Of Contour Maps, Candy, and Cargo Cults

Whew! We just came back from a two-week road trip as a family; I'll write about that in a different post. This material is from notes I made before we left, which preparations for the trip kept me too busy to write up.

I forgot to write before that when we were on our way back from our trip to see the elk bugling, we were driving down a winding mountain road that roughly followed a river. P asked "Why do you think this road is so curvy?" We got to talking about why it's good for roads not to be super-steep, and I said the designers of the road were trying to follow the elevation contours as closely as they could. Earlier that day we'd seen a map of the national park, with contours shown in relief. If you looked closely, you could see that the contours were built up with actual flat layers of material (or perhaps the map was made to look as if it had been built up that way) -- so the contour lines were obvious in the fine texture of the map. We looked at some contour maps online when we got home, relating the concept to places familiar to us.

Also on that trip, P asked whether it was hard to tell aspen apart from pine in the summer, when the aspen weren't gloriously gold as they were on that autumn day. We talked a little about the lighter shade of green, flatter texture, and tendency to flutter in the breeze as distinguishing qualities of aspen leaves.

In an unfortunate example of experiential learning, P accidentally swallowed a peppermint hard candy whole while we were coming home from a restaurant. She was quite miserable with that big, hard thing stuck in her esophagus. We had her drink sips of water. She reported that each sip hurt as it reached the candy, but then the pain level went back to normal. When we got home I gave her some warm water to sip, and she said that seemed to speed up the process of dissolving the candy. In a little while the candy slipped into her stomach and stopped hurting, though her esophagus was still sore when she ate or drank for the rest of the day. We talked a little about the process of dissolving, and why P wouldn't see the whole mint in her poop. The next time I went grocery shopping, I bought a bag of peppermints. Then, as we were finishing lunch one day, I set up three bowls of water -- cold with ice, room temperature, and hot -- the kids got very curious as I did this without explanation (I answered their questions rather than laying it all out) -- and put a mint into each. We stirred each about the same amount with a chopstick and watched what happened until the differences were clear: the one in hot water was dissolving a lot faster. There didn't seem to be much difference between the cool- and cold-water bowls. We ate the mints and drank the water from the bowls. P noticed that the mint flavor in the water tasted strong in the ice-cold water. We wondered whether the cool tongue feel of the menthol was intensified by the cold of the ice water.

One day, P was pretending that she lived in a pre-electric society, but that she had heard of electric lights and had made something that looked like a light fixture and stuck it on her bedroom ceiling. This reminded me of cargo cults, so I told her about them and pulled up some photos online of pre-industrial Pacific Islanders who, after WWII ended in the Pacific, had built control towers, runways, and (nonworking) radio gear out of locally available materials, hoping that doing so would bring back the airplanes and their useful cargo. We talked a little about how, when people don't understand a technology or phenomenon, they sometimes try to replicate it in an attempt to make it work for them anyway. Richard Feynman described "Cargo Cult Science" in one of his famous talks.

This playing may have been related to another recent event. There were some great rebates available for energy-efficiency home improvements, so we had our home checked out by an energy auditor. As a result we've made covers for the swamp cooler vents and had insulation added to the attic and some sealing of our home done. I explained what was going on to P, who was annoyed at all the racket in the house (though she and T loved coming up with games to play with the leftover mylar/plastic insulation from the vent covers). We talked about how getting our house better sealed and insulated should allow us to spend less on energy and have less of a detrimental effect on the environment. After thinking about this a bit, P asked if sometime soon we could go a week using no energy. We talked about what that would mean -- we wouldn't be able to heat the house, use our electronics, turn on lights, cook food, etc. She was still interested in a more limited version (no electronics/lights for a limited time), so we may try that soon.

A few times recently, P has asked me what I was doing when I was looking at online petitions, trying to decide whether to participate. Some recently have been very general online petitions, without enough detail about how the organizers wanted to achieve their goals. P was curious about what petitions were for, so we talked about online petitions, recall petitions, and other means for lots of ordinary people to try to effect change in things beyond their direct control. The particular petition that sparked her questions was about student loan forgiveness, and P wanted to know about student loans, so we talked about those and loans in general. P wanted to know why I wasn't sure about the petition, so I talked about my concerns about where the money would come from, and how current and future college students could plan. Would they expect their loans to be forgiven also? It might make more sense to increase government funding available for education in a way that would allow realistic financial planning for all involved.

