Spring Smorgasbord

Spring weather has finally arrived in our area, and our bodies and minds are all over the place. Except in the garden, where I'd like to be preparing the soil for planting; but the kids want to be playing inside today, and so I have time to write.

We've been getting outdoors a lot for letterboxing adventures, learning, and socialization. A non-comprehensive list of our outdoor play:

• We took our first hike of the season in the nearby mountain park, hoping to find a letterbox at the end of the hike. I was glad we had a goal in mind, because the uphill hike was tiring, and we considered turning around but persisted, thinking (correctly) that our goal was close at hand. On the hike we talked about circulation and surgery: P wanted to know why you can't feel your leg when its circulation gets cut off for a while, so we talked about nerve cells needing oxygen to work; then she wanted to know if you'd have to be asleep for a surgery in which blood flow to a part of the body needed to be stopped. We talked about various kinds of surgeries and which could be done awake or asleep. We saw and identified yucca, cactus, grasses, trees, magpies, and blue jays. We talked about moss, which we saw on some rocks in creeks. The kids enjoyed playing on the rocks across the creek in several places, and building tiny dams of pine needles, sticks, and moss. T is much steadier on his feet than I expected; he was able to cross creeks on rocks easily on his own. Both kids ran joyfully most of the way on the downhill return hike.
• T went with me for another letterbox while P was at her choir rehearsal nearby. He enjoyed playing with the compass and beginning to learn to use it. He was clear that if he faced north, south was behind him, and vice versa.
• We visited a nearby park, playing for as long as the kids wanted and then going to find two more letterboxes in the neighboring open space. On that walk the kids played in mud, experiencing different textures and kinds, including pull-your-shoes-off sticky mud. They played in a big puddle/small pond with sticks, stirring up the very fine sediment and noticing how the water looked cloudy, but the individual silt/clay particles were too fine to see. We talked about what kind of rock those sediments would form, given enough time and pressure. I was uptight about the mud at first, but before we went home I had relaxed into letting the kids get as messy as they wanted, knowing we'd be able to clean ourselves up. I was reminded of Ms. Frizzle's slogan from The Magic School Bus: "Take chances, make mistakes, get messy!" That might make a good unschooling motto!
• At an unschooling park day, P experienced some rejection when trying to join a game being played by several girls near her age, who've played together for months or years. As the afternoon went on, I made some suggestions about how to join their play (learn their names instead of calling them "guys," use questions and suggestions rather than demands, look for opportunities to expand on their game in fun ways, rather than trying to change it), and I came along to try to grease the skids a bit. She did eventually work her way in, providing a tornado shelter for the fairy house they were building, and she played for a long time with one of the girls after the others went home. T also wanted to be in on some of those games, and I worked with him on how to make his way in, too. He was carrying a big stick that one of the girls was worried about, so she was telling him to stay away; but once he put down the stick and came to help, he was more or less welcome.

Through these outings, I was working on my pace and how I handled transitions with the kids. I'm noticing that when I avoid making arbitrary demands (do this, do that, hurry up), the requests or demands that I do make, for real reasons, are met with greater cooperation. There's a "Duh!" element to this, of course, but it's sinking in more deeply for me that when I notice what the kids are enjoying at transition time, rather than focusing on how fast I can get them to do something else, they notice my consideration for them and react better when the time to move on has really (and it helps if it's for reasons they can understand) arrived. They light up when they can share their enjoyment with me and feel seen, along with all their pleasures and preferences about how life goes -- and that helps when their preferences don't work out on a particular occasion.

We had some interesting books from the library:

• Every Thing On It, a book of poems by Shel Silverstein. These are delightfully attuned to kids' interests, including gross and silly stuff as well as calmer fare. And the segmented nature of the poems lends itself well to bedtime reading, when I'm trying to keep an eye on approaching sleep and stop reading when it's time to doze off quietly. We had one delightful group nap on the big bed, on a day when I felt everyone could use one -- I grabbed a stack of interesting books and said I'd read them to anyone who came along. Everyone was listening within 2 minutes, and everyone was asleep in about half an hour, including me. Yum!
• Listen for the Bus: David's Story. Both kids liked this picture book about David, a boy who's blind and hard of hearing. The book talks about how kindergarten works for David, including braille and other tactile clues his teachers use to help him navigate his world; and about what David loves most in his life outside school (loud noises, big dogs, hammock swings, riding horses, and more). 

• To Everything There Is a Season. I was reading a Secular Homeschooling Magazine article about reading the Bible for cultural literacy, and this book came up there as a good start for kids still a little young for some of the Bible's more disturbing offerings. The illustrations are based on the content and style of pictures from a variety of cultures -- Japanese, ancient Egyptian, Aztec, Thai, Indian, and more -- and there is a key to the illustrations in the back of the book that briefly explains both the meaning of the verse from Ecclesiastes on that page, and a bit about the cultural context of the illustration used. P was very engaged in both the text and the illustration key. She did point out, in response the the verse used at the end (Ecclesiastes 1:4, "One generation passes away, and another generation comes; But the earth abides forever."), that the Earth would actually be engulfed in the sun in a few billion more years. We talked a little about how that compares to the time scale of human life.
• The Magic School Bus Hops Home: A Book About Animal Habitats. This was the book that started our group-nap reading. I like that it addresses both what animals need in real and artificial habitats, and how they might be better or worse off as pets than living in the wider world.

