learn a basic math technique could learn it in one sitting -- maybe even with one good problem -- whereas in a schoolroom, you might have to do the same thing 30 times before most of the students would find themselves in the right mental state, at least one of those times, to learn it. That's a big reason why things some might call "busywork" or "drill and kill" happen in classrooms. But if you can watch just one child for the right moment, you don't need all the repetition. Don't get me wrong; I'm sure we'll see three-column addition again. It's a useful skill, the need for which comes up repeatedly. But I'll bet P will be able to hold the pencil from the beginning next time.

Accretion Happens

Wow, it's been a week! And a busy week at that. It feels like a mishmash, but themes emerge -- that's how learning works, after all. We take the mental models of the world that we already have, and we add things onto them or modify them somewhat as new information becomes available through observation, media, or other sources. That's constructivism, the theory from Lev Vygotsky and others that I learned on the way to my teaching credential back in the day. But today I am thinking of it in terms of accretion: Our body of knowledge gets bumped into by new things, and mostly they stick somewhere that they seem to belong, sometimes bringing new materials to the party, and sometimes just enriching the mix. Read on for some highlights.

P and T have been getting along really well. I started noticing it on last week's park day, when they woke up laughing and were sweet with each other all day. They still have their abrasive moments, but they seem to be learning to get along much better, and to be motivated to keep things fun and peaceful. I try to stay in the helping-them-figure-out-how-to-have-a-great-relationship space and out of the can't-you-kids-just-get-along-and-make-MY-life-easier space. It's not always easy, but when I can do it, things go better. They accumulate (accrete!) skills for cooperation, play that's fun for both of them, and peaceful coexistence in a house with several humans, each with his/her own needs. Unschooling has given me more time and breathing space to figure out my role in that and play it more effectively.

P has even slept in T's room for several nights running, with both of them wanting and enjoying that. Tonight things were a little rough getting to bedtime for various reasons, so I asked them to sleep in their own rooms to try to maximize the actual sleeping, but it's been sweet for all, and I won't be surprised if the room-sharing continues. P even gets herself down for a nap sometimes, if she can do it during T's nap and in his room.

We joined postcrossing.org, a web site that allows you to send and receive postcards back and forth with random folks in other countries. We're doing it under my name thus far, to avoid giving out names and physical addresses together for the kids. Our first round of five postcards has been traveling four days, en route to various parts of Canada, Belarus, and Russia. It's fun to see where all the countries are on the map, and I'm looking forward to receiving some postcards and finding out about the places they come from, once our postcards arrive at their destinations. Perhaps we'll get a pen-pal or e-mail exchange going with a kindred spirit or a few. I would love to put up a really large world map and pin postcards all around it; we'll see what the budget will allow. A mural would be fun and low-budget, but less rich in data than a printed map.

We watched Heidi (the 1993 TV miniseries with Jason Robards). It offers an unschooly look at how learning to read can occur, contrasting the tutor's ultra-drill-and-kill penmanship and phonics lessons, which leave Heidi feeling hopeless about ever learning to read, with Clara's grandmother reading her stories and awakening her understanding of letters/sounds forming words, then sentences, then stories, so that Heidi learns to read rather quickly, almost in spite of what the tutor has been trying to teach her. We stopped to discuss some bits of historical and social context -- some ways that orphans can be cared for, child labor, what asthma is and how it was treated before pocket inhalers, differences in daily routine and manners between the city and the country and between a rich house with servants and a homesteader's house without.

We went to open gym, where P is working a little on arm strength, with my encouragement. She's getting close to being able to do her first pullup. Go, P!

We played with an Android game called X Construction. Both kids enjoyed trying to build trestle-type railroad bridges and test them with virtual trains, getting a start on the triangles-make-things-stiff-and-strong concept of engineering. T had a hard time with it (though he still enjoyed trying), but P got it pretty well. I had thought she might enjoy it, since a couple of weeks ago she independently came up with the project of building a swingset for her dollhouse dolls. That's still unfinished, but it's also benefiting from the stiff-triangles idea, which we worked out with some preliminary experiments.

