Getting Closer to a Groove

It's been a busy time, and I've been remembering to write a lot of it down, so here goes with an unexpectedly-soon post!

I've been feeling like I'm settling into a better groove with the kids. Listening better to their questions, making sure my responses are as informative as I can manage, remembering to look it up later if I don't have a good answer, and following where the interests lead without judgment or wishing they were going somewhere else (or at least without acting on those wishes -- one step at a time!). I think I've had some success at directing less and collaborating more, at asking them for their thoughts when things get hard, and generally being present to them more. It's a good feeling.


Reading

• More in the library book on the human body. We've read about the structure of bones, osteomalacia and osteoporosis (after reading this  they asked for their vitamins to get their calcium and vitamin D supplements), the names of skeletal muscles (which one is this that's sore?), the male and female urinary and reproductive systems, what kidneys are for and some of what can go wrong with them (one of our cats is going through acute kidney failure, so this was of special interest). We continued with teeth, the anatomy of the mouth, and the parts of the digestive system and their functions. 
• P continues to read over my shoulder on the computer and during videos when there is text onscreen. 
• P reads kids' books to T pretty frequently.
• T played with Starfall.com for a while, enjoying the letter games and (with my help) the story pages.

Doing

• P went to a one-time class on mirrors at the local children's museum. I didn't go with her, so I don't know many details, but she excitedly showed me her drawing of the sunspots she'd observed through a solar telescope, and she made a triangular tube, mirrored on the inside, that gives nice kaleidoscopic effects when you look through it.
• Cleaning up -- mostly this is me, but P sometimes decides to dig in and get her room in better shape, with or without my help. And once recently, when I'd decided to spend half an hour tidying up at a run (while playing music) to get some aerobic exercise, T found the speed and liveliness contagious and helped me. We were so effective that before the half hour was up, there was very little stuff left to put away! P also dove willingly into cleaning her room more than has been usual recently when she got a book on CD from the library.
• Hooping (see below, under Making, for how we got started on this) -- P is working on hooping tricks in her own style, and she has some pretty original stuff going on. I've been working on it a lot, and I'm having fun hooping in the nearest shady spot when the kids are playing happily at a park.
• Swimming, with an emphasis on fun rather than specific skills. T, however, enjoys floating on his back with some support from me.

Making

• One mom in our unschooling park day group, after several people had fun learning some hula-hooping tricks from her, took orders with measurements and made custom-sized polyethylene-tubing hoops for everyone who wanted them -- 40 new hoopers! She brought appropriate tape for adding texture, weight, and decoration to the hoops, and each person decorated their own (or asked their mom to do it with their chosen colors!). P and I both got hoops. I can already see that I should have gotten one for T as well -- he loves trying to hoop with P's hoop, though it's too big for him to have extended success. P, armed with the right size hoop for her, has gone from frustrated to quite competent at hooping; and I'm having fun learning and inventing tricks to try. Hooping and hoop dancing are not as intense aerobically as running, but you can sure work up a sweat at them and strengthen some core muscles, as my sore body will attest!
• We bought T his first Lego Creator set -- it makes two kinds of rescue plane and one rescue boat. In the course of putting them together (he needed some support from me at first, but became increasingly independent after initial tries), he pays attention to numbers (step numbers on the page and counting bumps to find the right-size pieces), symmetry, angles, size, relative position, color, and whatever it looks like is taking shape (the nose of a plane, the engines, etc.). I was surprised, as we were going through the instructions for the first model plane, that he correctly and consistently identified the back end of the plane, although it took a while for it to be clear to me where the back was. It's a much richer experience than I had imagined.  T also did some improvising, adding waterskis to the bottom of the boat and such. P already has a couple of Lego Friends sets she got for her birthday this year, and the process of putting them together is similar, but she already had the number skills more firmly and put them together mostly by herself, so I didn't get as intimate a look at the process for her.

Writing

• P wrote out a recipe. She would ask how to spell things, and I'd encourage (but not require) her to take a guess and then let her know how she was doing. Most of her guesses were correct this time. Her spelling is gradually improving. I'm hoping her confidence will follow.
• Both kids signed their names to a note I sent along with a birthday present to their cousin. This was a big deal for T, who's only written his name 2 or 3 times before. Not so much for P, though she enjoyed writing her name in cursive.

Watching

• Fairly Legal, a TV series about a mediator working within a large law firm. The show takes the usual dramatic liberties with what mediators or lawyers would actually do, but it's neat to see how the different perspectives of lawyers and mediators work out in resolving conflicts, and of course it's nice for siblings to see how hard the mediator will work to find a win-win solution.
• Martha Speaks, the show about the talking dog, uses new vocabulary in ways that help it stick nicely.

Listening

• Me singing: UU hymns, chants, rounds (occasionally P learns them and we sing them in canon), patriotic songs, peace anthems, folk and country songs my dad sang to me when I was little, and whatever else pops into my mind along with enough of its lyrics at bedtime. 
• Lively music on the radio, when someone wants it.
• P checked out Book 5 of the 39 Clues series (The Black Circle) on CD and polished it off in just two days. This one is set in Russia, and I think it's related to the killings of the royal family at the time of the Revolution, though I wasn't listening closely enough to be sure.
• We went to an outdoor concert at a favorite park, but the amplified music was too loud for both kids. We tried moving way back away from the speakers, but they still weren't having a good time, so we ended up leaving. Maybe earplugs, or cotton to stuff in sensitive ears, should be in our car!

