Learning happens at every age, no matter what we do. Kids who are encouraged and aided in pursuing their own interests can learn anything! One family's adventures in unschooling.
Once again we've been focused on our activities more than on writing about them. I think I detect a pattern! I'm very glad, this Election Night, to be done with the election and also past the hardest parts of moving to a new house in a new town (near enough our old one to keep our old friends). Now perhaps we can settle down into a new rhythm and explore a wider variety of interests. Here's a sampling of recent learning: Reading
We read Little House in the Big Woods recently, as bedtime reading, and started on Little House on the Prairie. T listened carefully to the details of Pa making bullets, scrutinized the pictures, and asked me about it again a couple of nights later. P was excited to hear about square dancing and wanted to know if people still knew how to do it (yes) and if I knew how to do it (yes, a little). Perhaps we'll seek out some square dancing or contra dancing locally so she can try it. T asked what "pebbles" meant when we read about pebbles on the share of Lake Pepin. He knew about gravel from playgrounds, but didn't remember hearing small rocks called pebbles before. We read about cheese making, maple sugaring, and much more. As we started running into parts that are derogatory toward Indians, I noticed several local homeschooling moms chatting online about what other books they've used to give a more accurate or balanced view of Native Americans in that time period. We have one well-liked book from that discussion on hold at the library now; more on that when/if we read it!
P checked out several graphic novels at the great library that is a short walk from our new house. She's especially enjoying Akiko (the children's librarian said a lot of girls especially like this series), and it's wonderful to hear her read aloud from it. She's very fluent and gets a lot of appropriate expression into her reading voice.
T continues his frequent readings with UnschoolerDad of The Sneetches and Other Stories. He likes to read some of the words on each page (mostly from memory, but there is some actual decoding starting to happen), and with almost every reading he wants to read more of the words. He's asking just the right kinds of questions for starting to decode; for example, he asked UD why there were little sixes everywhere -- that was how he saw lowercase a, as he's still learning some of the lowercase letters.
Doing
We parked a twenty-minute walk from P's choir rehearsal and walked there along a local bike path that followed a creek. P and T both really enjoyed the walk. I commented as we passed a Jewish temple, and P wanted to know how I could tell that was what it was (Star of David, Hebrew lettering on sign, transliterated Hebrew in name of congregation), and talked just a bit about Jewish theology.
P went with me to our Democratic headquarters to volunteer on the get-out-the-vote effort one day. They wouldn't put an 8-year-old on the phone (and she wouldn't have wanted to phone, though she would have been happy to stuff envelopes), but she did a bunch of voter-list shredding (for voter privacy) to save time for another volunteer to make calls.
Both kids did some leaf-raking in our extremely leafy yard, for fun and for pay at different times.
Both kids enjoyed trick-or-treating. I totally dropped the ball on costumes, between our recent move and election work; but they cheerfully decided on and pulled together costumes (a purple dog, again, and a cowgirl) from what we had on hand and could find. This was T's first year of feeling confident about trick-or-treating, and he had fun, remembered his thank-yous more than he forgot them, and got into some fun conversations with people at their doors.
Making
P made some very fetching little cards for Thanksgiving, using materials she's found so far as we unpack in our new house. Some of them tell loved ones that she is thankful for them. Others provide space to list things the recipient is thankful for.
Both kids are building a lot with Lego and wooden building blocks. P was very happy when she finally located her big box of Lego bricks that had been in storage during our move. She builds creatures, vehicles, and often creations that are cyborg-like combinations of the two.
P continues making her elaborate creations in Minecraft. She's learned to open and search the Minecraft wiki when she wants to know how to make an item.
Writing
P wrote on her Thanksgiving cards, and she's been playing Scribblenauts a lot and asking about spellings of harder words. She comes up with really cool ideas in Scribblenauts, like having her character fly very high on a griffin's back and then parachute down, or getting out of a too-deep-for-a-ladder hole by bouncing on a big trampoline (because just a trampoline didn't quite do the job).
Watching
I brought in a tiny snail I found in the backyard, so the kids could get their first up-close look at a live snail. We put it on a plastic mat in the kitchen and tried bringing different things (grass, some dandelion leaves from where I found it, a slice of turnip, etc.) to see if it would be interested in eating them. P also experimented with moisture on the board to see how the snail would react. We were considering keeping it around inside for a while (I thought it might freeze to death soon otherwise), but we looked up a bit about snails and found that they hibernate, so after we'd watched it a good long while, we put it back outside where I found it, so it could go about the business of finding a good hibernation spot. Another day, after I killed a yellowjacket that had gotten into the house, P and I took a good look at its body structure and texture. She remarked on how smooth it was, "almost like plastic," and on how much its wings resembled smaller dragonfly wings.
On Election Day, I had an electoral map updating on my computer starting when the polls closed on the East Coast. P saw it and wanted to know how it all worked. She was very anxious about the possibility of Romney winning the presidency, and glad to see the electoral votes piling up for Obama, but I don't think she really believed me that Obama was winning at first -- after all, there were those huge red swaths across middle America! She felt better after I showed her the electoral map and equivalent cartogram for the 2008 presidential election on Wikipedia (look down a bit, on the right side of the page, for these images), so she could see in the cartogram how all those red states didn't account for many people/electors compared to the blue states. UnschoolerDad and P had a short talk about the House still having a Republican majority, and why highly polarized partisan politics could still make it hard to get things done. I find, as I try to explain why we believe as we do on certain issues, that I need to make sure UD and I don't demonize the other side inordinately. A blogger I love put it well, quoting her son as asking, during the election eight years ago, "So, if George Bush were driving in his car, and he saw me, would he try to run me over?"
The scary, geographically correct electoral map for 2008
The reassuring (to Obama supporters), electorally correct cartogram for 2008
Listening
I heard P humming the tune to "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" in the car, so I sang the first verse. P asked where it was from, and I said it was a wartime song (couldn't remember which war, but thought it was the Civil War) about waiting for the young men to come safely back from the war. She asked about their ages, and I said there was probably a minimum age, but some boys lied about their age and went when they were younger. An interesting discussion ensued about why someone might WANT to go off to war (fighting for their ideals, a chance at excitement or a new life, desire for glory). Later, I looked it up, and we found out that "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" was a pro-war song from the Civil War era, set to an older Irish tune, "Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye," which was an anti-war song!
Talking
I don't remember how the conversation about adrenaline started, but P and I talked about "a rush of adrenaline" as what happens when you are angry, scared, or very excited. We talked about how adrenaline temporarily suppresses immune responses, so for example, if you have a cold and are singing in a concert, your stage fright will probably keep you from coughing or sniffling during the concert. We also talked about how, in a crisis situation, adrenaline might give you greater strength and/or endurance than you would have without the adrenaline surge.
P said, as she's said several times recently, that she wishes she could go back into the past -- the horse-drawn-wagon, washing-clothes-by-hand past of the Little House books, which we've been reading out loud recently. We've talked about the incessant nature of chores in that time compared to now, but also about some things that might be pleasantly different. She speculated about being able to introduce some labor-saving devices early, and wondered whether time travel might actually become possible in her lifetime. I told her about one of my favorite books, Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, and how in that story, time travel to the past results in the present ceasing to exist. I told her a little about the interventions decided upon in that book (giving smallpox immunity, better weapons, and some potentially protective religious ideas to some native American groups to place them in a more powerful position upon Columbus's arrival), to make changes around 1492, in hopes of correcting the disastrous route history had taken by our future/the book's present. I said I didn't know whether she'd enjoy the book yet, but she said, "Oh, I'm all about time travel," so I guess we'll give it a try when we find it. We just moved, so most of our books are still in boxes.
Listening to the radio one day, P asked what the electoral college was. Complicated discussion ensued as we talked about the E.C. vote versus the popular vote. We also got into apportionment of Congress members and Senators, since electors for a state are mostly equal to the sum of those two.
Visiting
Both kids are ecstatic to be living just two blocks from our new local library, since we moved last month. They love the kids-only computers in the children's section, and they love walking or riding their bikes to the library. Wait till they find out the local rec center's nearly as close in another direction!
Thinking, asking questions, planning...
P decided to spend some allowance on deeply discounted gymnastics clothing. T was considering also getting a fancy, shiny gymnastics shirt -- he tried it on and told me he wanted to buy it -- but as I almost always do for him, I reminded him that he'd been telling me he was saving up for a particular Lego set, and asked him to decide whether getting the shirt was more important than that goal. He thought for a few minutes and decided to save for the Legos. He doesn't always decide this way -- eraser pets recently won out over the savings goal -- but sometimes savings win out.
T asked how you send papers -- he wanted to know how mail works, so I explained about addresses, stamps, mail carriers, sorting at the post office, and planes and trucks to get the mail to the right delivery area. I wrote a letter to my parents from him, using his words/ideas (he signed his name), so he could send some mail. And shortly afterward, he got some back!
