It's been a slow week. I got sick last Tuesday, and I'm still in the throes of a nasty cold-trying-to-turn-sinus-infection. This has meant a slowing of strewing and outings with the kids, so a bit less to write about. But here we go...
The day I got sick, we had a science museum day. P was acting emotionally fragile in the morning, and after trying to help her with the underlying issue and giving her several chances to clean up her whining and opposition to every step of preparation to leave, I decided to take only T to the museum. The kids are a handful when I'm the only adult with them at the museum, since they usually want to do different things, and I was already feeling a little puny, so I decided not to risk a really hard day for all of us. P was upset, but she had the quiet day at home (with UnschoolerDad working at home and available to help her) that I think she really needed, and she was in good spirits when we got home. T was anxious to see the "T Rex Encounter" exhibit -- he wanted to know what Buddy from Dinosaur Train would really have looked like -- and the dinosaur part of the museum's permanent collection. We recognized two Stygimolochs in a diorama. They had been there on our previous visits, but this time we knew what they were from watching Dinosaur Train. It's one of the kids' current favorite shows, and there's always a bit of real paleontology at the end of each episode, related to what happened in the episode.
T, who has a pretty good command of the alphabet and numerals now, enjoyed pushing the appropriate elevator buttons and looking at some signs while I read them to him, repeating the occasional word and pointing to it himself. He's really working on cracking the code of written language, and he makes visible progress just about every week. I opened up the Starfall website for him after seeing a reference to it on a homeschooling email list. I found it disappointing, in that it's strictly phonics-based and almost as boring as any phonics stuff I've seen before (it has some cute animations with the stories that make it a little more fun); but T enjoyed playing with it for a while, and we'll see if he's interested in going back. After most activities there, there's a question, "Did you like this movie (game, book, etc.)?" and the child can mouse over faces with spoken cues (frown = "Not really," flat = "Kind of," and smiling = "Yes!") and choose a response. T chose "Yes!" each time. The web site is set up well to not require much parental coaching; T figured out the interface quickly. He is a digital native, as they say -- he figured out how to use Netflix on the iPad to find the program he wanted, after watching me do it just a few times. He talked through it out loud, with UnschoolerDad listening from across the room. "I want to watch the first Dora episode. I think it's here.... How do I get to the next episode? Maybe I can click this."
This week I learned P was short on books to read independently, so we went to the downtown library and found some good candidates. She asked for recommendations, and I suggested several based on my familiarity with them, or just their jacket-flap descriptions and a quick assessment of their reading level. She rejected the first couple with barely a look, but when I pointed out that she wasn't going to find many books by asking for recommendations and then not even considering them, she started accepting more and getting excited about some of the possibilities.
Another fun use of reading this week happened later in my illness, when talking without coughing became impossible for stretches of the day, and I'd type on my computer for my end of a conversation. P would occasionally have trouble with a word with counter-intuitive spelling, but she figured them all out quickly using contextual clues. P wrote some notes to friends this week, and I noticed again that her handwriting and spelling are improving steadily, even though she doesn't write much -- much that I see, anyway. Sometimes, when I help her clean her room, I find lists or stories that I didn't know she'd written.
There are two read-aloud books going for P's bedtime these days (T still chooses short picture books for bedtime). UnschoolerDad is reading her Dragonsinger (the second book in the Harper Hall trilogy, which they started after finishing the Song of the Lioness series), by the recently-deceased Anne McCaffrey. P likes me to read her short stories from Fearless Girls, Wise Women, and Beloved Sisters: Heroines in Folktales from Around the World. This book was a birthday gift from a wise friend who had mother-daughter story time in mind, and P loves it. We stop to talk about unfamiliar words and situations, and sometimes we talk about the stories after we finish them, thinking about the heroines' actions from our perspective and trying to put them in context for the cultures the stories come from. A new concept this week, in stories from the American Pacific Northwest, was the idea of a village shaman as healer and spiritual guide for the community. Mouse Woman also appeared in two different stories. She's an interesting character: tiny, but powerful because she always knows and does the correct thing for the situation, defeating less-benign actors through sheer cultural and personal integrity.