P, T, and UnschoolerDad went to a fall festival at a local farm. Not much learning of any schooly subjects was reported to me, but the kids had a lot of fun climbing on stacks of giant tractor tires, driving pedal-powered race cars, and screening pails of mud for semiprecious stones. (Size, not density, was the screening method, so there wasn't a chance to relate this to panning for gold.)

But speaking of schooly subjects, P continues to read chapter books on her own, and the other day when we were doing a very rushed set of errands, she went through a pile of coupons as I drove, looking for the one for the store we were headed to. She found it on the first time through the coupons, so I'd say her reading speed is doing great. She's also been asking occasionally to "do math." I ask her what kind of math she wants to do, and then write some arithmetic problems to suit her desires. If they're challenging, we do some together, and I gradually pull back until she's doing them mostly or completely on her own. For stuff that's more familiar, she likes me to write down several problems and then sit nearby while she works them, checking her answers when she asks me to. Our most recent problem set was addition facts to 20, including doubles and problems with unknown addends (e.g., 3 + ___ = 11, or subtraction/algebra in disguise). She's done more advanced, multi-digit addition and subtraction, but she seems to be recognizing that stuff like that is easier if you have many of the more basic facts memorized, and she's actively working on them.

T is learning to add small numbers (up to five or so) and read 2-digit numbers. He asks frequently how to say a 2-digit number (such as the page number in a book being read) and how to write particular letters, and he's enjoying some Android phone games I've downloaded that let him practice some of these skills.

In a happy accident recently, T chose an early-generation Transformer toy on a thrift store trip with UnschoolerDad. He thought it was just a car, but when he showed it to me, something about it seemed to want to move, and I started the process of making it into a robot. We discovered its full range of moves over the next day or so. This is just about the perfect toy for T, who really enjoys figuring out how things work and then making them do their thing, over and over again.

P continues to spend her allowance on things she wants, mostly small toys. On that same rushed set of errands, though, we were at the fabric store, and I told her I'd buy her some small pieces of fabric for her sewing/crafting. She picked out a couple of holiday calico prints to make holiday dresses for her dolls.

Here are some highlights of learning from recent media, from the PBSKids iPad app and library DVDs:

• What a metal detector is and how to use it (Curious George)
• What "scrub the mission" means (Curious George; I paused it to check if they understood, and then I looked up and shared the origin of the term, from when lists of plane flights were made in pencil and could be erased or "scrubbed" when canceled)
• "Leaves of three, let it be" (Curious George; I added and explained, "But if it's hairy, then it's a berry")
• Dentists and what kinds of things they help with (Berenstain Bears; this was new material to T, who's been along for P's visits but hasn't yet been himself)
• Why people move house sometimes, and what's good and hard about the process (Berenstain Bears; P remembers a little bit about our last move, but not much; T was only 6 months old then)
• Snobbish/arrogant behavior and its effects on social relationships (Berenstain Bears)
• Ways of looking for different perspectives when things look bad (Berenstain Bears)

And finally: P wants fish. She's been asking for lots of different kinds of pets for a while now, most of them likely prey to our two cats. Fish, though, I think we could manage, with good precautions to keep an aquarium lid secure. P wanted fish NOW, before our road trip, but I said we could look at it seriously when we returned. P decided to make a fake fishbowl in a mason jar, with some rocks, tap water, and a fish made of aluminum foil. First she cut out the fish shape from the foil, but it just floated on the surface tension of the water. I suggested she try molding a 3-D fish from foil, and that floated because of trapped air inside. We tried squeezing it tightly, but it still floated until we poked some holes with a skewer to let out the bubbles. Then it sank to the bottom, but rested on its nose there, almost neutrally buoyant. The next morning, it was floating again, and we saw that there were tiny bubbles all over it. Shaking the jar dislodged those, so it went to the bottom again. During all this, P started showing some insight into buoyancy, and we talked about Archimedes' principle (a floating body displaces its own weight in water). We tried floating a small glass bowl in a larger bowl of water, which worked fine. We imagined crumpling up the glass bowl into a hunk of solid glass and decided it would sink, as indeed the bowl does when you put it into the water sideways. But if you put it in bottom first, it displaces more water, since the airspace inside that's below the water line also displaces water, so it floats. In a tie-in with her recent pottery lessons, P noted that a hunk of clay would sink in water, but if you made it into a pinch pot, it could float.

I'm still trying to decide whether to bring up the real fish again, or wait until P mentions it.