We drive pretty often by a Catholic church that, at the moment, has 3000+ crosses planted in its front yard, with signs about abortion. P asked what the crosses were all about, so I gave her the basics of what abortion is and the opposing viewpoints about it. Hard topic! We also talked some about contraception, which to my mind should be the best thing for both sides, since it minimizes the demand for abortions -- but I can't claim to speak for Catholics. Then, the next day, P asked me to read aloud to her from a book I bought a long time ago at a library sale, thinking P might be ready for it one of these years: Catherine, Called Birdy. It's a humorous teen novel set in 1290, voiced as the diary of a 13-year-old young woman. She's the daughter of a country knight with modest holdings for a noble, and she hates her life and writing about it, but her mother has made a deal that if she writes a daily account for her brother (an aspiring monk who is trying to make sure she gets at least a little education), she need not spin. Spinning is worse than writing, so the game's afoot. Just about every paragraph requires some kind of explanation of a vocabulary word (e.g., betrothal), a social structure (e.g., dowries, or feudalism and the tenant farmer system, including payment of rents in goods rather than currency), a historical phenomenon (e.g., the Crusades), if not several of these. Very rich, thick going. But P gets most of the humor, and she asks good questions about the explanations. How did the Church get to be in charge of so much? That one took a while, but fortunately we'd watched some videos about the Roman Empire, so she had some background for it.
T and I watched several episodes of Little House on the Prairie on DVD while he was sick one day. He asked me several times whether this was real life. I think he was trying to get the hang of live action vs. animated video (he's seen lots of animation in a variety of styles), and also whether this was filmed close to the present day or in the older times it portrays. I think we got that worked out: I told him these were real people and animals doing things in real places, but that they were people filmed pretty recently, when I was a little girl (I realize that juxtaposition may be confusing for him!), pretending to be people who lived much longer ago.
We've been working hard on moving, searching for a new house, getting our old house ready to sell, etc., so I've been very spotty about keeping notes on our activities and learning; and the kids have been spending more time than usual learning on their own, without me. So this is just a tiny sample of what's actually happened, since it's what I saw and am now able to remember -- but it's what I can manage this time! Perhaps after our move things will settle down a bit and I'll be able to witness and record more of the learning. Reading
We finished reading The Black Cauldron out loud for bedtime reading.
We read Land of Hope, a historical novel about immigrants coming to the U.S. via Ellis Island, with many pauses to talk about the history and why things happened as they did for the characters.
We started Little House in the Big Woods. Both kids are enjoying it, looking at the pictures, and asking lots of questions.
T is showing a new level of interest in words. UnschoolerDad started a tradition of reading the same book (The Sneetches and Other Stories by Dr. Seuss) to him every day. T likes to pick one word that appears often in each story and say that word when it comes up. He also likes to do a word search: I'll tell him a word that appears somewhere on the page we're reading, and he'll try to find the word on the page. The first time we tried this he seemed frustrated, but when I started to move on to more reading, he said he wanted to try it again. Not one to shrink from a challenge of his own choosing, this young one!
We walked by a police car the other day, parked in a restaurant's dumpster area. We saw it from the back -- the lights on top were almost invisible, so the only sign it was a police car was the word POLICE written across the back of the trunk. T asked why the police car was parked by the trash. I answered him, then asked how he knew it was a police car. He said he saw the word "POLICE" on it. He was very proud of himself!
P is enjoying the Amulet series of graphic novels. She reads and rereads them, to herself and to T, who also enjoys them.
Doing
When we were getting ready to make an offer on a house to buy, P helped me do the arithmetic to figure price per square foot on some comparable homes sold in the area recently. I'd read her the prices and square footage of the homes, and she'd divide them out, tell me the result, and then multiply by the square footage of our desired home. This was the first time she'd dealt with place values up to the hundreds of thousands. I don't think it sank in all the way, but it was a good exposure, and she enjoyed the exercise.
We went to a Heritage Event, a sort of living history event set in 1880 in the Colorado foothills. P enjoyed it and is considering becoming a volunteer next year, when she'll be old enough to do so as long as I'm volunteering too. We saw and/or tried metal bathtubs, chamber pots, hand tools for making buttons (we watched but didn't do it, as the line was very long!), butter churning, laundry with washboard and wringer, sausage making, a class in a multi-age schoolroom segregated by sex (though the teacher let P sit by T when she asked very politely if she could go and help him), and more.
Making
We've been making cookies. T especially likes to help measure in the ingredients and lick the spoon. P picks up a new cooking term or technique from time to time.
Both kids have been painting and drawing a lot.
T is enjoying stamping with rubber stamps, including carefully cleaning the stamps between colors of ink.
P is making amazing creations in Minecraft. She builds elaborate castles, farms, security systems, arenas, zoos, signs to be viewed from high in the sky, and more, and she's lighting them up with electric lamps controlled by redstone circuits, and then sometimes enjoying blowing them up with TNT and/or drowning them in lava when she's ready to move on. She watches YouTube videos other Minecraft enthusiasts have made to get ideas. I showed her how to access the Minecraft Wiki online to learn how to craft or use items in Minecraft, which is leading to a fair amount of reading, spelling, and online search activity.
T is building like mad with Lego. He has several Lego kits, and we've bought, organized, and labeled two big fishing-lure boxes to hold them in an accessible way by sorting them by size and shape. T enjoys the building and the sorting, and he likes sharing his creations with other kids and adults.
Writing
T liked writing numbers on a slate at the living-history class. His numbers bear some resemblance to the usual forms. He reads numbers very well because of his extensive work with Lego building instructions. He also likes writing his name on things, though he still asks how to make some of the letters.
P wrote a fairy story to put in a book in her Minecraft library. She's learning her way around a computer keyboard, so typing is becoming less frustrated.
Watching
We watched the first three Star Wars movies (Episodes IV, V, VI) on DVD. T is starting to be more okay with tense moments in movies, though sometimes he leaves and plays with something else for a while.
Minecraft videos
Opera scenes on YouTube -- I heard some great opera arias on a public radio pledge drive one day, and I wanted to share them with whoever was interested, so I looked them up on YouTube and played some. (I also made a pledge that will get us a 6-CD set of 100 opera arias sometime soon.) T was very interested in the costumes and the facial expressions and body language. Sometimes he asked what they were saying, and I supplied the best translations I could come up with for the Italian or German.
Listening
Both kids are more attentive than they look at times, catching odd bits of my conversations with UnschoolerDad or of stories on the radio and asking questions about them. Examples of that are in some other sections.
Talking
After a little bit of stargazing in new-moon dark skies recently, P started asking questions: Why do the planets go around the Sun instead of around some other star? (We talked about relative strengths of gravitational attraction based on distance, about measuring distance in light years and light minutes, and about how everything in our galaxy orbits the galactic core.) T wanted to know what planets were in our solar system (P was able to come up with most of them, and I supplied the rest). P wanted to know why the band of stars across the sky was called the Milky Way, when that's the galaxy we're in (We talked about spiral arms and the general shape of the galaxy). We talked about the lengths of years for different planets at different distances from the Sun. There was more along those lines, but that's what I remember.
T asked UnschoolerDad how fast a car would have to go to keep up with the sun (really with the earth's rotation, keeping the sun always in the sky). UD asked me, and I said it would depend on latitude, but at the equator, you'd have to go a little over 1000 miles per hour. We talked about why a car wouldn't be able to do that. UD mentioned that in space, without air resistance, the space shuttle could orbit in a matter of hours, going MUCH faster than the car at the equator and passing quickly from day to night and back again. T was intrigued.
P asked why the sky is blue even though the sun is yellow. We talked about atmospheric scattering of blue light, and why these two observations are partly due to the same phenomenon.
I took the kids out to dinner recently, and one of the straws that came with their milk drinks had some liquid in it inside the wrapper. We washed it out thoroughly, and a conversation about various kinds of food contamination (deliberate and accidental) ensued. We talked about how one poisoning incident with medicines when I was a child had led to just about everything having safety seals on it. We talked about pop-up lids on goods in jars, and why they work the way they do (UD returned a jar of something recently after discovering its lid had popped up before we opened it, and the kids noticed that and wanted to know about it). We talked about swollen cans or jar lids and the connection with botulism, about safe opening and disposal of contaminated goods, and more. P connected the pressure in botulism-infected cans with the pressure of fizzy drinks when you open them, so we talked about carbonation. We also talked a little about Botox injections and how the botulinum toxin in them paralyzes facial muscles, and wondered together why people getting Botox injections don't get botulism illness.
Visiting
Both kids have enjoyed looking at new houses we were considering buying. They love the one we chose. They've been back to the old house with me many times, doing various things to get it ready for sale or get our stuff out of it. They watched as UD and I hauled some heavy tools up a steep ramp from the workshop to the garage (whence the movers can take over), using a block and tackle so I could pull the 400-lb tools up fairly easily while UD supported and steered them up the ramp.
Thinking, asking questions, planning...