P and I watched a couple of episodes of Cosmos on Hulu this week. I wasn't expecting her to be that interested; I just turned it on while I was folding laundry, to see if anyone would be drawn to it. P was pretty riveted, as it turned out. Carl Sagan's explanations aren't exactly aimed at a seven-year-old, but his presentation held her attention, and we stopped sometimes to clarify things. What we watched covered the concept of a light year (and thus why it would take so long to travel to other planetary systems), the "cosmic calendar" (looking at the time since the universe began as if it were one year, and placing events on Earth in that perspective), the name and structure of our galaxy (P: "Our galaxy is just the Milky Way?"), how Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth (we also checked out a picture book about this, The Librarian Who Measured the Earth, which we read together today) how natural selection works, the role of sexual reproduction in driving evolution faster, DNA as the instructions for life, and how life may have arisen in the first place (the experiment with running a current through a gas matching the atmosphere of the early Earth, and thus creating the building blocks of proteins and nucleic acids). This last question was one P had asked recently, before we started watching Cosmos. She had also asked, in a voice dripping with skepticism, whether we knew for sure that evolution was how humans had come to exist. Sagan addressed this directly, explaining the mechanisms of natural and artificial selection and giving enough examples of evolution in action that I think P believed him when he said, "Evolution is a fact, not a theory. It really happened." I have discussed with P how scienctists should always be open to new evidence that might refine or revise existing theories, so she has that perspective already, and it might be where her skeptical question came from. It's all good!
In other science-related stuff, both kids have been trying out a demo version of the game World of Goo, which came recommended by other homeschoolers. It's a physics/construction game with a kid-friendly user interface and delightful graphics. The game dynamics quickly get across the principles of making structures strong while conserving building materials. And unlike similar games we've seen elsewhere, this ones uses materials that are flexible and bouncy. Sure, steel beams may be closer to fully rigid than they are to World-of-Goo flexibility, but it's nice to see a game acknowledge and build on (groan!) the fact that even steel beams are flexible and can bend, buckle, and break, so good engineering must take this into account.
Just as I was writing this bit, P asked me, "Five times two, plus two, is twelve, right?" I said yes, and she cried out, "Then six times two is twelve!" I never know when she's going to bring up math, but I like the thinking she shows when she does.
We took a few steps down the path toward starting an aquarium a bit this week, by buying a water test kit and testing the pH and hardness of our water, to find out what kinds of fish would do well with it. We also priced aquarium setups and checked out some fish species at the local pet store; I think we'll buy our fish elsewhere, after seeing how many dead fish were floating in their tanks. We're considering whether we should buy a used aquarium to save money, when we won't really be able to see if it works until we get it home, and we'd need to clean it thoroughly. When P and I made a list, the day before Thanksgiving, of things we were thankful for, "Getting fish soon" was one of P's additions to the list.
One night when I was helping P clean her room, I was thinking about her nametag at church. Each kid can add a bead to the shoelace their nametag hangs on each time they attend, but P has always chosen not to do so. It occurred to me that this might be because P didn't know any knots that were easy to tie and release. So I showed her how to tie and release a square knot, using a shoelace I had handy. She got excited about this. I showed her a lark's head knot too, and it turned out she had figured that one out on her own. I also demonstrated a couple of other knots with different purposes, though we didn't pursue those that night. The next day I showed her how to use well-placed half-hitches in embroidery floss to make a friendship bracelet, the way I learned when I was in high school. She learned that easily and has been adding a few rows per day to a simple bracelet I helped her start. I made a slightly more complex one for her, and she's been wearing it and talking about it happily.
It's signup time for classes at the local recreation centers, and P needs to decide whether to be in gymnastics for the next session. She's been getting scared and/or frustrated with some of the things she's being asked to do in Group 2. I spoke with her instructor after a recent lesson, and she suggested P might like to go back to Group 1 to build her confidence a bit more on the basics. I asked P about this, and she said she'd like to try it. Today I sent her with a note asking to make that change, and it was made. A couple of girls in P's new group pulled her hair repeatedly (Grrrr!), which upset P, but we talked about how she might deal with it if it happens again, and by this evening she was saying she did want to sign up for the new session. P and I have also talked about what kinds of things it would help for her to practice, and we continue working on them together in open gym sessions, with happy results. The rec center where she takes gymnastics has just started doing open gym times, which P is looking forward to trying out.
