Midwinter, Mountains, Music, and Minecraft

Wow, more than two months gone by! I don't have many notes from this period, so this will be a fairly skeletal sampling of what I can remember. It's been a busy time and a slow time, on different days and weeks.

An astonishing video, with music by Tchaikovsky, of a composite European city built in Minecraft.

Reading

• P has been reading a lot of graphic novels, since getting a good introduction from a friend (who gave her some Amulet books) and our local children's librarian (who pointed her at Akiko). She devours them solo and sometimes reads them out loud to T. She's anxiously awaiting her next Amulet installment!
• After reading Little House on the Prairie out loud, I searched for a book that would give a more balanced or positive view of Native Americans around the same time. I found Sign of the Beaver, which everyone enjoyed. It was a good information source and conversation starter about Indian woodlore, social structures in Indian and settler life, betrayals of Indians with bad treaties, and more.
• Then we read Farmer Boy, which was a lot of fun. I enjoyed thinking about the quantities of food being produced on the farm for the humans and livestock living there, and how they would translate to a smaller farm such as our family might someday have. The kids were very engaged as well, and asked many related questions while that book was in progress. T was especially interested in whether the characters in the books were real people. (Most of the major characters are; others are composites.)
• P has been playing Minecraft a lot, and she's learned to do her own research on the Minecraft wiki when she doesn't know how to craft something she wants to make. She surprises me frequently with things she's learned there; even T (through watching her use what she's learned) knows a lot about Minecraft! She and I, separately and together, have discovered amazing videos of other people's Minecraft constructions, including the London Bridge, Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water house, and a HUGE composite European imperial capital (see video linked above), showcasing architectural styles from various European cities.
• T has been asking a lot about what the signs on storefronts say; he seems to be on an active information-gathering expedition, working toward cracking the code.
• T got a hand-me-down cash register with play money, and he reads the numbers to sort the bills.
• At a recent game night at a friend's house, I found ten-sided dice for 4-digit numbers: one die was numbered from 0 to 9, one from 00 to 90, one from 000 to 900, and one from 0000 to 9000. Both kids, but especially T, enjoyed arranging the dice (sometimes removing one or more) and having me say what number the dice represented.
• We've started reading Savvy, a Newbery Honor Book by Ingrid Law, who lives not far from us, out loud. It's a funny book, with tween-friendly jokes and vivid writing. It centers on the coming-of-age of a girl in a family where most of the family members have special powers, called savvies. These appear on their thirteenth birthdays, and that's the day it is a few chapters into the story. P wasn't satisfied with eight chapters read aloud in one evening, so she took the book to bed to read more on her own.
• On a quick trip to the library to pick up Savvy, which was recommended by an unschooling friend, T wanted to play with trains, but he asked me to find him some books about cars and trucks. It took me a while to find the right section for those, and on the way I found an armload of books about things the kids have been asking about lately: boogers, kite making, origami, volcanoes, airships, and old fairy tales (P recently picked up a book of medieval tales I bought at a library sale a year or so ago, and she's been asking for bedtime stories from it and reading some on her own. We've also been enjoying a really colorful book of Aesop's fables discovered on another recent library visit.)

A gem of a book about boogers, belly buttons, tornadoes, and an astonishing number of things
the kids have already been asking about! P has already spent an evening with it.

