Our Own Slow Solstice

As we approach the solstice, the tipping of the Earth relative to the Sun slows, and the first derivative of the length-of-day graph approaches zero. Any math geek has got to love the solstice! Our activities have remained low-key and home-centered as we get over more people's colds. We are all finally well now (knock wood!), so things are starting to pick up again. We've decided to go to an unschooling symposium nearby just after Christmas. I'm looking forward to some in-person time with the unschooling parents who do so much good mentoring on the Always Learning list.

I read an interesting article this week, making the case from experimental evidence that delaying the teaching of arithmetic in schools results in much more rapid learning when it is finally introduced (in the experiment, the experimental group started arithmetic lessons in sixth grade), but also confers an intriguing benefit -- when arithmetic instruction in K-5 is replaced with practice telling stories and otherwise communicating out loud to others (not, I should note, specifically about numbers!), those students are far ahead of control-group kids at the beginning of sixth grade in their ability to solve arithmetic story problems, even though they've had no formal arithmetic instruction. The experimental group didn't do as well on traditionally-formatted arithmetic problems as the control group at the beginning of sixth grade, but by the end of sixth grade, they'd caught up. I love this article. Having taught math to middle- and high-schoolers, I know that story problems give many students nightmares. But in the end, story problems -- using math to think about real-world situations-- are exactly what math is FOR. And even though P and I have done very little arithmetic practice together, when she talks about numbers, I see that she has good number sense, and that she's using numbers in very sensible and sometimes creative ways. I am encouraged. And I should listen more intently when P tells me stories, as she does at pretty much every opportunity!

P sang her holiday choir concerts this past week. She and I rode the bus to her Saturday evening concert and back. It took more time overall, but it meant we had a good half hour on each end of the concert during which our attention was undivided. As P put it, "I like taking the bus with you, because we can talk the whole way, and you never have to focus on driving, only getting us off at the right stop." Our schedule in the new year will give more one-on-one time for both kids with me and UnschoolerDad. I'm looking forward to it, and so is P, who is already planning out how she wants to spend some of those "date nights."

This week, P, T, and I mixed up salt dough, rolled it out, cut it into Christmasy shapes, baked them, and painted them to be ornaments for our tree. This was our first time trying acrylic paints, which takes more work from me to prevent gummed-up brushes than when we use watercolors, but the bright colors are very satisfying. And the time on task fit in with something I've been working on, which is being more present for the kids, and more available to stop what I'm doing and play or explore with them when they ask or a good opportunity arises. It's a thousand little decisions, not one big one, but each time I decide in favor of doing something with them, it gets easier. The house isn't as clean as it has sometimes been, but I think we can cope. Sandra Dodd posted a piece of a poem on the AlwaysLearning list that's helpful here:

    The cleaning and scrubbing can wait till tomorrow
    But children grow up as I've learned to my sorrow
    So quiet down cobwebs; Dust go to sleep!
    I'm rocking my baby and babies don't keep.
         - Ruth Hulbert Hamilton

On the housework side of that balance, the other day, when we were all immersed in our own things, T got up and announced he was going to clean up the living room. He put several toys away and then settled back down again. I thanked him. If I'd gotten up and joined him, he might have done more, but I was too tired at that moment. Here's hoping for more opportunities to combine togetherness and cleaning up!

As we've tried to shake this long cold , there have been several pretty sedentary days with lots of media. P has now watched the entire three-season run of Phineas and Ferb on Netflix. As she watched the last few episodes, I joined her while knitting, and I found the show to be rich in cultural references and awesome vocabulary, much of which is probably going over P's head at this point. I shared those observations with P and invited her to ask me about anything she wants as she's watching. For just one example, the mother remarked to Candace once that she'd gone into the backyard to look at the monkeys Candace told her were there, but instead found "a stunning lack of monkeys." We spent a minute taking that apart, since stunning and lack were both new words for P. P's asked several vocabulary questions since then, either while watching or at other times, seemingly out of the blue. She's invited me to watch episodes with her that she thought I would enjoy (and I did!). She also makes some interesting observations about the show. She noticed the Frankenstein monster in the title sequence, linked it to our earlier discussion about the Frankenstein story, and gleefully reported her find. She also observed out loud that little Suzy (who appears totally sweet to most people but makes a few lives pretty hellish) was an even bigger bully than Buford, as we watched an episode in which Suzy bullied Candace, and in which Buford admitted to Suzy being what he was most afraid of in the world.

