...Aaaand then it got rich again.

We go along and have these lazy days and weeks, and then things take off again. Here we go!

The kids and I watched a couple of TED talks online together this week. One was about flowers and the tricks they've evolved to play on their pollinators. P, who is beginning to understand the role sex plays in reproduction with humans and animals, was ready to enjoy this and has mentioned it to me unprompted since then; she remembered the flowers that smell like carrion, enticing blowflies to come in and lay their eggs there, meanwhile getting coated with pollen for other such plants. The other was about a new ultralight robot that flies like a bird, flapping its wings. That had the whole family grinning from ear to ear, probably all for different reasons, but it was delightful and memorable nonetheless.

P and I also watched some old TV together online. We watched the first few episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which has always been my favorite Trek series (though the first season is a little hard to take!). P referred to some of the technology in the show (e.g., transporters) as magic, so we talked about the nature of science/speculative fiction as the creator's idea of where science and technology could go in the future, and how that might change the world and the ways people interact. Of course it also reminded me of the Arthur C. Clarke quote, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," and I shared that idea with P as well. 

A library book, Twelve Snails to One Lizard, was a fun story about the nature of measurement and why measurement tools are so useful; and it repeated some key numbers for the English system and some arithmetic enough to let them sink in a bit.

We watched The Secret Garden on DVD and talked a bit about the British empire (the movie is set near the time of its greatest extent and begins in colonial India, and a map puzzle the children assemble in the movie provides a great visual for that). A day later, P asked me if it was a real story. I said no, I thought it came from a novel. She asked me how you could make a movie that wasn't a real story. In hindsight, maybe she thought that true-story movies were actually filmed in real time -- I'll have to ask her. But it led to a great exploration on YouTube of making-of videos, particularly for a Transformers movie that we haven't seen, but that was beautifully documented on YouTube. We saw an outdoor set, complete with beautiful building facades and plain-as-dirt, unfilmed backsides with security guards keeping folks off the street during takes. We saw cameras on cranes, cameras on go-karts, and cameras on trucks outfitted with cages to protect them from flying cars in chase scenes. We learned how a scene in which a giant robot ripped a bus in two was filmed -- not in miniature, but with exploding bolts and air cannons to blow the bus apart, and CGI robots inserted later. We saw gas flames turn on near destroyed cars just before "Action!" in a street scene. We also saw some stop-motion videos that Transformers fans had made themselves. Maybe we'll talk more another time about screenwriting, acting, directing, editing, and more. Maybe we'll go to Universal Studios sometime. It was a lovely trip behind the curtain today, though.

In the car on the way to the science museum today (more on that below), P started writing a get-well-soon card to a relative. I've explained that this relative may have a harder time than most folks with unconventional spelling or messy (or overly fancy) handwriting, so P was careful to check her spellings with me.

And the museum. I could write pages and pages just about the 5.5 hours we spent there today. Here are some highlights:

• A "Real Pirates" exhibit documented the history of the Whydah, discovered off Cape Cod after a maiden voyage as a slave ship and, following her capture, a short career as flagship of Sam Bellamy's pirate fleet. We learned about the trans-Atlantic trades in slaves, gold, coffee, sugar, tobacco, ivory, etc., and how those markets depended on each other, as well as a bit about what life was like for African captives in slave forts, on the Middle Passage, and on Caribbean plantations. We learned why sailors wanted to become pirates -- greed played a part, yes, but what I hadn't known was that pirate crews were so democratic. Sailors who had experienced the duress of navy or merchant service, often having been press-ganged into it, could trade that for an equal share of the booty and an equal vote on a pirate crew, regardless of their race or social station, if they didn't mind the danger of battle or the death penalty for piracy following possible capture. Big "if," yes. But still. P recognized scurvy and its cure from a Magic Tree House book. We learned that Vitamin C gets its scientific name, ascorbic acid, from Greek and Latin words meaning "no scurvy." And to cap it off, P got to figure out how many fake doubloons she could buy at $1.49 a pop with her $5 cash on hand. (I think I need to be more patient with P's incessant shopping and desire to spend ALL her money when she hits a great shop. She gets so much good math/money/value education by figuring out whether she can afford this? Or this? Or this? Even if I sometimes want just to cut her short with, "No, you can't afford that, either!" or "No, it's really not necessary for you to find something to spend that last dollar on!" She still hears enough from me to know that I value spending money on things you actually want or need as opposed to whatever in the store is cheap enough, and maybe she'll soak that up someday. But in the meantime, I think it's valuable that she learn arithmetic and the value of money herself through using her own money according to her own choices.)
• From an exhibit on mummies, we learned the story of Osiris, which is why mummies got made. We scrutinized a model of the temple of Ramses II, including tiny depictions of animal sacrifice. We learned about how CT scans of mummies can be used to reconstruct the appearance of the person in life; this came up with concretions discovered on the Whydah as well.
• In the Prehistoric Journey exhibit, which is a perennial favorite, today the take-aways were about how bone ridges facilitate the reconstruction from fossils of animals' appearance and behavior; the emergence of camel-like mammals in the Americas, and how they evolved into llamas, alpacas, and the like in South America; the differences between mammoths (ate grass and had finely ridged teeth) and mastodons (ate branches and had coarsely ridged teeth); the movement of continents and where the inland sea was in North America compared to Colorado; P noticing the similarities (general shape) and differences (size and proportions) of the vertebrae in different parts of a sauropod skeleton; and early humans' appearance and adaptations compared to other primates. I'm probably missing a lot here. This is an incredibly rich exhibit.
• In the little kids' area, both kids danced and jumped around a lot in an area intended and well designed for just that. T got to play with magnets, attraction and repulsion. P, while playing with some magnet blocks, got to make sense of the different-shaped triangles on their faces (scalene right, isosceles right, and isosceles acute; matching the same shapes made the blocks stick together better). P and T both decided to give their cardboard souvenir pirate hats to two younger boys who hadn't gotten to go to the Real Pirates exhibit. T got to brush "dirt" off "fossils" in a nice little excavation-play-pit. Both kids had fun with funny-shaped mirrors, noticing how things looked different in them. It was one of the best kid-friendly museum areas I have experienced.
• And we didn't even enter the exhibits on Space, or Gems and Minerals, or natural history sections. We'll be back!

Summer Smorgasbord

It gets harder, after a while, to pick out the learning opportunities from the rest of life. Partly this is because P has become such a strong reader that I am often unaware of what she's taking in, especially when it's in magazines like Highlights that she snaps up and reads voraciously to herself instead of asking me for help. (One example: We were out letterboxing one day, and a clue called for finding the face of Shakespeare. P was the first to recognize it on a sign. It turned out she'd learned it from a Magic Tree House book.) Partly it's because I'm relaxing a bit about the whole keeping-track thing. And partly it's because we've been slacking for the early summer and not getting out on lots of trips with high learning-new-things potential of the easily recognizable kind. The inescapability of learning, however, keeps popping up.

There are the conversations that come seemingly out of nowhere and lead to new understandings. P found an advertisement for her in the mail recently that said she must "Send your card back TODAY to take advantage of this special offer!" She told me about it a day or two later, figuring that she'd missed her chance since she hadn't returned the card, and we had an interesting little talk about how advertisers like to create an artificial sense of urgency, because if you don't do it now, you'll probably either forget about it or realize you don't really want or need what they're pushing, and they won't get any of your money. (She already has a good grip on the fact that the main purpose of advertisement is to get you to want what you don't need, and might not even want if you just saw the thing instead of the flashy advertisement.) I told her a story about when I was about 7 or 8 and my sister, two years younger, saw one of those "Call NOW!" advertisements on TV when we were watching -- so she picked up the phone and started dialing. The fact was, of course, that if she really wanted (and could pay for) the thing being sold, she could call anytime. P and I also talked about how rarely "free," in advertisements, really means free.

Another little economics lesson came after we bought some ice cream at the grocery store to take home, and T wanted to stop at the outdoor restaurant tables between the grocery store and our car (we had parked at the hardware store a block away for another errand) and eat it there. Aside from our having no spoons, the restaurant was open and busy, so we talked about why they wouldn't want us eating our ice cream there. We talked about what kinds of flowers were planted in the shopping center's planters and why those were good choices. Recently T and I have talked about why traffic lights work the way they do and why it's important to obey them (an adult version of taking turns!).

P and T both have a lot of questions about the world. I've noticed that many adults view these incessant questions as an annoyance -- as if the kids were asking them just to see how much we could take before we deflect or explode or run away to get some peace. But it's come home to me more than ever in recent months that these questions are very real for them. The questions are the kids' way of using the nearest available resource (me) to sort out how the world works, and why. If I want them to keep learning and keep showing me their curiosity, I'd better give them answers that make sense to them, and I'd better have a good attitude about it!

