Principles, Projectors, and Pineapples

One thing many radical unschoolers recommend is living by principles rather than rules. So last week, when P left the dinner table and started a video, which attracted T away from his just-started dinner, and UnschoolerDad (UD) asked me if I thought we should make a no-videos-until-everyone's-done-eating rule, it was a good chance to think together. I asked UD if we could track that rule-making impulse to a principle that could give us more general guidance. We played with some ideas and decided a good principle to try on would be:

No one should have to choose between enough food and enough play.

There may be more elegant or accurate ways to say that -- I'm an incorrigible qualifier, so I want to add "when practicable" and other such dangly bits to this. But I think it works well as a principle as given -- it's a direction in which to steer. So on that night, I saved some of T's favorite foods from dinner for him to eat later. When UD and I were done eating, I invited P to bring the video to the table, so eating and watching could both happen. Everyone ate, and everyone played.

There has been a related trend of food and play competing for our kids' attention: it's been hard for us to get T to stop playing long enough to eat enough food in the evening so that he's comfortable going to sleep and sleeping through the night. We've tried various ways to address this, but shortly after the evening above, we hit on a solution. We do encourage T to eat dinner, but then when bedtime is coming, we make T some tasty food that will keep overnight without refrigeration -- a quesadilla or a PB&J sandwich, say -- and give it to him. He can eat some of it in the evening if he wants, and so far he's always eaten what's left for breakfast. He is happier night and morning, and we don't have to worry about whether he's getting enough food. Hooray for principles at work!

So about the projector. Once upon a time, before kids, we were frequent TV watchers. We had satellite TV, TiVo, and a room partly devoted to media, with a projector for big-screen viewing. We got rid of the satellite  feed when we realized TV was using up too much of our time on trivia that we would rather spend on other things. Then came kids and several moves. The projector has been languishing as we became increasingly anti-TV for ourselves and the kids. But since beginning to unschool, we are finding that the kids learn a lot from their time watching videos and playing video games (we still don't have cable or satellite, since the Internet provides such a wealth of content now). So UnschoolerDad finally convinced me that it was okay to put up the projector screen in our living room. He pointed out that it's easier for an adult to keep up with, comment on, or otherwise participate in the kids' viewing if it's on a screen that can be seen clearly from the kitchen; and the kids have an easier time multitasking if they want to watch and do something else (jump on the trampoline, dance, roll around, play with a toy) at the same time, so watching becomes less sedentary for them than when it happened only on iPads or my computer.

Both kids have been enjoying watching Bob the Builder on the projector. They're learning about building techniques (sometimes we stop and talk about it when the program gets it wrong) and enjoying pretend play as the BTB characters, switching roles when they want to do something that machine wouldn't be able to do. BTB models cooperation and forgiveness (moving on from a difficulty and helping people make amends when appropriate, rather than laying blame or punishing), too. Both kids love the footage of real construction projects that's included in most episodes.

We've also had some good movie nights on the projector. We watched The Wizard of Oz last night. T decided to go to another room with me during the scariest part, and later that evening he wanted to talk a lot about tornadoes. I'm glad they aren't a major hazard where we live; but the kids do know where in the house to go if there ever is a tornado in the area. It was interesting, too, looking at the special effects (such as they were) with P and think about how people showed imaginative scenes in movies before computer graphics. It always gives me a giggle when we watch an old movie and all the credits fit in the time taken by a short overture before the movie begins. Moviemaking has certainly become more complex!

One day when I accidentally fell asleep while getting T down for his nap, P spent her time learning to fold origami models from diagram instructions. I've given her a little help with this before, but this was the first time she did a lot of folding on her own. She taught me the models she'd learned (a pouch and a piano) and was very pleased with herself. She made a party blower that didn't turn out too well in that it blows out but doesn't roll back up. She told me how she should have made it by leaving it rolled for a day or more in a rubber band. Later I found the instructions that said that. They were text-heavy; she had to read a page of small print to get that information. It was good to see that she's using her reading skills in real-world ways, even though she's reading less for pleasure these days. She does still eagerly devour books from her favorite series when she finds new ones, and the reading aloud is still frequent and much enjoyed.

Some more highlights from this week:

• After her origami spree, P taped together a three-sided pyramid from cut pieces of paper and showed it to me, totally unprompted.
• I gave T and P each a kazoo. T was tickled at the sounds P made, but he didn't know how to make a sound at first, and he didn't know what "hum" meant. So I asked him to say no with his mouth closed ("Mm-mm"), and then do the same with the kazoo in his mouth. He lit up when he realized what he needed to do, and much musical play has ensued. We also tried making the kazoo sound with wax paper folded over a comb. Both kids could make it work, but T was especially good at it.
• Our sugar crystals never really crystallized more than a tiny bit, but the borax crystals came out beautifully. We ate some of the sugar syrup over banana slices, and we used some to make lemonade.