P has been doing less pleasure reading recently; this is a little surprising to me, given how voracious she was for a while. She still reads all kinds of incidental things throughout the day and shows a good level of understanding of them. And a couple of times, when I've suggested that getting ready early for bed would give her more time to read in bed, she's jumped at the chance. So I'm taking it easy about the change for now: if I push reading when she's not particularly interested in it, it seems sure to make her even less interested. I'm also noticing that her spelling and handwriting are still improving. Perhaps when Phineas and Ferb gets old, the next cool chapter book will seem a little shinier. P also volunteered that she sometimes reads an article in a magazine I've left out in the bathroom -- I think it's time for some good strewing in that room.

P and I did watch a DVD together this week with stories from several great children's books, some of which P's first-grade class read before she left school, and some of which were new to us. The stories were The Man Who Walked Between Buildings (about the tightrope-walker who illicitly strung a cable between the nearly-complete towers of the World Trade Center and then walked it for hours before he submitted to arrest; his punishment was to perform for the city's children, which he loved doing), Miss Rumphius (about making the world more beautiful, with some side-trips for us into how flowers propagate and how seeds spread naturally), Snowflake Bentley (about the man who spent his life capturing photos of snowflakes; we spotted some wonderful ones in the latest snowfall here and enjoyed sharing them with each other in the same spirit, though we need some magnifying glasses!), and The Pot That Juan Built (which goes into many of the processes for making traditional clay pottery in the Southwest and points south). All were based on true stories and processes, some of which we followed up to find out more afterward. We also watched a The Way Things Work DVD on Floating, which covered both buoyancy and the basics of sailing.

A few days later, I was trying to think of something new to add to our day, and I remembered a bag of corn husks, older than my marriage, that I'd evicted from the kitchen while cleaning up a bit. P said she'd be up for making corn-husk dolls with me (she'd expressed an interest in this before), so I looked up a tutorial to get us started, and we were off and running.

We made these (brother and sister, resting together on a big corn-husk pillow) in about 20 minutes, not counting some soaking time for the corn husks. We reinforced our knot lore. And when P had her two dolls and was ready to move on to something else, I used the rest of our soaked corn husks to make a large corn-husk angel to top our Christmas tree, since our previous tree topper broke last year.

We went to two open gyms in different locations this week, one with both kids and one with just P (T was too young for that one, so he got some one-on-one time with UnschoolerDad). I've started to work more during such events at spotting other kids that my kids are enjoying, finding their parents, and extending myself more to make contact with them and check out the possibilities for play dates -- especially for T, who has no ready-made cadre of former school friends and is getting more interested in playing with other kids. I used to resist this kind of connection because my introverted side feared rejection or other sources of social awkwardness. As I learn and live through more things, however, I am developing more courage to act in spite of embarrassment and emotional vulnerability; and I realized it was time to stop letting my own fears be the limiting factor in my kids' social lives. There's no surfeit of play dates to show for these efforts yet, but I'll keep trying, realizing that not every attempt will pan out, and that making new commitments around the holidays is not high on most families' lists of things to do! In the meantime, the kids and I are enjoying each other's company more and more, and that is all to the good.

Cabin Fever and Its Fruits

Another week and though I'm improving slowly, I'm still sick. I guess I need more sleep. But unschooling carries on, albeit at a somewhat slower pace and with a measure of cabin fever.

