Can We Do Some Math? Pleeeease?

I've been continuing my efforts to help P with tidying and organizing her room in the evenings. She likes having things clean, but hates cleaning by herself. If I'm in there, either cleaning with her or reading to her as she cleans, she has a pretty easy time getting the job done. Lately, a few times, as we finish up and it's time for her to go to bed, she's been asking to "do math" with me. Sometimes it's late enough that I ask her to go to bed anyway, since she doesn't sleep in much, so late nights mean a grumpy kid the next day. Last night, though, we finished up early, so P asked to add up some large (multi-digit) numbers. We decided to figure out how many days were left until (and including) Christmas; 118 was our answer. Then we played with a couple of related problems.

I noticed P was still counting on her fingers for some under-20 addition facts. On a trip to Target recently, I had picked up some addition flash cards for a buck, figuring a dollar wasn't a big loss if they never became interesting. Last night I got them out and showed them to P. We played with a few ways of using them, setting on practicing a few until those facts came faster. Looking back at how P was doing things, I think we should have picked out some under-10 facts to do first -- next time I'll suggest that. P had fun trying to get faster, but not having facts like 3+5 memorized made things like 7+8 harder. Of course, not memorizing math facts this way is always a choice -- P is getting some of them down even with very minimal practice, and I expect more would come in time -- but my own experience is that big numbers get a lot easier when addition to 20 is close to automatic. We'll see what is motivating going forward. P is having fun working  through a second-grade workbook she chose at a going-out-of-business bookstore sale last spring. I think both of us like getting a look at what second-graders in school are doing, though I don't ever push using the workbook. I look over her shoulder sometimes and suggest a retry when answers are awry, or show her another way to do something if it looks like that would help and she's willing to listen, which is usually.

Recently, as we were walking to the bank to make a deposit, P initiated some mental arithmetic about how much she could save if she didn't spend her allowance for a few weeks. She's good at holding several numbers in her head while she works with them; she did well with minimal support. She decided to deposit some of her money into her savings account, and she filled out her own deposit slip for the first time, getting some nice feedback from the bank teller who handled the deposit. P sometimes claims it doesn't matter if her numbers are backwards. This was one situation where a backwards 2 was demonstrably a problem, and her resistance to learning to make numbers forwards has decreased since then. P's savings account is a kids' account for which a deposit of $5 or more earns a small prize; this time, P decided to get something for T, since he doesn't yet have a bank account and can't get prizes of his own. Hooray, generosity!

A bit of research and writing has come out of the desire to make a gift for UnschoolerDad. It's a surprise, however, so I won't say much more about that here. We did notice, experimenting with writing media, that P's handwriting is far more legible on lined paper than on unlined paper.

Gymnastics lessons have started for both kids now. T is thrilled with his new activity and likes his teacher a lot. P still seems to be having fun, though she was disappointed still to be in group 1. I think I can see what she needs to do to move to group 2, but so far she is very resistant to working on it with me. I'm trying to follow a portion of Sandra Dodd's recommendation, "Try a little, wait, watch," with respect to this. It's frustrating to me to see her seemingly wasting her time. I know she'd like to be working on the skills group 2 gets to try, but some simple things are holding her back. One of her stumbling blocks in class ties in with a recent conversation we had about balance as a matter of having your center of gravity over your base of support. Perhaps that's where we can connect. Breathe, Mama.

Gymnastics is not something I've ever been particularly good at. Singing, though, I know lots more about. P has decided to audition for a local children's chorale. This is a total about-face from the last time I mentioned it to her, in the spring, when she didn't even want to think about it. I think she probably has the tone and ear to get in. She has a tendency to freeze in new situations that might make things hard. It's a big unknown, and I'm trying not to put any pressure on with my own hopes or expectations. I do know what they do in an audition, so I've been trying to run through some of it with P, in ways that are playful rather than stressful for her, when she's willing, so there might be less tendency to freeze. We've been playing with tone and breath support as well, in some very close and playful times together. P also has pottery lessons starting soon, so if she gets into the choir, it will be a fuller schedule than we've had for a while. Keep breathing, Mama.