Borax crystals, lying on some recent reading material

• T learned to turn on the stereo and switch to his current favorite CD, which is Hicksville by Celtic Cross. Both kids danced to the title track on a recent evening while getting ready for bed. P said she thinks all music tells a story, and that the latter part of the song sounded like a secret agent sneaking around, looking for his/her nemesis; so she danced that story. I tried dancing in a completely different way, and she made up a story to go with my dance. 
• P decided to try making a board game. We tossed some ideas back and forth about what would make a game fun, and she drew a game board and started implementing them. We tried playing the game and found it too long, with game pieces that wouldn't stay in place, and we talked about ways to make it better.
• T wanted to use the game board for a home for his toy truck, which made it hard to play with, so I drew him a plan view of a house the right size for the truck, with rooms, furniture, etc. P made one, too, and I could see her thinking hard about it -- how to design a front hall to block high winds (we had some hurricane-force winds here one night this week), what a bathroom sink would look like from above, and more.
• We played outside, taking stock of what the 100-mph winds had blown over, digging, climbing, taking care of downed branches, and more. T asked how all the beans got outside on the ground and learned that they were actually deer droppings! We dug into our years-neglected compost pile and marveled at the transformations taking place there.
• While watching a couple of Phineas and Ferb episodes, we stopped to find the meanings of some expressions like "drop a dime on you" and "color commentator." I also checked out an encyclopedia of word and phrase etymologies this week, and while I've read it mostly to myself, it's been fun sharing some meanings with P.
• P was painting and collaging pictures of tall ships, after watching a Phineas and Ferb episode that included a pirate ship, and she wanted to do one for each ocean. So we looked at the four major oceans and how they connect up with each other, and we thought about which ones might have icebergs in them.
• We bought a pineapple at the grocery store, the first fresh one the kids could remember eating. I showed P how to cut it up and we talked about what it resembled (artichoke, pine cone). P put the leafy top on her nature table. P and T both loved eating it.
• P, annoyed by a very loose tooth, yanked it out and dealt very cheerfully with the resulting blood. She noticed the bleeding stopped quickly on its own, and we talked a bit about platelets and clotting. She observed that her older baby teeth have brown blood in their roots, while this new one was fresh and red. She connected this to the difference between raw and cooked chicken, but also noted that well-cooked chicken still has some parts inside the thigh that look red. (I found a link about why this is; our chicken is cooked more than these examples, but it's reassuring that even these awful-looking pieces of chicken are safely pasteurized.)
• We dissected owl pellets (thanks, Dad!) and sorted out the many, many tiny bones inside. P pulled out her book on the subject, Owl Puke, and we identified them as rodents, decided how many animals were represented, and figured out what most of the bones were.
• A few days later, after I brought home a picture book on anatomy from the library, T asked for lots of reading from it, especially noticing the bones, but curious about other things as well.
• We played with one of those bird whistles with water in the bottom, making a warbling sound. 
• P used a cardboard tube (narrowed) and aluminum foil to make quite a fetching model flute for pretend play.
• P and I played Mastermind some more. She played a game as the guesser and asked for some coaching on her guessing. It was wonderful to see her using the logic tools and ways of organizing the guessing effort that I was offering, along with those strategies she already understood, and making some very logical and successful guesses.
• I read the Magic School Bus chapter book Penguin Puzzle to T and P, who proceeded to do lots of penguin hatching and swimming play, with species specificity, leopard-seal predators, stages of feather growth, etc. 

Talking about penguin camouflage made me think of countershading in sharks. I tried to look it up and show P, but first I found this slide show on shark senses, which P loved. The title image was dried shark heads in a shop window, and P asked if people ate shark. I said yes, and that unfortunately sometimes sharks were killed just for their fins, for shark-fin soup. She asked why fishermen didn't just anesthetize the sharks and remove their fins, leaving the sharks alive, so we looked up what dorsal fins are for in sharks and other fish (stabilization against rolling), and P easily related this to her experiences with learning to swim.
Looking further for countershading photos, we found the Wikipedia page on camouflage and followed links from there to learn about shape, shine, shadow, and how various kinds of camouflage disguise or eliminate these visual clues. We saw photos of disruptive coloring, fringed/tapered edges to avoid shadows, mimicry of surroundings, etc. Later, P, seeing some popped popcorn kernels in the trash, remarked that they were well camouflaged among the used tissues.

As we looked at the camouflage photos, I showed P the first image on the page, of sticklike caterpillars, and asked if she could find the animals in those photos. She wanted a hint, so I said they were the young stages of an insect. She said, "Oh, so maybe a larva or a caterpillar." It's so much fun seeing evidence of retained understanding!

Chores, Choices, Chromosomes, Contact, and Crystals

I seem to have reorganized part of the inside of my head. This is hard to show pictures of, so here's a crystal tree to keep you going:

I recently finished reading Sandra Dodd's Big Book of Unschooling, which I bought from her at the Always Learning Live unschooling symposium. Lots of it was familiar from reading on her website; the book is a sort of snapshot of the web site from 2009. But there were many parts I hadn't seen before. One of them involved chores such as housecleaning. Sandra wrote that one of the principles they try to live by at her house is, "If a mess is bothering you, YOU clean it up." Really? Even if someone else made the whole thing? Even if I know who it was? This was in deep conflict with my existing ways of thinking about parenting. But it also resonated with some of what I'd heard at the symposium from other parents, and it sounded good, especially to my inner kid. I decided, provisionally, inside my own head, to try it out for a while. If P's room was really messy and bugging me and she didn't want to clean it, I'd spend some time on it myself. (This took some convincing of P the first time; she thought I meant to go in and get rid of things because she wouldn't clean them up, a sad memory from our older ways of doing things. We're still working on rebuilding trust from that sort of thing.) If the living room was too messy, I'd spend some time on it. (The living room is often a hard one to assign responsibility for anyway, since many people's messes intermingle there.)

I found that cleaning P's room by myself felt entirely different from cleaning it with her, in a good way. I didn't feel I had to teach her or somehow entrain her into doing it correctly on her own. I was just doing it, seeing it as my own project. I put things where I knew they went, or if I wasn't sure, I left them in a little pile in the middle of the room, so P wouldn't have a hard time finding them later. I enjoyed seeing what P was playing with and what kinds of juxtapositions she had made. I made some judgment calls I felt comfortable with as far as what bits and pieces to keep and what to recycle or throw away; and with some effort, I avoided the passive-aggressive urge to throw away more than P would, since I (!) was the one doing the cleaning. I felt at peace in that I was simply doing the task that I felt needed doing, not trying to get an unwilling other person to do it. I did feel a little irritated the next day, when most of what I'd cleaned had been messed up again. But I continued trying to be honest with myself, internally, about whether it was bugging me and why, and cleaning up when it felt like that would make my world better; and the irritation has passed for now.