We ran across some money pages in a 2nd-grade workbook P chose a while back. I think that, when we tried them together, P finally got the values of American coins down. It was another good little bit of arithmetic, and I think we'll use some coin-related puzzles on our birthday letterbox clues. P has been play-testing some clues I've come up with, as well as contributing ideas of her own. She also used some money math when buying a trinket at a local craft fair with allowance money, and interrogated me at length about the similarities and differences between her toy cash register, a calculator, and a real cash register -- a little microelectronics/practical computing accreting onto her arithmetic/money/commerce structure.

I'd been saving The King's Speech for several days to watch on my own, but "on my own" just doesn't happen as much these days, so P and I watched a good deal of it together while T napped one day. We had a good time looking at customs surrounding British royalty, a bit of the history leading up to Britain's entry into WWII, some older media forms (MovieTone newsreels, radio addresses), and wartime technology like barrage balloons. T had awakened and joined us by the time the war was happening in the movie, and he wanted to know "more and more and more about garage balloons" afterward. Three is such a fun age for language development, totally aside from the history/technology!

Today we hung out at the zoo, enjoying the beautiful weather, walking a lot, and checking out the various baby animals and how quickly they grew and started participating in life. (I'm glad my kids weren't 10 feet tall at nine months of age, like the baby giraffe!) Back home, we rested and then had a veggie-rich dinner in front of a documentary about how the planets formed. I don't make a practice of videos during meals much, but on a day when there's been a lot of good shared activity already, if we can do physical and mental nutrition at the same time, I'm on board. We stopped the video a lot to clarify the physics (the accretion-disk theory of planet formation) and also the historical context for the documentary: the German bombing of London during WWII, and then the cold war and the space race with Russia. It hadn't occurred to me that there would be so many links between watching The King's Speech and watching an astronomy documentary, but hey, accretion happens. :)

Faith in the Process: Conversations and Continuity

Sometimes with this unschooly approach to learning, it feels like a huge assortment of stuff gets presented, or discussed, or looked at once or twice, but it's hard to tell what's sinking in. It reminds me of the anti-drug ad that shows a teen's face looking exactly the same before and after her parents talk to her about drugs. OK, P's not that opaque at 6. But still, sometimes it seems information goes in one ear and out the other.

And then it doesn't, and I see the links among bits of knowledge forming and getting used, and interest returning to related themes again and again, and my faith in this process of interest-driven learning returns.

A recent example: P has probably finished a sentence about a scientific or historical subject three times for me today, using knowledge I didn't know she had. How did she learn all this stuff? From Magic Tree House and, even more so, Magic School Bus chapter books. She has been rereading her moderately large collection at two books per day this week, which at first made me feel guilty for not finding her more good chapter books yet. But I'm noticing that the ones she's been rereading are providing a lot of the knowledge that gets mapped into other situations. So I will get her more (or put them on her birthday list for others), but I won't be in such a rush!

By the way, her reading skill is coming along beautifully. She wanted to read to me the other day from a Magic Tree House book about dinosaurs, and while she stumbled over Cretaceous and Pteranodon, her oral fluency with the more ordinary vocabulary was almost as good as mine -- which, I think can honestly say, is saying something! She's also getting much more accurate than she was a month ago at using punctuation clues to read dialogue with correct expression and intonation. I love watching her soar.

Saturday evening I took P to a friend's choral concert. On the way to the concert (a 45-minute drive), while waiting for it to begin (it was held in a Congregational church; we are Unitarian-Universalist), and on the way home, we talked about at least the following, and probably more that I don't remember:

• Some possible reasons cats may be linked with witches in popular lore (One of my guesses: cats have been considered good luck at births because they give birth with apparent ease compared to human mothers; female healers, who would have assisted with births and who were later painted as witches when men started trying to take over medicine, may thus, or for other similar reasons, become associated with cats. I don't know whether this is the case, but cats-birth and women healers-witches are definitely associations that have been drawn at various places and times.)
• Where it's safest to be in a lightning storm; lightning rods and how they can protect buildings and their occupants
• How people get red hair; recessive genes; children get half their genes from each parent
• Ways of ending up with a child without having it yourself (adoption, foster care)
• What it means to be gay or lesbian (the chorus had a large number of GLBT members, and the friends who invited us are a gay couple with a child who came to them through the foster-to-adoption process)
• Why there were bibles in the pew racks
• What the little round holes in the pew racks are for (individual communion cups, which led to the story of the Last Supper and how Christian churches of various stripes practice communion, and why some non-Christian churches, like ours, have communion as well)
• Other stuff in the pew racks: prayer request cards, envelopes for cash offerings... only the envelopes and the hymnals have close analogues at our church, so this was all fascinating stuff
• Speed limits: why they exist, why they are enforced, why people exceeding them slightly don't generally get ticketed
• Why infants ride in backward-facing car seats, why we don't all ride facing backwards