As I write, both kids are playing with the PBS Kids app on an iPad. P loves the show Word Girl, in which a 10-year-old girl superhero fights nefarious plans and incorrect word usage. Some words highlighted in episodes she's watched include recreation, dismayed, enraged, contrary, exquisite, badger, nemesis, and contemplative. P enjoys the superhero dynamic, and it's become a new part of her pretend play.

On a recent evening when we had no plans, I got out some disposable cups, baking soda, food coloring, and vinegar, and made a quickie volcano. P had seen this at school, but both kids enjoyed it. I was trying to remember what the end products of the reaction were so I could tell the kids (it wasn't as simple as I thought I remembered, so we didn't go into it much except to note that carbon dioxide was released), and looking that up led to a more bomb-like way to play with baking soda, vinegar, and ziploc bags. We took the experimentation out to the back deck and had some fun with that. We also tried the bomb experiment with a balloon, failing to achieve an explosion but having fun watching the already-tied balloon expand with the release of carbon dioxide inside. Both kids wanted to play with balloons more, so we moved back inside and played with Newton's third law in the form of, "the air comes out this way, so which way will the balloon go?" After much sputtering about of balloons, we set up a fishing line across the room and taped a balloon to a section of drinking straw, getting a much straighter- and faster-flying rocket. That was a lot of fun. Now we need to buy more balloons!

Other fun bits lately:

• On that same walk to the bank, we saw a bee sipping nectar from a flower. We've seen butterflies doing this up close at the Butterfly Pavilion, but this was our first up-close look at a bee drinking. P knew just what to look for, and we saw the proboscis at work.
• We made lemonade for a neighborhood party, and P and I talked about what would happen to the water line as the ice melted. It was a good start on the basic principles of buoyancy -- the ice doesn't change weight when it melts, so it displaces the same amount of water before and after melting. We should follow this up with an actual experiment; the need to get the lemonade ready quickly meant we didn't have time to watch the melting process this time.
• I was reading a book (Ida B) to P in which the main character's mother is bald due to cancer treatment. P asked why her hair fell out, so we talked about radiation, chemotherapy, and the idea that killing cancer cells can entail making other parts of the body pretty sick.
• We've been continuing to raid the library like crazed Vikings, and P is reading like mad, still finding Magic Tree House books that are new to her, and also dabbling in other genres beyond MTH and fairies.
• Play dates with friends from school are a little harder to come by, now that school's in, but we're trying to keep a steady stream of contact, both with those friends and with local unschoolers at park days.

Interests in the Driver's Seat

What are my kids interested in? This week, I got to see some of their their interests that have little to do with school subjects coming to the fore. After borrowing my needle and thread to try making a cape for a doll, P asked for a needle and thread of her own. I asked if she'd like a bit more than that, and she said yes, so I "went shopping" in my sewing supplies. Ten minutes later she had several colors of thread (including a strong quilting thread for tougher projects), a sewing needle, a pincushion with pins, a few other bits and bobs, and a small toolbox to keep them in. Then P and I went through my rag bag, and she found several pieces of cloth she loved that were big enough for doll stuff but nearly useless otherwise except for scrap quilts (the sort of thing that brings me joy to give away!), and we tucked those into the large bottom compartment of her box. She's been making doll capes, doll dresses, and small bags for random stuff. From her first efforts, which had stitches I could stick a thumb through and loose thread ends coming out, to her later ones, which have smaller, more secure stitches, she's making a lot of progress, with very little instruction desired or given. 

T has completed his potty transition, and is now a self-motivated, full-time potty user. Knock wood, it's been at least a couple of weeks since the last accident. He chose a book at the library with shoelaces to practice tying and has been asking me to read it to him (and show him how to tie them) a lot. He's obsessed with buttons -- buttoning and unbuttoning them repeatedly when he could be eating, or playing, or going someplace he loves -- and is unhappy when he can't find a shirt with buttons to wear. And this week he climbed a tree on his own for the first time -- and, the next day, fell out of a tree for the first time. Fortunately he landed well and took no lasting damage. He was so proud to show me where he could climb!

