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!
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