How the World Works

Aaaand we're back! There's been a lot going on, so how about a really huge list of what I actually remembered to write down at the time?

How the World Works (Science)

• T asked about how long ago Pangaea was. We looked up some maps, still and animated, to get him some answers. We also looked at how plate tectonics works, with spreading centers, subduction zones, and places where two plates abut forcefully and make mountains. We found places on the world map where each of these had happened or is still happening. Now both kids ask questions about how various features formed, often mountains or islands, and we can talk about volcanic hot spots (e.g., Hawaii) vs. volcanoes in subduction zones (e.g., the Ring of Fire around the Pacific) or spreading centers (East Pacific Rise, Mid-Atlantic Ridge) vs. mountains getting pushed up by plate impacts or compression (Rocky Mountains, Himalayas).
• We watched a video about how natural selection works. This led to another video by the same creators, about how fracking works and its risks to climate and human health. There is an anti-fracking initiative coming up for a vote in our city, so this was highly relevant to current events in our area.

• T and I read together a Magic School Bus book about butterflies, covering the differences between butterflies and moths, metamorphosis, molting, hazards to butterflies, what they eat, and how to help them. (P has read this book on her own in the past.)
• We watched a video about Jellyfish Lake. We wanted to know what kinds of jellyfish those were, so we looked it up and learned that the golden jellyfish, which have evolved there in isolation after drifting in from the ocean when sea levels were higher, host algal symbiotes that feed them, so the jellyfish follow the sun back and forth every day. Divers aren't allowed to use scuba gear in Jellyfish Lake because there's so much hydrogen sulfide dissolved in the water in the anoxic layer below 15 meters deep that it could kill them by absorption through the skin.

• Another video showed us two of the world's largest organisms: one nicknamed the humongous fungus, and the Pando aspen grove, which is roughly the size of Vatican City.

• T and I read another Magic School Bus book about microbes -- different kinds, their functions in the environment, how they spread, and more.
• We watched a video about gravity and how the orbits of satellites work, including geosynchronous orbits.
• A great video covered the life cycle of salmon, with a special focus on what eats them after they die following spawning. Although the main scavengers shown were ravens, eagles, bears, and maggots, this also tied in well with our reading about microbes.
• Other videos showed how trash is burned to produce energy in Norway (where they have to import trash from other countries to meet their energy needs!), and showed the relative sizes of the planets in our solar system by picturing them in our sky as if they were the same distance away as our moon.
• We talked about how seeds get dispersed. This came from watching birds eating berries off the vines in our backyard, and from seeing lots of milkweed fluff in our yard from milkweed plants in the neighbor's yard. I brought one of the milkweed pods inside and put it in a bowl on the counter, so anyone could pet it when passing by, or build small structures with it. I loved feeling it and noticing that it was so soft, it was difficult to tell whether you were touching it.
• We read a library book about the water cycle, including how water gets purified naturally by filtering through soil or swamps, problems caused by pollution, and how to conserve and protect water supplies.
• We watched some videos about octopuses. Both kids watch some of these, but T is especially fascinated. T spotted an octopus puppet at a store where we were shopping, but decided not to buy it. Later we saw more videos: an octopus stealing a video camera while it was recording, and octopuses going through very small openings (T has asked several questions about whether we could do that sort of thing if we had no bones, and made comments about how our bones make us different from octopuses).

• T chose a very fancy dinosaur pop-up book on a Costco trip and has been having me read parts of it to him. P also reads it with him.
• T enjoyed a video of Grover doing some science experiments.
• A question about how fireworks are made led to some good videos about firework production, safety measures during production, (some steps are done in concrete bunkers, and tools are chosen for their anti-static properties), and how fireworks shows are choreographed.

• We read a very basic library book about fire, which led to some discussions about fire safety.
• We watched a video on how to start a fire with a bow drill.
• P and T found a crawdad in the creek one day at our local unschoolers' park day. They were so excited!
• P and I watched SciShow videos on what happens when you stop eating (stages of starvation), on sleep deprivation, and on why pigeons bob their heads back and forth as they walk (they're actually holding their heads still as their bodies move, which gives them better ability to detect motion of predators or prey).
• I was singing some folk songs to P one day, and one of them was about the bomb in Hiroshima ("Cranes Over Hiroshima" by Fred Small, covered here by Jim Couza). She asked about what a nuclear bomb is, and we talked about nuclear fission and how it's used in a controlled way for power, and in an uncontrolled way in bombs. We also talked about how things go wrong at power plants sometimes (e.g., Fukushima), and how that can lead to uncontrolled reactions at power plants (meltdowns). The kids bring nuclear ideas into their pretend play as well.
• T was playing with a cardboard tube, stuffing socks and other objects into it with a pen for a ramrod, then blowing them out with his breath or by pushing them back out with the pen. I drew him some pictures about how that relates to the loading of old-fashioned rifles (as described in the Little House books, which we read some time ago). He wanted to know whether cannons were loaded the same way, and how a fuse could set off a cannon as he'd seen in cartoons, so we talked about those, too, with pictures, and the difference between how gunpowder burns in the open and how it burns in enclosed spaces (these related back to our fireworks videos).