One night, I heard P singing a variety of nursery rhymes and songs to a single tune, which had a trochaic meter with 4/3/4/3 feet per line. She had already found that "Mary Had a Little Lamb" worked fine, but that "Rock-a-Bye Baby" and "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" were awkward. I sang each of them to her (to its own tune) while counting stressed syllables on my fingers, and she immediately caught on to the difference between the 4/3/4/3 pattern of "Mary" and the 4/4/4/4 pattern of the other songs. We didn't use the words meter, foot, trochee, or dactyl, but P learned the basics of scanning poetic meter handily from something she was already trying on her own.

We've had a video-heavy week -- I'm experimenting with placing fewer limits on screen time and seeing where the kids' natural preferences take them -- but we've still had some good family walk and walk/bus expeditions, and I'm hoping for more biking soon, now that the nearby school playground (which has lots of level blacktop and gentle grassy slopes) is open after renovation. My activity during the videos has been knitting a hat from yarn I spun last month. Now that it's done, both kids want a similar one, maybe in different colors. That will have to wait until I catch up with the laundry folding, but it should provide another good opportunity for thinking about colors and elements of textile design.

A while back, P broke her bedside lamp. At the time she declined my offer of a replacement. This week I offered again and she accepted, and bam, we're back on the reading-into-the-night track. I'm thrilled that she's reading in volume again, but sometimes she'll read a whole book in a night and still be in bed at 11 the next morning. With T still taking an afternoon nap, that puts a real crimp in our ability to get out and do things. We'll be searching for a good balance. Tonight I asked P to set a timer for a reasonable hour for lights-out, to remind her not to read through the night, and I see that she has honored it. More reading means more trips to the library. P still searches for any Magic Tree House books she can find, but she's chosen a few books in other genres. We'll see if they get read before they're due.

Here's a sampling of recent videos and their subjects:

• The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That: different ways of getting clean for different animals; silkworms; camouflage; different animals' adaptations for living in trees
• The Way Things Work: Ballooning, belts and gears, inclined planes, flight
• National Geographic's Really Wild Animals: Polar Prowl was about animals' adaptations to prevent freezing to death (migration, insulation, hibernation, and staying in the water a lot); and how young are raised and learn survival behaviors. A bonus feature on cats highlighted similarities between domestic and big cats, as well as cats' adaptations and behaviors for hunting, and how young cats learn to hunt by playing. After all this, my kids' imaginative play has taken a turn toward feeding baby birds, including regurgitating food for their penguin babies. 

Do Unto Others

I got a whack on the head the other evening. I was reading Kim Stanley Robinson's book, Forty Signs of Rain, and one of the characters noted that being a good person to work for was possibly the ultimate test of a man. I don't even remember anymore, exactly, how this led me to the realization about parenting that it did, but the upshot of my train of thought was that if I wanted P to be helping out more willingly around the house, it made sense to help her first, to show how a loving family member can just help, without it being a big tit-for-tat deal.

So the next evening, when P was cleaning her room before bed, I offered to help, without putting any conditions on it except that T needed to be allowed to come in, since I was in charge of him at the time. And the next day, she helped me in the kitchen without being asked. She still doesn't want to help every time it's needed or every time I ask (I'm experimenting with not insisting unless I actually need her help, which occasionally happens but isn't super-frequent), but I seem to be building up a slush fund of goodwill by helping her when I can and not expecting my requests to jump to be answered with, "How high?" Sometimes, when she's been no help to me during the day and I have more to do in the evening as a result, I don't end up helping her with her room; but more often than not, I help at least a little.

So far the resulting trend is good. P went from resisting helping clean up one morning, to sweeping and scrubbing floors later in the day. Today I asked P if she'd clear the table for dinner, since I was cooking a more elaborate dinner than usual and expected to be working on it until the moment we sat down to eat. At first she said no, and I expressed mild frustration about that but let it go without trying to force the issue. Very soon after that, she said that if I'd let her set the table with things in the order she wanted (yesterday I tried to show her a standard place setting arrangement, but she wasn't interested), she would clear and set everything. And she did a very nonstandard but thorough job of it, even finding a candle for a centerpiece and dressing in a fancy dress for dinner. We'll keep trying to find our way, as I try to be a better person to work for, in a mom sort of way.