Humor helps with getting things across and keeping it light. Today P asked me how long until it was time to leave for her first slumber party, tonight. I figured I'd probably hear this question a lot, so I asked P to bring out her toy clock so we could talk about it. She worked with me for a few minutes, learning the basics of telling time beyond just the hours. When she started getting just a touch impatient, I launched into a totally singsong recitation of the quarter-hours between the current time and the end of the slumber party tomorrow, throwing in some landmarks like dinner, movie, various people's bedtimes, and so on. She was giggling the whole time. We'll see if it sticks -- but at least I think we took some of the "learning is dreary work" edge off that particular bit. She's come to me for help with telling time a couple of times since then, whereas previously she avoided it. I've also noticed an increase in my ability to use humor to defuse an emotionally fraught situation, without making anyone feel bad. I've never felt very good at that kind of gentle humor, so it's good to discover I can still learn, too!

Some good opportunities for P's social learning have come with several play dates with friends. P really likes playing with T, and part of the reason seems to be that T, four years younger, will put up with a certain amount of dictatorial behavior from his sister and idol. P is learning from her friends, though, that most of the people she wants to play with will not put up with the bossiness that her adoring little brother will. P said something peremptory and unkind to a friend who was visiting a few days ago, and he replied, "I don't like it when you say that to me. It hurts my feelings." I was awed by how articulate and composed he was (I made sure to tell his mom when she picked him up), and I'm looking forward to more opportunities to play with that family, so P and T can learn from the kids and I can pick up some tips from their mom on how to encourage such emotionally intelligent behavior. I've been through Nonviolent Communication training, but helping children learn such emotional skills is, so far, a humbling endeavor for me. We are making some progress, however, and when I am patient and can model the appropriate behavior myself, of course that helps.

P has been continuing her gymnastics lessons, and when I can get the kids both to agree, we go on walks, short hikes, or bike rides together. We also visit new and familiar parks most weeks. For this past week P went to a gymnastics day camp every weekday afternoon, and she'll go to a gymnastics-themed birthday party this afternoon. She's been having a lot of fun and making some good progress with her gymnastics skills. She's also champing at the bit to learn to ride a two-wheeled bike with pedals (she is quite adept now on her pedal-less two-wheeler, and most of her friends ride regular bikes now), so there's some cycling in our near future. We've taken a couple of short bike rides with me helping her balance on the two-wheeler, and she's soooo close!

Here's the media roundup, from the library, Netflix, and the Internet:

• Magic School Bus DVD on the mechanics of flight and comets/meteors/asteroids
• Tractor Adventures DVD, with lots of information on different jobs tractors do and also how milking machines work
• Donald in Mathmagic Land: not a lot of depth to this, but it had a nice video intro to conic sections.
• A DVD on Monet (I can't find a link to it, but it's a very kid-friendly, humorous production with lots of good information) and his impressionist contemporaries and how they influenced art in their time
• A Little Princess: a bit of Indian myth, how boarding schools and pauperism worked in early 1900s England (We read a plot summary of the Francis Hodgson Burnett book afterward, and the movie took some huge liberties with the plot.)
• Awesome Animal Builders DVD: How several kinds of animals (spiders, caterpillars, termites) build using their own bodily secretions; naked mole rat burrows and their adaptations for digging; beaver dams and lodges; weaverbird nests and their function in mate selection; migrations of wildebeest, tundra swans, and some others; animals (e.g., rattlesnakes) that move into houses built by others. This one was a lot of fun for both kids. P recognized a trapdoor spider based on previous learning (this time a Magic School Bus book). We also got some books about beavers from the library recently, so we are looking at beavers from several angles.
• We watched several videos online of Atlantis's final liftoff, from cameras attached to the solid rocket boosters. For half an hour of video with no sound, this was riveting. We talked about how the SRBs and the big fuel tank help the shuttle get into orbit. We saw how the color of the sky changed as the rockets left the lower atmosphere, and then as they re-entered after separating from the shuttle. We saw the view tumble between the earth and space (and sometimes the sun) as the SRBs fell to earth. We saw parachutes deploying as the SRBs neared the ocean, and how this slowed and steadied their motion. It was a beautiful way to point out and answer questions about both the physics of the situation and the history of the space program -- previous disasters having motivated the use of those SRB cameras! After the liftoff videos, we watched a short piece about the NASA food lab and how they prepare ordinary and special foods for the astronauts' use in space.
• P's been reading Magic Tree House books, Fairy Realm books, and a book called Ida B, given to us by friends, which is about an unschooled child and how things change in her life when her mother becomes seriously ill. We've discovered that grocery shopping trips are much easier when I get a double cart so the kids can sit next to each other, and P reads a book aloud to T. They read most of Lions at Lunchtime this way during our last major grocery shopping trip.

