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.