Doing

• P just started an aerial dance class at our newly local gymnastics gym, and it's going well.
• T is getting back into gymnastics after a fall hiatus. He didn't initially want to take classes at the gym near our new house, but after a parents' night out there, playing with the equipment and the instructors, he was full of enthusiasm, and he's enjoying it.
• P took a class late last year about the physics of music, through our local university's science discovery program. She made instruments, learned some musical notation, and had a lot of fun. This month she'll start a class on the science of toys through the same organization.
• The kids are playing together for long stretches, getting along better and better. I try to be nearby, listening and sometimes offering information or suggestions when things get tense. Both kids are using thoughtful language about how they are getting along. P commented recently that she doesn't feel like herself when she acts mean toward T. T speculates out loud sometimes about why P is still mean sometimes, and what he or others might be able to do to make that happen less. We spent some time talking about P's idea, considering in what senses it might be true, and what might help keep the peace.
• We've gone swimming at our new local rec center, which we can walk to.
• P and I attended a presentation sponsored by the local historical society. An archaeologist living in town had excavated the historic privy in her backyard, finding hundreds of artifacts, and a group of students in archaeology at a nearby university had analyzed the glass and ceramic artifacts. They spoke about what they found and how it related to the history of the area. Perhaps the most intruiging aspect of this was that people tended to throw things in their privies that they didn't want others to know about. The privy was in use throughout prohibition, and there were patent medicine bottles thrown in during occupancy by middle-class folks (furnishers and preachers), and liquor bottles from the mining families' occupancy. They explained that patent medicines usually derived any actual benefit from their high alcohol or opioid content. Sometimes this had unfortunate results, such as children taking a cough syrup that stopped their coughing but left them addicted to opium. This led to an interesting talk with P afterward about the history of prohibition and patent medicines, and the nature of addiction. We talked about physical addiction, peer pressure, and how a lot of people start smoking or using other addictive substances in their teenage years, when their friends' opinions often seem more important than anything else; and how once you get through those years to young adulthood, it starts getting easier to know what you want for your own life, independent of what your friends think. I told P I wasn't sure if her teen years would look like this, given that unschooling is encouraging a much more cooperative and relaxed relationship between us than many kids have with their parents. It will be interesting to find out.

Making

• T continues to build lots of Lego creations, both from instructions and from his imagination (he calls it "building with my mind," which always reminds me of Richard Feynman fixing radios by thinking). At Christmas we bought a Lego Mindstorms set for the family, and UnschoolerDad, T, and I enjoyed building one of the models together and testing the sensor probes (touch, light/color, distance via ultrasound, and perhaps others I'm forgetting) and motors attached to its computer. T is already thinking about what kinds of things he wants to program the robots to do -- sneeze when they catch a green marble, for example, or turn in circles when they catch a red marble.
• P is slowly learning more about preparing the foods she enjoys. Sometimes she makes food because she wants to, and sometimes because I am busy with something else and not getting to it as fast as she'd like. 
• P happily builds things with many methods: origami, cut paper, glued craft sticks, cardboard, drawing, painting, and combinations of these and other creative methods. She makes settings and props for playing with small toys mostly, but sometimes other things as well. When T expresses a desire for a toy or costume piece he doesn't have, P often jumps in and makes a reasonable (to an imaginative mind, at least) facsimile from materials she can find around the house.

Writing

• P insists that she wants to write her thank-you notes for Christmas presents herself, in her own handwriting, "So people will know they really came from me" and so people who care about her could feel good about her writing skills. Only one has gotten done so far; we'll see how that goes! Her spelling continues to improve.
• P wrote down some measurements for me, so that we could cut the right size shelves for her closet, and in the process learned the abbreviation for inches (") and how to write a mixed number with a fraction (22 3/4).
• P occasionally works on her own comic book, inspired by the superhero genre. Sometimes she shows it to me to see if I can understand what's going on, and that has led to her learning a bit more about the conventions of comic books, such as using lines to indicate motion.

Watching

The 2012 election results, had our electoral laws stood as in 1920, when women could vote,
but racial minorities still faced significant obstacles (e.g., poll taxes) to voting.