I've been reading The Black Cauldron to the kids at bedtime. One night we reached the part apart the Marshes of Morva, and the book mentioned that the marshes reeked. I explained that reeking meant stinking, and talked a bit about aerobic and anaerobic bacteria, and how anaerobes' products of decomposition make marshes stinky, just as they do compost piles that don't get enough turning or aeration; but that decomposition by aerobic bacteria doesn't create nearly such a foul odor. P wanted to know what sorts of dead things would be decomposing, and we talked a little about the plant and animal possibilities.
P wants to write a thank-you note to our realtor for helping us find such a cool new house. She really likes him and says he's great with kids. I told her the best time to give a note like that would be at closing, since then we'd know we really were moving into that cool house. She thought about how much she'd like to write and started mentally working out how many sentences she could write if she did two per day for a week. (She got an incorrect answer, but when I used her same method to show her the correct answer, she immediately recognized what her mistake had been. As a former math teacher, I wish all my students had been so willing and able to seek and find their mistakes!)
In July, when we were coming up to the deadline to give our notice of intent to homeschool for this school year, P started saying she'd like to go back to school, "just for one more year." We talked some about why. It lit a fire under me to look for ways to make things more interesting and satisfying for her, as well as doing more active strewing so she doesn't spend so much of her day on the computer. (P has told me that, although the computer interests her a lot and can occupy her for hours on end, she feels dissatisfied when she spends too long using it without doing other things.) We had good conversations about what she wanted that school might provide, and how we might get those same benefits and more without school. She wanted to be able to walk some places and do some things on her own, so we settled on a first experiment: having her take the bus to the library to turn in a DVD, with me tailing her at a distance so she could fall back if she needed me. I told her I'd be all right with her doing that sort of thing without a tail, once she was comfortable with all the steps -- she was most uncertain about how she'd know when to get off the bus. We ended up getting rained out on that errand, but not before P had had a taste of doing something on her own. P also wanted to see more of friends, so we planned more play dates. Most of all, she said she wanted more one-on-one time with me. (School wouldn't have helped with this, but it was something she said would make her life better, so we started having fairly regular "date nights" when P and I would do something, just the two of us.) But P still said she wanted to go to school.
She expressed some apprehension about being asked to do things at school that she wouldn't know how to do, and asked me if I thought that would happen. I said I thought she'd be very strong in reading, would probably need to work on her spelling (but that seemed doable to both of us), and might be confused about some of the math notation. She's been working with a lot of math concepts, but not in a schoolish way; e.g., she knows what division is about and can do it in her head to a reasonable extent for a 2nd/3rd grader, but she didn't know what a division sign looked like. The math part gave her the most concern, so I pointed out that long ago she'd picked up a 2nd-grade workbook at a book sale, and that by working through that, she could make sure she'd seen most or all of the same stuff as her peers. She wanted to do that, so we worked out that at 15 pages per day, she could finish the workbook before school started, spending less time per day on it than she'd spend doing desk work at school.
P set out on that course, but after a few days of doing worksheets on skills that, while useful, were out of the richer context she's grown accustomed to having with her learning, she was souring on the idea of school, and decided she wanted to stick with unschooling after all -- though she did exact my promise that we could continue with play dates (subject to the desired friends' availability, which we knew would be a lot less once school started), with increasing independence for her, and with date nights.
I sighed with relief, my feelings far less mixed than they were when P initially left school. I've grown to enjoy this way of life and the improved relationship I have with both kids, without school dictating our sleep schedule and shaping most of our daytime activities. I'd been trying to prepare myself, mentally and emotionally, for supporting her in returning to school. I knew I could let her come home again if she changed her mind. What I expected to be hard was letting P's relationship with school be her own, not stepping in and ruthlessly enforcing the demands of school. I was a very dedicated student when I was in school, and then I was a schoolteacher for four years, and it's really hard for me to imagine supporting a student who is in school by choice in not toeing the line on homework, attendance, etc. I was working on figuring it out, and someday that time may still come. But for now I'm glad we're still out of school!
Sandra Dodd wrote a very thought-provoking essay, "Public School on Your Own Terms," that was helpful to me in thinking about the possibilities for different relationships between me and my kid's school. I am uncomfortable with the idea of lying to school authorities about absences -- I really dislike outright dishonesty and avoid it whenever I can -- but the rest of it makes a lot of sense to me.
So, all that aside, a lot has been going on since I last posted. In the past six weeks we've been in overdrive on housing changes. UnschoolerDad and I decided we were spending too much money on housing for our one-earner lifestyle to be sustainable, so we moved out of our house into a small apartment, prepared our house for sale, put it on the market, got into contract to sell it, searched for a new house, and got into contract to buy one two towns over, about the same size as before but MUCH less expensive. Hopefully both sales will go through! We held off on the decision until we knew P would not be returning to school this year, so we wouldn't be yanking her away from school if she chose it. Both kids have been helpful with the transition. They are sad to leave our home, but they have been excited about hunting for a new one, and they both love the one we've chosen. They are sharing a room in our transitional apartment, which has led to some additional conflict, but also to much more opportunity for me to be with both of them at bedtime, and not only with T. (On good nights, we've had one parent with each child, but UnschoolerDad's schedule and mine sometimes mean there's only one parent at bedtime.) P has gotten clearer as a result that in our new house, she wants her room near T's so bedtimes can still be shared, and not on another floor as she previously thought. That helped with our choices in house hunting! We're moving to an area where the schools, should our kids want them, are still good, though not as highly rated as those we're leaving. My belief is that if a child is in school by choice, he or she will be much more able to suck the marrow out of school, regardless of what school s/he attends. I remember my parents saying something like that to me when I was college hunting -- that it would be helpful to find a college that would be a good match for my style, but that because I was so active in pursuing learning, I would be able to get a good education almost no matter where I went. So here's hoping it's true.
I haven't been tracking the kids' activities here during the whole move process. But here are some things I've noticed and remembered about what they've been doing.
Reading
On a visit to the library, P picked out LOTS of chapter books and some picture books. She and I had just been talking, in the context of our school-or-unschool conversation about third grade, about the fact that in school she'd be exposed to lots of stories she might not otherwise think to read. I pointed out that, since she'll be in contact with her schooled friends, she can ask them about what they're reading and check it out if it seems intriguing. I also offered to read some of the same books she's reading and discuss them with her, or help her follow up on doing or learning more about subjects in which they pique her interest. Perhaps that inspired her to be more adventurous about trying new series and authors, in addition to picking up Book Two in the How to Train Your Dragon series, the next 39 Clues book, and another book by the same author as the Fairy Realm books she's been enjoying. On another visit, I picked up a bunch of things I thought she might like. She's enjoying some mystery books, and I'm reading The Chronicles of Prydain out loud to both kids for bedtime reading.
P continues to read to herself and out loud, to me and to T. She's really quite fluent, and she usually asks about words she doesn't know, if I'm listening.
More in the anatomy book: the digestive system, appendicitis.
I've been reading Parent/Teen Breakthrough: The Relationship Approach: The New Program to End Battles With Your Pre-Teens and Teens, which gets a lot of recommendations from parents of grown unschoolers, even though it's clearly written with schooled adolescents in mind. When I started to read it, I was thinking in terms of things I might need in a few years, but I'm recognizing some of the preteen/teen relationship patterns from my current relationship with P. It's already been helpful to put the book's main advice into practice: Rather than trying to control your adolescent as you may have when they were younger, put lots of energy into building a strong, warm relationship with your child, because once they hit adolescence and their main mission in life becomes individuation and independence, a solid relationship is the best way to have a good influence in their lives. At this stage in P's life, a certain amount of direct control is still possible, but I already see her starting to resist in places, and I know I don't want to go down the path of ever-more-draconian measures to keep her in line -- that's a losing battle all the way around, especially as she gets older. So this book is becoming helpful in steering my thinking away from battling for control and toward building warm relationship and positive influence, including real dialogue with the kids about what's going to help make our lives as individuals and as a family go well -- not just me and UnschoolerDad figuring it out and announcing our decisions.
I read Roald Dahl's The BFG to both kids. They enjoy the nonsensical, yet intelligible, talk of the giant. Every once in a while P asks me what something means. Usually it's a coined, nonsensical word, but what she really wants to know is, what is the giant trying to say, and what does that mean?
Doing
P did a Young Inventors workshop at the local children's museum. She took apart an analog clock and built a lizard-grabber thing from craft sticks, egg cartons, tape, yarn, and paper clips. She was very pleased with it.
The next day, P did a Dinosaurs workshop at the same place. She found a plastic stegosaurus in a digging activity, but another girl really, really wanted the stegosaurus, so P gave it to her and settled for a brachiosaurus. ("Of course she wanted the stegosaurus. It is our state fossil, so everyone wants it!") P had lots of questions about brachiosaurus -- how did it defend itself from predators? Were predators even interested in taking on something so much larger than themselves? Did brachiosaurus swim all the way underwater? P also exclaimed to me that there was a dinosaur (spinosaurus) that looked just like the spiny animals my character was hunting in World of Warcraft. I pointed out that the WoW creatures had two spiny fans rather than one, and P said yes, they could get twice as much heating or cooling that way, and wasn't it cool how WoW was based partly on science?! In the workshop, they also compared the sizes of parts of their hands, feet, and fingers with dinosaur tracks of different sizes, and P remarked that some of the dinosaurs were pretty small! I came across a fact the other day, that on a linear time scale, Triceratops lived closer to humans than it did to Stegosaurus, and P was as surprised as I was to hear that, but the facts bear out. We have a long way to go until the dinosaurs will have been extinct for as long as they ruled the earth.
