Floods, Egypt, and Good Questions

It's been an eventful couple of weeks here. The Front Range just got about a year's worth of rain in about four days. We were fortunately dry and warm in our house, but the roads were dangerous, so we holed up at home for the duration -- glad to have electricity, clean water, and enough food on hand -- and kept up with friends and acquaintances who were evacuating, digging out, and drying out.

I think this is in central Boulder. Here's the original, but be aware -- it will start a video automatically.

The flooding led to some interesting learning around here. T and I played an imaginary game in which he accidentally dropped a magical bucket of water that flooded the whole world. We played at being, and talked about, squid, sea snakes, some of the smallest sea creatures (plankton and coral), some of the fastest sea creatures (tuna), and how we'd be better off breathing with gills. T also asked where the ocean was deepest, and where in the world giant squid lived. We found the Mariana Trench and the Challenger Deep on our world map. We looked up giant squid and found out about where they've been seen (all over the world, pretty much) and how they swim. We also found the first video captured of a giant squid in its own habitat. The scientists in the video were hugely excited, and so was T!

When we were able to drive around again, we were at a Park Day, talking with friends displaced by the floods and seeking interim housing, when another thunderstorm rolled in. We quickly got to the car and started home. On the way home, as we had on the way, we watched for areas that were still flooded or showed signs of flooding (P spotted so much debris caught on one barbed-wire fence that it looked as if it were made of hay bales!), and we talked a little hydrology -- what runoff is, and how it starts to happen faster when the ground is already saturated from previous rains, which was why we were driving home instead of waiting the storm out at the park. We also talked about what to do in a flash flood situation -- getting to higher ground as quickly as possible, which for some people in the canyons meant grabbing only their shoes and each other and climbing a hill in their pajamas before their houses washed away.

We've been reading a lot from the Theodosia series of books about Egyptologists and Egyptian magic in Edwardian London. In those books and online, we read some details about how the ancient Egyptians made mummies of their dead. We talked about the concept of desecration, as we read a part of the story in which a mummy was unwrapped for the entertainment of guests at a party. The story compared this to digging up and undressing one's deceased grandfather. Perhaps the richest thing about the Theodosia books has been their unstinting vocabulary. In the past two weeks, P has learned an enormous number of words from context and from my explaining them as we read. Here's a small sampling, from the times when my notebook was nearby to jot down the juicy words and phrases (while most of these are from Theodosia, a few are from the Ranger's Apprentice series, which P is reading with UnschoolerDad):

* fete * champagne * desecration * lorgnette * ensorcelled * wreak/reek * codger * scrutiny * wrath * stroke * apoplexy * frippery * poltroon * stevedore * treason * sherry * sarcophagus * lavatory * comportment * contravention * impertinent * loathe * glower * discern * simper * disabuse * attributed * grimoire * understatement * mortification * dudgeon * rue the day * tumult * charlatan * wizened * calling card * score (20) * macabre * lumbered * gin * listed * ajar * nonplussed * supercilious * demur * dressed above his station * spats *

I had to look up a few of these myself! Fortunately we're reading library e-books on a Kindle, so definitions for most of them are as easy to find as pushing a few buttons, and the flow of the story is hardly interrupted.

Here's a sampling of what else we've been up to, by general subject areas:

Math, Spatial Learning, and Logic (and a little Reading)

• Both kids have been playing a lot with Minecraft. UnschoolerDad (UD) had some time during the floods to set up a server where they could play together, and he included the ComputerCraft mod, so they can also program "turtles" (like almost everything else in Minecraft, they're cubical) to dig, farm, tunnel, or do other tasks. So far they've mostly seen what UD could make the turtles do. The kids themselves have been continuing to experiment with roller coasters made from mine carts and mine-cart tracks, including ordinary tracks, powered tracks (which can accelerate or brake the carts depending on whether they're on or off), and detector tracks (which are nice for setting off huge piles of TNT blocks and creating new valleys in which to build coasters!). T in particular has been experimenting in very detailed ways. I watched him build a stretch of track between two stops (blocks placed across the track) that used a dip in the tracks to accelerate carts toward and away from one of the stopping blocks. When he had a train of mine carts behaving one way, he'd replace one section of track at a time with a different type of track and see how it affected their behavior. This investigation is completely self-driven. When I watch him I'm reminded of some research I recently read about regarding toys and how kids use them. Apparently when researchers instruct kids in the proper way to use a toy, the kids play with it less and rate it as less enjoyable than when the approach is more discovery-based and open-ended. Minecraft is an incredibly open-ended set of tools and toys, and T is enjoying it and using it a lot! 
• On the reading side of things, T found out about using slash commands to change his game mode mid-game (from survival to creative and back again), and he's learning to recognize and type the appropriate commands. I tell him the letters to type when he asks, describing their position on the  keyboard if he doesn't already know where to find them -- so he's getting some right-left practice here, along with letter recognition and learning some written words. He's asking me a lot to read him the names of items in his inventory so he can find the specific items (often potions, which mostly look alike) he wants to use, and he seems gradually to be recognizing some of the words himself. 
• T has been asking a lot of questions about adding small numbers, and also about doubling numbers again and again. I think many of these are motivated by watching the numbers of items change as he crafts items in Minecraft or organizes his inventory. P answers some of his questions, and seems to enjoy doing so.
• T has also been enjoying making his character in Minecraft invisible (so only his armor shows) and then watching himself in third person while he builds things. This new point of view seemed a little challenging at first, but he's taken to it quickly and now gets around almost as easily with the third-person, varying-angle point of view as he does in first-person view.
• P is building a lot in Minecraft, too. Recently she designed a cruise ship (grounded). It's very large and includes a secret door to a secret-agent office. She used sticky pistons to open the door.
• Once or twice recently, P asked me for some practice at adding 2-digit numbers in her head. She did well, including with carrying (e.g., 68+17).
• P was looking over my shoulder when I saw a friend's Facebook post of a 5-pointed star drawn using an equation in polar coordinates. She asked about it. I started explaining Cartesian and polar coordinate systems. She moved on quickly to other things, so she doesn't really get it yet, but we sowed a seed, I think.
• Both kids played Robo Rally, a board game, with UnschoolerDad. I have not played this game personally, but he says it involves skills in common with programming (and since he makes his living programming and was largely self-taught, he should know). T asked to play it again a few days later.