In the rest of the house, focusing on tidying up and cleaning because I, personally (not some external arbiter or internalized voice in my head), would like things to be neater or cleaner, has had interesting effects. Parts of the house get a little messier than they used to, at least for a while. Other parts are cleaner. The kitchen looks great; I use it every day, and it really makes a difference to me when it's clean and ready to use. The bathroom is clean; I like using a clean sink and toilet and looking in an unbespattered mirror. I either put others' laundry away, feeling I'm giving them a gift and/or making my world better; or I wait until I can feel that way about it, or until they put it away themselves, whichever comes first. The living room only bothers me sometimes, so it gets picked up less frequently. Yesterday I saw UnschoolerDad walking across pieces of trash on the floor (there had been a pretend game involving lots of paper tickets or something) and asked him if it bothered him to be doing that. He said yes, and I said it was bothering me, too, so how about if we cleaned up? In about 10 minutes, the living room was looking great, and we were both feeling better about it. There was no browbeating the kids. Okay, we did tell them there were a few paper playthings we'd have a hard time telling apart from trash, so if they wanted to keep them, they should pick them up. Mostly they didn't care; the fun had been in making the things, more than in using them past the first couple of days.

Would I want my kids to sit, unheeding, while I clean up their messes, forever? Nope. I'm not there yet, if indeed I ever will be. And I still do ask them to clean up some of their own messes (used tissues, and sometimes things I let them get out on the condition they would clean them up), though I try to let them have some say in the timing. I reserve the right to change where I draw the lines. But for now, I find cleaning up by myself much faster and less stressful than making the kids do it with me. And I don't think the kids are benefiting from my making them clean up. I think they're learning to resent it, and that their resistance to helping is likely to get worse, not better, unless and until they have their own reasons for wanting things cleaner or for helping me. (Empathy is not a strong point of their current developmental stages, but that won't be true forever.) Sure, by being made to pick up trash and put toys away, they learn how to do those tasks, but they aren't rocket science. It's easy stuff to figure out, and T (who has had far less required of him at age 3 than P has at ages 5-7) does tidy up spontaneously now and then. They do enjoy certain kinds of cleaning, like scrubbing the floors, if I let them choose when to do them. One unschooling writer, Joyce Fetteroll, often has unschooling moms consider whether what they're telling their kids is okay, by imagining their husbands saying the same things to the moms. I would be pissed if UnschoolerDad tried to tell me when to scrub the floor, or that it was time for me to pick things up off the floor right now, while I'm in the middle of writing a blog entry. If there were a good reason I could understand (if someone on whom we wanted to make a good impression were on their way over, say, or if he would be willing to vacuum if the floor were tidied up before he had to go do something else), I'd be on board. But I'd have to understand it, or at least trust his reasoning. When the chores required and the times for doing them are arbitrary as far as they're concerned, it's hard for the kids to get on board.

What many parents of older unschooled kids say is that, once the parents switched from requiring kids to do chores to doing them cheerfully themselves, the kids first kicked back for a while as they came to trust they wouldn't be forced to work, and then started pitching in fairly frequently without being asked, or even going beyond the original scope of work to do other chores they noticed needed to be done. I can hope for that. But I think that if I fix that in mind as my goal, it will lead to more of the same old resentment if it doesn't pan out on whatever schedule I have in mind, or for a particular task. So for now, I'll keep trying out the theory that chores won't be hard to learn when the kids are ready, and that doing them myself preserves more peace for me and everyone else than trying to conscript the kids into doing them. The more I can let go of my angst and resentment around chores (and I have had plenty), the more attractive helping me will look. We'll see how it goes.

I've continued trying to think in terms of two choices -- think of at least two ways to handle a given situation, and choose the one that matches my goals better. I've talked with P a little about this, too, to help her handle times when she's exasperated with T. It's sinking in a little. "Did you make a choice?" is becoming a useful question between us.

I saw a great TED talk this week and shared it with P and T. It's about scientific visualization of molecular processes within the human body. It had amazing visuals of DNA folding into chromosomes, and of mitosis, especially the part where microtubules pull one duplicate set of chromosomes to each end of the cell, forming two new nuclei. P enjoyed it, too. We paused a lot to talk about the basics (DNA replication, chromosomes, cell division, etc.). T, who watched most of it with us, asked at one point, "Is that going on in my body right now?" Yes, everywhere, my dear! I love it!

P watched large portions of the movie Contact with me this week. She wasn't much interested in all the talk and arguing about scientific funding policy in the beginning (no surprise), but once the prime numbers started coming in over the Very Large Array in New Mexico, she was pretty well hooked. We paused to talk about ham radio and some of its conventions, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), what prime numbers are, and why hearing them on a radio telescope would indicate a transmitting intelligence.

Before I get to crystals and everywhere they took us, here's a brief roundup of other highlights. There's a notable lack of anything involving leaving the house here, since we're still convalescing from the flu.

• I made a new robe for P this week. In the process, I showed her a few things about garment construction and how to use a sewing machine. She's not super-interested in machine sewing yet, but she listened and took it in, and she hand-sewed herself a little purse that day.
• P and T were playing a pretend game based on SuperWhy at one point (the SuperWhy board game was a total bust for actual game play, but the game pieces inspired extensive pretend play!), and when P tried Princess Presto's line, "Cue the sparkles! Cue the music! Princess Presto to the rescue!" only she said, "Do the sparkles! Do the music!" I realized she was missing the word cue. We talked about what cue means in stage and screen productions. With all the pretend play, this was right up P's current alley.