P told me a week ago that she wants to go back to school, because all her friends say they want her to come back when she sees them on playdates. What I think is important is what she wants, but I'll support her if she wants to go back, and I told her so. We've given ourselves until August 1 to make a decision, since until that point we can still either enroll her or give the district our notice to homeschool. (I started to write, "to make a final decision," but of course either course of action is alterable.) Now she says she doesn't want to go back. We'll see where she comes down in another week. I bring it up occasionally, to get a reading on where she is, and to provide a chance to talk about it if it seems useful. I have mixed feelings myself. Though I still think that unschooling works better for us, on balance, because of the freedom to pursue our own schedule and interests, school does provide the feeling of a safety net. The cost of that net is high, though, if by pushing P through the list of standards, school blunts her interest in learning. She's had enough of a taste of it to know that going through curriculum at the class's pace is sometimes fun but often, really, not something she enjoys.

Holiday Hodgepodge

It's been a long time since I wrote. The last few weeks have had the feeling of being on holiday here in some ways -- we've slowed way down and not done as much on as many days. This is partly the summer heat and inertia slowing us down, partly a visit from family, and partly my having some health issues that have made it hard to get far from home for several days. But at any rate, we've been taking it slow and easy, and I took the week of the family visit off from writing. So here we go with some serious hodgepodge....

P had her birthday party in early June. She got several nice presents from friends and family, and thank-you notes seemed in order, particularly for family living far away. In the past, P has written thank-you notes with some reluctance and difficulty; we've done 2-3 per day until they were done, with me helping her figure out what to say, and her doing most of the actual writing.

Well, now that P's had a taste of freedom from being told what to do every hour of every day in school, she was really digging in her heels after a few notes. I started to write a message to my favorite unschooling listserve, asking how people dealt with giving their kids more freedom and still meeting the expectations of extended family regarding social niceties. This list really picks messages apart (often in a helpful way), so I was being careful to describe what we'd already tried, and I realized what I hadn't tried yet was separating the composition of the notes from the physical pushing of the pencil or computer keys (including spelling). I figured that while relatives might appreciate seeing how P's handwriting is coming along, more important was hearing her gratitude in her own words, and receiving something created by her hands. So I offered P another way: she could dictate the words, I would type them out, we would print them out, and P would glue them into cards, sign her name, and create stamped or drawn designs on the cards for a personal touch of beauty. She accepted, and we completed the task with relish and in record time. P said some things in composing the messages that were unmistakably in her own unique voice, and I preserved her wording as best I could, while offering a little guidance for etiquette and clarity. P does enough writing for her own reasons (notes to family and friends, writing stories, etc.) that she has lots of chances to practice handwriting and spelling in contexts where she's self-motivated, so I think this is an excellent step toward keeping writing an ongoing pleasure rather than a dreaded chore.

Postcards have started coming in from other countries via our postcrossing.com exchange. On our profile page, I ask for postcards that show something beautiful from the place the sender lives, and for recommendations of books (for children or adults) that tell the truth in some way about the speaker's country. We've found out about some fun books we've been able to get on interlibrary loan in English translation. So far most of the books haven't been about the home countries, but the illustrations and parts of the text have given clues to traditions of those countries. For example, a Finnish correspondent recommended Santa and His Elves, and we saw Christmas decorations and traditions from northern Europe in the background of the story. It's a fun way to pick up some of the flavor of different countries. A Thai writer told us a bit about how many Thai children go to Buddhist temples for a few months to learn Buddhist teachings, and the postcard showed one such temple. It's fun to see what people send and write, and to think about what to tell them about our area that they might not already know. We've also put up the wonderful, huge world map P got for her birthday on an equally huge corkboard in the hall, and we put the postcards near the countries they came from. Both kids check and/or ask about things on the map pretty frequently.

