There's been some developing body awareness: the kids' awareness of their own needs, and my awareness of how to support them in meeting the needs. T has been moving toward giving up his naps, so early in these last few weeks I stopped trying to help him get down for them, except when he's really dead on his feet. A few times in that first week, he went to bed and took a nap on his own initiative, asking us to close his curtains so his room could be dark. After the first week, he napped less, but sometimes fell asleep on the couch just before or after dinner after a big day. UnschoolerDad and I still need a somewhat regular sleep schedule to keep up with work and the kids, so we still encourage a bedtime, trying to keep it pleasant and loving. Sometimes T really doesn't want to go to bed, and other times he goes down easily. P usually goes to bed without much protest, but I'm sure it helps that she can read in bed if she wants.
A recent outing to a Russian festival on the nearby college campus brought unexpected learning opportunities, in addition to the chance to hear Balkan music and try some Russian cookies. We rode the bus to the festival to avoid parking difficulties near campus, and P spent a long time reading the route map and learning how to use it. (P and T have also been playing a lot lately with a United States map that goes with their Tag reader, getting more familiar with where things are in our home country.) When the festival didn't hold the kids' attention (it wasn't geared as much to young people as we thought it might be), we wandered down to a nearby pond, where P noticed the way the pond drain was built and we talked about how that would keep the pond at a constant water level. We checked out the turtles resting on a log in the pond and thought about why they would choose that spot for warming sun, available moisture, and sufficient distance from likely predators. Someone was trying out his thrift-store radio-controlled boat on the pond, and he let each of the kids steer it for a little while, which they loved. We met a few other homeschoolers, broadening our local network a bit.
In the food department, T has a typically narrow diet for a four-year-old, but not too much so (lots of bread, tortillas, cheese, and peanut butter and jelly, with some fruits and vegetables and a few beans, other grains, etc.), though he's growing a bit more willing to taste new things; I hope our not forcing the issue will help him continue getting more adventurous and finding more things he enjoys. [Note from June: He has continued to be more willing to taste things.] P is enjoying more variety, sometimes choosing to make herself salads with custom ingredients (a favorite recipe follows) rather than eat the old lunch standbys. She's told me she wants to learn to prepare more of the foods she eats, and maybe go for a week making all her own food and some of T's. So far she's gone a day, but then wanted help, which is fine with me. She sometimes asks to help when I'm cooking, too.
Rockin' Salad - P's invention
1 apple, cut up in chunks
1 green onion, chopped
12 or so green olives
1-2 ounces of cheese, preferably pepper jack, in chunks
No dressing required. Side dish of sardines can be nice.
P wrote the list of ingredients for her salad, and the beginning of a story she's writing and illustrating. I showed her how to use Word's spell checker when she's not sure how to spell something -- for every misspelled word we entered into it, she picked the correct alternative from the list of suggestions, so I think she's learning to identify correct spellings by sight for familiar words, even if she can't produce the correct spelling on the first try herself. I've heard that other unschoolers have learned to spell in a similar way. I'm trying to support P using the computer to find what she wants (log in to a game, or Netflix, or look up something on the internet if she's willing), so keyboarding is becoming motivated for her. I still do stuff for her if she asks me, but she's more and more willing to do it herself. I need to think about which of my online passwords I'm willing for her to have! Fortunately they're all different, so we can pick and choose. She's starting to learn to navigate what actions might cause problems (being charged money unintentionally, going to a web site that might put malware on our computer, etc.), but she still has a lot to learn. Mostly I stay close by when she's using the computer, so we can check out unfamiliar situations together. I'll have her read me dialog boxes rather than just looking and clicking through myself, so she learns what they say and how to respond, and when possible I try to explain why I choose the action I do.
In other writing fun, P used the phrase "big cat allergies" to mean severe allergies to cats. I giggled about the possible alternate meaning (allergies to lions, cheetahs, etc.), and she wanted to know what was funny, so I showed her how punctuation could make the difference between "big cat allergies" and "big-cat allergies."
P recently received a Lego Friends set, with hundreds of itty-bitty pieces to assemble into a cafe scene. She meticulously followed the instructions, which had no words but required close attention to detail over a long period, and successfully assembled the cafe. I was interested to see that she built a mirror image of what the instructions showed, so I asked her about it. She had noticed that several steps in, and thought hard about how to reverse each subsequent step.
One day P and I had a great conversation about economics. P started it by remarking that, since Luna bars seemed to be getting more popular, she thought their makers might raise the prices since the demand would be higher. (We had talked once before about low supply and high demand leading to higher prices.) I said they might do that, but because it would make some customers unhappy and prompt them to look for cheaper brands, perhaps they'd increase their profits in other ways, like running the machines that make the bars for extra shifts and hiring more workers. We talked and thought together about economies of scale -- even though the extra power and worker hours would cost more, Luna might not need more machines; or if they did, they might be able to fit them in existing factory space; and so on, allowing the product to get cheaper as production and sales increased. We also talked about how, if Luna needed to increase prices to cover their costs, they might bring out new flavors that would cost more, and later bring other prices up to match if the new flavors were popular enough; or possibly they'd make some product improvement they could tout on the packaging and increase the price at the same time. And we went backwards in time, thinking about how a person selling their first-ever snack bars, baked at home, at a farmer's market say, might have to charge a lot more per bar to start off (no wholesale deals on ingredients, no economies of scale in production) -- but how some people might be willing to pay those prices for an interesting new product, or because they could meet the producer and find out a lot about the product. And then that person might ramp up production by leasing a commercial kitchen and hiring workers to help, if the demand was growing and a local store wanted to carry the bars. Some of these concepts have come up in other conversations since.
P thinks a lot about ways to make money. We watched a video together about Caine's Arcade -- it's really worth seeing and is linked below. P asked if I thought she could do something similar, and we talked about the advantages Caine had -- one of the biggest being the use of a storefront, since his dad's auto parts business had mostly gone online. (Of course Caine had only one customer until the flash mob -- we haven't gone there explicitly yet, but I think P understood.)
Not long after watching this, P built a supermarket for fairies out of paper and cardboard. It included shelves for the goods being sold, signs, and an elevator so the tiny fairies could get from one level to another.
P asks almost every day what something means -- something she's heard on the radio, or read in a story, or seen in a TV program. Today, as we ate dinner and she watched a baseball game being played silently on the TVs in the restaurant bar, she asked what the goal of a baseball game was. Yesterday she clarified the meanings of increase and decrease. Today we followed up with what "in decline" meant when said of a person or animal.
Both kids got cameras of their own this month, so UnschoolerDad and I can worry less about ours getting wet, dropped, lost, etc. The kids noticed odd blurs in some of their images and turned it into a ghost hunt! We also experimented with taking photos of moving objects, or scenes with large disparity in lighting, and trying to create some of those mysterious blurs in those ways.
A quick math/numbers roundup:
- T made his first paper-model cell phone -- the kids play with these a lot, but in the past P has made them all. T wanted to write the numbers on his phone, and P helped by writing sample numbers he could copy.
- P came and offered to show me how to divide a pizza into 3 equal parts, using a drawing. The pattern blocks were out, so I duplicated her picture using a yellow hexagon with 3 blue rhombuses arranged to cover it, so the same angles showed up in the middle. She watched, then said in an odd, sing-song way, "That's science." So I sang back, "Or math, or geometry, or life." She smiled.
- P was setting up an easter-egg hunt for both kids. She had 16 eggs, and unasked, she worked out that they could find 8 eggs apiece. Thinking about it a bit, she then exclamed, "I did that right!" and explained her reasoning: half 10 (5) plus half 6 (3) is eight.