• P was looking with me at an online gallery of art-history references from The Simpsons (which she doesn't yet watch, but the gallery was linked on an unschooling list) when we saw a portrait in the style of Pablo Picasso, complete with too many eyes showing in a profile portrait. P remembered that Major Monogram on Phineas and Ferb is always shown the same way:
I showed everyone a video I found a while back of a vortex cannon (air cannon) being used to blow down structures made of straw, sticks, and bricks. That was fun! 
The kids and I watched Toy Story 3 together. This was mostly simple fun, but we did see a way that magnets could be used to sort ferrous metals out from trash, and the kids learned what an incinerator is. There was also some Spanish music and dance toward the end, when Buzz Lightyear got reset.
One morning, both kids were measuring everything with retractable metal tape measures. P told me a certain laundry basket was 13 inches across. I asked how many of those it would take to equal her height. (She's been telling me about some math of about that difficulty that she's doing in her head.) Rather than try the numbers, she started measuring 13-inch segments up her body, concluding that about three and a half of them fit within her height. I like her sense of what division means, there.
T has been having a lot of fun playing with my decommissioned electric toothbrush; seeing what the moving parts are and how they connect, seeing what kinds of noises it can make, changing brush heads, feeling the brush against his hand, enjoying the vibrations, and so on. 
P said something about platypuses being the only egg-laying mammals (monotremes). I thought I remembered otherwise from a museum exhibit, so we looked it up. We found out that four species of spiny anteaters (echidnas) share this distinction. And we found out the "mono" in "monotreme" comes from the fact that eggs, solid and liquid wastes all exit through the same cloacal opening. Guess it's a good thing those babies are inside protective shells, eh?

Okay, now for the crystals! This morning I got out a "Mystical Tree," which I bought recently on a toy store run with P. We set it up and got it growing. The finished product, after 6 hours, is shown at the top of this post. Here it is halfway through its growth:

I warned the kids not to touch the liquid, and then wondered whether my warnings were too strong. So I looked up the main ingredient, monopotassium phosphate. Yes, it's an eye, skin, and lung irritant -- and it's used in fertilizer and Gatorade! Okay then; I started thinking about other crystal-growing experiments the kids could be more hands-on with. I remembered making rock candy by growing sugar crystals in elementary school. So I heated up some water, dissolved a whole lot of sugar in it, and put it in two pint jars with wool yarn hanging down into them from craft sticks on top, below:

Then I got to thinking -- was that really enough sugar? I looked up a recipe for doing this and found that I'd put perhaps a third as much in as I should to saturate the solution. P watched as I boiled the solution again and put in more and more sugar, and always it dissolved out of sight. We talked about how the sugar molecules were associating with water molecules, and how we wanted to get to the point where every water molecule was doing all it could to dissolve the sugar molecules, with none left over. The dissolving got slower and weirder-looking (floating islands of granulated sugar, anyone?) until finally the solution wouldn't take any more and went all grainy. We added tiny bits of water until things dissolved again, and then re-jarred the solution to sit overnight. I gave the kids each a bit of the saturated sugar syrup in a bowl to feel and taste, and meanwhile I browsed online for other ideas. I found a page about making a Borax snowflake. P decided to try it with a spiral shape, which she made, below:

This time she did the stirring-in (only about 4.5 tablespoons of borax would dissolve in our jar of water, compared to more than 2 cups of sugar!), enjoying the swirling clouds of borax that slowly dissolved away, and the musical notes the spoon made against the jar. The jar was getting a little overfull, so I took out some water, and we found the notes got higher -- it seems the water, not so much the jar, was what determined the functional size of the resonator. After we put the jar up to cool and sit overnight next to our hopeful rock candy and (just for comparison) my weaker sugar syrup (I'll post photos of the finished crystals next time), we watched YouTube videos of glass harp music. I tried to show P how to play by rubbing the edge of a glass, but most of our glasses are too massive to vibrate well that way. We tried filling up a few with different amounts of water and striking them, but we could only get a range of about a fourth in those chunky glasses. One delicate glass teacup did allow us to stroke its edge just right to make a note of sorts. But it was nothing like the wine glasses in this Toccata and Fugue in D minor:

After a while, though, hearing Bach on wine glasses is like watching a bear dance: It's not that it's that the bear dances wonderfully that holds your attention, but that it can dance at all. So we looked up an organ version of the Bach and found this lovely video:

The piano-roll-style digital notation here is wonderfully intuitive, whether you read music yet or not. We listened to several pieces more by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, and more with similar visuals, enjoying the interplay between sound and sight and the artistry of the varied visual representations we found. P gave us the play-by-play for those pieces included in either version of Fantasia (1940 or 2000), but she also watched with total attention through Bach's entire Cello Suite No. 1, which isn't in either movie:

This exploration also led to watching videos on how a harpsichord works, discussing the differences between harpsichord and piano, and making a mallet from a skewer and rubber bands to try on P's lap harp. She says it sounds a little like a piano.

And if that isn't a nice excursion of ideas from a Mystical Tree, I don't know what is.