Both kids and I did an ice-cream-making workshop at the same place. We had fun making a really basic vanilla ice cream in nested ziploc bags. P and I talked a little about ice crystal formation and the role of stirring in making ice cream with a good texture.
The kids have started "keep-trading" toys with each other. I warned P, when this started, that T, like many four-year-olds, didn't have a very good sense of permanance of trades, and that she needed to be ready to trade back if he asked her to. At first she was called on to trade back a lot. Now T seems to be gaining more of a lasting sense of what trading means, but P is still good-natured about it when he occasionally wants to trade back. And sometimes P wants to trade back, and T is good about that, too.
As the garden starts to grow in earnest, we've been doing things like eating green onions and beet green thinnings together, straight from the ground. I talked a little with P about how beet greens have the vitamins and minerals of spinach, but without the oxalic acid to prevent calcium absorption. T enjoyed tasting beet greens for the first time, which he was remarkable non-reluctant to do. We pretended to be caterpillars. T is also showing me which squash to harvest, based on their size, and enjoying looking for squash of various sizes and stages as they grow. P and I are looking forward to our fermented (traditional pickle-crock) dill pickles being ready. Today I showed her the bubbles that are rising in the crock as the fermentation process really gets going. Periodically we cut off a piece of pickle and taste it to see how things are changing.
T and P played a complicated board game, Lords of Waterdeep, with UnschoolerDad, who simplified the rules a bit to make it friendlier for not-yet-reading T. After a while T lost interest, so UD and P played with the full rules. P is very enthusiastic about playing complicated strategy games. She went to a mostly-adult game night with UD and played the game there, to both their great satisfaction. I know UD will be glad to have someone in the house more interested in the really complicated games than I am! Fluxx is about my speed, and UD, P, and I played that together once or twice.
Making
P has been drawing and labeling even more house plans for the cars, eraser pets, and other tiny toys both kids have. They're getting better thought out, with more relevant furnishings, room for doors to open, and more.
P and T are building elaborate block structures using both their sets of blocks, now that they're in the same room.
T has become a Lego fiend. He has several "Creator" sets (these are great because you can use the same set of blocks to build 3 or 4 different models), and he plays with them every day for long stretches, both building from the instructions and improvising his own designs. He needed a little support with the instructions at first, but he figured them out very quickly and now can build completely independently with the age 7-12 Creator sets. He does frequently need my help getting blocks apart, which is a nice chance for us to reconnect. Sometimes I help by finding the blocks he needs as he builds, or by organizing his blocks to make particular kinds easier to locate.
Writing
I've found a few things in P's room that seem to be either price lists for a store game or game rules -- not enough context to tell.
P wrote in her workbook when she was considering school.
P wrote a gift tag, very neatly, for her cousin's birthday gift.
P has written some stories in books in Minecraft, and she's getting faster at keyboarding. She's also written and illustrated some stories in paper booklets she puts together.
Watching
A "Disney Connections" DVD about the Colonial (English colonies in America) period and pirates, and how moviemakers portrayed them. I was disappointed because I thought it would be more history and less Disney-movie pseudohistory. The kids probably would have enjoyed it more if they had seen Pocahontas or Pirates of the Caribbean.
P and I watched The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. T still doesn't like movies that get this scary, so he watched other things and hung out with UnschoolerDad while we watched. It's interesting to me, as a non-Christian who knows the stories of Jesus's life quite well, to see the close parallels between Aslan's sacrifice and Jesus's crucifixion that I missed when I read the books as a child, before I knew C.S. Lewis was a Christian theologian. I think P is likely to have some similar, interesting revelations at some point. I don't know whether we'll talk about it explicitly. P is interested in comparative religions already, so she may get to it sooner than I did.
P and I watched a video from the library about puberty for girls. The information went by really fast, so we stopped it a lot to talk about it. She learned some of the essentials she'll need in the next few years about body changes, periods, mood changes, and more. It was a good opportunity to talk a little about how our relationship is evolving as she starts to think a little more about her future as an adult and wants to move toward more independence, but still has a lot to learn that I can help her with.
P and T often watch shows together. Recent hits include My Little Pony, Horseland, and old favorite Phineas and Ferb, which is still releasing new episodes.
P watched some of the second season of Downton Abbey with me. It didn't suck her in as it did me, but she asked questions about the social conventions depicted and we discussed the relevant history (mostly battlefield tactics and conscription practices circa WWI) a bit.
Listening
P and T are having to get better at listening to each other, as we live in close quarters and need to share the space, and as they share a lot of play together. I've been trying to support each in hearing what the other is saying, and thinking about what kinds of responses will contribute to a happier relationship and to their getting their needs met.
P has been paying more attention to the radio, when I have it on in the car, and asking questions about what she hears. We've talked at some length about presidential politics as we've heard snippets from the Republican and Democratic conventions.
Talking
Both kids have been wanting to tell their dreams. It's interesting seeing how they listen, respond, and often fail to listen to each other, interrupting with corrections, of all things! It's a good chance to work on listening skills, and on my own patience with dream retellings that loop back on themselves and are full of contradictions.
P took a one-hour job at the company that makes the Rosetta Stone language software, repeating 200 sentences in English or Spanish to give them data to improve the way the software works with children's voices in native and non-native languages. She earned a $25 Visa gift card for her work. T and I built Lego models very quietly in the corner of the room while P worked.
T and P are both working up some enthusiasm for learning Spanish, especially as the town we are moving to has a larger Latino population than the one we are leaving. They're noticing people speaking Spanish in public and wanting to be able to communicate more with them.
Visiting
Both kids went to a birthday party at their cousin's martial-arts dojo. T was the youngest child present and didn't think at first that he would participate, and he did sit on the sidelines taking pictures for part of the time; but when the obstacle courses got started, T was fully and joyfully in on the action. When he wasn't participating, he was using UnschoolerDad's spare camera to document the action.
The kids and I visited a local history museum we hadn't seen before, one day after looking at some houses we were considering. They enjoyed it and we didn't see everything, so we'll probably go back soon. We played a lot with a water table where you could open and close gates, directing water to farm fields, cities, recreational river activities, and more. They enjoyed the challenges offered on the museum display for the water table.
Thinking, asking questions, planning...
P is noticing more things that she'd like to film. I've enlisted UnschoolerDad's help to gather together our video-recording technology.
At a park recently, T was playing on an odd playground feature shaped like a hippo, with major hippo organs (including at least three stomachs) portrayed on the playing floor. T remarked, correctly, "Oh, these must be the kidneys." Further conversation revealed that he wasn't reading the labels on the organs, but identifying them by their shape and position, based on our reading in the last couple of weeks about kidneys and the urinary system. We traced through the respiratory and digestive systems on the hippo diagram, much to T's delight.
T showed me recently how he could make "a part of your heart" with pattern blocks. He arranged three blue rhombuses into a hexagon, and then he made thump-bump sounds with his mouth while moving the pieces apart and back together. I saw immediately what he was doing -- it was a tricuspid valve, which he remembered from previous readings in our library anatomy book. I was impressed and told him so. P happened along then and said she'd actually thought of it and showed T. Still pretty cool!
P wanted to know why we were picking up a vaccination form at the doctor's office, so I told her we were signing her up for a homeschooling umbrella school, which would change our day-to-day life not at all but would mean she wouldn't have to take standardized tests unless she wants to. She said sometimes taking tests was fun and that she would like to try it, and I told her I'd look for a test we could do and grade at home so she could give it a try. She said she thought she could do pretty well on a 3rd-grade test, and I said one thing that might be on it that she hadn't done much was multiplication. She said she already knew some multiplication, and told me some multiplication facts that were true. I said sometimes people used multiplication tables to learn more about multiplication and the patterns that go with it, and she asked if I would make her one. I made the grid and filled in the numbers along the side and top, and then I started filling in the grid with her input. She noticed the 2's row was like counting by twos. We kept going, using mental arithmetic tricks she knows to fill things in (e.g., four sixes is the same as two twelves, and she knows how to add two-digit numbers, so we did that to come up with 24). The more patterns she noticed, the giddier she became! I recognized the feeling from when I started learning about multiplication, and shared my memory of that pleasure with her. I told her that when I looked down our growing columns of sixes and sevens, they looked like old friends. "Oh, hello, sixes! Good to see you again!" We kept going, and she started physically rolling around on the floor with excitement. I recognized this behavior from a much earlier time when I tried to help her figure out some math stuff on a worksheet, at her request if I recall correctly -- I can't remember if it was before or after we started unschooling. That other time, though, I thought I saw a lot of tension and unpleasant feeling, perhaps frustration or fear, going along with the giddiness I saw today. It was good this time to see the pleasure of figuring things out unalloyed with anxiety! She kept begging me to go on. Finally I called a halt since it had gotten quite late and we had plans the next day. By the time we stopped, we had visited place value into the billions, why commas are used in really long numbers, different symbols people use to show multiplication (x, dot, parentheses), a little bit of order of operations, diagrams to show multiplication with tiny squares forming larger rectangles or squares, what multiplication of multiple-digit numbers looks like, and how to show inequalities with < and > symbols, with a lot of fun along the way.