Science

• T has been asking for Magic School Bus chapter books pretty regularly for bedtime reading. He likes to interrupt with his own ideas and questions about the story and the real-life things it tells about. His recent reading has included books about food chains and food webs, and about dinosaurs and fossils.
• With all the recent thunderstorms, we've had some good conversations about lightning. P and I talked at length about lightning rods (how they're constructed and why they work), and about why being inside a house or car is pretty safe in a lightning storm, as long as you're not in contact with the conductive elements of either. I talked about how both houses (because of their plumbing and wiring) and cars (because of their metal frames and body parts) act like metal cages, and how people have used metal cages (I couldn't think of the term Faraday cage at the time) to isolate people or objects from electrical hazards.
• The kids and I watched a video about skeletal preservations (for museums and such). This included using dermestid beetles to clean all the flesh off the bones. This came up in a book I was reading, in a conversation with a taxidermist about how flesh-removal has progressed from boiling to beetles, so I told the kids about that too. I know all this made an impression on T, because he asked me to remind him of the name of the group of beetles, days later.

• Another video showed us a blue button jelly which, though it acts a lot like a jellyfish, is actually a community of small animals serving specialized purposes. We compared this to coral colonies. And we enjoyed a video about basking sharks, the second-largest fish. This one blew me away -- their mouths are so big, you could almost fit a piano inside!

• Another video was about the nature of pain: nociceptors, plus a lot of variables, including subjective ones like mood and previous experience.
• We also watched a video about optical illusions, specifically those that make things of the same color appear to have very different hues or values.
• A SciShow video told us about Evolutionary Life History Theory, which says that we have limited energy to spend on reproduction, and each species or individual must strike a balance between spending that energy on courtship and mating, and spending it on caring for young. Apparently a recent study has showed an inverse correlation in male humans between the size of a man's testes and the energy he spends caring for his children. SciShow's often on the colorful side with the terms used, so be warned if you're watching this with kids around:

• Another SciShow video described three inventions or discoveries growing from work done on the International Space Station. One of these had to do with microbeads, which related back to my exploration with P of how color-changing Polly Pocket hair works!
• And, of course, see above for science related to flooding.

History, Civics, Geography

• We read a right about the Civil Rights movement in the United States, emphasizing cooperation between African-Americans and Jews. We talked about some of the things that were being protested, such as poll taxes and literacy tests, and about how new Voter ID laws can have a similar effect on the ability of people of color and poor people to vote.
• P perked up when Syria was mentioned in our Theodosia reading (in an ancient context, there) and immediately identified it as a place with current conflict. We talked a little about why everyone is talking about Syria -- the regime's apparent use of chemical weapons, especially against civilians, and why chemical and biological weapons are taboo.
• P and I had a brief conversation about the custom of wearing white at weddings. I mentioned that traditionally, wearing white was a symbol of purity or virginity for the bride. We went on to define virgin, and to talk a little about why virginity has been valued more for women than for men (because without modern paternity testing, it's much harder to determine who the father of a child is than who its mother is, because her having only one sex partner makes this simple, and because this becomes important if a man is expected to care and/or provide for his children but not for the children of other men). 
• And of course Theodosia gives us nice tidbits of English and Egyptian history and customs, sometimes explicity, and sometimes more implicitly, in the ways that characters treat each other.

