Agriculture, Economics, and Iwo Jima

Our biggest outing recently was yesterday morning: we went to an Agricultural Heritage Center in a nearby town. The place was a homestead starting in the 1870s, and several subsequent buildings and improvements were made before the land was given to the county as a museum. The farm still keeps some animals and has a small garden, but no big field crops. They have added an area of hands-on, museum-type exhibits in one of the barns. One of my favorites, which the kids also liked, was a wooden birthday cake divided up into 8 wedges that you could pull out and examine. Each wedge had a picture of a typical cake ingredient (butter, eggs, honey, flour, etc.) on one flat face, and a picture of where that ingredient came from (cows, chickens, beehives, wheat fields, etc.) on the other. There were higher-tech exhibits, but that one just tied things together so nicely in a way that isn't obvious to young kids raised in the city.

The exhibit-area experience was a little loud and overwhelming because we were sharing the area with two first-grade classes on a field trip. Much more relaxed and enjoyable were our self-guided tour of the farmhouse, outbuildings, and grounds, and some opportunities to ask questions of a friendly volunteer. After the school groups left, the volunteers let the chickens out, and we hung out with the chickens and watched them hunt grasshoppers; judging by the mad dashes the chickens made to try to catch the grasshoppers, they really like to eat them! P has been around chickens before, but this was T's first opportunity. He was tickled pink. One chicken nipped curiously at the sleeve of P's dress but did no harm; she was tickled as well once she got over her surprise. We saw bunnies that lived in a woodpile, checked out the crops in the war garden (noticing the striking similarities between the chard and beets, which are different varieties of the same species) and the damage that had been done to them by various pests, and reflected on the meaning of "loafing shed," as one building was described on the map we had.

Some of the things P and T got a chance to learn about or try were:

• Tools and implements from the early 1900s or so, including lariats, lots of tack and farm implements,  water pumps, windmills, iceboxes (the pre-refrigeration type that used blocks of ice), wood-burning heating and cooking stoves (including air inlet for controlling temperature), corn sheller, grain grinder, older stone grinding setup for grain, and some initially mysterious things like calf weaners. 
• Other stuff related to lower-tech ways of living, like outhouses (there was an old wooden one on the site, plus a newer, better-ventilated one for actual use); milking areas with stanchions for hand milking of cows; and a wooden yoke for draft animals that we could take apart and reassemble.
• Bits of history, especially war gardens/victory gardens and why they were important.
• Changes in building technology, and adaptations to the weather here: The old barn was built with unusual mortise-and-tenon joints that allowed it to flex in the high winds rather than breaking down as so many old barns in this area have. The silo at the farm was built of concrete staves with a tongue-and-groove shape, encircled by metal hoops to hold it all together; this was a new technology around 1900. (P noticed another concrete-stave silo on the way home and remarked on it.)

It hadn't occurred to me before that silo and silage are probably related by more than sound! I'd encountered both, but not previously encountered the one being used to store the other. P got to hear about silage (partially fermented grains and/or grasses -- it stinks to high heaven, but if it's made right, the cows love it!). She also learned where mules come from and that they generally can't reproduce. (We're not sure whether the animal we were watching was a donkey or a mule, but it was still a good conversation.)

On the way home we talked about a silent-auction school fundraiser we were attending that evening. P had never heard of an auction, so I described how a live auction works, and then how a silent auction accomplishes the same thing without the noise and more quickly. I hope she'll be willing to talk more about it -- I can show her a silent auction bidding sheet, since we won one item -- and how it ties in with her recent yearnings to sell things. She's been wanting to sell her outgrown and unwanted stuff for money, and begging to go out and set up in the driveway to try to sell it garage-sale style. The problems with this have been that 1) she gets this notion at odd times, like a chilly 6 p.m. on a Thursday night, and wants to do it right then, and 2) we live on a street that gets very little non-resident traffic, since it doesn't follow a useful path for anyone else. I've tried explaining how essential advertising and location are (not to mention having desirable goods) for a sale, but she says she doesn't care and just wants to go do it. The deal I made with her was that she could do it on a Saturday morning when we could plan to hang around and wait for people (and maybe run an ad on craigslist the day before); or I would help her try to sell stuff on eBay if she wants. Maybe having the auction as a bit of background will help with the eBay idea, which seems to me like her best bet at actually selling her stuff, albeit not for much money.