• I shared with P a web page that analyzed election results by demographics and gave maps showing what the results would have been if, say, only men, or only whites, or only people over 21 had voted (corresponding to various phases of U.S. law regarding who had the vote, and who faced significant barriers to voting). It was an interesting walk through the history of democracy in the United States.
• After we read Farmer Boy, T asked for more Little House on the Prairie videos, so we checked out the next 4 episodes from the library, and he's been watching them.
• Both kids have watched the three seasons of Avatar: The Last Airbender, and a few episodes of Avatar: The Legend of Korra. They enjoy playing games inspired by these, and talk a lot about the four elements (earth/water/air/fire) around which the world of these series is based. P has been curious about what the real elements are, so we've had several short conversations, talking a little about them. At the science museum in Oklahoma City, the table numbers for the cafe were elements, with cards showing all the stuff you'd find in a standard periodic table of the elements. We talked a little about what those numbers and symbols meant. Sometimes I pull out our Elements coffee-table book when a picture seems to be in order.
• The kids enjoy looking up YouTube videos to watch together; so far they are mostly on Minecraft and funny cats :)
• The whole family watched A Child's Garden of Poetry, which is a lovely HBO special we have on DVD about poetry, with beautiful animations and reading by children, poets, actors, and musicians. Kids in the video also talked rather eloquently, and at least seemingly unscripted, about understanding and enjoying poetry, as well as what it's like to write poetry. Both our kids were rapt.

 Listening

• We bought a new car recently that came with a Sirius XM subscription. We discovered the channel called Book Radio ("Where the pictures are inside your head!"). P often finds the novel excerpts riveting and asks about checking out the books. We haven't done that yet -- there's so much we want to read that's written for young people and more enjoyable for T -- but I think it will happen before long. T is often engaged by the stories as well, but mostly not to the same degree as P.

Talking

• T asked, out of the blue, how you stop when you're riding a zipline. He also wanted to know whether people ever went uphill on ziplines, and if so, how. I told him what I knew, which was very little, and suggested we ask my mother, since she went ziplining on a vacation in Costa Rica last summer. We did so later, and she had some better answers. But in the moment, T asked if it would be possible for us to throw something far enough that it would hit Costa Rica. I said I didn't think we could throw anything that far. I loved his thinking -- he doesn't know much about units of length measure on that scale, so he handily placed the conversation in terms he could understand. We talked about how long it would take to drive to Costa Rica, compared to our recent driving trip to Texas. T often asks about where we are; he's working on wrapping his head around the ideas of city/state/country/continent/planet and how they are related.
• Other conversations have ended up in other sections. :)

