Reading
- We read Little House in the Big Woods recently, as bedtime reading, and started on Little House on the Prairie. T listened carefully to the details of Pa making bullets, scrutinized the pictures, and asked me about it again a couple of nights later. P was excited to hear about square dancing and wanted to know if people still knew how to do it (yes) and if I knew how to do it (yes, a little). Perhaps we'll seek out some square dancing or contra dancing locally so she can try it. T asked what "pebbles" meant when we read about pebbles on the share of Lake Pepin. He knew about gravel from playgrounds, but didn't remember hearing small rocks called pebbles before. We read about cheese making, maple sugaring, and much more. As we started running into parts that are derogatory toward Indians, I noticed several local homeschooling moms chatting online about what other books they've used to give a more accurate or balanced view of Native Americans in that time period. We have one well-liked book from that discussion on hold at the library now; more on that when/if we read it!
- P checked out several graphic novels at the great library that is a short walk from our new house. She's especially enjoying Akiko (the children's librarian said a lot of girls especially like this series), and it's wonderful to hear her read aloud from it. She's very fluent and gets a lot of appropriate expression into her reading voice.
- T continues his frequent readings with UnschoolerDad of The Sneetches and Other Stories. He likes to read some of the words on each page (mostly from memory, but there is some actual decoding starting to happen), and with almost every reading he wants to read more of the words. He's asking just the right kinds of questions for starting to decode; for example, he asked UD why there were little sixes everywhere -- that was how he saw lowercase a, as he's still learning some of the lowercase letters.
- We parked a twenty-minute walk from P's choir rehearsal and walked there along a local bike path that followed a creek. P and T both really enjoyed the walk. I commented as we passed a Jewish temple, and P wanted to know how I could tell that was what it was (Star of David, Hebrew lettering on sign, transliterated Hebrew in name of congregation), and talked just a bit about Jewish theology.
- P went with me to our Democratic headquarters to volunteer on the get-out-the-vote effort one day. They wouldn't put an 8-year-old on the phone (and she wouldn't have wanted to phone, though she would have been happy to stuff envelopes), but she did a bunch of voter-list shredding (for voter privacy) to save time for another volunteer to make calls.
- Both kids did some leaf-raking in our extremely leafy yard, for fun and for pay at different times.
- Both kids enjoyed trick-or-treating. I totally dropped the ball on costumes, between our recent move and election work; but they cheerfully decided on and pulled together costumes (a purple dog, again, and a cowgirl) from what we had on hand and could find. This was T's first year of feeling confident about trick-or-treating, and he had fun, remembered his thank-yous more than he forgot them, and got into some fun conversations with people at their doors.
- P made some very fetching little cards for Thanksgiving, using materials she's found so far as we unpack in our new house. Some of them tell loved ones that she is thankful for them. Others provide space to list things the recipient is thankful for.
- Both kids are building a lot with Lego and wooden building blocks. P was very happy when she finally located her big box of Lego bricks that had been in storage during our move. She builds creatures, vehicles, and often creations that are cyborg-like combinations of the two.
- P continues making her elaborate creations in Minecraft. She's learned to open and search the Minecraft wiki when she wants to know how to make an item.
- P wrote on her Thanksgiving cards, and she's been playing Scribblenauts a lot and asking about spellings of harder words. She comes up with really cool ideas in Scribblenauts, like having her character fly very high on a griffin's back and then parachute down, or getting out of a too-deep-for-a-ladder hole by bouncing on a big trampoline (because just a trampoline didn't quite do the job).
- I brought in a tiny snail I found in the backyard, so the kids could get their first up-close look at a live snail. We put it on a plastic mat in the kitchen and tried bringing different things (grass, some dandelion leaves from where I found it, a slice of turnip, etc.) to see if it would be interested in eating them. P also experimented with moisture on the board to see how the snail would react. We were considering keeping it around inside for a while (I thought it might freeze to death soon otherwise), but we looked up a bit about snails and found that they hibernate, so after we'd watched it a good long while, we put it back outside where I found it, so it could go about the business of finding a good hibernation spot. Another day, after I killed a yellowjacket that had gotten into the house, P and I took a good look at its body structure and texture. She remarked on how smooth it was, "almost like plastic," and on how much its wings resembled smaller dragonfly wings.
- On Election Day, I had an electoral map updating on my computer starting when the polls closed on the East Coast. P saw it and wanted to know how it all worked. She was very anxious about the possibility of Romney winning the presidency, and glad to see the electoral votes piling up for Obama, but I don't think she really believed me that Obama was winning at first -- after all, there were those huge red swaths across middle America! She felt better after I showed her the electoral map and equivalent cartogram for the 2008 presidential election on Wikipedia (look down a bit, on the right side of the page, for these images), so she could see in the cartogram how all those red states didn't account for many people/electors compared to the blue states. UnschoolerDad and P had a short talk about the House still having a Republican majority, and why highly polarized partisan politics could still make it hard to get things done. I find, as I try to explain why we believe as we do on certain issues, that I need to make sure UD and I don't demonize the other side inordinately. A blogger I love put it well, quoting her son as asking, during the election eight years ago, "So, if George Bush were driving in his car, and he saw me, would he try to run me over?"