Reading, Language

Lots of reading has been described above. Here's what's left over:

• T ended up with a copy of Diary of a Spider as a prize from the library summer reading program. We enjoyed reading it, and his appreciation of it was enhanced by our recent reading of a Magic School Bus book about insects and spiders. He enjoyed the pictures -- there's something funny or interesting to notice in them on every page, independent of the text, so the book is very engaging.
• One day T asked how to say "two" in Spanish, and P answered him correctly. That evening I read him a library book called Gracias, Thanks in both Spanish and English. He asked me to point at the words I was reading so he could see the Spanish and English text. He liked it more than he has liked bilingual books in the past. He also picked up on the theme of being thankful for everyday things small and large, and we talked about people and things we appreciate.

Other Things

• T continues using the mini-trampoline a lot, especially on days when are stuck inside or otherwise not exercising in other ways. 
• We've had a couple of big pillow fights between me and the kids: we have a bag of small, light pillows that are great for throwing, and this gets us running around to pick them up as well. Sometimes I start a pillow fight when the kids are crabbing at each other, because I can usually get them to team up against me, and this shifts their interaction with each other positively.
• P is taking a new (to her) recreational gymnastics class. It was touch-and-go at first in her new class, which takes place at a much noisier time in the gym than her previous aerial dance class. She's sensitive to very noisy environments and is more easily upset in them, and the first and second classes were emotionally very stormy for her. But after crying with me through most of the second class time, she had a good conversation with me about what was going on for her. I hadn't been aware that noise was such a big part of the problem. We talked about what would help, and now we try to make sure she's well rested and recently fed when she goes to gymnastics, and that she has some quiet time in the hour or two before the class, so she isn't already fed up with noise before she gets there. So far, so good -- after her most recent class she was very excited to have made a leap forward with her cartwheel skills. She's also looking much more confident on the beam than I've seen her in the past.

We've Come a Long Way

I've had the feeling, several times recently, that I've come a long way with my parenting since we started unschooling. Usually it's hard for me to put my finger on what makes me feel this way, and sometimes even when I can, I don't remember very long. Unfortunately it's always easier for me to see what's going badly than what's going well. I do have a long way to go in some respects, but it's good to recognize progress, too. So here, to aid my memory and for your perusal, is a sample of what's going well.

A friend wrote recently that she'd been in a huge fight with her preschooler about what to wear. It was a chilly, windy day, and he wanted to wear shorts instead of pants. She struggled with him for 45 minutes, including a time-out that left her with bruises, before finally leaving the house with him still in shorts, because otherwise they were going to miss another child's appointment.

Looking back, I can remember having this kind of struggle. I used to be much more controlling about what my kids wore, what they ate, and what time they went to bed, and we did have big struggles on all three fronts at times, from which we all emerged exhausted and often with a good deal of ill will toward each other. Parenting was a lot harder then!

Now, if one of my kids wants to wear shorts when it's cold, I'll tell them what I know about the weather forecast, or ask them to step outside and see if they still think that's a good idea. If they still want the shorts, I just pack something warmer along with us (or send it with them, if I won't be with them) so that when and if they change their minds, they can change their clothing as well. They usually do want the additional warmth before they get home, but sometimes I'm wrong and they're fine without it. Either way, it doesn't stress our relationship.

Similarly, if fruits or veggies aren't going over well one day, I now have enough experience to know that they probably will the next time I offer them. Sometimes my 5-year old subsists on mac and cheese or variants on that theme (quesadillas, toasted cheese sandwiches) for a couple of full days, and then breaks his dairy-and-grain fast with a large bowl of carrots. His body eventually tells him it needs some variety. I encourage the variety when I can, but I don't force the issue anymore.

And with sleep, we just try to get a pleasant bedtime routine going at a reasonable hour, and things usually wind down naturally; not always as early as I'd like, but usually as early as I've actually planned effectively for (being proactive really helps, but sometimes I'm too tired to be at my most proactive). Every once in a while one of the kids is so into an activity that they don't want to stop. But eventually they do, and usually it's before I really was going to be in bed myself. They might fall asleep somewhere in the middle of something and just get covered up where they are or carried to bed; or they might call a halt and go to bed more or less on their own when they are tired enough. (One of my unschooling role models, Sandra Dodd, when people used to ask her what time her baby went to bed, would usually answer, "About half an hour after he goes to sleep.")

All of these issues are about having control over their own bodies, which I know all kids want. I remember wanting it, too. Sometimes they might want or need some guidance, but mostly they would like to be the ones to decide what goes in their mouths, what gets put on their bodies, and when they sleep and wake, as much as possible. Fair enough -- so do I, even now!

There are several other concepts at work here. One is another idea I've heard from Sandra: the suggestion that parents behave as if we have a coupon book full of "NO" coupons, with some large but finite (and I would add: unknown) number of coupons, and that at some point they will all get used up. We'll lose our ability to effectively stop our kids when that happens, and we can only try to ensure that they're making good decisions on their own by then. In other words, we have to choose our battles as parents. Or better, in terms of a partnership model with our kids, we have to use our influence wisely and refrain from advising or directing sometimes, or everything we say will start to sound like "Blah, blah, blah." If we restrict our advice to when it's truly useful and necessary, or when it's specifically requested, our kids will be much more likely to continue listening.