It's been a busy time, and I've been remembering to write a lot of it down, so here goes with an unexpectedly-soon post!
I've been feeling like I'm settling into a better groove with the kids. Listening better to their questions, making sure my responses are as informative as I can manage, remembering to look it up later if I don't have a good answer, and following where the interests lead without judgment or wishing they were going somewhere else (or at least without acting on those wishes -- one step at a time!). I think I've had some success at directing less and collaborating more, at asking them for their thoughts when things get hard, and generally being present to them more. It's a good feeling.
Reading
More in the library book on the human body. We've read about the structure of bones, osteomalacia and osteoporosis (after reading this they asked for their vitamins to get their calcium and vitamin D supplements), the names of skeletal muscles (which one is this that's sore?), the male and female urinary and reproductive systems, what kidneys are for and some of what can go wrong with them (one of our cats is going through acute kidney failure, so this was of special interest). We continued with teeth, the anatomy of the mouth, and the parts of the digestive system and their functions.
P continues to read over my shoulder on the computer and during videos when there is text onscreen.
P reads kids' books to T pretty frequently.
T played with Starfall.com for a while, enjoying the letter games and (with my help) the story pages.
Doing
P went to a one-time class on mirrors at the local children's museum. I didn't go with her, so I don't know many details, but she excitedly showed me her drawing of the sunspots she'd observed through a solar telescope, and she made a triangular tube, mirrored on the inside, that gives nice kaleidoscopic effects when you look through it.
Cleaning up -- mostly this is me, but P sometimes decides to dig in and get her room in better shape, with or without my help. And once recently, when I'd decided to spend half an hour tidying up at a run (while playing music) to get some aerobic exercise, T found the speed and liveliness contagious and helped me. We were so effective that before the half hour was up, there was very little stuff left to put away! P also dove willingly into cleaning her room more than has been usual recently when she got a book on CD from the library.
Hooping (see below, under Making, for how we got started on this) -- P is working on hooping tricks in her own style, and she has some pretty original stuff going on. I've been working on it a lot, and I'm having fun hooping in the nearest shady spot when the kids are playing happily at a park.
Swimming, with an emphasis on fun rather than specific skills. T, however, enjoys floating on his back with some support from me.
Making
One mom in our unschooling park day group, after several people had fun learning some hula-hooping tricks from her, took orders with measurements and made custom-sized polyethylene-tubing hoops for everyone who wanted them -- 40 new hoopers! She brought appropriate tape for adding texture, weight, and decoration to the hoops, and each person decorated their own (or asked their mom to do it with their chosen colors!). P and I both got hoops. I can already see that I should have gotten one for T as well -- he loves trying to hoop with P's hoop, though it's too big for him to have extended success. P, armed with the right size hoop for her, has gone from frustrated to quite competent at hooping; and I'm having fun learning and inventing tricks to try. Hooping and hoop dancing are not as intense aerobically as running, but you can sure work up a sweat at them and strengthen some core muscles, as my sore body will attest!
We bought T his first Lego Creator set -- it makes two kinds of rescue plane and one rescue boat. In the course of putting them together (he needed some support from me at first, but became increasingly independent after initial tries), he pays attention to numbers (step numbers on the page and counting bumps to find the right-size pieces), symmetry, angles, size, relative position, color, and whatever it looks like is taking shape (the nose of a plane, the engines, etc.). I was surprised, as we were going through the instructions for the first model plane, that he correctly and consistently identified the back end of the plane, although it took a while for it to be clear to me where the back was. It's a much richer experience than I had imagined. T also did some improvising, adding waterskis to the bottom of the boat and such. P already has a couple of Lego Friends sets she got for her birthday this year, and the process of putting them together is similar, but she already had the number skills more firmly and put them together mostly by herself, so I didn't get as intimate a look at the process for her.
Writing
P wrote out a recipe. She would ask how to spell things, and I'd encourage (but not require) her to take a guess and then let her know how she was doing. Most of her guesses were correct this time. Her spelling is gradually improving. I'm hoping her confidence will follow.
Both kids signed their names to a note I sent along with a birthday present to their cousin. This was a big deal for T, who's only written his name 2 or 3 times before. Not so much for P, though she enjoyed writing her name in cursive.
Watching
Fairly Legal, a TV series about a mediator working within a large law firm. The show takes the usual dramatic liberties with what mediators or lawyers would actually do, but it's neat to see how the different perspectives of lawyers and mediators work out in resolving conflicts, and of course it's nice for siblings to see how hard the mediator will work to find a win-win solution.
Martha Speaks, the show about the talking dog, uses new vocabulary in ways that help it stick nicely.
Listening
Me singing: UU hymns, chants, rounds (occasionally P learns them and we sing them in canon), patriotic songs, peace anthems, folk and country songs my dad sang to me when I was little, and whatever else pops into my mind along with enough of its lyrics at bedtime.
Lively music on the radio, when someone wants it.
P checked out Book 5 of the 39 Clues series (The Black Circle) on CD and polished it off in just two days. This one is set in Russia, and I think it's related to the killings of the royal family at the time of the Revolution, though I wasn't listening closely enough to be sure.
We went to an outdoor concert at a favorite park, but the amplified music was too loud for both kids. We tried moving way back away from the speakers, but they still weren't having a good time, so we ended up leaving. Maybe earplugs, or cotton to stuff in sensitive ears, should be in our car!
Talking
When T was putting together his Lego set, P really wanted him to be playing with her instead. She wove and acted out an intense narrative right nearby, with eraser-pet animals and vehicles built of her own Lego. He was sucked in several times, though he kept coming back to his building. Often when they start off playing together, P weaves a tale, but conflict arises when T wants to do something in a different way (contribute his own thinking to the the game). In this case, she had to focus on creating a tale that would draw him in as much as possible, without direct feedback from him aside from what got him to come away from his building to look.
Overheard between the kids: P was telling T about how, when T was a baby, he would pull P's hair really hard. T said, "Oh, is that why you boss me around so much?" P assured him she hardly remembered the hair pulling. T asked, "Then why do you do it?" and after a pause added, "I would like you to stop." This is clearer than he's been on this issue in the past. It seems to be much on his mind. I think it will be interesting to think with P about why she does act bossy so much and what might help change that dynamic. Her first thought in the conversation with T was that maybe she should stop hanging around a particular friend so much, since she is "the queen of the bossy people." P has mixed feelings about this friend, whom she sees at a particular gathering she attends often. She's glad to have someone to play with, but often P ends up in tears before the gathering is over.
Visiting
We've spent some time at a local children's museum. Both kids love dressing up in costumes and sometimes using them to put on plays. They saw Earth's motions of rotation and revolution on a model where they could sit and spin in place or roll on a track around the sun. P saw why we have seasons using a model of the Sun and Earth that included the tilted axis, the north star, rotation and revolution, and a volunteer with laser tools to demonstrate everything. T played with model trains (electric and Thomas-type) for loooong stretches of time and dug in the sandbox. Both kids played with play money, play train tickets, and a whooshing vacuum system for delivering those little drive-thru bank canisters back and forth. They made huge bubble walls around themselves. They experimented with swinging an LED-lit pendulum over a rotating disk on which the light left tracks, and we saw some of the awesome possibilities of periodic motion. They tried rolling balls down tracks and seeing what shape tracks the balls could complete vs. those they would roll backward on. They learned about pirate flags and their uses in communication with other ships. They built with Lincoln Logs and similar but larger, big-enough-to-walk-inside-the-finished-house, modular building pieces. They held prisms and diffraction gratings (aka CDs) in sunlight and played with rainbows. They held their hands up in front of red, green, and blue lights and saw the multitude of colored shadows created by blocking some lights and not others. They shared toys, ideas, and pretend play with other kids, including friends and strangers, and made friends with the children of a friend of mine who just moved to town. At one point my friend observed, "The girls have traded little brothers, and I think they both like the change!"
Thinking, asking questions, planning...
P asked whether Tasmanian devils were close relatives of dogs or cats. We looked them up and found they were marsupials. We talked about mammals including all three animals, and then about the major divisions of mammals (placental mammals, marsupials, and monotremes) and the key differences among them. P was very amused by the short-beaked echidna pictured on the Wikipedia page on monotremes. Even though her favorite TV show, Phineas and Ferb, includes a platypus character, Perry (he has his own theme song, similar to "Secret Agent Man," which starts off, "He's a semiaquatic, egg-laying mammal of action!"), beaked mammals were a funny idea. I think that speaks to a pretty good concept of mammals in general, monotremes excepted!