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| The scary, geographically correct electoral map for 2008 |
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| The reassuring (to Obama supporters), electorally correct cartogram for 2008 |
- I heard P humming the tune to "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" in the car, so I sang the first verse. P asked where it was from, and I said it was a wartime song (couldn't remember which war, but thought it was the Civil War) about waiting for the young men to come safely back from the war. She asked about their ages, and I said there was probably a minimum age, but some boys lied about their age and went when they were younger. An interesting discussion ensued about why someone might WANT to go off to war (fighting for their ideals, a chance at excitement or a new life, desire for glory). Later, I looked it up, and we found out that "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" was a pro-war song from the Civil War era, set to an older Irish tune, "Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye," which was an anti-war song!
- I don't remember how the conversation about adrenaline started, but P and I talked about "a rush of adrenaline" as what happens when you are angry, scared, or very excited. We talked about how adrenaline temporarily suppresses immune responses, so for example, if you have a cold and are singing in a concert, your stage fright will probably keep you from coughing or sniffling during the concert. We also talked about how, in a crisis situation, adrenaline might give you greater strength and/or endurance than you would have without the adrenaline surge.
- P said, as she's said several times recently, that she wishes she could go back into the past -- the horse-drawn-wagon, washing-clothes-by-hand past of the Little House books, which we've been reading out loud recently. We've talked about the incessant nature of chores in that time compared to now, but also about some things that might be pleasantly different. She speculated about being able to introduce some labor-saving devices early, and wondered whether time travel might actually become possible in her lifetime. I told her about one of my favorite books, Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, and how in that story, time travel to the past results in the present ceasing to exist. I told her a little about the interventions decided upon in that book (giving smallpox immunity, better weapons, and some potentially protective religious ideas to some native American groups to place them in a more powerful position upon Columbus's arrival), to make changes around 1492, in hopes of correcting the disastrous route history had taken by our future/the book's present. I said I didn't know whether she'd enjoy the book yet, but she said, "Oh, I'm all about time travel," so I guess we'll give it a try when we find it. We just moved, so most of our books are still in boxes.
- Listening to the radio one day, P asked what the electoral college was. Complicated discussion ensued as we talked about the E.C. vote versus the popular vote. We also got into apportionment of Congress members and Senators, since electors for a state are mostly equal to the sum of those two.
- Both kids are ecstatic to be living just two blocks from our new local library, since we moved last month. They love the kids-only computers in the children's section, and they love walking or riding their bikes to the library. Wait till they find out the local rec center's nearly as close in another direction!
- P decided to spend some allowance on deeply discounted gymnastics clothing. T was considering also getting a fancy, shiny gymnastics shirt -- he tried it on and told me he wanted to buy it -- but as I almost always do for him, I reminded him that he'd been telling me he was saving up for a particular Lego set, and asked him to decide whether getting the shirt was more important than that goal. He thought for a few minutes and decided to save for the Legos. He doesn't always decide this way -- eraser pets recently won out over the savings goal -- but sometimes savings win out.
- T asked how you send papers -- he wanted to know how mail works, so I explained about addresses, stamps, mail carriers, sorting at the post office, and planes and trucks to get the mail to the right delivery area. I wrote a letter to my parents from him, using his words/ideas (he signed his name), so he could send some mail. And shortly afterward, he got some back!
- We drive pretty often by a Catholic church that, at the moment, has 3000+ crosses planted in its front yard, with signs about abortion. P asked what the crosses were all about, so I gave her the basics of what abortion is and the opposing viewpoints about it. Hard topic! We also talked some about contraception, which to my mind should be the best thing for both sides, since it minimizes the demand for abortions -- but I can't claim to speak for Catholics. Then, the next day, P asked me to read aloud to her from a book I bought a long time ago at a library sale, thinking P might be ready for it one of these years: Catherine, Called Birdy. It's a humorous teen novel set in 1290, voiced as the diary of a 13-year-old young woman. She's the daughter of a country knight with modest holdings for a noble, and she hates her life and writing about it, but her mother has made a deal that if she writes a daily account for her brother (an aspiring monk who is trying to make sure she gets at least a little education), she need not spin. Spinning is worse than writing, so the game's afoot. Just about every paragraph requires some kind of explanation of a vocabulary word (e.g., betrothal), a social structure (e.g., dowries, or feudalism and the tenant farmer system, including payment of rents in goods rather than currency), a historical phenomenon (e.g., the Crusades), if not several of these. Very rich, thick going. But P gets most of the humor, and she asks good questions about the explanations. How did the Church get to be in charge of so much? That one took a while, but fortunately we'd watched some videos about the Roman Empire, so she had some background for it.
- T and I watched several episodes of Little House on the Prairie on DVD while he was sick one day. He asked me several times whether this was real life. I think he was trying to get the hang of live action vs. animated video (he's seen lots of animation in a variety of styles), and also whether this was filmed close to the present day or in the older times it portrays. I think we got that worked out: I told him these were real people and animals doing things in real places, but that they were people filmed pretty recently, when I was a little girl (I realize that juxtaposition may be confusing for him!), pretending to be people who lived much longer ago.