How the World Works (Math, Spatial Reasoning, Logic)

• T spent some hours in Minecraft, seemingly trying to do everything one could possibly do with mine carts and tracks. He'd do very deliberate experiments, building a setup with powered tracks, for example, and then replacing one block at a time of track with unpowered track and testing the results each time. One such experiment involved a dip in the track, how much momentum the cars needed to make it back up the other side of the dip, and how this varied when the number of cars was changed.
• We watched a video about impossible objects and were tickled to see that most of the letter in the logo for The Kid Should See This were impossible objects.

• P mentioned one evening that she knew how to count by 25s. I asked if she learned that by thinking about money (which is how I think about it), and she said she learned from Plants vs. Zombies! (You get sun power in increments of 25 in that game.)
• P and I played with finding places on the world map by latitude and longitude (finally, a way into coordinate systems!) We tried plugging our rough estimate of our home's location into Google Maps, and found it was actually quite close, at a location we drive past regularly. Then we played with the numbers until we found the exact location of our house, just a few minutes/seconds from our original rough estimate.
• The kids found a video showing how to build a toilet in Minecraft that could actually flush and wasn't super-sized. It exploits one of the less-realistic aspects of how water and lava behave in the Minecraft world. P quickly built one in her Minecraft world and one for T in his world. T has since built his own version. Both kids have had fun with lighting their toilet areas to take advantage of the glow that comes from the lava, through the water, when the flush valve is open. P arranged it so that the flush lever turned off the room lights!
• We've made a few short stop-motion videos using iPad software. One day, on the way home from buying some new Lego sets, we worked up an estimate of how long it would take to make a stop-motion video of a Lego minifigure building one of the new sets from beginning to end. Our estimate of the least amount of time that could take was about 5 hours, based on the number of seconds it would take to set up and shoot each frame, and the likely number of frames per brick in the Lego set. We knew it would probably take much longer than that, because of time for planning sequences, fixing mistakes, and so on.
• Both kids, but especially T, have gotten really interested in Minecraft mods and the content packs that go with them. UnschoolerDad installed one mod they really wanted, but then he was busy, so I had to learn how to install additional content packs. It's not that hard, but the documentation available for how to do it is very spotty. I had to get help from UD for one obscure step. It's good for me to keep exercising the technical parts of my intelligence -- it's easy to let UD take care of it because he's so much faster at most such things, but when I figure it out, I can help the kids better, and they see me in the process of learning challenging things, rather than relying on experts all the time. That's important, I think.
• P continues to work on her empire in Dragonvale. She is amassing huge amounts of money in the game, and a few weeks ago I heard her reading out the amount to T. It was $12,192,691, and I asked to see what she was reading and verified that she was reading it out completely correctly. She has mastered place value (at least in the whole-number range) without much instruction from me -- I've spent a total of about five or ten minutes over the last couple of years, answering questions and providing brief explanations when she asked for them.
• T asked me recently if infinity really exists. We talked about the idea that the universe may be bounded, and thus not infinite in size. That might mean there's no actual, physical infinity out there. But we talked about how infinity is still an interesting and useful idea in mathematics -- the fact that there's no number so large that you can't produce a bigger number, and also the fact that you can imagine an infinity of fractions between any two numbers on a number line (density property of rational numbers).
• P has been building things on quite grand scales in Minecraft. Occasionally she takes me on a tour. Sometimes I have questions, like "How can the people get to the different animal stalls in the petting zoo?" P sometimes responds by remodeling to fix the issue. She builds quickly, seeming to have a plan in her head sometimes (e.g., how many floors, and thus how tall the exterior walls should be), and other times seeming to improvise and embellish on a simple original idea. T likes to see her creations, and sometimes he emulates them in addition to coming up with his own ideas.