The day I got sick, we had a science museum day. P was acting emotionally fragile in the morning, and after trying to help her with the underlying issue and giving her several chances to clean up her whining and opposition to every step of preparation to leave, I decided to take only T to the museum. The kids are a handful when I'm the only adult with them at the museum, since they usually want to do different things, and I was already feeling a little puny, so I decided not to risk a really hard day for all of us. P was upset, but she had the quiet day at home (with UnschoolerDad working at home and available to help her) that I think she really needed, and she was in good spirits when we got home. T was anxious to see the "T Rex Encounter" exhibit -- he wanted to know what Buddy from Dinosaur Train would really have looked like -- and the dinosaur part of the museum's permanent collection. We recognized two Stygimolochs in a diorama. They had been there on our previous visits, but this time we knew what they were from watching Dinosaur Train. It's one of the kids' current favorite shows, and there's always a bit of real paleontology at the end of each episode, related to what happened in the episode.
T, who has a pretty good command of the alphabet and numerals now, enjoyed pushing the appropriate elevator buttons and looking at some signs while I read them to him, repeating the occasional word and pointing to it himself. He's really working on cracking the code of written language, and he makes visible progress just about every week. I opened up the Starfall website for him after seeing a reference to it on a homeschooling email list. I found it disappointing, in that it's strictly phonics-based and almost as boring as any phonics stuff I've seen before (it has some cute animations with the stories that make it a little more fun); but T enjoyed playing with it for a while, and we'll see if he's interested in going back. After most activities there, there's a question, "Did you like this movie (game, book, etc.)?" and the child can mouse over faces with spoken cues (frown = "Not really," flat = "Kind of," and smiling = "Yes!") and choose a response. T chose "Yes!" each time. The web site is set up well to not require much parental coaching; T figured out the interface quickly. He is a digital native, as they say -- he figured out how to use Netflix on the iPad to find the program he wanted, after watching me do it just a few times. He talked through it out loud, with UnschoolerDad listening from across the room. "I want to watch the first Dora episode. I think it's here.... How do I get to the next episode? Maybe I can click this."
This week I learned P was short on books to read independently, so we went to the downtown library and found some good candidates. She asked for recommendations, and I suggested several based on my familiarity with them, or just their jacket-flap descriptions and a quick assessment of their reading level. She rejected the first couple with barely a look, but when I pointed out that she wasn't going to find many books by asking for recommendations and then not even considering them, she started accepting more and getting excited about some of the possibilities.
Another fun use of reading this week happened later in my illness, when talking without coughing became impossible for stretches of the day, and I'd type on my computer for my end of a conversation. P would occasionally have trouble with a word with counter-intuitive spelling, but she figured them all out quickly using contextual clues. P wrote some notes to friends this week, and I noticed again that her handwriting and spelling are improving steadily, even though she doesn't write much -- much that I see, anyway. Sometimes, when I help her clean her room, I find lists or stories that I didn't know she'd written.
There are two read-aloud books going for P's bedtime these days (T still chooses short picture books for bedtime). UnschoolerDad is reading her Dragonsinger (the second book in the Harper Hall trilogy, which they started after finishing the Song of the Lioness series), by the recently-deceased Anne McCaffrey. P likes me to read her short stories from Fearless Girls, Wise Women, and Beloved Sisters: Heroines in Folktales from Around the World. This book was a birthday gift from a wise friend who had mother-daughter story time in mind, and P loves it. We stop to talk about unfamiliar words and situations, and sometimes we talk about the stories after we finish them, thinking about the heroines' actions from our perspective and trying to put them in context for the cultures the stories come from. A new concept this week, in stories from the American Pacific Northwest, was the idea of a village shaman as healer and spiritual guide for the community. Mouse Woman also appeared in two different stories. She's an interesting character: tiny, but powerful because she always knows and does the correct thing for the situation, defeating less-benign actors through sheer cultural and personal integrity.
P and I watched a couple of episodes of Cosmos on Hulu this week. I wasn't expecting her to be that interested; I just turned it on while I was folding laundry, to see if anyone would be drawn to it. P was pretty riveted, as it turned out. Carl Sagan's explanations aren't exactly aimed at a seven-year-old, but his presentation held her attention, and we stopped sometimes to clarify things. What we watched covered the concept of a light year (and thus why it would take so long to travel to other planetary systems), the "cosmic calendar" (looking at the time since the universe began as if it were one year, and placing events on Earth in that perspective), the name and structure of our galaxy (P: "Our galaxy is just the Milky Way?"), how Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth (we also checked out a picture book about this, The Librarian Who Measured the Earth, which we read together today) how natural selection works, the role of sexual reproduction in driving evolution faster, DNA as the instructions for life, and how life may have arisen in the first place (the experiment with running a current through a gas matching the atmosphere of the early Earth, and thus creating the building blocks of proteins and nucleic acids). This last question was one P had asked recently, before we started watching Cosmos. She had also asked, in a voice dripping with skepticism, whether we knew for sure that evolution was how humans had come to exist. Sagan addressed this directly, explaining the mechanisms of natural and artificial selection and giving enough examples of evolution in action that I think P believed him when he said, "Evolution is a fact, not a theory. It really happened." I have discussed with P how scienctists should always be open to new evidence that might refine or revise existing theories, so she has that perspective already, and it might be where her skeptical question came from. It's all good!
