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.