P asked me, as we were in the car, about to turn onto the residential through street near our house, whether it was a one-way street. I said no, they were all two-way around here, so she asked, "Then why do we drive right down the middle of it?" I pointed out we were slightly to the right and talked about what my driver ed teacher told me -- that when you're driving on a street without lane markings, you have to position yourself between actual and likely hazards. We talked about what those were for that road -- oncoming traffic (none at the moment), car doors opening or people or animals walking out between parked cars (always possible), and P understood that was why we would drive out toward the middle rather than hugging the parked cars on the right. We also talked about how drivers always need to be scanning ahead for possible hazards, like children playing in yards, dogs walking off leash, cars backing out of driveways, and other beings who might dart out into the road without thinking or without seeing us in time to avoid a collision without our vigilance.
P asked why the police tell people to come out (of buildings, cars, etc.) with their hands up. We talked about the possibility of concealed weapons and the police needing to know that people aren't about to use them.
P asked why people learn to fly on gliders rather than small powered planes. We talked about the pros and cons: it would be nice to have the option of aborting a landing and going around again if you miss the runway, for example, but in a glider there would be fewer controls to learn to handle simultaneously. We also talked about instructors with dual controls providing a safeguard against serious errors by new pilots.
P asked whether you need to get a permit when you move from one state to another. I told her that wasn't necessary within the United States, but that you did need a visa to move to another country. We also talked about what you do have to do when you change states, like getting a driver's license in your new state, re-registering your car, re-registering to vote, etc.
P asked why some horses whose paddocks we were driving by had hoods on that covered their eyes. We wondered whether they were skittish and could relax better when blindfolded. We looked it up after we got home and found out those were fly masks. Flies like to drink the liquid that comes from a horse's eyes, and this is very annoying to the horse. The fly masks are made of a fabric that the horses can see through, because it's so close to their eyes. One site we found said that horses are almost never blindfolded, unless it's an emergency situation like a fire, when the handler needs to lead a horse quickly without it being distracted by scary things around it.
T asked whether there were real rescue planes like the one he was building with his Lego set. We looked up rescue seaplanes and found some interesting Wikipedia pages, like this one, about particular flying boats.
Here's a partial summary of what we've been up to for the past month or two. I'm borrowing this format from Pam Sorooshian, who unschooled her three children, now grown. It's a fun way to keep track of what we've been doing, and less daunting than putting together cogent paragraphs and essays. If it's less fun to read, you have my apologies, my faithful one or two readers! :)
Reading...
Lots of text in World of Warcraft game (P, to herself)
39 Clues series of books (P reads to herself and we read them out loud to P or both kids)
Susan Cooper's Over Sea and Under Stone (UnschoolerDad reads out loud to P or both kids)
Text on the Internet, when we look things up (P reads over my shoulder)
Houses and Homes, a library book about how homes have been built in various places and times. T especially loves this one, looking at the detailed pictures and asking about them. As we looked at a big picture of Sargon's Palace, he asked how the people shown on the roof of the palace got up there. We searched and searched and found only one or two potential access points. I like how this boy thinks!
American Girl books and a mystery book, scored from a garage sale (P, to herself)
More fairy chapter books from the library (P finds these whenever new ones come to our branch)
Instructions for Mind-Blowing Science Kit (more on this below -- P was reading ahead for what activities she wanted to try out)
Subtitles and title/narrative text in films, cartoons, etc. (P reads these out loud to T so he'll understand what's going on)
Why Do We Need to Brush Our Teeth? from the Ask Isaac Asimov series (I read out loud to both kids. T keeps asking for it. P has also read it to herself.)
The big library book on the Human Body, which we've checked out again. P and T requested the pages on broken bones and on the parts of the heart recently. I read these to them, and we went on to learn about myocardial infarction, atherosclerosis, and some of the ways these are treated.
P frequently reads picture books to T when they are playing together.
Doing...
P went to a week-long Nature Camp at church and learned about the earth through scientific, experiential, and spiritual avenues.
P sang in the final concerts of her choir season. That will start up again in the fall. The last concert included songs in many languages, and the choirs were joined by drum-and-marimba concert groups from a nearby Zimbabwean music school.
P and T have both helped a little in our vegetable garden, digging, weeding, breaking up clumps to prepare beds, and helping plant seeds.
P and T continue weekly gymnastics classes.
P has done some walking and running with me. Sometimes when the family has gone out to dinner, she and I get dropped off a mile or so from home and walk the rest of the way for some exercise and one-on-one time, as well as a chance to notice nature and people's creations in our neighborhood.
P and I completed P's first Bolder Boulder 10K race, along with a friend of mine who was visiting us from out of town. We mostly walked, with a little jogging to maintain a pace that would allow us to finish the course before it was cleared for the elite racers. We finished in 2:07, including one rather long bathroom stop. The few times that P wanted to stop, one of us would carry her piggyback for a bit to give her a little rest. P has seemed much more aware of her stamina since then. A few times she's made comments like, "If I walk six miles, I can do this!" I love to hear that.
We've been swimming a lot. Both kids are gaining confidence and skill. P is pretty much safe in the "deep" end (she can still touch there, but also swims) and loves the waterslides now. T is making progress, enjoying learning to float and get around by kicking and scooping with his arms.
P got a "Mind-Blowing Science Kit" for her birthday, and we've enjoyed the first few activities from that, mostly involving changing the color of a cabbage-indicator solution by adding citric acid or baking soda. The kids played for hours with their solutions, combining and recombining them gradually. We're looking forward to making the underwater volcano and color-changing volcanoes, as well as other creations from this kit.
P's been playing a computer game called Botanicula -- a cute game that draws on spatial skills and cause-and-effect thinking to solve puzzles.
Making...
I've been making play clothes for both kids from thrifted T-shirts. The kids are enjoying choosing colors, seeing how things take shape, and sometimes helping out. So far this effort has produced three dresses for P, two pairs of pants for T, and a shirt and two skirts for me, from a total outlay of less than $20; and we still have two shirts left to cannibalize.
P has made some beaded backpack charms from a kit she received for her birthday.
P helped me decorate a dreamcatcher as a gift for a friend.
P has been making lots of paper dolls and Dressy Cats for herself and T, and the kids play with them a lot.
Both kids have been painting, drawing, and making things with Sculpey to bake. T's drawings are representational now sometimes -- usually cars. P still likes to draw house plans -- she calls them ladybug houses -- and T gives her exacting specifications to draw them for him. She's also been making a book of Halloween costumes. Each page has a picture of what you're dressing as, and then a set of pictures of the parts the costume requires.
P makes, and helps T make, finger puppets for their pretend games.
P sews doll clothes by hand from her collection of fabric scraps and thread.
T got some architectural building blocks (just like P's, which she didn't share enough for his pleasure), and he's been making some impressive buildings with them.
Both kids like to build things with T's erector set.
Recently I started a timeline in the hall, with post-its for events of interest. I put on the date for the Declaration of Independence's adoption, since we'd just watched a TV episode about that on the 4th of July. The next day P specified other dates to add. We have birthdates for family, adoption dates for pets, the Civil War, WWII, Colorado becoming a U.S. state, the extinction of the dinosaurs, and the date of the earliest remains of modern humans that have been discovered. We'll add other things as they become interesting. So far, I've been writing the post-its, and P has been finding their proper place on the timeline, so she's learning to read dates and put them in order, including concurrent events (such as my parents' birthdates, which both were during WWII). We've talked about, but not yet implemented, a scale for the timeline. We're considering a logarithmic scale, on which each tick as you go to the left as twice as long ago as the previous tick. We figure about 33 ticks to get to the age of the Earth.
Writing...
P has done thank-you notes, using a mixture of dictating to me and doing her own writing.
P has written a letter or two to friends.
T wrote a couple of words in a crossword, with me showing him what letters went where and how to write those letters. He also wrote his name and can recognize it now.
P writes down pieces of stories and song lyrics she wants to remember, labels maps and house plans, makes mockups of cell phones and other electronics for pretend play, and occasionally embarks on a book project with writing and pictures. Her latest undertaking is writing up her pretend game with T, which they call "Dark Land Castle." Each is choosing characters and thinking out what they should look like. P is making sketches for the pictures.
Watching...
Phineas and Ferb (new episodes and repeats)
Sabrina cartoons and other cartoons discovered on Netflix
Wild Kratts (we found a store of new-to-us episodes on Hulu Plus when I got a two-week free trial, and the kids powered through them while I did a weaving project, learning lots of new things about various animals and ecological concepts such as food webs)
Chuggington DVD ("Chuggers on Safari") -- we get this occasionally from the library. T loves it.
