Worms, screen-free week, gardens, and more friends!

This blog covers a longer period than most, partly because we recently had a screen-free week. The kids were into the idea, and I joined them, though I did use email and recipe lookup sites. But not this one. :)  So here's a sampling of what we've been up to:

Reading

• One day, T realized that he could touch my phone screen in such a way as to highlight words on a web page. He loved highlighting different words and portions of words and having me read them. He did it over and over, breaking down different words, phrases, and parts of words, and he noticed with interest that when he highlighted the "hum" part of "human" I pronounced it differently than I did when the whole word was highlighted. He also liked highlighting spaces between words and asking me which words he'd just separated.
• P has been reading a novel called The Merlin Effect from the library, and other books from time to time. She's also been devouring comic-strip treasuries, including The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes. The Far Side books have been fun for exploring some of the cultural references the jokes rely on. 
• My sister sent several picture books for the kids' birthdays, about the civil rights struggle of the 1950s-1960s in the United States, and we've read those together and talked a little about what was going on then and how things are different now, though racism still happens in some ways. Before I even got to the books, P had read all but one.
• We did a lot of reading aloud during screen-free week, even more than at other times. Some reading was by candlelight. I liked turning off the lights in the evening and reading in the circle of candlelight with the kids. It's amazing how distractions recede when the circle of light in a room is small. We focused better on the story and each other, and had good conversations, at those times.

Doing

• We took a trip on an airplane, the first T can remember. He loved watching the control surfaces on the wing do their things, always pointing out when he saw them change. We talked a little, when we were at full flaps for landing, about how that mimics birds who cup their wings forward when landing, to maintain lift while slowing forward motion. P was amazed at how slowly we seemed to be moving when we were up high. We played with different ways of clearing our ears on ascent and descent. We speculated about where the stuff in the airplane toilet goes on flushing. Here's a good answer.
• We started an indoor worm bin, buying worms from a garden center. We put it together, and the kids like looking inside to see where the worms are, what they seem to like best to eat, and how the food scraps change over time.
• The kids also enjoyed helping me assemble the outdoor compost bin, and playing inside it until we took it out and started loading it up. 
• During screen-free week, we played a lot of cards. P learned to play Gin, Five Crowns, Spit, and War with me. War (the most boring card game ever?) was made more interesting by having T judge who won each comparison. He was quite accurate in his decisions, and seemed to enjoy the practice. I asked if he'd give us a dramatic decision ("Queen beats three!"), and found that he didn't know all the number names; but he was game, so he got some practice with them.
• While T was having his gymnastics class one day, P and I sat in the bleachers. There was pop music playing, and I heard P starting to hum in harmony with the music. I started tapping some body percussion and then humming another harmony along with her. It kept changing over a few songs, and it was a wonderful series of wordlessly collaborative improvisational moments.

A great hand-me-down gift from a neighbor a few years ago comes into its own.

Both kids have played a lot recently with a color-sorting toy that uses binary ideas. T traces routes physically, adjusting the controls on the left to let a ball go where it belongs. P was doing the same. Then I asked them if they'd figured out the number part -- that if you make the numbers with "1" next to them on the left add up to the number under the slot you're aiming for, the ball will go there. Both of them started paying more attention to that and practicing some addition as a result. I gave P an introduction to writing numbers in binary format, but I'm not sure it stuck.

Making

• T's birthday happened recently, and P made her presents for him. He's always wanting to take over the couch or a long table as a runway for his toy planes, so P made him a cardboard runway, complete with a slight upward slope, drawn-on lights, and directional arrows. She also made a sort of airport terminal with waiting area, complete with tiny scrolls for the people to read while they waited.
• One day while I was digging the garden, T and P worked together inside to build a zipline the right size for Polly Pocket dolls to use, plus hooks and harnesses they could ride in.

Writing

• P told me one morning recently, when everyone else got up rather late, that she'd been in her room since early, drawing and writing. She hasn't yet showed me what she did.
• One morning, I found T had arisen before me and was diligently writing letters in a book for that purpose. P told me he'd found the book the night before. T used it all day, asking for different kinds of help (more details early on, then less as he got the hang of it), and going through all the letters. The next week or two, he used a magnetic drawing tablet a lot to write different things. One morning he asked me to show him how to write his name, so I wrote an example for him on a nearby dry-erase board. He wrote it beautifully, then erased both versions and kept writing his name through the day. He's written his name before, but this was the first time he did it without a model right in front of him. He's not reading very much yet, though he is recognizing some words in context by their first letters. It seems he may be learning to write first. :)
• T and I worked together to compose a thank-you note for a birthday gift. He didn't know what to say (it's a new skill for him), so I talked about the sorts of things people often say, asked him what he liked about the gift, and made suggestions about what to write, writing down the ones he approved of.

