There's been a lot of social learning. The kids play together a lot, and pretend play is usually their default activity if nothing else is suggested to them. They also seem to metabolize most of what they learn from outside sources (books, videos, situations we encounter together) through pretend play. That means there are LOTS of opportunities to have interactions with each other go well or poorly. Flexibility is key; I've told P about the rule in improvisational theater that you try not to act in a way that shuts off someone else's idea, but instead adopt an attitude of, "Yes, and...." She and T are both getting better at this kind of flexibility. Can there be lava in My Little Pony? Can there be two of the same character in a game? Increasingly, the answer is some form of, "Yes, and...." Sometimes when one of them is digging in heels at the other's suggestion, if I'm nearby and see it starting to happen, I'll say something like, "I think you have a big enough imagination to handle that, don't you?" That often gets things back on a cooperative track. Sometimes one doesn't directly concede the other's point, but comes up with a way around it. T and P were both wanting to play the same My Little Pony character, but P didn't want that, so she came up with her own original MLP persona (with her own name, colors, and "cutie mark," natch) that she can be if T wants the same character she does. It worked, releasing the tension and letting the game go on. They, and I, are learning to find the yes in as many situations as we can. (Part of this idea also comes from Sandra Dodd's writing and web pages; here's one about saying yes.)
We're also looking at competition, friendly and otherwise, and how it affects our relationships. Are we racing? Does everyone have to be racing for it to really be a race? If only the winner was racing, how does their gloating affect the rest of us? One way the kids argue about racing is getting buckled into car seats when we're getting ready to go somewhere. I wanted to head off the same old argument one day as we got ready to go, so I made up a song on the fly, to a raucous western-ish tune:
No one wins, but everybody wins, when we work together
No one wins, but everybody wins, when we're on the same team
When we work against each other, people win or lose
So there's one thing we get to do: We all get to choose
'Cause no one wins, but everybody wins, when we work together
No one wins, but everybody wins, when we're on the same team
Like most of my songs, it was pretty ad hoc, but it hit a nerve for the kids. They've been requesting it a lot and singing it themselves, especially when things are getting a little more tense and competitive than they're comfortable with. They understood my suggestion that, really, our goal was to get going, so we all won once we were all buckled in, regardless of who finished first.
In other social happenings, P now has a good friend at park days, one of the girls whose fairy house P added a tornado shelter to on that first good day. And I've been gratified that P has asked for, and taken, my advice several times recently. Sometimes she listens to my reasoning and still chooses something else, but she asks and listens, and I like that.
There's been a lot of reading. Some examples:
- I picked up The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes for twenty cents at a library sale a while back. Recently P picked it up and read it for hours on end.
- UnschoolerDad order a book of the collected Copper web comics. When it came, P picked it up and read it all evening.
- When I've brought home library books and at other times, P's been reading picture books to T a lot, and both of them are enjoying it.
- One night, P stayed up very late and read an entire Magic School Bus chapter book about butterflies.
- We watched a Nature program about raccoons. This happened in two sittings, because once a family of baby raccoons appeared for a few minutes in the program, the kids were off to play baby raccoons. In the second sitting, we heard how urban raccoons may be evolving for more sophisticated brain development, as the urban environment gives them ever more challenging situations to respond to.
- We (mostly P and I) watched a NOVA program on genetic testing and genomics. The program covered techniques and ethics of embryonic screening; how some genes determine disorders while others only influence their probability of occurring; how some people choose not to find out about the risk-factor genes, since the influence is fuzzy enough that they'd rather not know; how some people choose to get tested for things like the Huntington's gene so they can plan their lives accordingly and make appropriate financial plans; the structure of DNA and how single mutations or multiple copies of a sequence can cause problems; how DNA specifies proteins, which do most of the body's work; and more. Experimental drug therapies for melanoma and cystic fibrosis (CF) were described, along with patient case studies and the mechanism of failure in CF. I talked with P about how I got tested for the CF gene before getting pregnant, but since I was negative, UnscoolerDad (UD) didn't get tested, which means P may want to get tested before having kids in case she has a CF gene copy from UD. (We also talked about how, since genetic science and technology is progressing so fast, she may face a whole different set of tests and choices than we did.) When P was listening to the part of the program about mutations, she remembered a set of monsters in World of Warcraft called Mutated Owlkin; these monsters are found in an area with lots of radiation.
- We watched the first part of a NOVA pragram about tornadoes; perhaps we'll watch the rest another time. It covered Doppler radar, and how you can use it to see the hook shapes in a thunderstorm that indicate a tornado may be forming. It also had great graphics of the jet stream and other weather patterns that contribute to tornado formation. We talked about duck and cover, and where the safer places are to be in a tornado.
- We watched part of a PBS program about industrial agriculture. The first part of the program was very gee-whiz positive about all of it; unfortunately P got interested in something else just as the program started to get around to environmental and health consequences. Maybe we'll finish it soon!
- Both kids asked the same question within a day of each other: Are lions nocturnal? This led to a YouTube exploration of lions hunting, elephants helping each other out of a water hole, keepers moving an elephant to a new zoo exhibit nearby that we hope to visit, people taking a behind-the-scenes visit with two zoo hippos, and many other animal things. It turns out, by the way, that lions sleep about 20 hours out of 24, and their few active hours occur during both night and day.
Since it's been so long since I got anything out on this blog, I'll write up the rest of my notes (writing, economics, math, computers, etc.) in another post. But to wind up this one, here's a quick note on where my online time has been going instead of to this blog: Partly I'm playing World of Warcraft, with P or on my own; but lately I'm brushing up my Spanish and beginning to learn German on DuoLingo, a translation and language-learning project I encountered in a TED talk a while back that's still in the beta phase. T likes to listen to the audio that DuoLingo puts out and ask what each sentence means. P wants to try using it to learn Spanish, so I've put her on the list for a beta invitation. I tried LingQ a while back, but I didn't find it as engaging as DuoLingo has been so far, and trying to start a new language (Mandarin) on LingQ was a total fail for me; I just couldn't get a toehold. DuoLingo seems to have a better approach for a cold start on a language, though I've done enough singing in German that I can't quite say I'm starting from nothing; and of course having most of the alphabet in common between English and German is a huge help, compared to Mandarin. But aside from software comparisons, the most fun thing I've learned while playing with DuoLingo is that I do just fine working on two foreign languages at once. It might even make both go better. I used to think I had only one foreign-language spot in my head for a given word or concept in English, but it turns out there's more capacity there than I thought.
