When Does This Ruckus Die Down?

Yesterday I spoke with a parent of another child in P's choir, and she mentioned going recently to nearby Rocky Mountain National Park to see the aspen in their fall colors, to see the elk in rut, and to hear them bugling. We didn't have anything scheduled today, so this morning I proposed a day trip and the kids agreed. After lunch we took our warm clothes, snacks, water, and a take-out dinner, and headed up to the park.

On the way, we talked about other things: Why kids can't have credit cards of their own (because they can't legally sign contracts promising to pay on time). How interest on credit cards works. These came up because of an Arthur clip the kids watched on the iPad shortly before we left. Then, as we got out of town, P asked what the difference was between mountains and foothills, and we played around with that, talking about possible ways of making the distinction. Then we talked about National Parks -- why they exist, and how their rules are different from those of city parks (for instance, that those who run the parks leave things closer to their natural state, and that guests aren't supposed to take things away from National Parks), and that there are usually park rangers who live in the National Parks.

Then we reached the visitors' center just outside the park, and the fun gained momentum. We briefly checked out the displays on seasons in the park and saw stuffed local fauna: weasels and ptarmigan in their winter coats/plumage, a badger (P asked if it was related to a skunk because of its stripy markings; we agreed to look it up later), a chickaree, a marten (cute!), and others. We looked through a Discovery Room with local clothing and artifacts from three eras: When the Utes and Arapahoes were the humans living here, the early period of white settlement, and the present. P tried on a sunbonnet and realized why Laura Ingalls always wanted to pull hers off to get her peripheral vision back. We petted pelts from elk, beaver, and squirrel. We smelled beaver castorium (yuck! But it must smell good to beavers), used to bait beaver traps during the settlement era. We felt replica spear heads and arrowheads and saw an atlatl. We checked out a raised-relief map of the park showing alpine tundra, subalpine forest, montane forest, and riparian biomes. We talked about treeline and how it marks the boundary between the first two.

Then we drove into the park and found a good place to watch an elk harem or two do their mating-season thing. I don't think we actually saw any mating take place, though it wasn't for lack of anyone trying. The alpha bull was too busy chasing away satellite bulls to get busy with the cows, most of whom were probably already pregnant anyway, since the mating season is almost over. One bystander said that alpha bulls lose a lot of weight during the six-week mating season, since they have very little time to rest or eat, especially if they have large harems. The one we were watching most was trying to keep upwards of 30 cows to himself, and he had his work cut out for him! I got to listen in on a naturalist speaking to a group of people he'd brought in, and I passed along interesting tidbits to P about:

• Harem size (from a few cows to the larger group we saw): in larger harems, more cows are mated by non-alpha males, which increases the genetic diversity of the herd
• Dominance (alpha male tries to pass on his own genes; other males sneak in to mate if they can get away with it)
• Scent marking of females by males (the males pee on their own front legs, and then mount for the sole purpose of rubbing those legs on the females' flanks. This would explain some of the smelly reputation elk have, I guess!)
• Cows get to decide whether to allow an approaching male to mate them; most cows try to get pregnant early in the season so their calves will be born earlier in the year and size up better before the next winter.

We also talked about aspen, since we could see some beautiful stands of them, some still with their golden foliage: How they are fast growers but individually not very long-lived; but how this doesn't matter much, since they send out runners and spread so successfully that an individual aspen organism can have hundreds of trunks. Some of our neighbors have aspens in their front yards; we'll check next time we walk by for nearby volunteers. We talked about pine bark beetles, about which there were many informational displays in the park, and about how we may have to remove our Ponderosa pine this winter, since it appears to have become infested (we should be able to tell for sure and get it removed before the next generation of beetles flies and endangers neighbors' trees). The ranger on hand talked to us for a while. I asked her if there was an hour when the elks' ruckus tended to die down. She said nope, she lives in the park, and those guys bugle all night long.

Oh, the bugling. It's quite an eerie noise. My mamma mind kept switching between enjoying its strangeness, filtering it out as if it were the sound of kids playing a rowdy game in the distance, and being startled at the apparent sound of someone getting mauled by a bear! Last night when I was hatching my day-trip plan, I searched for YouTube videos posted in the last week of elk at Rocky Mountain National Park and found one posted just two days earlier. When I played it, after the kids were asleep, UnschoolerDad was nearby but not watching my screen. He just about panicked, wondering who was screaming bloody murder in our house and why.