Another key concept, which I started realizing as a classroom teacher, before I had children, is this: We only have control over other humans when they are sufficiently small and/or cowed to believe we have that control. My seventh-grade students were (mostly) like elephants tethered by strings -- completely capable of taking over the classroom should they decide to, especially if they cooperated with each other, but mostly consenting to follow my plan, or at least not to derail it. The social contract kept me (mostly) in control, but I knew that control was illusory, and if the kids caught on, my classroom routine would be toast. In classes where I had one 7th-grade elephant who had broken his string, it was much harder to lead the other students effectively. So I tried to be reasonable, a benevolent leader, and I hoped for the best. And I was so scared I couldn't keep breakfast down on school mornings. Really. And this was not in a rough neighborhood or school. When my kids were babies, I could mostly control them with little struggle, because they were so small and helpless. (Their bodies, that is -- their voices were another matter!) But when they were toddlers, I began to realize that my control over them would rapidly come to resemble my classroom authority, and that someday they would be as big and strong as I was, if not more so, and I'd better have figured out some other way of maintaining peace by then! That got me thinking about choosing carefully what was really worth a struggle, and working toward resolving conflicts without resorting to my greater mass and strength.

The last concept, and I think the most important, is that my job as a parent is to help my kids learn whatever they will need to know to be able to make good decisions once they are on their own or I am gone. And I believe that the best way for them to learn to make good decisions is for them to get to make lots of decisions (not just blue-pants-or-brown-pants decisions, but pants-or-shorts-or-fairy-costume decisions too) and experience their consequences. Natural consequences only -- I still use my own experience to soften the mistakes when I can. I don't actually want them to get hypothermia if they're under-dressed, so I pack warm things whenever I think it's a good idea. (But if I forget, we might have to cuddle and shiver for a bit; and I do insist we all have jackets around our waists when we go hiking in the fickle Colorado weather.) The point is not for them to suffer real harm or misery. The point is for them to be able to make decisions, make mistakes sometimes, and learn how to fix those mistakes.

How's it working out with the kids? They're learning. Now that those jackets have come off the hips and been used during a few hikes, I don't get much pushback on taking the jackets in the first place. And after feeling cold and changing a few times, they usually listen when I say I think today's weather forecast calls for pants, not shorts. They eat less variety than I hope they will someday, but when you look at the long-term trend, it seems to be toward a reasonably healthy diet. They get enough sleep most nights -- and if they don't, they go to bed earlier the next night pretty willingly.

Eek! That last paragraph makes it sound like I think they're learning because their decisions are looking more like the ones *I* would make. To some extent I guess that's reasonable: I have more life experience, so some kinds of decisions will converge on similar territory. But perhaps one of my next steps will be to find a different way to see progress and learning: to see paths that diverge from mine as potentially wonderful on their own merits. Or to judge my kids' decisions less and just try to understand and enjoy them more.

I can't predict now where I might be headed on that score. But I suspect that as we get some basic-survival stuff (avoiding hypothermia and fatal car accidents, say) out of the way, it will get easier to appreciate paths that are different from what I would choose. For now, I appreciate that there's far less stress and conflict and more visible caring and kindness in our lives than there used to be, and that my kids are trusting my advice more when I do give it, and learning a lot about the world and how to live well in it.

Camping Rocks!

This week we had our first camping trip as a family! I was pretty stressed about the preparations, but things worked out well. While we were at the camp, on day two, I finally had one of those moments when I realized all the necessary work had been done and that I could relax. (As you might imagine, these don't often happen at home; there's always something I could or should be doing!)

This was a group camping trip, and the kids had been enjoying playing with other kids, but it still seemed like they were missing the comforts of home (iPads, etc.) more than they were enjoying the camping trip. So I talked with a new friend who had grown to love camping as a child about what she had loved. And I remembered the good things about my camping trips as a Girl Scout. Having and helping build campfires was a big one. Being entrusted with a knife and learning to use it was another.

There was a campfire-building in the works for that evening, so I talked to the guy building it about bringing in interested kids on the experience, and he was game. We showed the kids (including P) how we were splitting cordwood into kindling and tinder with a hatchet. They didn't want to do that, but they enjoyed helping building the tinder/kindling structure of the fire. When it came time to light it, we gave each kid a thin wooden splint we'd split for the purpose, and then we lit the ends of their splints (none of them wanted to tackle cardboard matches this time, and I couldn't blame them, between the difficulty and the wind), and they lit the tinder and got the fire going. They all enjoyed that, and some stuck around to continue feeding the fire as it grew.