YouTube videos about augurs, pile drivers, parkour, extreme rock climbing, fetal face formation, and more (most of these were with T)
Liberty's Kids, a series about American history around the time of the American Revolution -- we streamed one episode on July 4th so we could find out why it's a holiday, and both kids liked it, so we bought the whole series to watch at our leisure)
A PBS documentary about the building and retrofitting of the Golden Gate Bridge (both kids liked it, but P was the most engrossed)
Breaking Pointe, a reality show/documentary about a professional ballet company in the six weeks leading up to their performance season. (P and me)
David Macaulay's Roman City DVD -- both kids watched this all the way through. It covered how Romans conquered territory and built Roman-style cities all over their Empire, how they dealt with the local peoples (everything from gruesome to granting Roman citizenship), baths, aqueducts, arches, concrete, theaters and amphitheaters and what went on there (on hearing about gladiators, public executions, and the like, P exclaimed, "I'd rather read the most boring book ever than watch that!").
Listening...
UnschoolerDad playing piano music
Me playing guitar and singing
CDs on the stereo (T likes to start them himself)
Stories from UD and each other
A segment from Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me! in which Bill Clinton was quizzed about My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, a TV series both kids have watched pretty much all the way through
Radio news when I have it on in the car. Sometimes they tune it out, but sometimes they ask me questions about it. This goes for political ads as well.
Talking...
Telling each other stories and playing elaborate pretend games with cars and dolls in P's room or on T's town-map play rug. Sometimes these are collaboratively created, and sometimes P is mostly instructing T in how things are going to be. We're working on increasing the collaboration! There is sometimes debate about how things should be.
Telling me about their creative play (mostly P, but sometimies T, too)
T likes to talk about hypothetical situations. Today he was speculating about what life would be like if cars, trucks, etc. ran on railroad tracks instead of roads. ("There would be lots of turntables!") We talked about how life would be different if that were the case. He also loves hypotheticals involving pee and poop; e.g., "What if there were two cars that ran on pee and poop and also put out pee and poop from their exhaust pipes, and they could run on each other's pee and poop?" I'm still looking for ways to get into energy loss and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics with him. There will be time. :)
Visiting...
Aside from swimming, we haven't been getting out to attractions much recently. We had a sleepover at UD's sister's house when our neighborhood was threatened by fire! Both kids are taking some one-off classes at a local children's museum starting this week. The first one was not impressive, either in its planning or the kids' response to it; we may see if we can cancel some of the remaining ones. We have a freeform visit to the same museum planned with friends later this week, and I think that will be more fun.
We went to the toy store and spent hours looking at things. Each kid had a budget to spend separately or combine if they wished, so we spent a lot of time looking at prices and thinking about numbers that way.
Thinking...
P and I have been thinking together about how to plan a game night at our house, and how to make it fun for adults and kids both. (P initiated this idea.)
P helped plan her birthday party, including a treasure hunt and other activities.
P and T have put together some impromptu percussion bands, and P is thinking about names, instruments, and repertoire for a possible band involving the whole family. We haven't gotten far with this one yet, because T hasn't been interested in trying it. But his moods change quickly.
We thought together about what to take along if we needed to evacuate ahead of the wildfire a couple of weeks ago. The kids thought about what was most important to them to bring. I packed according to my emergency plan, and we talked about why I was doing things the way I was (boarding the cats far from danger, filling the bathtub with water against the worst-case, trapped-in-the-house scenario, packing bags and putting them in the car before we needed to leave, parking the cars facing out in the driveway, etc.)
It's been a very long time since I wrote. This blog might be getting less frequent in general. I'm finding that, as I really pay attention to what the kids are doing and learning, and as I do more with them, things flow in a way that's harder to write about because we go SO many places in such a short time sometimes. For my next blog entry I'll try a different format for a change. But here's the entry that would have come in late April, based on the notes I made then -- words like "today" and "yesterday," of course, have a very different meaning now!
There's been some developing body awareness: the kids' awareness of their own needs, and my awareness of how to support them in meeting the needs. T has been moving toward giving up his naps, so early in these last few weeks I stopped trying to help him get down for them, except when he's really dead on his feet. A few times in that first week, he went to bed and took a nap on his own initiative, asking us to close his curtains so his room could be dark. After the first week, he napped less, but sometimes fell asleep on the couch just before or after dinner after a big day. UnschoolerDad and I still need a somewhat regular sleep schedule to keep up with work and the kids, so we still encourage a bedtime, trying to keep it pleasant and loving. Sometimes T really doesn't want to go to bed, and other times he goes down easily. P usually goes to bed without much protest, but I'm sure it helps that she can read in bed if she wants.
A recent outing to a Russian festival on the nearby college campus brought unexpected learning opportunities, in addition to the chance to hear Balkan music and try some Russian cookies. We rode the bus to the festival to avoid parking difficulties near campus, and P spent a long time reading the route map and learning how to use it. (P and T have also been playing a lot lately with a United States map that goes with their Tag reader, getting more familiar with where things are in our home country.) When the festival didn't hold the kids' attention (it wasn't geared as much to young people as we thought it might be), we wandered down to a nearby pond, where P noticed the way the pond drain was built and we talked about how that would keep the pond at a constant water level. We checked out the turtles resting on a log in the pond and thought about why they would choose that spot for warming sun, available moisture, and sufficient distance from likely predators. Someone was trying out his thrift-store radio-controlled boat on the pond, and he let each of the kids steer it for a little while, which they loved. We met a few other homeschoolers, broadening our local network a bit.
In the food department, T has a typically narrow diet for a four-year-old, but not too much so (lots of bread, tortillas, cheese, and peanut butter and jelly, with some fruits and vegetables and a few beans, other grains, etc.), though he's growing a bit more willing to taste new things; I hope our not forcing the issue will help him continue getting more adventurous and finding more things he enjoys. [Note from June: He has continued to be more willing to taste things.] P is enjoying more variety, sometimes choosing to make herself salads with custom ingredients (a favorite recipe follows) rather than eat the old lunch standbys. She's told me she wants to learn to prepare more of the foods she eats, and maybe go for a week making all her own food and some of T's. So far she's gone a day, but then wanted help, which is fine with me. She sometimes asks to help when I'm cooking, too.
Rockin' Salad - P's invention 1 apple, cut up in chunks 1 green onion, chopped 12 or so green olives 1-2 ounces of cheese, preferably pepper jack, in chunks No dressing required. Side dish of sardines can be nice.
P wrote the list of ingredients for her salad, and the beginning of a story she's writing and illustrating. I showed her how to use Word's spell checker when she's not sure how to spell something -- for every misspelled word we entered into it, she picked the correct alternative from the list of suggestions, so I think she's learning to identify correct spellings by sight for familiar words, even if she can't produce the correct spelling on the first try herself. I've heard that other unschoolers have learned to spell in a similar way. I'm trying to support P using the computer to find what she wants (log in to a game, or Netflix, or look up something on the internet if she's willing), so keyboarding is becoming motivated for her. I still do stuff for her if she asks me, but she's more and more willing to do it herself. I need to think about which of my online passwords I'm willing for her to have! Fortunately they're all different, so we can pick and choose. She's starting to learn to navigate what actions might cause problems (being charged money unintentionally, going to a web site that might put malware on our computer, etc.), but she still has a lot to learn. Mostly I stay close by when she's using the computer, so we can check out unfamiliar situations together. I'll have her read me dialog boxes rather than just looking and clicking through myself, so she learns what they say and how to respond, and when possible I try to explain why I choose the action I do.
In other writing fun, P used the phrase "big cat allergies" to mean severe allergies to cats. I giggled about the possible alternate meaning (allergies to lions, cheetahs, etc.), and she wanted to know what was funny, so I showed her how punctuation could make the difference between "big cat allergies" and "big-cat allergies."
P recently received a Lego Friends set, with hundreds of itty-bitty pieces to assemble into a cafe scene. She meticulously followed the instructions, which had no words but required close attention to detail over a long period, and successfully assembled the cafe. I was interested to see that she built a mirror image of what the instructions showed, so I asked her about it. She had noticed that several steps in, and thought hard about how to reverse each subsequent step.
One day P and I had a great conversation about economics. P started it by remarking that, since Luna bars seemed to be getting more popular, she thought their makers might raise the prices since the demand would be higher. (We had talked once before about low supply and high demand leading to higher prices.) I said they might do that, but because it would make some customers unhappy and prompt them to look for cheaper brands, perhaps they'd increase their profits in other ways, like running the machines that make the bars for extra shifts and hiring more workers. We talked and thought together about economies of scale -- even though the extra power and worker hours would cost more, Luna might not need more machines; or if they did, they might be able to fit them in existing factory space; and so on, allowing the product to get cheaper as production and sales increased. We also talked about how, if Luna needed to increase prices to cover their costs, they might bring out new flavors that would cost more, and later bring other prices up to match if the new flavors were popular enough; or possibly they'd make some product improvement they could tout on the packaging and increase the price at the same time. And we went backwards in time, thinking about how a person selling their first-ever snack bars, baked at home, at a farmer's market say, might have to charge a lot more per bar to start off (no wholesale deals on ingredients, no economies of scale in production) -- but how some people might be willing to pay those prices for an interesting new product, or because they could meet the producer and find out a lot about the product. And then that person might ramp up production by leasing a commercial kitchen and hiring workers to help, if the demand was growing and a local store wanted to carry the bars. Some of these concepts have come up in other conversations since.
