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.