P is getting more confident and effective at interacting with people in the world at large. Lately she's been very willing to ask adult strangers questions or make requests of them when it's appropriate. Sometimes I suggest she do it (asking for something she wants in a restaurant, for example, or asking if she could play with the pump at the Agricultural Heritage Center), and sometimes she takes the initiative herself (asking her choir director if her sparkly black shoes would be okay for her concert uniform). She used to do this only reluctantly or with a lot of coaching, but now she's pretty good at deciding to do it and using an appropriate tone and level of politeness for the situation. This is the sort of thing we get more opportunities to try because of unschooling, since she sees a wider variety of people in different situations than if she were in school all day most days.

Here are a slew of other recent bits of learning:

• We've been seeing a particular ad a lot, one promoting Obama's jobs bill with an excerpt of his speech to Congress. P knew who was speaking -- she remembers Obama being elected, as it was something we cared about and worked on a lot. In the speech, he mentions "the people who hired us to work for them," and I asked if she knew who he was talking about. She didn't, so I explained it was people like us, who voted for Obama and the members of Congress he was addressing, since they wouldn't have their jobs without winning those votes.
• P and I took a wrong turn on the way home from her pottery class the first time and ended up driving through a cemetery, so we got a chance to talk about how cemeteries work and some of the alternatives (cremation, for example, and different things people do with the ashes, including entombing them in a columbarium). P liked going there and wants to go back, so we may have more chances to talk about the end of life and the many aspects of the "what happens afterward" question.
• We talked a little about the portrayal of Indian language in the Peter Pan musical we'd watched recently -- almost the entire song was made up of "Ug-a-wug" kind of noises. I told her at the time that this was a gross mischaracterization, but more recently I was reminded of the Navajo code talkers who provided rapid transmission of undecipherable messages during World War II, with particular value in the Battle of Iwo Jima -- Navajo was chosen because it has a highly complex grammar and because it was mutually unintelligible with even its close linguistic relatives. P was interested to hear about that. This led into a discussion of war in broader terms. We talked about the international effort to stop "ethnic cleansing" in Yugoslavia as a war many people consider justified. P is of the firm opinion that war is stupid and people should talk about their problems and work them out. On a certain level, I couldn't agree more. We talked a little bit about how diplomacy works (ambassadors from countries to other countries, with the job of communicating between governments).
• We've been continuing to read the Song of the Lioness books to P, and she hasn't been shy about asking the meanings of unfamiliar words we run across there. She's more forthcoming with such questions than she was when in school, maybe because we just tell her the meanings as straightforwardly as we can, without launching into a lecture (unless she's interested in the topic) or handing her a dictionary. 
• On another reading level, T is starting to ask what some words in books say, and sometimes sounds them out after I tell him. Exciting stuff!
• Adventures continue with sewing and cloth. P has been making things with buttons on them for T, who is still in love with buttoning and unbuttoning his clothes, and starting to branch out into zippers and snaps. P and I investigated one of her dresses with a magnifying glass to determine whether it was woven or knit -- I thought it was knit because of its stretchiness, but P didn't believe it until she saw the stitches up close, at which point she recognized it clearly as a knit fabric. P and T have also done some counting and sorting of buttons from a big bag of inexpensive buttons we had from the fabric store. I think more button acquisitions are in our near future.
• Recently P mentioned a "thousand million billion" of something, so I asked if she know how many zeros were in a thousand. She knew that a hundred had two zeros, and we talked about a thousand having three and a million having six. Then I started asking questions like, "How many zeros in ten thousand?" She did pretty well at using that concept, especially considering we were in the car and had no visual reference. It's still an emerging concept for her, but it was a good start.
• A week or so ago, P and I were talking about how mountain lions are naturally nocturnal, but how some of the lions around here have adapted to their prey, as house cats adapt to their human caretakers, and are hunting during the day. Then just a couple of days ago, I overheard P telling T, "When we got them, our cats were probably nocturnal. Do you know what that means? It means they mostly like to sleep during the day and be awake at night. But they like to get lovies and food from us, so they wake up during the day. But they still sleep a lot." I added that cats, big and little, sleep a lot more than us (16 hours per day or more).
• P has not been wanting to talk about choir. It's been seeming like she wasn't having much fun. But when I told her I had really enjoyed singing in choirs and missed the chance to do it now, she perked up and taught me a couple of the songs she's been learning. I'm hoping the sharing of the music will increase the fun for her. We'll see. She still wants to stick with it through the first concert, so we've ordered her uniform, which fortunately was on deep discount.
• Last time I wrote that after hours of a sore leg, P still said she preferred the flu shot to the nasal mist. The next day, though, she told me unsolicited that two days of soreness was too much, and next time she'd choose the mist.