School starts Monday at P's former elementary. Our notice of intent to homeschool didn't get processed before class lists came out, so P was placed in a class with several friends, and she had a brief change of heart, but soon decided again to continue unschooling with me. Play dates for long stretches on weekdays will be a thing of the past soon, but some of her friends are available for after-school play dates, and we live very near the school, so it should be pretty easy to keep seeing them.

UnschoolerDad strewed a copy of the Calvin and Hobbes book, Scientific Progress Goes "Boink," in P's path recently. As with many things, she wasn't interested at first, but a few hours later she was buried in it. That evening I ran across, and showed P, a web site focused on photos from around 100 years ago. Of course nearly all the photos are black and white. P remarked on the Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin asks his dad why all the old photos are black and white. This is a classic strip, so I did remember, and simply replied, "And his dad gave him a pretty bad answer, huh?" She laughed and agreed.

Both kids still enjoy watching old Pink Panther shorts, but I get tired of that being what they always ask for, so I look for new things to suggest. Recently I ran across the series, The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That. This discovery has been a mixed blessing. The show's aimed at a pretty young, unsophisticated audience -- more appropriate to T's level of knowledge about the world than P's -- but they enjoy it, and it feels better to me than watching the Pink Panther and Inspector Clouseau chase each other around with guns and bombs yet again. The Cat has mostly eclipsed the Panther in the kids' requests for videos, and they've watched episodes about bees, bird nests, desert oases, whale songs, and other topics. Onward and upward.

I keep trying to make more sophisticated media available, and sometimes the kids are interested. P really got into a BBC science web site, where she enjoyed interactive games on classifying materials, the parts of flowering plants, marine and land-based food chains, and many other interesting topics. I was impressed with the quality of the activities, compared to some other "educational" web sites I've seen. The BBC site's not everything I could hope for, but it's far more engaging than many, and P's enjoying it a lot. Today I found a made-for-IMAX film about beavers, which have been a recurring theme with both kids lately, and they watched it with me, with stops to explain things and talk about what was going on. There are several similar films on different topics, so we'll probably get back to that thread soon.

I've been on a Grey's Anatomy kick for a while, and sometimes P ends up watching part of an episode with me. Recently this has led to good questions from her and ensuing discussions about the relationships between brain function, heart function, life and death; the fact that hypothermia can allow drowning victims' brains to recover from long periods with no heartbeat; the existence of crystal methamphetamine and its hazards to users and manufacturers; and more generally the phenomenon of drug addiction and the harm it can do to the body and to lives and relationships.

On the literature side of things, we had a great trip to the central library this week, shortly after P announced that she is done with all her Magic Tree House books and is ready to give them away (I'll keep them for T to read when he's ready). I figured we'd better start looking for other books she'd enjoy, and the library didn't disappoint. P came home with a few different flavors of chapter books about fairies, and we found some DVDs we're looking forward to watching together. T also found lots of books he wanted to bring home, and I added some to the bag for further strewing.

T continues to blossom into early reading. He's noticing and looking for rhymes and other similarities between words, actively learning letters and numerals, and asking to play and enjoying a phonics game on my phone that used to go frustratingly over his head. Getting to play games on my phone is something he always enjoys, but it's great to see him enjoying and understanding the content, rather than just wanting phone games because they are phone games. He's also eagerly absorbing just about anything I'll tell him about the letters and words in books we're looking at together. Today when I popped in to keep an eye on him in the bath while UnschoolerDad went to get something, he pointed out and identified a foam letter X that had been stuck to his back, and then asked me questions about how dolphins sing and swim (Dolphins IMAX film on deck!). It will be fun to see where he aims his curiosity next, and how reading develops for him.

