Okay, so really I made those by myself while the kids played. I asked P if they could be my valentine to everyone, and she was content. She's been giving me little hug coupons, hand-made valentines, and other treasures for days, and I was feeling behind in the game, but today she told me she felt bad because I'd made the cookies and she didn't feel she'd given me anything. I reminded her of how loved I'd felt with her hugs and pictures. Perhaps we have satisfied the valentine urge for this year, though it never hurts to give love notes and cookies for no reason at all!
Earlier this week, during T's nap, P and I played a number game I'd learned on the Always Learning unschooling email list. Pam Sorooshian posted it there, in response to a question about learning powers of ten or place values. Her version starts with a dollar bill and a pile of dimes and pennies in the middle of the table. The players take turns rolling a die and taking the number of cents they roll. Whenever they can trade in 10 pennies for a dime, they must do so. The first player to accumulate 10 dimes to trade for the dollar is the winner. (You can play for keeps or not.) We didn't have enough dimes for that version, so P and I both emptied our change purses and played with what we had: a motley collection of pennies, quarters, a few dimes, and one lonely nickel. This made for a really interesting game, actually, since we had only 10 pennies, so sometimes we had to make change from a dime to end up taking the right number of cents. As we played, I watched P get better at identifying coins, adding, subtracting, and counting out coins quickly. I suggested we play again, but P wanted to take turns identifying coins without looking, by their size, weight, and edge texture. She got better at that, too. Then I asked if she wanted to play the original game again, and she said, "Let's play for five minutes, and whoever is ahead when time's up will decide what we both do for five minutes after that." P was ahead when the timer went off, so for a while we were friends of animals in Antarctica, strategizing about how to get a large number of evil, wasteful hunters to go away and never come back to hunt our friends. Our best solution involved the good swimmers swimming away, lots of scary leopard seals keeping the hunters at bay until they starved or left, and an elaborate igloo with good camouflage to hide the non-swimmers. (Veteran readers of this blog will recognize links to previous investigations!) I'm glad P won; I probably would have chosen to clean up the living room floor together, and her choice was more fun.
More number play has been happening this week. P came to me yesterday, complaining bitterly that I had not kept a fresh battery in her purple analog watch, which was one of two gifts she'd specifically requested for her third birthday. I reminded her that I'd replaced that battery a couple of years ago, but that she had not wanted to wear the watch or learn to tell time on it; and I told her I'd get her a new battery when she showed me that she could tell time to the nearest five minutes, which I thought she could accomplish within a day if she tried. P took on the challenge. She let me explain the basics to her (again), and she asked several times during the day to have me check her reading of the clock. In the 36 hours since then, she has learned to tell time to the minute, including doing her own multiplication by 5 for the long hand. As if to reward her efforts more quickly than I could, the watch mysteriously started working right after P caught on!
When I asked P recently if she'd like me to read to both of them from T's beloved bug book, she made a great show of saying how gross bugs were. But bugs have nevertheless been another theme this week. A few days ago, P and T were pretending to be cicadas (I'm betting that was T's idea), and T asked what cicadas ate. I looked it up and found that they suck juices from the xylem of plants. I passed that along, and it got put to good use. It was bothering me, though: why xylem, the tubes that mainly carry water from the roots upward? Why not phloem, which carries sugars down from the leaves? Later I looked it up more specifically, and found that the original reference was correct, but that I was also correct to find it counterintuitive -- most sap-sucking insects do sip from the phloem because of its higher sugar content. Cicadas' diet is high in fluids and amino acids and low in sugars. The larvae use the resulting copious, liquidy waste to cement together the cells they build for themselves. I drew a diagram of a plant, showing the xylem and phloem, to share my discoveries with P, who was interested in them and later showed the diagram to UnschoolerDad, excited to tell him what she'd learned.
And then today, yet another beetle came in from outside. I wish I knew how they get in; we throw one back outside a few times per week in the winter, to keep them from breeding in our house. This time, I didn't get it right away, and P watched it for a while, interested in its appearance and behavior and keeping me updated. She asked what kind of bug it was, and we found it on a web site about insects common in Colorado: a western conifer seed bug, Leptoglossus occidentalis. Native to the temperate and warm west coast of North America, it has spread across the U.S., and there are plenty of tasty trees here for it to feed on.
I made one more attempt to interest P in The Friendship Doll before we had to take it back to the library. This time, it caught her interest, as I'd thought and hoped it might after reading it myself and enjoying the flavors of history in its pages. In three days of lots of reading, we've read and investigated about:
- Coming-out parties and other social customs among wealthy New Yorkers, circa 1927
- The existence of a group of exquisite dolls sent from Japan to the U.S. around then to promote good international relations (this really happened)
- Rag curls and how to make them
- How the economy changed between 1927 and 1933
- The situation in a town near Chicago in 1933: many fathers out of work, 25 cents' admission to attend the Chicago World's Fair was a hardship for many
- What a gong is and how it sounds
- What it means to get 99 percent on a test
- Lots of new words
- Who the character Aunt Jemima was
- The geographical and economic divide between rich city dwellers and "holler folk" in Kentucky, circa 1937
- Flu as a more deadly disease then than now, and a bit about why
- How wills and bequests work
- Reminders of several things we've run across before: rock types and how they form, A Little Princess, and a story of an emperor's daughter who flew away on a kite to convince her father to remedy the huge divide between the lives of courtiers and peasants.
...and we still have a quarter of the book to go! UnschoolerDad stood nearby and listened for most of the third section of the book this evening, and T played quietly in P's room as I read to everyone. I love it when a story can draw all of us in together. P and T have also been enjoying the Sunday comics a lot lately; P reads them to T, and they both laugh. P says Garfield is her favorite, so we have a Garfield book on hold at the library now.
And in closing: Today I learned, though I haven't yet shared it with the kids, that the reason mint soap makes my hands feel cold is that menthol (along with other chemicals, such as one from eucalyptus) activates the same nerve ion channels our bodies use to sense temperatures below 26 degrees Celsius (79 F). Hot stuff. No Wait -- cool. :)
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