And one more nice thing happened. P told me out of the blue a few days ago, "I don't resist when you want me to help clean up. It's not my favorite thing, but I do it when you ask me to." This was news to me! I do a lot of the cleaning myself or with occasional volunteer help, but I ask for help for 15 minutes or so every few days in the living room, which gets strewn with toys. The next day I asked for help, and P helped cheerfully. She did ask to change from the CD I was playing to one of her own, and since we both know the songs on that CD, we danced and sang our way to a beautiful living room, ready for play dates. It was actually fun, and I don't normally enjoy cleaning up (I know, that's part of the problem -- I'm working on making it look and be more fun so maybe I won't pass that attitude along). I'm looking forward to the next time! 

Forays Into Fantasy

Life has been busy enough that I forgot to keep notes for this blog for several days. On the one hand, that's great -- life is too busy and interesting to remember to write! On the other hand, I like keeping track, for our own benefit, for friends and family keeping up, and in case we need to report to the school district what we've been up to educationally. So here goes with what I can remember!

P and I watched The Wiz together this week, mostly while T was sleeping, since we thought he might be a little too scared. (He did join in right after the flying monkeys, and he did fine.) I wanted P to see this other vision of the famous story and to get an introduction to some of the famous black performers of the Motown era (Michael Jackson is fantastic in this film -- his performance of "You Can't Win" is a heartbreaking contrast between the upbeat song and the optimistic scarecrow's visible, physical anguish at being forced to sing such a pessimistic anthem). P enjoyed the film and songs a lot. We talked a little about racism in Hollywood, and how although this movie offered hundreds of roles for black actors and dancers across a broad spectrum of types (rather than just the stereotypical villain/crook/clownish roles), its commercial failure meant there was a dearth of such roles for some time afterward.

UnschoolerDad (UD) has been continuing to read the Song of the Lioness books to P at bedtime. A happy side effect of this for me has been that UD is involved in the kids' bedtime more consistently than he has been for some time -- he's been head-down on a programming project for several months, but the work is easing up now, so he's more available, and the kids and I all appreciate seeing more of him during our evenings. In the second book, In the Hand of the Goddess, the main character Alanna came of age, became a knight (without her secret of being a girl becoming generally known), and started falling in love. The writing is PG, but UD had me read one evening's worth of slightly steamy stuff to P, thinking she might be more comfortable asking me questions about it if the post-pubescent romance material was confusing for her. He was right (though the key difference may actually be that I am more comfortable eliciting and answering such questions), and it was a good conversation. P's first question was why Alanna was so scared of falling in love. We talked about how strong, unexpected new feelings can feel scary to anyone, and how a girl in Alanna's position (pretending to be a boy to almost everyone in her life) could be especially threatened by such feelings putting her into awkward positions.

I also started reading the first Lemony Snicket book, The Bad Beginning, to the kids. On the surface the content of these books is simply horrible; but I sense (and hear from other adults who have read them to the beloved young people in their lives) that there may be some insights about the real world, some interesting conversations about the conventions of fiction, and some good fun in store. We'll see. One thing is certain: the vocabulary in these books is scrumptious!

Our other fantasy foray this week was buying and beginning to play the game Minecraft. This game does not have a specific plot and cannot be won; it's a sandbox game, with huge creative possibilities, and optionally monsters to be fought. So far the kids want to play in Peaceful mode, in which other beings, when present, leave you alone. P and T both have their own Minecraft worlds they can play in. They're learning the interface, which involves a lot of fine-motor dexterity and procedural learning and memory. When they play with me nearby, they ask questions about the real-world correlates of game elements, like mining, smelting, wood harvesting and milling, cartography, and music-making (!). We're just dabbling so far, but this game has an amazing array of things to explore. I have heard from many other unschooling parents that their kids love Minecraft and have learned a lot from it, including math, reading, and other skills that translate well to the real world.