In the world of ideas about school: Two different people pointed me to a Washington Post article about a school board member, a very successful businessman, who pledged to take the high-stakes tests students in his district were required to pass for graduation, and to publish his results. Of 60 math questions (to take just one section), he knew the answers to none but was able to guess correctly at 10. This experience raised huge questions for him about who writes these tests, who decides what should be on them, and how the results should be used -- he would have been required to take a remedial reading course based on his results. I recommend the article heartily.

Here's a simple, mama-needs-sleep-soon list of highlights for us this week:

• We set up and decorated our large artificial Christmas tree. P is now strong and dexterous enough to get the branches into place on the trunk, and T can now read letters reliably, so my role has been reduced to fluffing up the branches, mediating minor squabbles, and doing things too high for either child to reach. It was a good exercise in cooperation among the three of us, and we did pretty well. Our biggest wrangle was over playing with ornaments (delicate) as if they were toys (stronger). After gluing several broken ornaments back together, I ended up hanging the precious things high and giving up on protecting things that weren't of great sentimental value to any of us. The subsequent decrease in interest in the ornaments has me wondering whether my reaction wasn't one of the fun parts of playing with them. In any case, one of the things I'm working on is decreasing my attachment to particular objects and ways of doing things, especially where that attachment conflicts with my kids' desires for learning and interesting experiences.
• We rolled, cut, and baked dough ornaments. Decorating them is waiting on a trip to the craft store for acrylic paints. As we measured the flour for the dough, we found it infested with some kind of maggots. We looked them up and found they were probably Indian Meal Moths, common worldwide. We looked at photos of them, read a bit about their life cycle and methods for controlling them, and then proceeded to sift them out of the flour and make our ornaments. At least one was alive and wiggling. Having lived in Northern California, where similar (identical?) critters called orchard moths are everywhere, we already keep most of our vulnerable foodstuffs in airtight containers, but our crafts-only white flour was unprotected.
• We roasted some chestnuts, after looking up different ways to cook them and settling on the method used by New York street vendors, which is to boil them until tender and then just toast them a bit for nice looks. Along the way we looked at photos of chestnut trees, chestnut lumber, and the furry green casings in which the nuts grow. We talked a bit about chestnut blight and how its has almost completely wiped out American chestnut trees, so we're eating chestnuts from Asian chestnut trees, which coevolved with the blight. After speculating a bit about the etymology of chestnut, we looked it up and found it has nothing to do with chests, but is most likely what some English speaker heard when someone said Castanea, the genus name and original name of the tree in many places, across language groups.
• P got out an origami-per-day calendar I gave her a while back and wanted to learn to fold things from it. I'm helping her learn to read the instructions and diagrams and do the various techniques. She gets very frustrated sometimes. This week she was fuming loudly in the spectators' area during T's gymnastics lesson, and I said if she couldn't handle her frustration without bothering the people around us, she should wait until we got home to work on the origami. I was pleased to see that she was able to to quiet down and still work through her frustration to a satisfactory result. Learning something you're interested in is always satisfying generally, but not always fun in the moment!
• I'd been noticing that lots of P's pretend play was about being poor, so on one car ride, I suggested we brainstorm the minimum possessions a family living in very limited conditions (no running water or electricity) would need. P took me up on it. She played along as we thought about things like one cooking pot and a fire ring or some kind of stove to use it on; but she really lit up when we started thinking about toys and books. She thought they'd have a few, but when I told her that many poor families have no toys or books at all, she thought long and hard about what kinds of things the kids would play with, or how they might learn to read if they had the opportunity. We got another angle on poverty on a more typical United-States level when I told her a story I'd just read about a family, living on a very tight budget, who had decided to give each other only one gift each, with a $5 spending limit -- and how that Christmas was the best they'd ever had. We have been burning through savings this year and doing less discretionary spending than usual because we're waiting to see the first income from an independent software project to be released very soon, and I can see from her play that money is very much on P's mind. I'm trying to strike a balance in talking with her about money and poverty, not romanticizing poverty, but also letting P know that not having lots of money doesn't mean a family can't have a good life. The kids and I had planned to sign up to help sort gifts at the Share-a-Gift "store," where families who can't afford Christmas presents can pick out donated toys and books to give their kids; but while I was ill and delaying new commitments, volunteer registration filled up. We'll still sort through what we have to donate some gently-used toys to the program.
• After last week's bullying in gymnastics, P and I talked about what might happen if we spoke to the hair-pulling girls and their parents (with possibilities ranging from the situation being resolved to the girls really having it in for her). Today in class, P made a connection with one of the girls and got her to stop; the other girl wasn't in class. Here's hoping this episode of P's education in dealing with bullies is over.
• After reading a thread about art on my favorite unschooling email list (AlwaysLearning), I decided to increase the kids' independent access to art supplies. We took our arts/crafts basket down from the counter and put it on the train table, which never gets used for trains anyway since the floor is so much nicer for big track layouts. P and I sorted supplies and found containers to make them easy to find and use, and I put just a few things up high so T can't decorate too many walls in an unsupervised moment. There's more ongoing art happening now. P has been writing in pretend Chinese characters -- she loves the concept of ideograms for words. I dug up a postcard from my adventures on PostCrossing.com on which my correspondent had illustrated the steps for writing "hi" (Ni Hao) in Chinese, and put them into a form P can use more readily when she's ready for some real characters. Besides art supplies, we started a container of bits and bobs that could be incorporated into creations. P enjoyed taking apart and reassembling some older, less-efficient sink aerators we recently replaced, asking about what they were for, and then transforming them into buildings in a town, with scrap-yarn roads and an inexplicably tall dentist's office building. P's appetite for making creations has been whetted; now she wants lots of yarn she can use to make giant spiderwebs. It's on the shopping list!