Visiting

• On our trip to Texas, we visited Capulin Mountain, a dormant volcano in New Mexico. Before we got there, we noted the lava rocks scattered around the countryside for miles around and contemplated the force of an eruption that could throw so much weight so far. We drove up to the crater rim and walked down inside the crater, talking about the rocks there, how they formed, how fertile the soil was because of the minerals in the lava rocks and what plants predominated there, how long ago it had erupted (about 60,000 years ago) and whether it was likely to erupt again (no, according to what we read there). We speculated about whether a wall-like structure of lava rocks at the bottom of the crater was natural or human-made; we'd noticed several good places to get out of the weather among the jumbled rocks along the trail and thought that wall might make pretty good shelter too. While P and UnschoolerDad walked part way around the rim trail to see the view of several surrounding states (!), T sat on a bench near the trailhead and took a position for meditation. He couldn't remember the word meditation to tell me what he was doing, but he described it well enough that I could guess and supply the word. (I've been noticing that he's picking up multisyllabic words on one hearing and pronouncing them very precisely these days, though his Rs and Ls are still a little hard to distinguish; and although he shortens a lot of consonant clusters in words he's used for a long time, he says them well in new words; his once-problematic speech is cleaning itself up in a hurry, and he really enjoys being able to talk to almost everyone he runs into and be understood.) He was so peaceful, soaking up the sun on that chilly day.
• On the way back from Texas, we visited the science museum in Oklahoma City. T got to drive a Segway; we stood on moving plates simulating different kinds of ground motion from earthquakes; P and I spent some time in a hall full of optical illusions; both kids played a long time with jets of air and plastic balls, finding many things they could do with them; and I'm sure there was much more I'm forgetting. It's a great museum that we've visited before, and I'm sure we'll go again at some point.
• Also on the Texas trip, we visited the Prairie Museum of Art and History in Colby, Kansas. We looked around the collections of wedding dresses, military uniforms, dolls, fine china, and more rather quickly, since we got there close to closing time. The real fun started when we went outside to look at the other buildings. We visited a dugout house (and got to see exactly how the latch described in Little House on the Prairie worked, since it was the same type), where there were settler-style clothes to try on and cleaning tools we were welcomed to use to clean the place up (the kids were happy to do their part). We visited a one-room schoolhouse, looked through the readers and spellers, and thought about where the kids would sit based on their age and sex. We visited a church where we were encouraged to ring the bell in the bell tower (harder than we thought it would be) and got a look at hymn books and Sunday clothing, as well as the style of the building and its furnishings. But the highlight for me was visiting the huge barn, where a small stage has been added to the hayloft to use for weddings. Since we were the only ones there, P and I sang "Bright Morning Star" in  voices in full voice in the hayloft, enjoying the acoustics of the huge space. It felt like the right song for the place, and P knows it, since it's been one of our lullabies for years.
• On the Texas trip, we visited my family and met my parents' new bloodhound, a dog rescued last year from starvation and neglect at the hands of a breeder. The kids got to see how amazing a bloodhound's sense of smell could be when in the service of a total obsession with food. The dog was gentle and friendly when no food was available, though, and the kids loved her. They also enjoyed my sister's dog, a huge Great Pyrenees, totally unflappable and calmly friendly. T is losing his fear of big dogs, though he's still very wary about strange, off-leash dogs of any size. The kids liked seeing all the people, too, and I think they interacted pretty well with them, with reasonable manners and grace, from great-grandmother all the way through young cousins.
• After the holidays, we visited the Da Vinci Machines exhibit in Denver. This consisted chiefly of machines built based on Leonardo's drawings, from materials that would have been available to him. Many of these were okay to touch and play with, though T was sorely disappointed that Leonardo's idea for a tank was not one of them. He really wanted to try out moving the four independently driven wheels in different directions to see what movements the tank might have been capable of. He loved the bicycle chain, though, as well as the cam hammer, the compound pulleys (he spent a lot of time with these, with and without me, trying out ideas about how they worked), and pretty much everything else he could touch. P enjoyed these too, and also spent a while watching the 40-minute video running on a loop. She particularly liked the water pump based on the spiral of Archimedes (if memory serves, Leonardo figured out that if you made it from pipe wrapped around a cylinder and put the cylinder at a 45-degree angle, it could move water uphill). She asked me why it worked, and it was fun figuring out enough to answer her question accurately. We bought a kit to build a working model of Da Vinci's aerial screw, a failed but inspiring attempt at a helicopter.

Thinking, asking questions, planning...

• P is torn about her room. Sometimes she says she likes it messy. We usually try to clean it up some (usually with my help) when someone is coming over to play. I've been trying not to put a lot of pressure on her about it, which is different from what I did before unschooling. Recently she said to me, "I don't often have the time and the will for this at the same time, but I really want my room to be neat, with a place for everything." I was privately very pleased that she could say that to me, and that instead of launching into possible solutions, I was able simply to ask whether there was anything I could do to support her in that goal. Thus we have measured for shelves in the closet, and I'm helping her with cleaning, organizing, and helping her think about what she's willing to give away, for short periods more frequently, rather than helping mainly with crisis cleaning.
• Recently, P saw a woman with dwarfism in a store where we were shopping. I think she was the first such person P has seen outside The Wizard of Oz (and I don't know whether we talked about it then, so P might have thought that was done with special effects). P looked very curious and made sure I saw the woman, too. I asked P not to point or stare, and as we moved on, I told her the basics about the most common form of dwarfism. P moved on to other things comfortably. Perhaps there will be more questions in time, or I can share the Wikipedia article with her, but for that moment, her curiosity was satisfied.
• T asked me one evening whether you would die if your arm got cut off. I said you might if no one helped you, because you could bleed too much to survive, but that if someone could keep you from bleeding too much, you might survive and have a stump left where your arm was. T wanted to see pictures, so we found a photo of a man who had lost limbs in a train accident, showing his healed stumps. T wanted to know if he could walk, and I said maybe not (he'd lost both legs above the knee as well as an arm), but maybe so if he could get good prosthetic limbs. There followed a long time of looking at pictures, reading descriptions, and then watching videos about various kinds of prostheses, including the C-leg and various prosthetic arms, hands, and fingers. We stopped a lot to talk about what wasn't being made explicit in the videos, such as how the people wearing the prosthetics controlled them. When T had had enough of prosthetics, he asked what else we could watch. He's been asking lots of questions about volcanoes, so we watched a video about the 1980 eruptions of Mount St. Helens, noting that several images from that video corresponded very closely to the volcano sequence in Fantasia 2000, in which a sleeping volcano awakes and erupts. (I've read that St. Helens was the model for the volcano in that sequence, set to Stravinsky's Firebird.) Then T saw links to videos about the space program, so we watched videos about Moon and Mars missions (including Spirit/Opportunity and Curiosity). It was a fruitful evening, and T asked lots of good questions, like, "Are the Mars rovers kind of like robot servants to help those people?" I asked which people he meant, and he said, "The people who want to know more about what it's like on Mars." I told him he was right on. We had already discussed how the rovers had to be able to do some things on their own, because it took so long for messages to travel between Earth and Mars, but that big decisions about what to do came as messages from the scientists on Earth.