Other tidbits and highlights from the past several days:

• Both kids continued their gymnastics classes. P took a day off when her leg was sore from a flu vaccine. Interestingly, she chose the shot instead of the nasal mist vaccine, preferring some soreness to the drippy nose; and even after she got sore, she said she'd do it the same way again.
• P is on the cusp of losing a tooth, and she is curious and un-freaked-out about the occasional bleeding as its connections loosen. I am thrilled.
• We took a long walk (2.5 miles round trip) to the nearby shopping center one day. T rode in the stroller a lot, but P walked the whole way without difficulty. There were lots of short stops to check out interesting plants, animals, and especially bugs.
• We went swimming, trying out a flotation device for T. He liked it a lot, and it made it more possible for me to be in deeper water where P could swim (not wade) and get better at it. T is exploring ways of moving himself around in the water now that he doesn't have to cling to me. We'll get to both kids swimming somehow!
• P started her youth choir and learned some good tricks for improving tone, as well as the first part of "Alouette," complete with pretty good French diction. That's one of the things I like about this choir -- lots of opportunities to sing in other languages, and they don't do diction halfway. My own ear for languages is pretty good, and I think it has a lot to do with singing in many languages over the years, usually with skilled diction coaching from choir directors.
• P started a pottery class on handbuilding with terra cotta clay. They're learning basics construction techniques, as well as painting as glazing their items. This class can lead into many more ceramics classes if P chooses.
• Both kids have been enjoying videos: Reading Rainbow (dinosaurs and paleontology), Magic School Bus (Bats, Spiders, Sound -- a repeat, but they learn more each time), and Sid the Science Kid (skeletal system/joints).

Puzzles and Tactics and Books, Oh My!

We are delinquent newspaper readers. We take a newspaper four days per week, but recently I went to bring the trash cans in after collection day, and there were three newspapers in the driveway. I tried to remember what I liked about getting newspapers, and hit on the puzzles in the section with the comics. I thought maybe P would enjoy doing a puzzle or two with me, so I got out the page with the Ken-Ken puzzles. Ken-Ken is a little like Sudoku, but some basic arithmetic is also required. P's getting enough of a grip on her small-numbers arithmetic that I thought it would be fun, and indeed it was. We did two of the "easy" (4x4) puzzles together, with P taking more of a role as we went. She's asked to do them again once or twice in the days since, and our lackadaisical newspaper reading means there are many more in the recycling pile.

Not long after that first Ken-Ken session, P asked me to play tic-tac-toe with her. She knows the rules, but we haven't played very much before. We played about a dozen games, stopping when she'd gotten good enough to reach cat's game most of the time. (It does get old at that point!) She was psyched about learning good enough tactics to keep me from winning, or sometimes win if I made a mistake.

(Writing this blog post, I got curious about whether there was an etymological link between the word "tactics" and the name "tic-tac-toe." Isn't that uncanny? A brief search makes it look like they have completely disjoint etymologies. Too weird! It's still fun to notice and learn new things myself!)

A real-world puzzle got interesting today. P wanted to watch a DVD on our portable player, which has to be plugged in because its battery no longer holds a charge. She took it to her room,  but came back to tell me that the DVD was stopping suddenly in the middle of a video. I asked if she could tell why, and she couldn't, but she went back to her room and put in a different DVD to see if the disc was the problem. Same thing happened, so she decided it must be a problem with the player. I said the suddenness of the shutdown sounded like the power was being interrupted, but she said she'd checked the plug at the player and at the wall, and both were securely plugged in. Out of ideas, I asked her to bring it out to the living room and let me take a look at it. She said that first she'd try plugging it into an outlet in the living room, in case the problem was with the outlet in her room. The same thing happened, so she rechecked the cord connections, and discovered that a connection in the middle of the modular cord that was loose. Problem solved! As she waited for her DVD to rev back up, I said I thought that had been a very scientific approach to the problem -- checking and changing one thing at a time until we found the problem. P said, "Wait a minute. Are you saying you think I'm a scientific girl?" I said yes, and she looked pleased. She knows I think of myself as a scientist (my education and work history center around physics), so "scientific girl" was clearly a compliment. 

Reading goes on, with more reading out loud as we get into the fall and there's less time to play after dinner and before dark. I finished reading Ida B to P, and I was pleased to see that while Ida B would have preferred to stay out of school and learn as she had been doing, she found things to love about school, too. I'd hate to demonize school to my kids and then find ourselves in a situation where they need to go! We started two out-loud books this week: The Borrowers for when both kids are listening, and Alanna for when it's just P. Alanna is our first joint venture into traditional fantasy fiction -- it's about a girl who really wants to become a knight, so she disguises herself as a boy and begins training as a page. UnschoolerDad, who has a very hard time putting down any sci-fi/fantasy book, has taken over reading to P around bedtime so they can enjoy that story together, and he's already put the sequel on hold at the library. P's loving it, too. Both kids are absorbed in The Borrowers. P is also reading on her own, though honestly I don't know what she's reading this week. She did find a couple of new-to-her Magic Tree House books (related to the Revolutionary and Civil Wars this time) at the library last time, plus some Flower Fairy Friends books, so it's likely those.

