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!