I am the Gluer

P just came into my room after T went down for his nap and said, with the most irresistible expression on her face, that she wanted to do a big art project with me. I asked her what she had in mind, and we settled on making a picture frame with decoupage decorations. I cut the pieces of the frame from cardboard and fixed them together while she looked for stuff to cut out and glue on. She chose Sunday funnies and food photos from grocery circulars. The result hardly resembles what I had in mind at all -- and I think that's the best part about it. I was the gluer, applying Mod Podge and putting her chosen images on where she told me to. We did the project together, but it is mostly her creativity that shows in it. At first I tried to steer her to a different vision, but realizing that 1) it was her creative baby and 2) the beauty of decoupage is that if you decide you don't like the first version, you can put new things over it as many times as you like, I managed to stop steering and keep my mouth shut. P got a chance at self-expression, and that is where I draw the line between an art project (what she asked for) and a craft project. Good stuff. (Now, as the glue dries on the frame and I write, P is experimenting with sewing doll clothes. I gave her a needle and thread, and she's using fabric we had around and coming up with some nice, simple stuff with no instruction needed or desired so far -- she knows I can help if she wants to know how to do something more elaborate.)

Being the gluer is a pretty good metaphor for at least one aspect of the primary role of an unschooling parent. The kids are the ones who decide (as much as I can give them the slack to do so) what they want to accomplish, from the many possibilities they can imagine or I can offer; I'm in an auxiliary role, helping them find the materials, information, or other resources they need to get it done, and sometimes doing part of the work/play along with them. I do sometimes layer my own desires for outcomes or bits of learning onto what they're doing: I'll insist on putting a final coat of Mod Podge on the picture frame to give it a bit of gloss and make the pieces stick together better, or I'll try to get P to do a relevant bit of arithmetic with me rather than just making the process of figuring something out invisible. The kids are mostly tolerant of this, but I'm not always sure it adds much to their learning or enjoyment. I try to strike a balance between their desires and needs and my own desires and needs, so we all get some autonomy and satisfaction out of what happens from day to day. Some of my desires involve a certain amount of keeping up with the concepts in the basic elementary school curriculum, both to ensure a satisfactory evaluation for P in third grade if we keep this up (which would allow us to continue unschooling), and to make a possible return to school less difficult should P choose that.

This past week was our time to decide whether P would start second grade at our local school, or continue unschooling with me. She'd been on the fence all summer, though I didn't ask about it often, not wanting that to be our main focus and not wanting her to cement a decision in place before she needed to. My sense was that starting second grade and then dropping back out would be easier than starting a school year partway through, should she change her mind; but even more so, I think that unschooling has great potential for us, some realized and some still to be worked out, and that P would be happier (and we would all be less stressed) unschooling than dealing with the time demands of school. I wanted the decision to be P's, though. So I took her through the best way I know to make such decisions: for about a week in late July, both of us tried to notice and say out loud things that we'd noticed would be different depending on which choice she made. Then, with a few days to go until the district deadline to declare our intention to homeschool, together we brainstormed lists of pros and cons to both possibilities (starting school or continuing to unschool). When we felt we had all the important stuff on the lists, we picked the list items that seemed most important and underlined them, so we wouldn't base a decision on sheer numbers of less-important or redundant items. When we'd finished our lists, I asked P to think about all this and decide with her head and her heart. She changed her mind three or four times between then and our deadline, finally deciding she wanted to continue unschooling. I think the last deciding factor was that she wanted to take classes in both gymnastics and pottery this fall, and she saw that fitting those in along with school and homework would leave little time for other, more spontaneously chosen activities. I'm feeling good about the choice. Instead of gearing up for school's early mornings and bedtimes -- always a challenge for all of us night owls -- I can gear up for supporting more of what P wants to do and learn this year. For one example, it's probably time for her to have more access to a computer than she can get by borrowing mine, so we have some buying decisions to make.

P will be in both gymnastics and pottery classes in the fall, and miraculously, we got T into a gymnastics class he wanted to take (it's hard to get new students into the crowded program at our local rec center, which is well taught and organized, and far less expensive than other nearby gymnastics centers). 