Today I showed P a photo one of my friends, who is a midwife, posted on Facebook, showing her tending to a newborn baby. P asked, "Did she bring a cat?" We talked about the likely answer (probably not, though she probably would have no problem with the family's cat being there for a home birth), but I loved the continuity of ideas, considering that I didn't even mention the word midwife in the earlier conversation. P remembered it because three years ago, when T was born, a nurse-midwife at the hospital was our main caregiver during pregnancy, labor and birth. Also today, P said something about blue jeans and then noted aloud that jeans is a homonym. I asked her other meaning she knew, and she talked about the genes that come from both parents to make a baby. Hooray!

Also this week, we listened to Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes on tape. We've been talking a little about nuclear weapons and radiation in the context of the current nuclear troubles in Japan, so this was a natural extension. Sadako's leukemia also tied back to our recent conversations about cancer.

And today, we found our first letterbox! (Look here for a short description and lots of links about letterboxing.) We hiked about a mile round-trip on rocky trails near the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Before setting out, we visited the NCAR lobby, which has lots of displays, some of them interactive, about atmospheric science and the tools it uses. Along the way, we identified some plants (yucca, juniper) and talked about their defenses against getting eaten. On the way back, we stopped and read several signs on the NCAR weather trail about floods, droughts, fires (one of the sentences P finished for me was about fire suppression leading to more intense forest fires, whereas allowing fires to burn and just protecting structures can lead to healthier forests), lightning, and erosion. We examined the anemometers and wind vanes atop the NCAR roof and talked about what they measured and how, and whether any of those other things up there were lightning rods. We read signs about trails that were closed, some for revegetation and others to protect nesting raptors and breeding bats. We marveled at the view from the NCAR terrace, where we ate part of our picnic lunch. It was a beautiful hike and a rich learning experience, and the kids loved the "secret mission" feel of finding and re-hiding the letterbox. That the 1-mile hike took us an hour and a quarter may give you an idea of the walking:learning ratio.

I think letterboxing, pursued at a leisurely pace and with lots of side trips, is going to be a great way for us to get out and see new places and things. And P wants her 7th birthday party, which will happen next month, to be a letterboxing party. Now that's a party I can have fun helping prepare! We'll hide boxes with hand-carved stamps and logbooks around our yard and possibly in cooperative neighbors' yards. We'll help each guest create his or her own unique signature stamp. We'll prepare puzzle clues so each child can play a part in working out where to find the boxes. It's a win-win-win: we make a fancy treasure hunt with a low budget and a theme that may introduce other families to a cool new hobby, P and I will get to create puzzles together, and I'll get to practice my stamp carving!

Even more stuff: P and I watched the last of the Jim Henson: Storyteller Greek myth episodes, which was the story of Perseus and the Gorgon. I think the most interesting discussion we had about that was about Acrisius' attempt to prevent Perseus from killing him, as the Oracle predicted. He imprisoned Danae, and then after she bore Zeus's child anyway, he had mother and son locked in a treasure chest and thrown into the sea. They lived, and Acrisius was eventually killed in an accident, by a discus Perseus threw in a competition Acrisius attended, before the two could become reacquainted. The theme of fate being inevitable, of disaster avoided on one path returning by another (cf. Oedipus the King), is so clear here.

Oh, and never fear, T is learning too! He can talk about more things and show more of what he knows all the time. Today we found a Brain Quest deck of questions and answers for 3-4 year olds (T recently turned 3, but these were from when P was little), and he and I had fun going through it and seeing how much knowledge and cognitive skill he has picked up in his short and late-to-speak life. There's no shortage of candlepower there. But I write more about P -- partly because no school district yet has the right to ask me to account for T's learning, but they could do so for P -- and partly because P just talks so much more about, well, almost everything except helicopters, motorcycles, and construction machinery.