Mastermind, Maps, and Mandalas

Since I got back from the Always Learning Live unschooling symposium, I've been trying to get more deliberate about what I put into unschooling, proactively, and not just reacting to what I see in the kids. I was doing that before, but now I'm doing it better. One part of that is being on the lookout for interesting stuff to strew in the kids' paths. A sale notification for Barnes and Noble came across my email some days back, and I ordered some deeply discounted stuff: a puzzle of North America with pictures and labels in English and Spanish, a "Super Why" board game (based on the PBS series of the same name, which is for pre-readers like T and early readers), a coloring book of mandalas meant to be put in a window like stained glass, and the game Mastermind. I first encountered Mastermind in my elementary school library, perhaps a year after it first came out in the seventies. I never had it at home, but I loved it in the library. Its usability design has improved since then:

When the package arrived, I got out the Mastermind game and showed it to P, who was sick with the flu and lounging in an armchair in her room. She didn't want to play at first, so I played a game against myself, talking about it a little so she could see how it went. Her interest piqued, we tried a game with her guessing, which quickly became too frustrating, so we switched to her making the code and me guessing. We played for hours! P quickly understood the system of using mini-pegs to give feedback (so many pegs correct in color and position, so many correct in color but not position), and I thought out loud a lot (I'm not very good at the game without doing so!), so she got a look at my thinking and strategy. At first P claimed she was playing because I wanted to and it would make me happy -- sweet in itself -- but when I said I'd be happy to stop if she wanted to do something else, she owned up to an intense interest of her own, so we kept playing. The next day I got UnschoolerDad to play her a few games, so she got to see a different strategy of guessing and hear a lot of kibitzing between him and me about the advantages of one strategy vs. another. I learned something that day, which is that my usual set of starting guesses has unexpected results if the code I'm trying to guess has more than two pegs of the same color! P has tried guessing a few more times and gotten frustrated quickly. I remember guessing being really hard when I was her age -- there's a lot of abstraction involved in guessing the code quickly. I think she's at a great place for her developmental level in math and logic.

In breaks between games, P and I each colored a page from the Mandalas coloring book, enjoying talking about color combinations, why we chose them, and the effects they created. P also initiated a conversation about methods of getting the desired results from the felt-tip pens we were using. I told her what an art teacher had taught me about that, and P had already figured it out for herself. We also talked about the extreme symmetry of some of the images, and how a computer might be useful for creating such exact symmetry.

With T and P both having had the flu in the last couple of weeks, P is learning about various ways of managing illness -- antipyretics like ibuprofen and acetaminophen for fevers over 102 F or so; expectorants for when coughs become problematic (but not for kids T's age; he has a vaporizer running in his room); the need for lots of fluids and sleep and enough food for energy to fight the infection. The three of us also used a stethoscope to listen to each other's hearts and lungs; I was listening for signs of pneumonia, and the kids were having a good game of doctor's appointment.

Another bit of strewing this week was checking out the book Mistakes That Worked from the library: here's Amazon's cover image for it.

The text is a little dense to hold the kids' interest for long, and the cartoons in the book unfortunately don't correspond to what the book is describing, but some of them are funny. We read about the invention of Coca-Cola, chocolate chip cookies, Post-It notes (I'd heard the story of the adhesive's discovery before, but not how it came to be applied to paper), potato chips, and several other accidental or unintentional discoveries that led to hugely popular products. There's more to browse in the weeks before the book is due.

The North America puzzle led to some cool connections. T and I had fun putting it together, and then we spent some time looking at the pictures on the map. Which areas had cacti? Where were there oil wells? T wanted to know what the oil wells were, so I explained a bit about plants and animals like the dinosaurs turning into oil over millions of years. We looked at the Gulf of Mexico and talked about hurricanes and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which P remembers because UnschoolerDad and I talked about it a lot at the time, and then again later after I heard a talk from a former physics mentor of mine who was head of the US Geological Survey during the spill. P and T linked this to a tanker oil spill in an episode of Go, Diego, Go! I talked a little about the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the problems it caused for animals and birds. P wished there were real-life oil vacuums that worked as well as the ones in the Diego episode.

Other strewing this week included:

• Bananagrams, which we've had but not played with for a while: T kept cleaning up the tiles and putting them away, but then he had fun spelling some words with me. He's been doing spontaneous bits of cleaning lately; it's nice to see.
• A jigsaw puzzle meant for families to work together, with pieces of three different sizes in different parts of the puzzle: T put together the big pieces and I did the rest.
• A pile of kids' library books that were due back soon: No one even looked at them this time, but T enjoyed it when I offered to read him a book on the history of aircraft. He had lots of good questions, especially about where the people would go in each craft (he picked up quickly on the oddity of an unmanned craft) and how you would pilot it.
• The iPad game Where's My Water?, in which players route water to a crocodile waiting for a bath, negotiating various obstacles and difficulties: both kids are having fun with this, as am I. There are lots of opportunities for looking at fun and/or bizarre cause-and-effect relationships and thinking about some of the physics of fluids.
• Writing thank-you notes for Christmas presents: Okay, not exactly strewing. But P got to think some more about social conventions and what people might like to read in a thank-you note.

Much of the rest of the learning I noticed this week was initiated by the kids. They made some great connections and found interesting things to notice in objects that have been around the house a long time -- a good case for leaving stuff around where it can be seen or found! Here are some of the highlights:

• T went downstairs with me when I went to clean the cat litter boxes one day. He had lots of questions, never having taken a good look at them before. The idea of cat pee causing the litter to clump was fascinating. I've brought some clean litter upstairs in a big bowl to experiment with when it seems like the right moment; we could also try mixing water with other things, like flour, cornstarch, oats, baking soda, salt, sugar...
• I was mending a sweater one evening, sitting next to T while he played with trains on the floor. I said, "Ouch!" and he asked why; I'd poked myself with the needle, I explained. He asked what a needle was, so I showed him -- pointy on one end, with an eye on the other for putting thread through, and here's how you use it. It's easy to forget, sometimes, what little kids haven't yet learned. I'm so glad mine are asking!
• T has been building lots of fancy train-track layouts, sometimes asking for help with them. After watching me mess with some sticky situations where I needed a piece with two male or two female ends to complete a layout, he made one himself where he used a dual-ended female connector to get a bridge in place. He came to me, excited, to tell me about it.
• P and T both asked about how airplanes steer. I showed them the control surfaces on some of their toy planes and talked a little about what each kind could do. We also talked about how both propellers and jet engines work. I'm realizing as I write this that we might do well to follow up with some video. The kids saw both kinds of engines in person at the aircraft museum in my last entry.
• P noticed out loud that if she drools and sucks it back in, or spits in her hand and licks it back up, it's cooler already. Ew, but good stuff -- she thought out loud and accurately about why it got cool quickly (cooler air surrounding), and I talked about the idea of the saliva losing heat to the air by evaporation, which has come up before.
• I was trying to learn the lyrics of the Phineas and Ferb theme song from P, who knows them pretty well. She noticed aloud that there were lots of rhymes, and wondered if all songs and poems rhyme. I mentioned and described haiku as a non-rhyming form. She did something with haiku in kindergarten, and she has the book Zen Ties, which has a character named Ku who always speaks in haiku. (When he is greeted on his arrival in the story, the greeting is of course, "Hi, Ku!") She also said "nanobots" was a weird word and asked what it meant -- robots whose size would be measured in nanometers -- and we compared a nanometer to the smallest thing you could see close up and to the size of a hydrogen atom.
• P noticed again that there seemed to be two Russias on our large world map. She wanted to know why, so I explained that the map had been done as if wrapping a big piece of paper around a globe and overlapping the edges, so both Russia and Alaska could be shown whole. We noticed several other places that appear on both map edges. P asked if Colorado were really a rectangle; this followed on an earlier conversation about how states and countries get their shapes (mostly straight lines from surveys and wiggly lines from rivers) and how some boundaries, including one between Texas and New Mexico, have come into dispute as surveying and GPS technologies have improved. I talked a bit about the difference between a rectangle on a flat piece of paper and the warped, curved rectangle that Colorado really is on the surface of the Earth. P said she wanted to learn lots of things from the map and write them down. More ensued:
• P noticed the equator was well below the center of our map. We noticed there was more land, and more population centers, in the Northern Hemisphere, and that Antarctica was quite truncated, and chalked this up to the map being a political map, and there being no national boundaries and not many people in Antarctica. (We can talk another time about Eurocentrism and other political biases.) We noticed some areas, like the area north of the Arctic Circle and the Sahara desert, where there were very few cities, and those small; and we talked about why not many people would live there.
• Both kids noticed some interesting things about the national flags, many of which appear at the bottom of our map. Liberia's flag is a lot like the U.S. flag. We talked about why: Liberia was founded as a nation by freed U.S. slaves, who took a lot of the details of government, their flag design, and their capital's name from U.S. sources. And they governed even though they were a small minority vs. a large indigenous population -- also arguably a page from U.S. and other colonial history. We noticed the flags of Australia, New Zealand, and Tuvalu were very similar, each having a Union Jack in the upper left and a different pattern of stars in the remainder of the flag. We looked up the patterns and found that Australia's and New Zealand's were each a different version of the Southern Cross, while Tuvalu's was a map of its nine islands, with East on the top and North to the left. I wondered why, but things moved on too quickly to investigate this time.
• P asked me to tell her stories from my childhood. We got through moving when I was two weeks old (with reflections on the recent development of car seats and cat carriers), my first three memories (with links to experiences of tarantulas, spiders, bees, and wasps), and moving to the house where my parents still live and we've visited them, before things moved on to...
• T noticing the "adjustment screw" detail on his non-adjustable plastic wrench from his Erector set and asking what it was for. We got out P's toolkit, including a real adjustable wrench, to show him. They played together with P's set of real tools -- hand-cranked drill, little wooden workbench, screwdriver, etc. -- for a little while before crankiness scuttled that bit of cooperation. Nap and bath time.
• P asked more about Tuvalu while she was in the bath, so I looked things up and we talked more. Their main crop, pulaka, led to talking about what water table means and the drilling of wells. We learned a bit about atolls and how they form. We read about how Tuvalu is threatened by sea-level rise, since its highest point is only 15 feet above sea level. We learned that Tuvalans play a game like cricket, which led to a brief discussion about Britain's influence on its many colonies. P asked if the U.S. had been a British colony, and whether people played cricket here, so we talked about baseball as an offshoot of cricket and the relative unpopularity of cricket in the U.S. compared to baseball. We learned that Tuvalu has few roads, no railroads, 10 square miles of land over 9 islands, one primary school for each island and one boarding secondary school for the entire country of just over 10,000 people, along with an adult literacy rate of 99%, about the same as the U.S. We did the math for how many adults in Tuvalu can''t read, and P noted that she'd never (to her knowledge) met an adult who couldn't read.

This has gotten long enough, so I'll leave my internal insights of this week for another entry: in which UnschoolerMom learns to love housework and refereeing kids' fights? Hmm...

Life is full, learning is good, and this entry is long!

Whoo -- we've had solstice, Christmas, and a trip to an unschooling conference, with nary a blog entry. I'll try to hit the high points rather than fall farther behind!

For three days in late December, P was at a church day camp, which focused on the seven principles of Unitarian-Universalism in the form of the recently-invented holiday Chalica, condensed into three days. P and I celebrated Chalica last year together in a very low-key way at home, but this year we were going to be on the road and otherwise occupied during its Christmas-to-New-Year's span, so camp was it. At chapel each day, there were stories and songs related to that day's principles. Activities, specifically related or not, rounded out the days. A song to the tune of the do-re-mi song in The Sound of Music summarized all the principles (given in brackets) thus:
     One, each person is worthwhile [The inherent worth and dignity of every person]
     Two, be kind in all you do [Justice, equity and compassion in human relations]
     Three, we help each other learn [Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations]
     Four, and search for what is true [A free and responsible search for truth and meaning]
     Five, all people have a say [The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large]
     Six, work toward a peaceful world [The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all]
     Seven, the web of life's the way [Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part]
     That will bring us back to me and UU you!