P thinks a lot about ways to make money. We watched a video together about Caine's Arcade -- it's really worth seeing and is linked below. P asked if I thought she could do something similar, and we talked about the advantages Caine had -- one of the biggest being the use of a storefront, since his dad's auto parts business had mostly gone online. (Of course Caine had only one customer until the flash mob -- we haven't gone there explicitly yet, but I think P understood.)
Not long after watching this, P built a supermarket for fairies out of paper and cardboard. It included shelves for the goods being sold, signs, and an elevator so the tiny fairies could get from one level to another.
P asks almost every day what something means -- something she's heard on the radio, or read in a story, or seen in a TV program. Today, as we ate dinner and she watched a baseball game being played silently on the TVs in the restaurant bar, she asked what the goal of a baseball game was. Yesterday she clarified the meanings of increase and decrease. Today we followed up with what "in decline" meant when said of a person or animal.
Both kids got cameras of their own this month, so UnschoolerDad and I can worry less about ours getting wet, dropped, lost, etc. The kids noticed odd blurs in some of their images and turned it into a ghost hunt! We also experimented with taking photos of moving objects, or scenes with large disparity in lighting, and trying to create some of those mysterious blurs in those ways.
A quick math/numbers roundup:
T made his first paper-model cell phone -- the kids play with these a lot, but in the past P has made them all. T wanted to write the numbers on his phone, and P helped by writing sample numbers he could copy.
P came and offered to show me how to divide a pizza into 3 equal parts, using a drawing. The pattern blocks were out, so I duplicated her picture using a yellow hexagon with 3 blue rhombuses arranged to cover it, so the same angles showed up in the middle. She watched, then said in an odd, sing-song way, "That's science." So I sang back, "Or math, or geometry, or life." She smiled.
P was setting up an easter-egg hunt for both kids. She had 16 eggs, and unasked, she worked out that they could find 8 eggs apiece. Thinking about it a bit, she then exclamed, "I did that right!" and explained her reasoning: half 10 (5) plus half 6 (3) is eight.
It's been a very busy time here -- plannning, preparing for, having, and cleaning up after a birthday party, and also painting T's room so we can make it a cooler place to be. The room is mostly put back together now, and just waiting for the supposedly-VOC-free paint to outgas and stop stinking before we have T sleep in there again (he's camping out in my bedroom.) The walls look great. The kids got to help when they wanted to, learning bits about painting and putting together Ikea furniture. Now to document some of the other learning that's been going on....
There's been a lot of social learning. The kids play together a lot, and pretend play is usually their default activity if nothing else is suggested to them. They also seem to metabolize most of what they learn from outside sources (books, videos, situations we encounter together) through pretend play. That means there are LOTS of opportunities to have interactions with each other go well or poorly. Flexibility is key; I've told P about the rule in improvisational theater that you try not to act in a way that shuts off someone else's idea, but instead adopt an attitude of, "Yes, and...." She and T are both getting better at this kind of flexibility. Can there be lava in My Little Pony? Can there be two of the same character in a game? Increasingly, the answer is some form of, "Yes, and...." Sometimes when one of them is digging in heels at the other's suggestion, if I'm nearby and see it starting to happen, I'll say something like, "I think you have a big enough imagination to handle that, don't you?" That often gets things back on a cooperative track. Sometimes one doesn't directly concede the other's point, but comes up with a way around it. T and P were both wanting to play the same My Little Pony character, but P didn't want that, so she came up with her own original MLP persona (with her own name, colors, and "cutie mark," natch) that she can be if T wants the same character she does. It worked, releasing the tension and letting the game go on. They, and I, are learning to find the yes in as many situations as we can. (Part of this idea also comes from Sandra Dodd's writing and web pages; here's one about saying yes.)
We're also looking at competition, friendly and otherwise, and how it affects our relationships. Are we racing? Does everyone have to be racing for it to really be a race? If only the winner was racing, how does their gloating affect the rest of us? One way the kids argue about racing is getting buckled into car seats when we're getting ready to go somewhere. I wanted to head off the same old argument one day as we got ready to go, so I made up a song on the fly, to a raucous western-ish tune:
No one wins, but everybody wins, when we work together No one wins, but everybody wins, when we're on the same team When we work against each other, people win or lose So there's one thing we get to do: We all get to choose 'Cause no one wins, but everybody wins, when we work together No one wins, but everybody wins, when we're on the same team
Like most of my songs, it was pretty ad hoc, but it hit a nerve for the kids. They've been requesting it a lot and singing it themselves, especially when things are getting a little more tense and competitive than they're comfortable with. They understood my suggestion that, really, our goal was to get going, so we all won once we were all buckled in, regardless of who finished first.
In other social happenings, P now has a good friend at park days, one of the girls whose fairy house P added a tornado shelter to on that first good day. And I've been gratified that P has asked for, and taken, my advice several times recently. Sometimes she listens to my reasoning and still chooses something else, but she asks and listens, and I like that.
There's been a lot of reading. Some examples:
I picked up The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes for twenty cents at a library sale a while back. Recently P picked it up and read it for hours on end.
UnschoolerDad order a book of the collected Copper web comics. When it came, P picked it up and read it all evening.
When I've brought home library books and at other times, P's been reading picture books to T a lot, and both of them are enjoying it.
One night, P stayed up very late and read an entire Magic School Bus chapter book about butterflies.
There's been a fair amount of watching of interesting videos, long and short:
We watched a Nature program about raccoons. This happened in two sittings, because once a family of baby raccoons appeared for a few minutes in the program, the kids were off to play baby raccoons. In the second sitting, we heard how urban raccoons may be evolving for more sophisticated brain development, as the urban environment gives them ever more challenging situations to respond to.
We (mostly P and I) watched a NOVA program on genetic testing and genomics. The program covered techniques and ethics of embryonic screening; how some genes determine disorders while others only influence their probability of occurring; how some people choose not to find out about the risk-factor genes, since the influence is fuzzy enough that they'd rather not know; how some people choose to get tested for things like the Huntington's gene so they can plan their lives accordingly and make appropriate financial plans; the structure of DNA and how single mutations or multiple copies of a sequence can cause problems; how DNA specifies proteins, which do most of the body's work; and more. Experimental drug therapies for melanoma and cystic fibrosis (CF) were described, along with patient case studies and the mechanism of failure in CF. I talked with P about how I got tested for the CF gene before getting pregnant, but since I was negative, UnscoolerDad (UD) didn't get tested, which means P may want to get tested before having kids in case she has a CF gene copy from UD. (We also talked about how, since genetic science and technology is progressing so fast, she may face a whole different set of tests and choices than we did.) When P was listening to the part of the program about mutations, she remembered a set of monsters in World of Warcraft called Mutated Owlkin; these monsters are found in an area with lots of radiation.
We watched the first part of a NOVA pragram about tornadoes; perhaps we'll watch the rest another time. It covered Doppler radar, and how you can use it to see the hook shapes in a thunderstorm that indicate a tornado may be forming. It also had great graphics of the jet stream and other weather patterns that contribute to tornado formation. We talked about duck and cover, and where the safer places are to be in a tornado.
We watched part of a PBS program about industrial agriculture. The first part of the program was very gee-whiz positive about all of it; unfortunately P got interested in something else just as the program started to get around to environmental and health consequences. Maybe we'll finish it soon!
Both kids asked the same question within a day of each other: Are lions nocturnal? This led to a YouTube exploration of lions hunting, elephants helping each other out of a water hole, keepers moving an elephant to a new zoo exhibit nearby that we hope to visit, people taking a behind-the-scenes visit with two zoo hippos, and many other animal things. It turns out, by the way, that lions sleep about 20 hours out of 24, and their few active hours occur during both night and day.
Since it's been so long since I got anything out on this blog, I'll write up the rest of my notes (writing, economics, math, computers, etc.) in another post. But to wind up this one, here's a quick note on where my online time has been going instead of to this blog: Partly I'm playing World of Warcraft, with P or on my own; but lately I'm brushing up my Spanish and beginning to learn German on DuoLingo, a translation and language-learning project I encountered in a TED talk a while back that's still in the beta phase. T likes to listen to the audio that DuoLingo puts out and ask what each sentence means. P wants to try using it to learn Spanish, so I've put her on the list for a beta invitation. I tried LingQ a while back, but I didn't find it as engaging as DuoLingo has been so far, and trying to start a new language (Mandarin) on LingQ was a total fail for me; I just couldn't get a toehold. DuoLingo seems to have a better approach for a cold start on a language, though I've done enough singing in German that I can't quite say I'm starting from nothing; and of course having most of the alphabet in common between English and German is a huge help, compared to Mandarin. But aside from software comparisons, the most fun thing I've learned while playing with DuoLingo is that I do just fine working on two foreign languages at once. It might even make both go better. I used to think I had only one foreign-language spot in my head for a given word or concept in English, but it turns out there's more capacity there than I thought.