P seems finally to be formulating a more complete understanding of cash and how it works for buying things. She's just about gotten beyond what seems to be a notion that she needs correct change (sometimes it's hard to be sure I understand her thinking) and realizing that as long as she has more money than an item costs, a store will make change. We continue to count out cash together when it's relevant, and P's getting better at thinking of piles of coins in mixed denominations as representing a single amount of money in dollars. She relishes spending, and sometimes saving, her allowance; when our next-door neighbors had a garage sale recently, she made about 12 trips to the sale and spent her last $5 or so, triumphantly announcing each purchase and choosing several things for T as well as herself. Garage sale items, incidentally, are fun in that they are low-stakes for potentially destructive disassembly; when T wants the 5-cent snowman doll not to have a hat, P can clip the threads holding the hat on and find out how he's put together, and nobody will get mad if it turns out there's no top to his head. (We were happy his head did have a top, though!)

Speaking of taking cheap things apart: this evening when P was going to bed, I remembered that her bedside lamp switch wasn't working well. She was early getting to bed, so we decided to try to take it apart and see if we could fix it. It turned out not to be repairable without some pretty major replacement parts, and it's an $11 lamp, so we just stripped the whole thing down to parts, and P got to see why it failed -- turning the switch the wrong way had chewed up parts of the switch mechanism. We learned all we could about how the switch and lamp socket work(ed). Then I gave her a quick lesson on an identical lamp in feeling which way is the right way to turn a twisty switch -- the sort of thing that has to be learned by doing, and sometimes with destructive testing -- but the sort of thing, I've found, that greatly increases confidence and facility in fixing things and figuring out how to use things.

Coal mining continued as a theme. I was driving P somewhere without T recently, and as I thought about all we'd learned recently about the local history of coal mining, I remembered Merle Travis's song "Dark as a Dungeon," (this version has a verse I didn't know, the one about getting buried alive) which I learned from my dad when I was a teenager. I sang it to P, who (uncharacteristically) listened willingly and attentively to this unsolicited musical offering. It got a conversation going about why people might be drawn to mining or to continuing to mine, and why it's so dangerous (both accidents and illnesses). I told her about the rescue of the Chilean miners who were trapped for more than two months and then rescued last year, and about the technology that got them out as well as the mutual support and leadership that helped them survive the ordeal. She was intrigued.

On the social side, we had a good park day one week recently. There was a paved path around the playground, and we took both kids' bikes. T enjoyed practicing his gliding over and over and over again, much as a baby practices walking, but with considerably fewer falls. P also biked, and I appreciated the level of care she exercised in playing with T, keeping track of him, and letting me know if he needed my help, if I hadn't already noticed. Her caring behavior toward him can drift too far toward policing sometimes (I like to keep the policing of behavior for safety as a mainly parental job, when it's necessary, so P and T can have a relationship based more in the bonds of love and friendship than in the exercise of authority), but we're finding our way to a balancing point with enough monitoring and gentle guidance, but not too much bossiness.

P's also having play dates with friends from school, making friends at church (World Religions day camp helped a lot with that, as I'd hoped it would), and seeing other kids at badminton when she goes there with UnschoolerDad. T is getting good at interacting with other kids, but if he's ready to make lasting friendships (P wasn't quite there yet at his age), we haven't yet discovered the right way to foster that. There are some hints of it in the way he remembers and talks about his interactions with younger siblings included in some of P's play dates. We'll keep watching for opportunities for him. Church is one place where he sees the same kids often from week to week, and that may be the natural place to start, with noticing who he's enjoying and making more connections with them where we can.

Here's a roundup of some of our recent media enjoyment and learning:

• P's still reading a fair amount, with A to Z Mysteries heaving in the mix lately. She's also enjoying How to Train Your Dragon and various chapter books from the library, especially those about fairies.
• We watched The King and I, which spawned some interesting discussions about slavery and the history of arranged marriages and polygamy vs. romantic, monogamous pairing. 
• P and I watched The Secret of Kells, an animated film with some decent historical grounding and some charming fiction about the creation of the Book of Kells, and also about Viking raiders. Afterward, we looked up images from the Book of Kells and were pleasantly surprised to see that the images in the movie were based closely on real illuminations. We learned a bit about the traditions of illumination, the tendency of local documents like land deeds to get incorporated in the same tomes with religious manuscripts, and how the latter has helped clarify the history of the former. The Northmen in the film were represented in such a distorted way that P thought they were meant to be monsters rather than humans, so we also read up a bit on who the Vikings were and where they had raided and/or settled. P wondered aloud about the map we found of this, "Why did they only go along the coasts?" We talked about how some groups in history have gotten especially good at travel by sea (building boats, navigation, etc.), while others have done better with land travel (horsemanship, caravan routes, good carts or sleds, etc.), and that the Vikings clearly were boat people!