P had a great time at camp playing with friends, making art, swimming at the local rec center, toasting marshmallows, helping make Stone Soup, and more. On the last day, families were invited to come share the Stone Soup, so T and I went. Both kids really love having a chance to be in the church sanctuary outside church services, exploring the space, asking questions about things, and making the place their own. I remember liking it the same way when I was young, though I started going to church at age 11.

One day while P was at camp, T brought me a Magic School Bus chapter book and asked me to read it to him. We read about half before we got tired of it. T was actively engaged in listening and making sense of the story. He asked questions about the story. At one point he pointed to the last line on a page and asked me what those words said, so I read them to him again. Unsatisfied, he pointed to the quotation marks on the line and asked what those were, finally getting what he was looking for in my explanation. I love watching him crack the code! Around once a day, he asks me how to spell some word, often a long one like transform. He's working actively on his spoken diction as well, starting to differentiate his L and R sounds and pronounce more consonant clusters, all of which makes him much easier to understand. He's also getting good at talking about things in a different way if he can't get us to understand a particular word. Recently he was trying to tell me something about snow, but he kept saying "so," and I just wasn't getting it because there wasn't enough context. He patiently explained, "You know, the white stuff that's falling down from the sky outside." He and I were both very happy when his idea got across!

In the lead-up to Christmas, T and P were doing lots of pretend play. I'm noticing more acceptance of a greater range of play. P used to get irritated at T whenever he wanted to play a female character or have a female name, which happens sometimes -- after all, his biggest pretend-play role model is his sister! I've been noticing recently that she has more slack for this and is embracing his creativity with fewer reservations. To top it off, on the 20th I overheard P saying that she was T's father in the game. Good stuff.

At last Christmas came, with several cool gifts from relatives. Both kids got packages of 10 matchbox-style cars, the better to share playing with cars. P's been asking for some of her own, since T has so many! There were Polly Pockets and a camper van for them, Barbies and clothes for them, Transformers, and an erector set, which have made for great separate and shared play. We also gave T an airplane that comes apart, using a battery-operated, kid-size cordless screwdriver. He spent hours over the next couple of days (before we left town and had to leave it behind) very earnestly taking the plane apart (always with some reason it needed to be fixed), reassembling it, and flying it about. He's a natural with the tool, even better than I expected. (P has had a small set of real tools and some wood to use them with for years, and she enjoys them too.) The grandparents also picked some things from my wish list for the family, giving us a set of Cuisenaire rods and a United States map that goes with our Tag reader. The map is getting some play, and the Cuisenaire rods have already led into some informal exploration of addition, multiplication, area, volume, square and cubic numbers, and prime numbers. I'm having fun with my Christmas gift, too -- a coffee-table book of the elements with amazing illustrations and amusing and informative text. It's getting read aloud a lot, mostly by me to UnschoolerDad, but the kids get to hear and see some of the good parts, too. Christmas stockings also provided pocket magnifiers that came along on our trip and got some use looking at color elements on TV screens and playing with light refracting in through motel peepholes.

And then we went on our trip! We attended a symposium in Albuquerque for unschooling parents and families tied to the Always Learning list, one of Sandra Dodd's many gifts to the world. Sandra spoke, and so did Pam Sorooshian, Joyce Fetteroll, and several other long-time unschooling parents who contribute to the list, as well as some always-unschooled children, teens, and young adults. There were play rooms set up for kids right next to the room for speakers, so parents could go back and forth as needed. I missed parts of talks while mediating kid difficulties, but it was good to be able to hear what I did, and UnschoolerDad filled me in on some of what I missed. He also took turns helping the kids.

There weren't a huge number of new ideas for me at the symposium (though there were some), since I've been reading the list faithfully for a year now. I did find the experience valuable, though, in that I got to see other unschooling families in action and hear about some ideas in new ways that allowed for deeper understanding. One idea that sounded preposterous to me before the symposium, but that I'm thinking about more seriously now, is that children can be treated as guests in their homes. They didn't ask to join our families; we parents decided to have them, and we committed to their upbringing and care. As such, it may make more sense to keep doing chores and such ourselves, accepting help as it's willingly given rather than requiring it. I do find that P helps more willingly (whether asked or not) when I request help less, and not trying to require chores certainly reduces the adversarial situations between us and creates more opportunities for grace. One young-adult speaker, always unschooled, talked about how her mom always had a hard time getting help with chores other than laundry. The key difference, it seems, was that the mom enjoyed doing laundry. When the mom realized this and started being more cheerful about other tasks, help became more available with those as well. Another speaker, a mom, talked about giving up on getting taking-out-trash help from her husband (who was forced to do that chore as a child and never wanted to do it again), and instead asking kids along to do it with her and making it fun. There was an in-ground trampoline on the way from their back door to the trash cans, and taking out the trash turned into a short, fun family expedition, chatty, playful, and stress-free, with children enthusiastically finding their shoes to come along. One of the ideas Sandra Dodd talks about a lot is releasing our sense that we "have to" do anything in particular, and instead emphasizing that we choose our actions, in general (by choosing the principles by which we wish to live) and from moment to moment. We don't actually have to mop the floor. We can choose to, or we can let many socks do the job, or we can play Cinderella from time to time, or we can just let it be dirty, or... you get the idea. That idea is an important one for me, when I'm considering that perhaps chores are my job, not something to be forced upon youthful conscripts. I can choose my priorities. And one of them can be supporting my kids' priorities, so they can learn to make good choices and establish their own priorities and principles, rather than living life as a list of have-tos based on other people's priorities.