• Starry Messenger, a book about Galileo Galilei. P, who is already familiar with Galileo's going against church teachings based on his observations of the planets, liked this one. It has the basic story of Galileo's discoveries and his conflict with the church, and also handwritten quotes on every page from Galileo's notebooks, supporting his attitude that science is a better guide than scripture for humans trying to understand how their world works.
• Hattie Big Sky. We recently started reading this book about an orphaned 16-year-old girl in 1917 who inherits her uncle's unproved claim in Montana and goes to work it and finish proving up by herself. We talked about why damp hands would freeze to a pump handle, what banking a fire means, food and land prices during World War I, why people were suspicious of their German neighbors, rationing, knitting for soldiers at the front, and more.

Other media encounters in the past two weeks:

• We discovered that new episodes of Phineas and Ferb are being produced and made available on Netflix. P recognized an allusion to the bridge in Monty Python and the Holy Grail in one of them, from my showing her the scene on YouTube months ago. The new episodes are even richer than usual in cultural and literary allusions, which I'm looking forward to unpacking with P.
• I remembered Paddle to the Sea, a short film I saw as a child, and showed it to P on YouTube. She watched it all the way through, and we talked a little about how the people who found the wooden Indian felt, and why they sent Paddle on his way instead of keeping him. After watching it, we tried making origami boats out of regular paper (which bogged down quickly as the water soaked through) and waxed paper (this floated for 3-4 days with very little change before we needed the space for something else). We talked a bit about water permeability and saw and felt the difference between the permeable and impermeable papers.
• With St. Patrick's Day coming up, I was thinking about the Blarney Stone, and we looked up the origins of the custom of kissing it, as well as images of how people kissed it before and after the iron railings for that purpose were added. The risk has been considerably reduced from the time when one had to be dangled by the ankles!
• P asked when Easter would be, and we looked up how it's figured (roughly speaking, it's the Sunday after the full moon that falls on or after March 21, unless you're talking about Orthodox Easter, which uses the Julian calendar, in which the equinox is figured around April 3...) and this year's date.
• A friend posted this marvelous web site about the scale of the universe, which all of perused at some length. It was interesting, after the pond adventure, to see the particle of silt, just below the size humans can see with the unaided eye. (Note: this site works much better in Chrome than in Firefox.) While I was writing this blog entry and went back to get the link for the site, P got interested again and I needed to give up the computer for a time so she could continue exploring! P discovered that you can click on objects on the site to learn more about them.
• T spent some time typing on a One-Laptop-Per-Child computer we've had for a long time, and which he sort of knows how to use. He asked how to spell my name so he could type it. He's figured out how to use Shift to get capital letters, and he knows all his capital letters, so he can hunt and peck to type what I say. P took a turn later and wrote some nicely spelled short messages!

The kids asked lots of cool questions. A few of them:

• "What are animals with pickles on their backs called?" That was T, who at age three doesn't say Rs yet. He was thinking of porcupines. He wanted to play porcupines with P, so he also wanted to know what porcupines ate. (Leaves, twigs, and other plants; in winter, inner bark/cambium. They smell like old sawdust.) We also learned that they turn their rumps to protect themselves from predators, that they cannot throw their quills but release them more easily when frightened, that they may slap with their tails, and that their common causes of death include predation, getting hit by cars, and falling out of trees.
• "If you looked in a mirror with x-ray glasses on, would you see behind the mirror or inside yourself?" P asked this. We talked a bit about why x-ray glasses wouldn't work so well (setting the depth of field is a problem), but then we looked it up. X rays reflect from mirrors only at grazing angles, so mostly you'd see behind the mirror. But they can "reflect" by Bragg diffraction (constructive interference between reflections from atoms in different layers of a crystal), which makes x-ray crystallography possible. at just the right angle, thus the possibility of x-ray crystallography.)
• "Why do our teeth curve backward instead of being in a straight line in front?" That was P. I explained it in terms of leverage: just as it's easier to cut near the pivot of scissors, our jaws are more powerful near the joint, so we can chew harder things with teeth that curve backward. So natural selection would favor animals whose jaws had that powerful construction. 

And there was much miscellany:

• T built some neat, non-tesselated tile designs with the pattern blocks. He also noticed that you could build up the shapes of some pattern blocks using others: three green triangles make a red trapezoid, two trapezoids make a yellow hexagon, etc.
• We went to a place with a lot of inflated, bouncy structures for one snowy park day. P went from lonely to buddied up (she has since played with those new friends at another park day), and T grew much more confident in his climbing as the hours wore on.
• P and I looked at photos of fishing flies and lures and talked about how and why they would be useful for catching fish.
• P was making triangles on a geoboard that happened to be isosceles triangles, so I commented on that and said it meant they had two sides the same. I wasn't sure she was listening, but she piped up, "And one side different." Nice to see comprehension when even attention wasn't a sure thing!
• P talked about having two and a half fourths of something. I said that I knew what she meant, and drew a circle divided into fourths, with 2.5 of them colored in. Then I redivided the circle into eighths with a different color of marker and showed her how 2.5 fourths was the same as five eighths. We did it with 3.5 fourths and 2.5 tenths as well. I showed her the "giant one" method for converting fractions that I used to teach to seventh graders. That may have been too much to sink in at this developmental stage, but I think P understood the pie charts. The next day P asked about how to divide 7 things equally between 2 people, and she followed the explanation well and reversed the calculations correctly herself.
• When UnschoolerDad came back from a business trip, we picked him up at the airport. It was a bit of a comedy of errors, trying to reach the right curb on the right level to pick him up; we circled the airport three times. While I drove, we talked about airport security and why we weren't allowed to park long enough for UD to walk to where we were.
• UD brought home gifts for the kids, including a model F-14 Tomcat fighter plane for T, who has been envious of P's model Blue Angel jet. The F-14's wings swivel back into a smaller, swept-back profile when it goes faster, and we talked a little about why different wing sizes would be desirable at different speeds, especially supersonic speeds (when a lot of vibration would be hard on wide wings, but swept-back wings can withstand it better).