Also that afternoon, UnschoolerDad supervised as P used her pocket knife to strip the bark from a long, dead stick and smooth it, discovering the color variations beneath the bark and generally noticing about how the wood grew and what that meant for how it could be used. Some of P's friends came by the campsite and watched and talked. They were surprised that P had her own knife. I wonder if some other parents will be getting requests for sharp objects soon?

The kids' highlights from the trip had to do with sleeping out in a tent, being outside a lot, playing with friends, and having more attention from family and friends who were not as busy as usual. We also went on a modest hike, built fairy houses, and saw different ways people were cooking their food outdoors. We are considering one more trip before the winter sets in -- we'll see!

So, here's more about what we did and learned during the week:

Math and Spatial Learning

• Both kids did a lot of Lego building this week. Some of the instructions were a little challenging for T, but he worked through his difficulties with occasional help.
• The roller coaster building has continued in Minecraft, with variations including more powered tracks and powered mine carts (which burn coal to move on their own). The kids have also been watching Minecraft videos for inspiration, including a massive cube of TNT (decorated with other materials to make it look like the largest-ever single block of TNT) being built and detonated; a giant Earth globe; giant jet airplanes and sports cars, and probably more I didn't see at the time.
• I've overheard T a few times, counting out loud while building things in Minecraft. I think he was going for specific dimensions on something he was building.
• In a game of numeric one-upmanship on the way home from camping, both kids were using "infinity" as a number ("Mine is infinity times five!") We talked some about how infinity is more of an idea than a number. When T asks me if there's a number bigger than infinity, I reply that infinity is the idea that no matter how big a number you think of, there is a bigger one. But in the car, I couldn't resist getting into the game, so I said, "Mine is infinity to the fifth power!" Then I had to explain what I meant by that: an introduction to exponents. Now I'm hearing them crop up in the kids' conversations.

Social Studies (History, Geography, Civics, Economics)

• I read an online primer on the current situation in Syria to UnschoolerDad. P listened and asked a few questions.
• Around Labor Day, we watched a video about the origins of Labor Day as a holiday and what labor unions have done to improve working conditions for everyone. This comes up occasionally as we see updates on our local grocery store's attempts to organize, and on Wal-Mart's union-busting and other unfair labor practices.
• T read One Hen again, about microlending and its role in building small businesses and self-sufficiency.
• P asked for help finding Hawaii on the world map. She also asked about how to pronounce the names of several South American nations, wanted to know exactly what was meant by "America" on the map (we talked about a few different ways it's used), and wanted to know why world maps aren't round (we talked about what would be hard to see if a world map were simply a photo of one side of a globe). 
• As we drove back from camping, T wanted to know if we were back in our state yet. I explained that we hadn't left it; we'd only been in two counties, I think. When we got home we used Google Maps to look at our trip on various scales, from a map of the whole country, to a map of the state, to a map showing our route at full screen, to zooming in on our campsite and finding where we pitched our tent (and then doing the same for our house). I let him be in charge of the zoom level, because I know it's disorienting to me when someone else is zooming about faster than I can understand what I'm looking at.
• Also see Reading below: Theodosia is keeping us learning.

Reading and Writing

• We finished Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos. This included some bits of early-20th-century culture in both Egypt and England. We read about open-air markets, beggars calling for baksheesh (alms), and about how archaeologists from colonial powers like Great Britain were accustomed to finding artifacts in other countries and taking them back to their home countries for display. We also talked a little about how some countries, more recently, have begun trying to get back their historical treasures that have been appropriated in this way. 
• P and UnschoolerDad finished The Burning Bridge, the second book in the Ranger's Apprentice series. 
• T enjoyed the rest of a Magic School Bus book about electrical storms.
• On the camping trip, we started a Magic Tree House book about early explorers of the ocean on the HMS Challenger.
• P wrote a short story to put in a book in Minecraft. She asked for spelling help when she needed it. She seems to care more about standardizing her spelling than she used to.
• T and P both played with Scribblenauts, asking for spellings when they needed them. P is able to help T with some words. Both kids continue learning their way around a keyboard in this way, too.
• T asked me about several words from Minecraft and what they really mean. These included ghast, blaze, and creeper. I was surprised that ghast is actually an English word (a transitive verb), albeit not commonly used.
• We saw an old Schoolhouse Rock video about verbs. We tied it into a song I often sing to the kids at night: "Sing When the Spirit Says Sing." T likes to substitute action verbs (especially build) into this song. That gave us many more examples of verbs.