Agriculture, Economics, and Iwo Jima

Our biggest outing recently was yesterday morning: we went to an Agricultural Heritage Center in a nearby town. The place was a homestead starting in the 1870s, and several subsequent buildings and improvements were made before the land was given to the county as a museum. The farm still keeps some animals and has a small garden, but no big field crops. They have added an area of hands-on, museum-type exhibits in one of the barns. One of my favorites, which the kids also liked, was a wooden birthday cake divided up into 8 wedges that you could pull out and examine. Each wedge had a picture of a typical cake ingredient (butter, eggs, honey, flour, etc.) on one flat face, and a picture of where that ingredient came from (cows, chickens, beehives, wheat fields, etc.) on the other. There were higher-tech exhibits, but that one just tied things together so nicely in a way that isn't obvious to young kids raised in the city.

The exhibit-area experience was a little loud and overwhelming because we were sharing the area with two first-grade classes on a field trip. Much more relaxed and enjoyable were our self-guided tour of the farmhouse, outbuildings, and grounds, and some opportunities to ask questions of a friendly volunteer. After the school groups left, the volunteers let the chickens out, and we hung out with the chickens and watched them hunt grasshoppers; judging by the mad dashes the chickens made to try to catch the grasshoppers, they really like to eat them! P has been around chickens before, but this was T's first opportunity. He was tickled pink. One chicken nipped curiously at the sleeve of P's dress but did no harm; she was tickled as well once she got over her surprise. We saw bunnies that lived in a woodpile, checked out the crops in the war garden (noticing the striking similarities between the chard and beets, which are different varieties of the same species) and the damage that had been done to them by various pests, and reflected on the meaning of "loafing shed," as one building was described on the map we had.

Some of the things P and T got a chance to learn about or try were:

• Tools and implements from the early 1900s or so, including lariats, lots of tack and farm implements,  water pumps, windmills, iceboxes (the pre-refrigeration type that used blocks of ice), wood-burning heating and cooking stoves (including air inlet for controlling temperature), corn sheller, grain grinder, older stone grinding setup for grain, and some initially mysterious things like calf weaners. 
• Other stuff related to lower-tech ways of living, like outhouses (there was an old wooden one on the site, plus a newer, better-ventilated one for actual use); milking areas with stanchions for hand milking of cows; and a wooden yoke for draft animals that we could take apart and reassemble.
• Bits of history, especially war gardens/victory gardens and why they were important.
• Changes in building technology, and adaptations to the weather here: The old barn was built with unusual mortise-and-tenon joints that allowed it to flex in the high winds rather than breaking down as so many old barns in this area have. The silo at the farm was built of concrete staves with a tongue-and-groove shape, encircled by metal hoops to hold it all together; this was a new technology around 1900. (P noticed another concrete-stave silo on the way home and remarked on it.)