How the Written World Works, What's Fun About It and What We Can Learn From It (Reading/Writing)

• T asked what the word "lizard" means. I gave him a quick description and some examples, but he seemed unsatisfied. So I tried giving him an etymology, since I often explain words in terms of what their parts mean. That was more satisfying, though it didn't have multiple roots or affixes to disassemble, which seemed to disappoint him. I like that he's in the habit of wondering why words mean what they do!
• We read the third and fourth books in the Theodosia series, Theodosia and the Eyes of Horus and Theodosia and the Last Pharaoh. The latter gave a glimpse into class divisions and conflicts in Egypt while the British were there in a colonial role.
• UnschoolerDad and P have read another two books in the Ranger's Apprentice series. There was an extended sequence in The Icebound Land about drug addiction (a drug was used to control one of the main characters when he was made a slave) and the process of detoxification. The Battle for Skandia gets into aspects of military strategy, including nuisance raids, choice of terrain for battle, and an ingenious method for the rapid training of a large force of archers.
• P wrote a brief pamphlet about fairies, asking for the spellings of some words. It turned out it was brief because she didn't have much to say about fairies! I've noticed her spelling has taken a turn for the better recently. She's remembering more spellings that she's asked about in the past, and she seems more aware of when she doesn't know the correct spelling for a word.
• The three of us read a bunch of picture books from the library, including two Jan Brett books (The Umbrella and The Three Snow Bears), another bilingual book (Mamá and Me), and an alphabet book with a different kind of boat for each letter. We had fun talking about nuclear submarines (a relative used to serve aboard one) and about why lightships and lighthouses are less essential now than before GPS came into broad use. Later we read another bilingual book about monarch butterflies, their life cycle, and their annual migration to Mexico. T likes to hear the Spanish first and then the English.
• T has been having us read the same few books over and over again. He seems to be working on reading some of the words himself. He can supply missing words from memory if I pause for some reason while reading.
• One of T's repeat books is Fox in Socks, which P also likes. P, UnschoolerDad, and I spent some time the other day thinking about what makes tongue-twisters hard, and trying to construct our own.
• T, who so far doesn't pronounce L or R sounds, tried L for the first time recently. He was trying to say something about a ladder, and I was hearing "rattle." I showed him how I said "ladder," with my tongue showing a little at the beginning, and he tried it! He's not been willing to try this before, so this was a nice step. He seemed pleased with himself. It hasn't translated to clearer speech in general yet, but the door is open. I think it was not a coincidence that this happened at a time when we were cuddling and feeling quite close and relaxed.
• P and I read Holes together. She loved it and is interested in the sequel, but the sequel is written for somewhat more mature audiences, so she agrees maybe we should wait a while and read other things in the meantime. I read most of the book out loud to her, but sometimes when I was busy she'd read to me, and sometimes when we were both eating, we'd read silently side by side. Holes addresses racism pretty directly, and has black and white characters relating to each other in both friendly and unfriendly ways.
• P and I are in the middle of Ella: Enchanted and enjoying it a lot.
• P has powered through the first couple of Geronimo Stilton books. These came as hand-me-downs from a neighbor. I started reading one out loud, but T and I were enjoying it much less than P, so I begged off reading it for a couple of days, and finally P dived in independently and read the first two books in a couple of hours one day.

How the World Works (History, Civics, Geography)

• See above for latitude and longitude, Egypt, fracking and its politics, and race issues.
• Prompted by Theodosia, we read a bit about the fire at the library in Alexandria, and also about hieroglyphic writing works.
• T asked whether there were real ninjas, so we did some reading and looking at pictures about real ninjas in Japanese history. It was interesting to find out that ninjas didn't dress in any particular way -- they dressed to blend in with the populace, since their purpose was to achieve their objectives without being noticed.
• We watched an animation of how political boundaries in Europe changed from the seventh century to the present. It was fascinating to watch the empires grow, shrink, and sometimes recover again; and to see the huge number of city-states in some periods of history.