Science

• In the Magic School Bus book on electrical storms, T learned about how lightning forms, what thunder is, how to count the distance to a lightning strike, lightning safety, and lightning rods, as well as a bit about atomic structure and electrons. (P's familiar with these from reading the same book before and from other experiences.)
• A hummingbird hawk moth showed up in our front yard recently, enjoying some flowers. UnschoolerDad and I had never seen one, but it stuck around long enough for us and P to get a good look. We looked it up and found it was probably a white-lined sphinx moth, and that it was an example of convergent evolution with hummingbirds and some other groups of birds.
• Several science videos were interesting this week: the Moon Illusion (covering many theories about the moon illusion, but not my favorite, so I explained that one too), first-ever footage of a deep-sea squid, how a pin-tumbler lock works, how bodies adapt to microgravity (and how that makes life hard upon returning to Earth gravity), and envisioning the age of the earth (compared to a calendar year, or to the life of a child from birth to the first day of high school).
• While we were camping, the kids enjoyed finding different kinds of rocks and pounding some of them to powder, getting different colors of powder out of different rocks. They also learned why we shouldn't scrape or otherwise damage tree bark (the trees have a hard enough time with the elk scraping them). We speculated about why trees in thickets have more snapped-off branches, higher up their trunks, than trees standing alone or at the edge of the woods (trees may shed their lower branches when other trees are blocking sunlight reaching them, and focus their energy on the higher branches, which can get sunlight and produce food for the tree). We saw many kinds of mushrooms and talked about the need to know a lot more than we do about mushrooms before considering tasting any of them. We saw chipmunks harvesting, nibbling, and carrying off some of the mushrooms and not others, and wondered whether humans and chipmunks could eat the same kinds of mushrooms (and whether any harm would befall those chipmunks from experimentation, or whether they already knew their way around the local mushrooms). We saw and talked about how campfires start and burn, including the need for plenty of air (but not too strong a wind in the beginning) and smaller fuels to start with. We also covered campfire safety, including keeping fuels and ourselves clear of the fire and keeping a big bucket of water nearby. The kids had gone to bed by the time we were extinguishing the fire, but they've seen that on previous campfire occasions at church.
• On the way home from camping, T spotted some kind of factory by the side of the road. He remembered a video we'd watched about how charcoal briquets are made and said the factory looked like it could be a charcoal factory. I had to agree that looked like a possibility based on the materials and machines we saw -- the kid has a good eye!

Odds and Ends

• We enjoyed a bike ride one evening.
• One day when I was practicing guitar, playing a song but not singing it, I heard P humming along with the right tune and even some good harmonies.
• Both kids loved a video of Rowan Atkinson in a live performance with an invisible drum set. A linked video of Jerry Lewis using an invisible typewriter fell flat, even after an explanation of how old typewriters worked. Atkinson showed much more attention to detail and variety in his performance. I had to agree he was funnier than Lewis.

Six-Second Science Fair and color-changing Polly Pockets spark an eventful week of exploration and learning

Starting two weeks ago, I decided to try an idea gleaned from a local homeschoolers' email list, in a discussion about record keeping. One mom used a teacher's plan book to keep track of her kids' studies -- one column per kid. I used teacher plan books for four years as a secondary teacher (one column per class), and I'm comfortable with that format. The next day I saw a teacher plan book on the $1 rack at Target, so I bought it and gave it a try.

I set things up with one column per general subject area, so I could see how our activities and learning were balancing out across subjects. The first problem I noticed was that teacher plan books only go Monday-Friday! That's okay -- I had a column left over, so we use that for overflow: Saturday and Sunday activites, and anything I can't fit in the regular columns for the week.

I leave the plan book on a coffee table by the couch where I frequently take little rests during the day, so it's easy to jot down whatever's happened most recently. This is also nice because instead of being in front of my computer in the kitchen when I'm making notes, I'm closer to whatever the kids are doing, and off my feet!

So this week, my summary will be loosely organized by subject. Some things overlap -- we Read about Science or History, for example. It's all good.

Science

• One morning, P brought me a small Lego construction: a buoy with a flag on top, easily recognizable. We tried floating it in a bowl of water, and it floated on its side. Throughout the day, both kids and I tried different things to try to get it to float upright: adding more weight on the bottom, etc. P found that it would float upright if she removed the sideways-pointing part of the flag, which was making its weight distribution asymmetric.
• P asked me how her Polly Pocket's hair was able to turn pink when warm and purple when cold. I didn't know, so we looked it up online. We found two possible mechanisms: thermochromism and halochromism. P was game for an explanation, so I drew diagrams to talk about different colors of light having different wavelengths; constructive and destructive interference resulting in crystals looking the colors they do, and how a crystal whose plane spacing changes could look different colors as the path length difference for diffracted light changes. These were in ascending order of complexity, and I think P grasped about the first half. Then we looked at halochromism and looked up the materials typically used and their relevant stats, especially the melting point of dodecanol, which turns out to be very close to that of coconut oil! When the dodecanol is liquid, salts in the halochromic microcapsules are dissolved, which changes the pH of the package and results in the protonation (or loss of a proton) by a dye molecule, which changes color as a result. I put a small lump of solid-at-room-temperature coconut oil on P's fingertip, and we watched it quickly melt; so it was easy to see how a transition from ice water to warm breath could change the color of a doll's hair if it had halochromic microcapsules on board. Again, I think P grasped the melting point and solubility parts, but the finer points of pH-driven reactions are a bit beyond our current level.
• We all watched a great video, which we found on thekidshouldseethis.com, full of 6-second science fair videos. One bit showed putting eggs into vinegar and dissolving the shells, so the eggs end up squishy sacs of yolk and white. P and I decided to do that, and watched the bubbling surfaces of the eggs. I know calcium carbonate was a major constituent of eggshells, so we also put a Tums in some vinegar to see if it would behave similarly, which it did (until the reaction stopped, probably because there wasn't enough vinegar in the little bowl we were using -- this led to a little talk about limiting reagents in reactions). I looked up the chemical reaction between calcium chloride and acetic acid, and P and I talked some about that, drawing diagrams of the molecules and noting which parts would dissociate or connect. The partial charges on the ions in the reactions needed more explanation, so I drew some atomic-shell diagrams to talk about why an atom might be inclined to gain or give up an electron. I used the ionic bonding of NaCl as an extreme example of this, and we found a cool video showing NaCl dissolving. The shape of the NaCl crystal in the video as it dissolved, first becoming pitted and then coming apart more completely, was reminiscent of what we'd seen in the dissolving antacid.

