Embodied Learning

We've been learning a lot with and about bodies, including our own bodies, this week. One day I took P roller skating at a nearby rink. We got great exercise, and my skills from when I last roller skated 25 years ago came back pretty well. P didn't make it away from the wall on her own this time, but she determinedly worked her way around the edges, getting faster and faster, and when I took her hand to help her away from the wall and around obstacles, she got steadier each time. She loved it and would like to go back. The rink has a "pixie class" for 2-6 year olds on Thursday mornings (I wonder if they'd let P participate?), so we might get T into the act as well, if he's interested.

Then P and I were invited to Buddy Week at the martial arts dojo where P and T's cousin and his mom (my sister-in-law) train. P and I went to two classes. P had a blast and wants to join up right away. She's unfazed by the homework requirements (kids must do at-home chore lists, logged reading, and other things designed to improve their discipline at home, and most of all in school, in order to qualify for their next belt test), and even wanted to practice "Yes, sir/ma'am!" at home! I had fun and a couple of good workouts, but I have some misgivings about whether the dojo is a good match for our family's values or unschooling philosophy. While all dojos I've experienced require respect for those of greater rank and courtesy toward everyone, the "respect" at this dojo takes the form of a lot of "yes, sir/ma'am," which is expected immediately, without time to think or digest the information or instructions. I've heard from my sister-in-law about some great things that are happening with her son's confidence there, and P would love to take a class with her cousin -- but he's due for a belt promotion, and then they'd be in different classes for at least a few months, and probably longer. Plus the place is quite expensive, money is very tight for us now, and they require months of notice to get out of the monthly payments if you decide to quit. All this has me looking for other options. Our current plan is to try the introductory week at a dojo much closer to us, which is probably less expensive (finding mat fees on a dojo's web site is harder than getting car prices from a dealership over the phone!) and sounds more agreeable in general philosophy, based on their web page. There are so many variables! When is sparring required? How much does it cost? How easy will it be for us to get to classes? How do they handle the balance among fun, challenge, discipline, and safety? And so much more. We'll see where it all leads. We might still end up at the cousin's dojo (I won't let my philosophy stop me if P is still enjoying it after a 30-day free trial -- I know that people can learn to move among home and other places with different expectations, and benefit from the experience), but at least we'll have an idea of what another place is like first. T is still on the young side for local dojos, but he'll be four in a couple of months, and if we're still at it, maybe he'll want in.

One night this week, the kids wanted to sleep together on the fold-out couch in our living room. We made it up with bed linens and they bedded down willingly, excited about  a new thing to try. P ended up going back to her room after a couple of hours, though -- she learned that she is a light sleeper, and even though UnschoolerDad and I were holed up in other parts of the house, there were too many little noises in the house for her to get good sleep. (When she was about two, she was having trouble getting to sleep in our shared bedroom, and after she chose to move to her own room, she slept much more soundly.) T was surprised, but not upset, to wake up without P in the morning. There hasn't been another request for that sleeping arrangement, which is okay with me -- it's hard for us adults to stay out of the living/dining/kitchen space that is the core of our house after the kids are in bed. We did have a very productive evening focusing on our paid work, though!

This morning, I was trying to decide whether T was over his cold enough to go to church with me and not give all the other kids colds. I asked if I could look inside his nose, and it seemed pretty clear. Then he wanted to look in my nose. He said I had a lot of yucky stuff in there. I asked if it was liquidy and shiny, or solid and boogery, and he said, "It's a lot of hair." I told him he had hair in his nose, too, and that it was to keep us from breathing in things like sand or bugs. He promptly went to P and asked to look in her nose, extending his data set.

Besides those first-person body learnings, we did lots of learning about bodies this week. One day T and I were reading about the lymph system in the anatomy book we still have from the library. That evening I was alone with P, and how the body deals with infection came up in conversation. I asked if she wanted to know what I'd learned about the lymph system, and she listened with interest. She's encountered the idea of swollen lymph nodes before, when we were checking her out and deciding whether to treat an illness at home or see a doctor. A couple of days later she told UnschoolerDad something about white blood cells helping to clean out   invaders from the body, as they do in the lymph system and elsewhere.

We found a great Doring-Kindersley book on bugs at the library book sale (more on the sale below),and T has been asking for bedtime reading from it every night. It's too long to read in one sitting, but we covered most of it in a few evenings, and now we're going back to T's favorite parts. He's fascinated with the detailed photos and models, he has lots of questions, and he was troubled that several of the ladybugs in the mass of ladybugs on one page have no spots. Today we looked that up and found that while they may be a different species (one source called them Asian beetles, in contrast to native ladybugs), they eat aphids and other pest insects, so they have the same garden benefits as ladybugs. T is fascinated with cicadas and the noises they make (below is one of the YouTube videos we watched), and he learned to make the R-rolling sound, unvoiced, as the best way we could come up with of imitating them.