Talking

• When T was putting together his Lego set, P really wanted him to be playing with her instead. She wove and acted out an intense narrative right nearby, with eraser-pet animals and vehicles built of her own Lego. He was sucked in several times, though he kept coming back to his building. Often when they start off playing together, P weaves a tale, but conflict arises when T wants to do something in a different way (contribute his own thinking to the the game). In this case, she had to focus on creating a tale that would draw him in as much as possible, without direct feedback from him aside from what got him to come away from his building to look.
• Overheard between the kids: P was telling T about how, when T was a baby, he would pull P's hair really hard. T said, "Oh, is that why you boss me around so much?" P assured him she hardly remembered the hair pulling. T asked, "Then why do you do it?" and after a pause added, "I would like you to stop." This is clearer than he's been on this issue in the past. It seems to be much on his mind. I think it will be interesting to think with P about why she does act bossy so much and what might help change that dynamic. Her first thought in the conversation with T was that maybe she should stop hanging around a particular friend so much, since she is "the queen of the bossy people." P has mixed feelings about this friend, whom she sees at a particular gathering she attends often. She's glad to have someone to play with, but often P ends up in tears before the gathering is over.

Visiting

• We've spent some time at a local children's museum. Both kids love dressing up in costumes and sometimes using them to put on plays. They saw Earth's motions of rotation and revolution on a model where they could sit and spin in place or roll on a track around the sun. P saw why we have seasons using a model of the Sun and Earth that included the tilted axis, the north star, rotation and revolution, and a volunteer with laser tools to demonstrate everything. T played with model trains (electric and Thomas-type) for loooong stretches of time and dug in the sandbox. Both kids played with play money, play train tickets, and a whooshing vacuum system for delivering those little drive-thru bank canisters back and forth. They made huge bubble walls around themselves. They experimented with swinging an LED-lit pendulum over a rotating disk on which the light left tracks, and we saw some of the awesome possibilities of periodic motion. They tried rolling balls down tracks and seeing what shape tracks the balls could complete vs. those they would roll backward on. They learned about pirate flags and their uses in communication with other ships. They built with Lincoln Logs and similar but larger, big-enough-to-walk-inside-the-finished-house, modular building pieces. They held prisms and diffraction gratings (aka CDs) in sunlight and played with rainbows. They held their hands up in front of red, green, and blue lights and saw the multitude of colored shadows created by blocking some lights and not others. They shared toys, ideas, and pretend play with other kids, including friends and strangers, and made friends with the children of a friend of mine who just moved to town. At one point my friend observed, "The girls have traded little brothers, and I think they both like the change!"

Thinking, asking questions, planning...

• P asked whether Tasmanian devils were close relatives of dogs or cats. We looked them up and found they were marsupials. We talked about mammals including all three animals, and then about the major divisions of mammals (placental mammals, marsupials, and monotremes) and the key differences among them. P was very amused by the short-beaked echidna pictured on the Wikipedia page on monotremes. Even though her favorite TV show, Phineas and Ferb, includes a platypus character, Perry (he has his own theme song, similar to "Secret Agent Man," which starts off, "He's a semiaquatic, egg-laying mammal of action!"), beaked mammals were a funny idea. I think that speaks to a pretty good concept of mammals in general, monotremes excepted!

Short-beaked echidna

• P asked me, as we were in the car, about to turn onto the residential through street near our house, whether it was a one-way street. I said no, they were all two-way around here, so she asked, "Then why do we drive right down the middle of it?" I pointed out we were slightly to the right and talked about what my driver ed teacher told me -- that when you're driving on a street without lane markings, you have to position yourself between actual and likely hazards. We talked about what those were for that road -- oncoming traffic (none at the moment), car doors opening or people or animals walking out between parked cars (always possible), and P understood that was why we would drive out toward the middle rather than hugging the parked cars on the right. We also talked about how drivers always need to be scanning ahead for possible hazards, like children playing in yards, dogs walking off leash, cars backing out of driveways, and other beings who might dart out into the road without thinking or without seeing us in time to avoid a collision without our vigilance.
• P asked why the police tell people to come out (of buildings, cars, etc.) with their hands up. We talked about the possibility of concealed weapons and the police needing to know that people aren't about to use them.
• P asked why people learn to fly on gliders rather than small powered planes. We talked about the pros and cons: it would be nice to have the option of aborting a landing and going around again if you miss the runway, for example, but in a glider there would be fewer controls to learn to handle simultaneously. We also talked about instructors with dual controls providing a safeguard against serious errors by new pilots.
• P asked whether you need to get a permit when you move from one state to another. I told her that wasn't necessary within the United States, but that you did need a visa to move to another country. We also talked about what you do have to do when you change states, like getting a driver's license in your new state, re-registering your car, re-registering to vote, etc.
• P asked why some horses whose paddocks we were driving by had hoods on that covered their eyes. We wondered whether they were skittish and could relax better when blindfolded. We looked it up after we got home and found out those were fly masks. Flies like to drink the liquid that comes from a horse's eyes, and this is very annoying to the horse. The fly masks are made of a fabric that the horses can see through, because it's so close to their eyes. One site we found said that horses are almost never blindfolded, unless it's an emergency situation like a fire, when the handler needs to lead a horse quickly without it being distracted by scary things around it.
• T asked whether there were real rescue planes like the one he was building with his Lego set. We looked up rescue seaplanes and found some interesting Wikipedia pages, like this one, about particular flying boats.