• Meanwhile, we kept an eye on the eggs. They were brown eggs, and we were surprised to see that the brown color didn't go all the way through the shells, but was the first part to dissolve away, while there was still plenty of hard shell left. We wondered whether tasting the solution the eggs were in was okay, so we looked up the reaction products and researched the one that wasn't familiar, calcium acetate. Safe enough, we decided. The next day, when the eggshells were fully dissolved, I tasted them (we had one hard-boiled and one raw; I cooked the raw one first) and, based on my review of the experience (yuck; vinegary, but not in a pleasant way), P decided not to taste them.
• We all read some Magic School Bus chapter books this week, about insects (predation, digestion, spider webs, compound eyes, speedy motion, and more) and electric storms (T only for this: cloud formation, types, and evolution; buildup of charges at top and bottom of a storm cloud; formation of hail).
• P and T watched Magic School Bus videos about decomposition, eggs, and dinosaurs.
• One day when he tired of Minecraft, T sat down with me to look at our big anatomy book. He wanted to see the heart, then the brain. We looked at the cardiac cycle and at the brain's sensory, motor, and language functions. Each time we saw a brain region on a diagram, I'd touch T's head in the corresponding place. He was telling me about some of the areas himself before we were done, so he was clearly engaged.
• In conjunction with our atomic-shell diagrams, P and I looked at the Periodic Table of the Elements and talked about why it has the shape it does (outer electron shells accommodate more electrons, so more different elements go by as you fill them) and what it would look like if it didn't have to fit on a standard-shape piece of paper (lanthanide and actinide series inserted, making the table much wider).
• Inspired by another 6-second science fair bit, P drew an arrow and wrote her name backwards (mirror-image) on a small piece of paper, and we held it behind a glass full of water, seeing how at short distance it magnified, while at greater distances the images were reversed. That called to P's prior experience with magnifying glasses.

Math and Spatial Skills

• Both kids did a lot of building in Minecraft this week. One day I went to the basement for maybe half an hour to deal with laundry, and when I came back, both kids had built rather impressive roller coasters with mine carts! They spent hours over the next few days embellishing these, adding new shapes and underground sections, adding powered track sections to boost speed, playing with block foundations to adjust slope, and so on.
• Both kids have also been experimenting with TNT in Minecraft. Simple experiments result in near-simultaneous explosions of multiple blocks, leaving a very satisfying hole in the ground. After watching a video about TNT cannons, P built one, using redstone wiring to produce a simultaneous explosion of a ring of TNT blocks, propelling her character (on a stone block in the center of the ring) straight up, well above the clouds. They do these tricks in Creative mode, so their characters don't get hurt by the explosions and so they'd have a ready supply of TNT.
• T asked me one evening, while I was reading to him, to say what the page number said. It was 79, and he seemed amazed it was so high. In the days since, I've asked him about a few two-digit page numbers, and he has interpreted them correctly. For 41, he also thought about what it would be if the digits were reversed, but he needed me to tell him that 14 was fourteen.
• P and I made a number line for T from string and construction-paper rectangles. It goes up to 21, which is his favorite number. We used paper color and other markings to facilitate skip-counting of evens, odds, fives, and tens. T likes it and has gone to it spontaneously a couple of times to count out loud and look at the numbers. We hope this will help him through the teens, which are a little hard to remember how to write, and where he usually skips a number or two when counting out loud.
• When P and I were talking about constructive and destructive interference of light waves, we discovered she didn't really know what negative numbers were. So I drew a number line that went both ways and showed her how to add positive and negative numbers on it. She quickly grasped this, so I also showed her subtraction of positive and negative numbers, both on the number line and in algebraic notation. She got it easily. We also looked a bit at algebraic notation for variables (e.g., the many ways to write multiplication), and how to write and evaluate simple expressions with variables. During this whole process, I could see P getting excited about these concepts in the same way I remember doing when I first learned them. It was so much fun to share concepts I love and have P share the feeling! 