P got into her children's chorale, with some very appreciative remarks from the director about her ear and her tone/intonation. P was pretty nervous just before and during the first part of the audition, but she warmed up to the director and enjoyed getting the outside-the-family feedback. We now have some very busy weeks ahead. We're trying to fit in a family road trip before winter hits, and it's getting challenging to find a slot where nothing we would miss would lead to trouble, like not being allowed to sing in a concert. But I think we'll manage it. I was thinking that more activities would be okay since the school schedule wasn't such a factor, but we'll have to see if we've overshot the right balance.

One fun set of activities this week was an impulsive on-sale purchase from Barnes and Noble, a kit called Magic School Bus: Back in Time With the Dinosaurs. It has a number of activities with associated short bits of reading about dinosaurs, fossils, paleontology, etc. So far P and I (sometimes with help from T) have put together a wooden T-rex model, sequenced text and drawings showing the steps from live dinosaur to fossil in a paleontologist's lab, buried a plastic dinosaur in sand and plaster to dig up after it hardened, and made a diorama of roughly Cretaceous-period dinosaurs and plants. P did the diorama almost completely independently, enjoying the chance to mix paints and make aesthetic decisions about how to put it all together. We also assembled a timeline from the late Triassic period to modern times and read about the theory that an asteroid impact caused the mass extinctions at the end of the Cretaceous period. It was interesting to contrast this with the dinosaur-extinction story in Fantasia, which P and T had watched earlier that day. Scientists in 1960 would not have known of the asteroid-impact theory, since the K-T boundary was discovered about 1980, and the Chicxulub crater became well-known in the 1990s following early evidence in the 1970s. We still have a couple of activities to go in this kit; it's been a fun one. We have another kit lined up to try, with various electrical things to build. More on that when we get to it.

On the peaceful parenting front, I was reminded this week of the need to look beyond off-track behavior to what it is communicating. We parents often respond too much to the bad deeds themselves, without realizing that pretty much everything a child does or says is some form of communicating the child's needs to us, directly or indirectly. I've been trying to practice looking beyond the behaviors and see what the feelings or needs behind them are, and respond to those rather than simply reiterating and enforcing rules (which have obviously been insufficient to deal with the behaviors, given how much the behaviors have been repeated despite the rules!). 

This kind of looking-beyond is one way I've been trying to use an idea from Sandra Dodd and Pam Sorooshian about making better choices: When I'm deciding what to do in a given moment, I try to think of at least two possibilities, and make the better choice. What's better? Right now my guiding stars are what leads to more of a harmonious, partners-in-learning-and-growing relationship with my kids (rather than the adversarial relationship that comes all too easily, particularly when their behavior is headed off the rails); and what leads to the most interesting learning possibilities. Of course I have other values, but these have been good ones to work with.

And finally, some media the kids have enjoyed this week from the library and Netflix:

• The Way Things Work videos: Cooling and Screws
• Dora the Explorer: Cowgirl Dora DVD. Both kids enjoy the little nuggets of Spanish Dora offers. T has been asking a lot for me to read him books in Spanish and bilingual books. I'll be looking into other Spanish-learning possibilities for me and P when our cash flow improves.
• Peter Pan, the Broadway play with Mary Martin. P and I have fun talking about the demands of staging a fantasy story without movie-style special effects, as well as how the depictions of people like pirates and Indians jibe with what we know from other sources.
• A kids' world music CD from the library. This one is weird, mixing instruments and rhythms from other cultures with well-known tunes from the Euro-American tradition. We comment on what's familiar and new to us, and if I recognize particular elements from other musical traditions (an instrument, a drumming style, etc.), I point them out sometimes.
• Lots of short clips in the PBS Kids iPad app. I was disappointed to discover that this app doesn't include many full episodes; those must be purchased for download. But the short clips help the kids discover what they enjoy most, so we can buy appropriate downloads. When we take our road trip, we won't be able to use streaming content in the car, so the right downloads (and other non-electronic fun stuff, of course) will be key.