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...