The kids have spent a lot of time on Netflix and at other iPad pastimes while I've been sick. I get glimpses:

• P writing "I Love You" with alphabet-soup letters in the Morris Lessmore app
• Both kids transforming Morris Lessmore characters into characters from famous books and related movies. One was the Bride of Frankenstein, which reminded us of a friend's photo I'd recently shown P on Facebook, of her post-op "Frankenfoot," all gussied up with neck bolts and such to go with the stitches, and accompanied by "Bride of Frankenfoot," her other foot, with the classic tall, gray-templed hairdo -- everything really does relate to everything else somewhere! P was curious, so I told her the basics of the story of the creation of Frankenstein's monster.
• P asking today, out of the blue, what a shrine is. She's been watching Phineas and Ferb, a Disney cartoon series she discovered on her own, and one character built a shrine for another who'd been sucked into another dimension. P described the shrine to me in great detail. I told her a little about shrines on different scales, from a tabletop to a building, and we talked a little about what they're for (reminders of loved ones or religious figures; places to focus, pray, and/or meditate). Thank goodness there's something to be learned from P&F, and P's willing to ask the key questions.

P and I also watched a bit more of Cosmos together. One episode, "Heaven and Hell," covered some ground we've seen before, about asteroid impacts, the Tunguska event, etc., as well as vividly describing the hot, corrosive atmosphere of Venus. I stopped to clarify things, including why the planets' appearances and their distances from each other couldn't easily be shown in the same scale, and how the solar-system model used in the series obscures the fact that an asteroid or comet, zooming through our solar system, has a negligible chance of hitting any planet. The word negligible made for an interesting discussion -- I explained it as "so small you could basically ignore it," which led back to more talk about scale -- how small is that? So small relative to what? We also wrestled a bit with helping P understand Kepler's Second Law of Planetary Motion (planets in orbit sweep out equal areas in equal times) -- we'll have to find some better ways of exploring the concept of area, but I think P got the basic idea.

The other big vocabulary-builder recently has been Dragonsinger, which UnschoolerDad finished reading to P tonight. P asks about unfamiliar words, and when UD isn't sure, he calls me in for my knowledge and my willingness to look words up. Just tonight I gave them definitions of querulous and sinecure, as well as a couple more I've already forgotten. Bless Anne McCaffrey; from beyond the grave she's enriching my daughter's vocabulary along with her imagination.