Watching

• I read in a favorite mom's blog about her kids, who enjoy cooking, doing "Iron Chef Lunch" some weekends when she is fresh out of energy and lunch ideas. I thought that could be fun if we built up the right skills and knowledge, so we watched a couple of episodes of Iron Chef America. The kids didn't like it as much as I did, but they got the concept, and it was interesting, if a little creepy, watching the crayfish episode (all recipes starting with live crayfish). We talked about crayfish basically being big water-dwelling bugs, and about other instances of human eating bugs on purpose.

Listening

• We had the radio on more than usual during our screen-free week, usually to the public-radio talk station. We didn't talk a whole lot about what we heard, but I could tell that at times the kids were listening. Sometimes if I went to turn the radio off, P told me she was listening and wanted to finish the story.

Talking

• P and T invented and initiated their own game, in T which gives P a series of numbers, and she adds them one by one for a cumulative total. I just listened to her get to 47 without making a mistake, even when she was mentally adding two 2-digit numbers (16 and 21). They've been doing this when I wasn't listening, they say. It tickles me to listen to P improving her mental arithmetic while T improves his sense of numbers and how quickly or slowly they add up.

Visiting

• We went to the county recycling center to buy a good compost bin at a good price. They had a self-guided tour area from which we could see the sorting machines, the railroad spur that took the recyclables away, the wetlands that were helping with water purification, and lots of useful signs explaining the process of separating recyclables from each other and from contaminants. There was also a display that did a much better job than the pamphlets we get in the mail of explaining what can go in the curbside pickup, what can't, and why. Seeing how the machines worked made these rules make much more sense, too.
• I've been digging up a garden plot in the front yard, and that has helped with meeting neighbors. Recently a dad and two kids were ambling by, and I called T out to play (P was away at a musical with UnschoolerDad). We found out where they lived and visited them shortly afterward, seeing their garden and backyard and meeting their backyard chickens.
• I saw the next-door neighbor's child, a little older than mine, playing in the snow one day by herself. I asked if she'd like to play with my kids if they came out, and she said yes, so P and T dressed in a hurry and spent the rest of the afternoon playing outside with her. That was the start of a beautiful relationship -- she comes over often to play, and we are in good communication with her parents. This is the first time we've had a friend close enough for truly spontaneous visits and play, and we're loving it. P went to her house one day and played with her six pet rats.
• P went to an evening campfire at church with me. After we'd toasted our fill of marshmallows, I fell in with the music makers, and she played with several kids around the big yard. She told me afterward that she needed to come to the late service the next day, since she'd agreed with another kid to meet and check on the rabbits they'd found. Usually P and T don't come with me to church; I go to the early service and come back quickly so UD can do his own Sunday activity, and the kids prefer to stay home. That Sunday, though, they both went to church, and they both enjoyed it. I hope we're opening the way for them to enjoy church with me. They are both registered for a week-long day camp at church this summer, and with luck, they will build some friendships there that will make church even more fun for them.
• On our trip by plane, we visited friends, family, the beach in Alameda, and Chinatown in Oakland. On the beach we looked at birds, shells, erosion patterns, and how the tides went in and out. The kids built sandcastles. In Chinatown we tried new foods from a dim sum takeout stand, looked at traditional and American-influenced children's clothing for sale, looked at and bought a few beautiful things made of fabric and semi-precious stones. We also noticed how many more people were hanging around outdoors, without or without their families, and talked a little about the history of Chinese immigrants in the American West and how and why Chinatowns would have formed and persisted.

Thinking, Asking Questions, Planning...

• In the car one day, we were listening to a story on NPR about the foster care system. The interviewer mentioned that the guest had been a foster mom for more than a quarter century. I kept listening for a couple of minutes, and then P said this: "A quarter century would be 25 years. Because I know half of 100 is 50. And the sound on my computer goes up to 50, and when it's exactly halfway up it's on 25. [She told me later she knew it was exactly halfway because she could see it on two different scales, one showing 50 out of 100 and one showing 25 out of 50.] And half of 5 is two and a half, and if you imagine each of those ones is a ten, then the half is five, and that makes 25." I was tickled to hear all this -- it's not how I would have taught it (except maybe the last part), and she connected it all together on her own. I asked her later how she knew half of five was two and a half. Her answer: "Well, it wouldn't be fair if one person got three and the other got two, so each should get two and a half." Spoken like a big sister who needs to know these things!
• Again in the car, P asked about the GPS display (miles to next turn):
  - That three point four there, how do you say that?
  - I'm not sure what you mean. I'd say three point four.
  - Yes, but what does it mean?
  - Oh, it means 3 and four tenths. If there were another number, like three point four five, that would be hundredths: three and 45 hundredths.
  I say a little about how UnschoolerDad and I sometimes talk about short times in milliseconds, which are like three decimal places. 100 milliseconds is one tenth of a second.
  P is quiet a moment, then says:
  - I just realized something. One in ten is the same as ten in a hundred is the same as a hundred in a thousand.
  - Yep, that's right. (I went on a bit more about equivalent fractions, but she had moved on, so I let it go.)