The array of things for kids to play with during the symposium was wonderful. There were art supplies, coloring books (including beautiful stained-glass mandalas), puzzles, mazes, Geoboards, Doodle Tops (with crayon tips), dinosaurs, pipe cleaners, a foam Fraction Burger, and lots more. The bigger kids' room had lots of board and card games, and several kids played Minecraft in there on various laptops that came with them. P joined them for a time on my computer, but unfortunately it had some problems. She did benefit from the expertise of some of the other kids, though, watching and learning from their amazing creations. Both kids had a great time with the Geoboards, and adults happening by and looking at the patterns they created often made comments that got the kids thinking even more. I think there are some Geoboards in our near future. Both kids also got to play with other kids a lot, both near their ages and not. We got some contact information for staying in touch with new friends. Unfortunately, none of them are local. But P is very enthusiastic about going to future unschooling conferences, so we may see some of them then if we don't see them sooner on trips!

P was very fearful and clingy when we went to the first evening gathering at the symposium. She was absolutely not willing to do the getting-to-know-you games that were going on, so I took her to the kids' play area to check out the toys. She played there happily for a long time, and by the time other people started coming in, she was ready to be social and get into the groove. Other big feelings came up a couple of times when she was dealing with younger children who were hitting. I sat with her outside and helped her release the feelings, and she rejoined the play with greater flexibility, enthusiasm, and resourcefulness. (This -- encouraging the release of big, hard feelings rather than changing the environment to make things easier -- is not an approach I learned from unschoolers, but it's one I think we'll keep using for a while, yet, because the rewards are great.) T wandered about from play room to snack table to our laps, getting his food and parent fixes as needed, and was on a pretty even keel emotionally the whole time. Both kids adapted easily to where and when noisy play was okay or not okay, and they enjoyed living all in one room in hotels. T, as usual, was sorry for the trip to end, though when he saw the left-behind toys, he didn't stay sad for long!

On the way home, we had some fun. We played tourist in Albuquerque, peeking in a few shops and eating our New-Mexican-leftovers lunch in the plaza in Old Town. We read about the brief occupation of Albuquerque by the Confederacy in 1862, and how the confederate troops buried eight cannons near the plaza and church as they fled. The former Confederate leader returned years later and showed the locals where to find the cannons, which by then were underneath a chile patch. Two of them (replicas now, because the originals were so valuable) are still on display in the plaza. We brought home a ristra of New Mexico red chile peppers (hard to find around here) and a blanket to remember Albuquerque by.

On a brief stop in Santa Fe, we browsed the markets, enjoyed some red-chile kettle corn, and found another couple of souvenirs. At first, as we waited to use a hotel restroom, I was distressed at how coiffed, made-up, and put-together the folks in Santa Fe seemed to be, compared to those in Albuquerque or other places I've been comfortable with my casual self. But it turned out that was the selection effect of the pricey hotel and the expensive shops on its ground level; once we hit the plaza, it was just folks again. The amount of public art on display in Santa Fe was impressive; I'm glad such creativity doesn't have to go along with people who go to such lengths to change their appearances.

Our last tourist stop before home was an aircraft museum in Pueblo, Colorado. There were dozens of aircraft on display, ranging in history from the Civil War to nearly the present, and a couple of helicopters were open to explore the inside and check out the instrumentation and seating, which made the kids happy. We also saw bombs, a space shuttle tire used on Atlantis, a MASH-type evacuation helicopter for the wounded, and many other craft. A huge captured Nazi flag was on display, and we talked about how Germany had changed from being our enemy in WWII to being an ally now, and what ally means. We saw a display of uniforms from real, local, female servicemembers. One Pueblo woman whose uniform was displayed had been a test pilot for prototype aircraft during WWII. We talked about the danger such a job would involve, and the high level of skill a good test pilot would need. P and T each chose a model airplane to bring home; T indulged his perpetual love of biplanes, and P chose a Blue Angels F/A-18 Hornet, which she's been cuddling as blissfully as any doll. Today we found a web site about the Hornet, because we wanted to know how fast it could go. P's eyes were wide as we compared its Mach 1.7+ top speed to a fast ordinary car and to the fastest racing cars. P remembered seeing something like the Blue Angels in the movie Cars, and seeing the real Blue Angels fly over our house from time to time in Boulder. We also bought a water rocket that should be fun to play with, exploring the effects of pressure and Newton's third law, when we get a warm day.

Since we returned, I've been trying to leave something fun or interesting on the coffee table each night for the kids to find in the morning -- a form of strewing that Sandra recently referred to as a "daily special." I love that idea, though I can imagine I'll have to give it some thought to come up with things. This morning I left out a set of blocks, similar to the Jenga game, to play with, having found them in a closet last night. The kids were up before me, and by the time I came out, there was a problem with not enough blocks to go around, so I got out some alphabet blocks and Connectagons. P went to town with the Connectagons, building a Robot Town and regaling us with stories about the various robots and how they worked. Later she was pretending to be a robot. This evening I put out the Tag reader, the books currently loaded on it, and the U.S. Tag map. T asked P to play with a Tag book geared to helping kids learn to write letters, which she willingly did as he watched, absorbed. The Tag things were meant to be tomorrow's daily special. I guess it's a good thing for me, for my own development as a co-discoverer with my kids of interesting stuff, that I can't wait to get out the fun stuff once I think of it. Maybe I'll get out a jigsaw puzzle for tomorrow, one that no one's seen for a while. I could really get to like this!