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!)