T is hitting some fun milestones. Through playing with the rest of us with letters on the fridge and in the tub, and by getting lots of stories read to him, he's learned most of the alphabet and many of the sounds the various letters make. He has some Brain Quest booklets of questions and answers left from when P was little. He asks for these instead of a bedtime story almost every night -- he really seems to enjoy being quizzed, and getting things explained patiently when he doesn't know the answers to the questions. Our three different sets are leveled for ages 3-4, 4-5, and 5-6 respectively. Having gone through the first two sets, he now prefers the 5-6 year old set, which spends a lot of time on letter sounds, rhyming, and numbers. He's also making great progress on using the potty, with many dry and clean days, and even some good series of them, in the last few weeks. One day, after he'd used the potty in the morning, I said he could wear big-kid underpants for a while; he finds them more comfortable, which is great, and we'll do that for a couple of hours before I start worrying about the couch and carpets. That evening I realized I'd forgotten to have him switch to a pullup, so he'd spent an entire successful day in big-kid underpants. Hooray! Both letter sounds and using the potty are things he was scarcely interested in a few months ago, so these developments give me confidence that he will actually learn these things and many others on his own initiative, in his own time, given the help he wants.

T has also had fun with a three-dimensional puzzle that UnschoolerDad brought back from a gathering of software developers. It goes together into a cube, and T carefully studied how to do this and learned two different solutions, with no prompting. He does love his spatial puzzles and challenges.

P's been going to a lot of birthday parties recently, so she writes birthday cards and gets more accurate with her spelling on that set of vocabulary. Today she floated the idea of making a movie, which I would film and narrate while she and T acted things out. I suggested she think about writing a script for it. We'll see where that goes.

This week we watched The Black Stallion. The kids didn't find the idea of the movie very appealing and were lobbying to watch something else, but I was tired of The Cat in the Hat and The Pink Panther, so I just started the movie and said they could watch it with me if they wanted. They were impatient with the first 20 minutes or so, but as soon as the ship fire and consequent emergencies began, they were riveted for an hour or more. The Black Stallion is a great movie to watch with inquisitive kids, as the middle hour or so (and much of the rest) have very little dialogue, so questions and answers can go on almost nonstop without losing any of the movie or needing to pause. We talked about what on a Mediterranean island might be edible for humans and horses, how wild horses can get used to humans, some of the methods of training horses, Alexander the Great and his horse Bucephalus, and a bit about horse racing rules, jockeys, and poker. After the movie ended, both kids volunteered that they liked it a lot.

This week was County Fair time, and the whole family went on Friday. We went just after lunch, not realizing the midway didn't open until 4:00. But that gave us lots of time to check out chickens of many breeds, goats, pigs, cows, bunnies, antique tractors, and the contest winners in fiber arts, baked goods, cake decorating, model making, and lots more. P had a good conversation with a beekeeper about her demonstration hive, wanting to know where those bees could get pollen or nectar (they couldn't, but wouldn't be there long and had stored honey and nectar).

When the midway opened, we measured P and found she was just barely tall enough to ride anything she wanted (first year of that!), so we sprung for ride-all-you-want armbands for P and me, and she was very daring. We both wanted to skip the very scariest ride, and I persuaded her not to ride the loop roller coaster after there was a power outage (a breaker tripped) and we got to thinking about being stuck upside down for an extended period. But otherwise she tried everything, and it was fun riding most of the rides with her. We got to talk a little about how some of the rides worked, particularly those where you go in a circle and get pinned to the outside of the circle by your body's tendency to go in a straight line while the ride forces you to go in a circle instead -- you know, the stuff that people usually call "centrifugal force." 

(Yes, the concept of centrifugal force is a real one, but it's singularly unhelpful in helping kids learn physics, in my experience. It describes without explaining, and it only makes sense with the other concepts of physics when you're working in a rotating reference frame; so I touch on it, but try to explain things in ways that will be more helpful. What I loved most about teaching physics, when that was my job, was seeing understanding bloom in response to good explanations and related experiential learning. It's still fun!)