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. :)