Reading and Writing

• We finished reading out loud the Olympian Gods section of D'Aulaire's Greek Mythology. Both kids still listen closely to this.
• We checked out an e-book version of Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos from our local library. P was delighted that we could do this late in the evening, when the library was closed, and without going anywhere. It's a book about the daughter of two Egyptologists who own a museum of antiquities in London, around 1900. We get snapshots of life in that period, bits of the political scene in Europe, bits of Egyptian history and mythology, and some British slang along with this interesting story. P was also delighted to see that my new Kindle has a built-in dictionary lookup function, so if a word is in its downloaded dictionary, we can just look it up as we're reading. There's a lot of good vocabulary in this book, so I pause to check if I think a word is unfamiliar to the kids, and give them a definition or explanation if they need it. Sometimes they ask, too, about unfamiliar words. Interestingly, Theodosia does not go to school -- her parents don't pay much attention to her, and when she didn't return to boarding school after a dreadful term there, they didn't force the issue. She is now an autodidact, well versed in Egyptian writing and magic from her readings in the museum library, and learning as she goes about Egyptian history.
• P read quite a bit of Theodosia out loud as I was giving T a bath this week. I haven't heard her read out loud much recently (though she does read to T beyond my hearing sometimes), and I was pleased to hear her fluency and expression as she read.
• UnschoolerDad has been reading more of The Burning Bridge to P.
• See Science for Magic School Bus reading this week.
• A local unschooler, considering buying tablets for her kids, asked about the differences between Minecraft versions for PC and tablet. P knows a lot about this, so she helped me write an email about the most important differences. The information was very useful to the person asking the question.
• When we were having sandwiches for lunch with my parents visiting, and I was dealing with dietary differences for many people, P wrote a list of what she would like on her sandwich so I wouldn't get confused.

Social Studies: History/Geography/Civics/Economics

• See Reading for what some of what we learned this week in history.
• UnschoolerDad was on a business trip this week, so T and I took a look at our world map to see where he was compared to where we were.
• One one longish drive home, P asserted that she already knew the rules of the road and just needed to learn how to drive when it was time. I asked if she would like for me to quiz her on that, and she said sure. So I did, and it turned out she still had some learning to do, though she has absorbed quite a bit. She enthusiastically talked laws and defensive driving with me the rest of the way home.
• On the 50th anniversary of MLK's famous speech at the March on Washington, I didn't get it together to show them the speech, but at bedtime we talked some about what people were fighting for, and I sang them "We Shall Overcome" as one of their bedtime songs.
• In connection with checking out e-books, P wondered why only one person could check out a given copy of an e-book at one time. We talked about the economics of publishing, and how publishers who have been making money on printed books still want to make money on library books (which they do, since the books can be lent to only one person at a time and eventually wear out and require replacement), and how those publishers have made e-book deals with libraries that mirror those for print books, because they're afraid they'll lose their revenue stream otherwise. We also talked about how, technically, e-books could be much more widely available, and how this would be desirable from the consumer's point of view, but might lead to problems for publishers.

Everything Else: Art, Music, PE, and Miscellaneous Learning and Exploration

• With UnschoolerDad out of town and calling us most evenings, both kids have finally learned how to carry on a conversation on the phone! It's easy to forget how weird this situation is for little kids. It requires not only thinking about a person they can't see, but also thinking a little about that person's perspective: what would they be interested to hear about? What can they sense, and not, about your surroundings as you talk with them? P was pretty good at it already, but she's getting better, too.
• P started a new weekly gymnastics class and is enjoying it.
• T has been making good use of our mini-trampoline, jumping often when he has excess energy to burn.
• I've been playing guitar and singing at bedtime most nights. P has been joining in as she learns songs, and also starting to harmonize a bit.
• With my parents visiting, we rented a canoe and a paddleboat at a nearby lake and went boating for an hour. We saw little trees that had grown in the spring and early summer while the lake was empty, some of them now far out in the lake. We saw fish jumping and speculated about why there are many bubbly places in the lake -- oxygenation for the fish, perhaps, or maybe that's where the lake gets filled? P learned a little about how to cooperate in paddling a canoe.
• P did some nice drawings while I read to her, working on shading to produce some three-dimensional effects in drawing hair in particular.
• T came up with an original (I think) idea in Minecraft. Since some blocks stick to others sideways while others fall when unsupported beneath, he built a tall shaft for crushing things (chickens, mostly). It has windows on one side for putting in whatever he wants to crush. He puts a sticky stone block with some sand blocks on top of it near the top of the shaft, and then he destroys the stone block so the sand falls all the way down.