On the way home, after a joyful time browsing the gift shop, we discussed high-beams and the etiquette of using them, as well as the uses and geometry of reflectors. We stopped at a dark pullout to check out the sky, and we saw the Milky Way, which we can't see in town. Aaaahhhhhh.

This was definitely our densest day of learning this week, but there have been several other highlights. Here are some:

• P went through a couple of days of scanning maps, finding places she wanted to know something about, and asking me questions to research online: "How many pyramids are there in Egypt? What can you tell me about the Congo? What kinds of animals live in South Africa? What kinds of houses do people live in in Australia?" We found pretty good answers to those, though she moved on quickly to other questions. Another map examination was punctuated with, "Hey, did you know there are two Russias on this map?" (Like most world maps, it wraps at the International Dateline, so there's a bit of Eastern Russia up there by Alaska.)
• P is sewing up a storm, crafting odd little things with lots of buttons to satisfy T's button mania, and making plans for bigger and more complicated things every day. She wants to sew by hand, not machine, and rejects many of my suggestions, but she's making very interesting progress without much guidance. Halloween costumes are in the bag with pretty much no input from me, which is a nice change!
• P is interested in helping T finish learning his letters; he's a highly motivated learner right now, as he starts to recognize and/or sound out the occasional word. This is prompting a certain amount of regularizing of her own writing, as I gently point out places where she's substituting a capital for a lowercase letter, writing something backwards, etc. P went through a period of not wanting her writing to be governed by outside rules, but she understands why I'd want T to be exposed to a less eccentric version of writing. I enjoy the fact that real-life considerations are motivating her to change where my earlier exhortations could not.
• At pottery class this week, the teacher gave T a lump of clay to play with on the way home when we picked P up from class. P enjoyed showing T some of what she's been learning and wants to get some play-dough going at home again so they can try it all out together. T loved the feel of the clay, and the difference the next day when it had dried and hardened, and getting to play with some of the fired items P's been bringing home.
• T checked out more than half the books on trucks, airplanes, and cars from the kids' section of our branch library this week. He has me read him the steps of the diesel-engine cycle over and over. I think there's something he's missing that he keeps trying to find there: he keeps telling me, "No! Read the whole thing!" even when I've read every word, and sometimes provided additional explanation where it seemed helpful. Perhaps we can find or build a model of an engine (or at least a cylinder and piston) we can play with, or barring that, an animation we can run and stop and talk about as much as he likes.
• P had two good play dates this week with friends from her former school, which was good, since we decided to skip Park Day because of a potty-training snag. Fortunately, things are getting better again with T's potty use. Knock wood!
• Both kids enjoyed a Magic School Bus DVD from the library. It included nice episodes on athletic performance (the relationships between oxygen, lactic acid, muscle performance, and the jobs of the heart and lungs); forces (types of forces, friction, and what life would be like without friction); and archaeology (how archaeologists use available information to form hypotheses about artifacts and then test their hypotheses using logical deduction and additional information).
• The kids discovered another show to love on the PBSKids iPad app. It's called Wild Kratts, and it's a fun exploration of lots of animals and their special "powers." The imaginative play between the kids has taken a turn toward the spandex-clad and superhero-themed recently, and now animal powers have been added to that mix.
• Both kids are enjoying shadow play with flashlights and hand shadows. T is finally starting to get the hang of tracking down the origins of scary-looking shadows in his room at night, as the concept of shadows-as-areas-of-blocked-light gets more solid for him.

I'm beginning to think this ruckus is never going to die down. And that's fine with me!

P.S. I ran across this blog post, which does a nice job of gathering together thoughts on why one might decide to unschool, what it's like, and why we might reasonably expect it to successful and way more fun than school. Also, this other post is a great explanation of why "child-led learning" is a misleading characterization of unschooling. Going to hear elk bugling today was not my kids' idea. It took a little selling to make the trip sound attractive enough that they wanted to go. But everyone was glad to have gone, and so (I hope!) my stock as a suggester of cool experiences, rich in learning opportunities, goes up.