Both kids have been watching a Magic School Bus video on the human body a lot this week. They love the episodes, which cover the digestive system, immune response, and the musculoskeletal system. They've seen them before, but they get new things out of them each time. As I write, they're watching a sports-themed Magic School Bus DVD, learning about friction.

We made it to our local library's annual children's book sale this week, and it was wonderful. We walked out with 19 books for $4, and some of them are large volumes that would cost $30 or more new. Some are encyclopedic volumes on countries in different regions of the world, that should be fun to browse or perhaps reference. Some are volumes of fables, medieval tales, and tales of mythical creatures (one of P's strong interests). There's a book with photos and stories about kids during the Great Depression -- we browsed the photos and found one of a California tent camp for migrant fruit-pickers that could have been where my maternal grandparents spent parts of their childhoods. There's a book of first-person stories from young people living with physical disabilities. We found a book on string games (P and I have tried a few), The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes, the bug book that T's been enjoying, a book on world religions that P wanted, plus some picture books the kids picked out and more. Now a bookshelf for the living room is on our wish list; I'm looking forward to having these easily available for anyone to enjoy.

The Great Depression has been an ongoing theme. P doesn't want to hear The Friendship Doll, which I really thought she'd enjoy, but after we looked at the photos from the Depression, she started some more pretend play about that time. She's absorbed enough information that she could tell us our pretend family was somewhat rich before the Depression, but most of our money was in the stock market, so our circumstances changed a lot after the  market crashed. She tried to put together an outfit from her closet that might fit the game, and it was interesting to talk about how things are different when you have only a few things to wear (if you're lucky enough to have more than one set of clothes) and they are mostly made, or at least washed and repaired, entirely by hand. Her things are also made from fabrics and yarns that would have been difficult or impossible to find 80 years ago -- cotton/synthetic blends, space-dyed knitting yarns, etc. -- so it was a tough dress-up challenge.

Other highlights from this week:

• P's been listening to UnschoolerDad read The Hobbit most nights, enjoying the story and learning lots of new and archaic words.
• We watched an old favorite movie, My Neighbor Totoro, again, and together noticed elements of life in the country near Tokyo, including large family baths, tatami mats and their shoe-related customs, rolling out futons to sleep instead of having separate bedrooms, rice-planting days off from school, getting around without cars, the abundance of small shrines around the countryside, and more.
• P and T were building things with an Erector set, and P noticed that one of their creations looked like a chariot, though she needed help remembering that word. Once we figured out what she was talking about, she wanted to know more about chariots, We found lots of images online that helped us pick out the common features of chariots and see how they were drawn and driven. P asked to use one line drawing we found as a coloring page, and she put a lot of thought into what materials it might have been made of as she chose her colors.
• P learned a little about the term "baker's dozen" from an adult she spoke with at UnschoolerDad's badminton gym. She told me about it, and we looked it up in the encyclopedia of phrase origins we have checked out from the library and learned even more. Apparently the penalties for selling underweight loaves have been so draconian in some places and times (in Ancient Egypt, a baker caught short-weighting his customers would be nailed to his shop door by the ear!), and it could be so difficult to make sure loaves met the expected sizes, that bakers included an extra loaf in each order of a dozen to make sure their customers received their due.
• Today P brought me an iguana grabber toy of T's and told me she'd figured out how it worked. She was right on target. 

The iguana in question

• On a recent trip to the bank, both kids wanted to know more about what banks are for and how they work. We talked about how ATMs work (and all the money that has to change hands electronically when you use an ATM that isn't at your own bank!) and what savings and checking accounts are for.
• P used subtraction and division out loud to figure out how many apple pieces she'd eaten based on how many she started with and how many were left, and then to decide how many more she could have without eating T's share. She did some more division out loud, thinking about how to divide eight pieces of apple fairly among two or four people.
• Since P had enjoyed reading Sideways Stories from the Wayside School, I grabbed its two sequels and another book called Sideways Arithmetic from the Wayside School on this week's library stop. I read a problem from the latter to P -- about eleven kids deciding whether they wanted to play basketball or freeze tag at recess, based on how many people each kid thought would make each game fun. P's intuition that they would all play freeze tag turned out to be correct, and we had fun with follow-up problems about how things would change if one kid changes his or her mind. We read some other problems, but P found them contrived, and I agreed.