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.