In other science-related stuff, both kids have been trying out a demo version of the game World of Goo, which came recommended by other homeschoolers. It's a physics/construction game with a kid-friendly user interface and delightful graphics. The game dynamics quickly get across the principles of making structures strong while conserving building materials. And unlike similar games we've seen elsewhere, this ones uses materials that are flexible and bouncy. Sure, steel beams may be closer to fully rigid than they are to World-of-Goo flexibility, but it's nice to see a game acknowledge and build on (groan!) the fact that even steel beams are flexible and can bend, buckle, and break, so good engineering must take this into account.
Just as I was writing this bit, P asked me, "Five times two, plus two, is twelve, right?" I said yes, and she cried out, "Then six times two is twelve!" I never know when she's going to bring up math, but I like the thinking she shows when she does.
We took a few steps down the path toward starting an aquarium a bit this week, by buying a water test kit and testing the pH and hardness of our water, to find out what kinds of fish would do well with it. We also priced aquarium setups and checked out some fish species at the local pet store; I think we'll buy our fish elsewhere, after seeing how many dead fish were floating in their tanks. We're considering whether we should buy a used aquarium to save money, when we won't really be able to see if it works until we get it home, and we'd need to clean it thoroughly. When P and I made a list, the day before Thanksgiving, of things we were thankful for, "Getting fish soon" was one of P's additions to the list.
One night when I was helping P clean her room, I was thinking about her nametag at church. Each kid can add a bead to the shoelace their nametag hangs on each time they attend, but P has always chosen not to do so. It occurred to me that this might be because P didn't know any knots that were easy to tie and release. So I showed her how to tie and release a square knot, using a shoelace I had handy. She got excited about this. I showed her a lark's head knot too, and it turned out she had figured that one out on her own. I also demonstrated a couple of other knots with different purposes, though we didn't pursue those that night. The next day I showed her how to use well-placed half-hitches in embroidery floss to make a friendship bracelet, the way I learned when I was in high school. She learned that easily and has been adding a few rows per day to a simple bracelet I helped her start. I made a slightly more complex one for her, and she's been wearing it and talking about it happily.
It's signup time for classes at the local recreation centers, and P needs to decide whether to be in gymnastics for the next session. She's been getting scared and/or frustrated with some of the things she's being asked to do in Group 2. I spoke with her instructor after a recent lesson, and she suggested P might like to go back to Group 1 to build her confidence a bit more on the basics. I asked P about this, and she said she'd like to try it. Today I sent her with a note asking to make that change, and it was made. A couple of girls in P's new group pulled her hair repeatedly (Grrrr!), which upset P, but we talked about how she might deal with it if it happens again, and by this evening she was saying she did want to sign up for the new session. P and I have also talked about what kinds of things it would help for her to practice, and we continue working on them together in open gym sessions, with happy results. The rec center where she takes gymnastics has just started doing open gym times, which P is looking forward to trying out.
The slowness of the week, and my need to rest a lot, has borne some interesting fruit. P has been volunteering to put T down for his naps by reading to him, as I used to do. They both seem to like it, and it gives me a break to rest more or get chores done earlier in the day, before I'm too tired. P has also been looking for ways to help on days when I'm really dragging, such as picking up clutter on the floor when my sinuses are too clogged for me to bend over without pain. Her ability to empathize and act compassionately, in short, is showing more than it has in the past. The compassionate behavior comes and goes, but it's good to see it; and it's been lovely to have a daughter who is sweet to me, at least some of the time, while I've been sick. I don't know whether it's the fruit of my recent efforts to be kinder and gentler with the kids as I work toward a more mindful parenting style, or a new developmental stage, or both, but it warms my heart either way.
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