• The government shutdown happened. I was watching and reading a lot of news about it, and P and I talked about why it was happening, what it meant (we had some relatives and friends furloughed), how Republicans in Congress were resisting the health care law, and how we expected the health care reforms to benefit us and others.
• We watched a video about what money is and what makes it money (stored value, accepted medium of exchange, divisible unit of account). 
• When UnschoolerDad traveled to Iceland for work, we talked about great circle routes, comparing where it looked like his plane would go (using yarn to mark "straight" routes on the world map) to where it would actually go (using yarn to mark great circle routes on the globe).
• When UD got home from Iceland, we saw some photos of the terrain there, which is pretty young volcanic soil and rock. We talked about what kinds of plants get into an area like that first, and how later succession leads to the kinds of terrain we're used to.
• While UD was in Iceland, we Skyped with him a few times, when it was afternoon for us and night for him. That led to some talk about time zones and why we have them.
• We used a web site that shows you a random point in the world. Most of those we landed in were in the ocean. One on land was near Ekimovichi in Russia. We looked up how many people live there and found out their principal industries: flax refining, cheese making, and a fruit combine. We had to look up "fruit combine," not an easy phrase to find on the Web, and then try just "combine," to figure out that probably meant a collective business of fruit producers and sellers. Another random place was in the ocean near Reunion, and the undersea terrain to the south of it looked like a spreading center, so we looked it up and found it was, at the edge of the African Plate. Hooray for connections!
• In our book about boats, the description of Viking Ship mentioned Scandinavia, and P figured out that this was what Skandia (in The Battle for Skandia) referred to. We talked about the other place names in that book -- Gallica is clearly France/Gaul, with a French-sounding language. Araluen and Tomujai are harder to peg, but I noticed another language sounds German-derived. UnschoolerDad and I spent some time with a real map and P half-listening, thinking about whether the actions in the series mapped onto the real-world map of France, Germany, Denmark, and perhaps some other nearby places. We decided it probably wasn't exact, but certainly drew inspiration from that region.
• We read about the foster-care system. Some friends of mine recently adopted a son who came to them through the foster-care system, and P and T have been curious about why kids end up in foster care and how that works. The book we found didn't get into the problems with the system, but described it in a way that would be helpful to kids involved in it themselves.
• I watched Ken Burns' The Civil War over several days while working on a knitting project. P listened in to some of it. I noticed that something like the battle maps used in the series popped up in her pretend play.
• After we went to buy the kids some new shoes (their old ones had gotten tight, and we thought P had grown three sizes until we realized that youth and adult sizes overlap by a couple of sizes), we talked a little about footbinding. The discussion didn't go far because I realized how difficult it is to answer P's "why?" questions in a way she can understand. It gets into eroticism, patriarchy, class structure, and other things that we can touch on, but that are hard to reach a good understanding of from her present point of view. That's one to keep working on.
• T enjoyed some videos on the days of the week and the months of the year.

Other Things About How the World Works

• One of our cats died. She had been in a slow decline for a couple of years, with a great number of physical problems, and things started getting worse more quickly. Last time we put a cat down, P was mad at me for a long time. I wanted to avoid that this time, so she and I had a long conversation about what to do, and we came to an agreement that if the vet didn't see a possibility for a good recovery (which she didn't, on a house call the next day), we would give our cat the best few days we could, and then have the vet come to our house to put the cat down. P stayed with me and the cat for the euthanasia,while UnschoolerDad hung out with T in another room. We both cried a lot during that week (T seemed to understand what was going on, but not to be distressed about it, as he's not much interested in the cats), but it was a good chance to say goodbye, come to terms with what was happening, and have some concentrated quality time with the cat before she died. P and I also got to think together about what the considerations are for the end of a pet's life. Does the pet understand what's going on? How much pain or distress are they in? Are there ways we can help them with those? Are those actions sustainable in our lives for the long term? Is a good recovery possible? With what probability, and at what cost in time and energy? Might things get worse soon? Considering all that, what's the kindest thing we can do for the animal, within our abilities in the short term and the longer term?
• Both kids, but especially P, are noticing that while their default preference is usually to stay at home and inside, they do have lots of fun when they get outside. When the leaves started falling, we left a restaurant one evening to find its deck unoccupied by people but full of fallen leaves. The kids started kicking them into piles. I was enjoying watching them very much, when it occurred to me I might have even more fun if I joined them. I was right, and the kids were energized by my participating, too. We made a big pile of leaves and lay down in it. This was one step in a process I've gone through recently, of relearning how to play in the ways the kids enjoy. Sometimes it seems so hard, but when I just make myself try, it's usually not so hard, and we have a lot of fun and sometimes hit some great learning places in our games.
• We made it to Park Day after being absent for many weeks. The kids both enjoyed how much running, climbing, and other hard play with friends they could do there. I think we'll be back for more Park Days in the future, especially now that we've re-outfitted for winter play at the kids' new sizes. (We bought some warm stuff when we thought we'd be doing a camping trip in October with snow on the ground; we missed the trip because of illness, but now we have really warm things!)
• Seemingly out of nowhere, T has started talking again about foods "joining the party" in his stomach -- something he picked up a couple of years ago from the only episode of Yo Gabba Gabba we ever watched. He uses the phrase when he's eating something different from what he ate previously, especially something healthy. Recently he asked for carrots with no prompting and made most of a meal of them. 
• P is picking up melodies easily. I was listening to several versions of a choir piece on YouTube, looking for a good one to share, and she picked up the piano introduction that went with the piece in each clip. She's also getting better at holding her own with harmonies. She likes singing rounds ("Make New Friends" and "Row Your Boat" are two favorites) and is getting better at holding her part in them. T doesn't sing as much as P did at his age, but I'm noticing him occasionally picking up tunes as well, and he hears the words of songs -- sometimes if I pause in a song because I'm having a hard time with the guitar chord, he supplies the next few words to remind me!