It hadn't occurred to me before that silo and silage are probably related by more than sound! I'd encountered both, but not previously encountered the one being used to store the other. P got to hear about silage (partially fermented grains and/or grasses -- it stinks to high heaven, but if it's made right, the cows love it!). She also learned where mules come from and that they generally can't reproduce. (We're not sure whether the animal we were watching was a donkey or a mule, but it was still a good conversation.)

On the way home we talked about a silent-auction school fundraiser we were attending that evening. P had never heard of an auction, so I described how a live auction works, and then how a silent auction accomplishes the same thing without the noise and more quickly. I hope she'll be willing to talk more about it -- I can show her a silent auction bidding sheet, since we won one item -- and how it ties in with her recent yearnings to sell things. She's been wanting to sell her outgrown and unwanted stuff for money, and begging to go out and set up in the driveway to try to sell it garage-sale style. The problems with this have been that 1) she gets this notion at odd times, like a chilly 6 p.m. on a Thursday night, and wants to do it right then, and 2) we live on a street that gets very little non-resident traffic, since it doesn't follow a useful path for anyone else. I've tried explaining how essential advertising and location are (not to mention having desirable goods) for a sale, but she says she doesn't care and just wants to go do it. The deal I made with her was that she could do it on a Saturday morning when we could plan to hang around and wait for people (and maybe run an ad on craigslist the day before); or I would help her try to sell stuff on eBay if she wants. Maybe having the auction as a bit of background will help with the eBay idea, which seems to me like her best bet at actually selling her stuff, albeit not for much money.

P is getting more confident and effective at interacting with people in the world at large. Lately she's been very willing to ask adult strangers questions or make requests of them when it's appropriate. Sometimes I suggest she do it (asking for something she wants in a restaurant, for example, or asking if she could play with the pump at the Agricultural Heritage Center), and sometimes she takes the initiative herself (asking her choir director if her sparkly black shoes would be okay for her concert uniform). She used to do this only reluctantly or with a lot of coaching, but now she's pretty good at deciding to do it and using an appropriate tone and level of politeness for the situation. This is the sort of thing we get more opportunities to try because of unschooling, since she sees a wider variety of people in different situations than if she were in school all day most days.

Here are a slew of other recent bits of learning:

• We've been seeing a particular ad a lot, one promoting Obama's jobs bill with an excerpt of his speech to Congress. P knew who was speaking -- she remembers Obama being elected, as it was something we cared about and worked on a lot. In the speech, he mentions "the people who hired us to work for them," and I asked if she knew who he was talking about. She didn't, so I explained it was people like us, who voted for Obama and the members of Congress he was addressing, since they wouldn't have their jobs without winning those votes.
• P and I took a wrong turn on the way home from her pottery class the first time and ended up driving through a cemetery, so we got a chance to talk about how cemeteries work and some of the alternatives (cremation, for example, and different things people do with the ashes, including entombing them in a columbarium). P liked going there and wants to go back, so we may have more chances to talk about the end of life and the many aspects of the "what happens afterward" question.
• We talked a little about the portrayal of Indian language in the Peter Pan musical we'd watched recently -- almost the entire song was made up of "Ug-a-wug" kind of noises. I told her at the time that this was a gross mischaracterization, but more recently I was reminded of the Navajo code talkers who provided rapid transmission of undecipherable messages during World War II, with particular value in the Battle of Iwo Jima -- Navajo was chosen because it has a highly complex grammar and because it was mutually unintelligible with even its close linguistic relatives. P was interested to hear about that. This led into a discussion of war in broader terms. We talked about the international effort to stop "ethnic cleansing" in Yugoslavia as a war many people consider justified. P is of the firm opinion that war is stupid and people should talk about their problems and work them out. On a certain level, I couldn't agree more. We talked a little bit about how diplomacy works (ambassadors from countries to other countries, with the job of communicating between governments).
• We've been continuing to read the Song of the Lioness books to P, and she hasn't been shy about asking the meanings of unfamiliar words we run across there. She's more forthcoming with such questions than she was when in school, maybe because we just tell her the meanings as straightforwardly as we can, without launching into a lecture (unless she's interested in the topic) or handing her a dictionary. 
• On another reading level, T is starting to ask what some words in books say, and sometimes sounds them out after I tell him. Exciting stuff!
• Adventures continue with sewing and cloth. P has been making things with buttons on them for T, who is still in love with buttoning and unbuttoning his clothes, and starting to branch out into zippers and snaps. P and I investigated one of her dresses with a magnifying glass to determine whether it was woven or knit -- I thought it was knit because of its stretchiness, but P didn't believe it until she saw the stitches up close, at which point she recognized it clearly as a knit fabric. P and T have also done some counting and sorting of buttons from a big bag of inexpensive buttons we had from the fabric store. I think more button acquisitions are in our near future.
• Recently P mentioned a "thousand million billion" of something, so I asked if she know how many zeros were in a thousand. She knew that a hundred had two zeros, and we talked about a thousand having three and a million having six. Then I started asking questions like, "How many zeros in ten thousand?" She did pretty well at using that concept, especially considering we were in the car and had no visual reference. It's still an emerging concept for her, but it was a good start.
• A week or so ago, P and I were talking about how mountain lions are naturally nocturnal, but how some of the lions around here have adapted to their prey, as house cats adapt to their human caretakers, and are hunting during the day. Then just a couple of days ago, I overheard P telling T, "When we got them, our cats were probably nocturnal. Do you know what that means? It means they mostly like to sleep during the day and be awake at night. But they like to get lovies and food from us, so they wake up during the day. But they still sleep a lot." I added that cats, big and little, sleep a lot more than us (16 hours per day or more).
• P has not been wanting to talk about choir. It's been seeming like she wasn't having much fun. But when I told her I had really enjoyed singing in choirs and missed the chance to do it now, she perked up and taught me a couple of the songs she's been learning. I'm hoping the sharing of the music will increase the fun for her. We'll see. She still wants to stick with it through the first concert, so we've ordered her uniform, which fortunately was on deep discount.
• Last time I wrote that after hours of a sore leg, P still said she preferred the flu shot to the nasal mist. The next day, though, she told me unsolicited that two days of soreness was too much, and next time she'd choose the mist.

And one more nice thing happened. P told me out of the blue a few days ago, "I don't resist when you want me to help clean up. It's not my favorite thing, but I do it when you ask me to." This was news to me! I do a lot of the cleaning myself or with occasional volunteer help, but I ask for help for 15 minutes or so every few days in the living room, which gets strewn with toys. The next day I asked for help, and P helped cheerfully. She did ask to change from the CD I was playing to one of her own, and since we both know the songs on that CD, we danced and sang our way to a beautiful living room, ready for play dates. It was actually fun, and I don't normally enjoy cleaning up (I know, that's part of the problem -- I'm working on making it look and be more fun so maybe I won't pass that attitude along). I'm looking forward to the next time! 

I am the Gluer

P just came into my room after T went down for his nap and said, with the most irresistible expression on her face, that she wanted to do a big art project with me. I asked her what she had in mind, and we settled on making a picture frame with decoupage decorations. I cut the pieces of the frame from cardboard and fixed them together while she looked for stuff to cut out and glue on. She chose Sunday funnies and food photos from grocery circulars. The result hardly resembles what I had in mind at all -- and I think that's the best part about it. I was the gluer, applying Mod Podge and putting her chosen images on where she told me to. We did the project together, but it is mostly her creativity that shows in it. At first I tried to steer her to a different vision, but realizing that 1) it was her creative baby and 2) the beauty of decoupage is that if you decide you don't like the first version, you can put new things over it as many times as you like, I managed to stop steering and keep my mouth shut. P got a chance at self-expression, and that is where I draw the line between an art project (what she asked for) and a craft project. Good stuff. (Now, as the glue dries on the frame and I write, P is experimenting with sewing doll clothes. I gave her a needle and thread, and she's using fabric we had around and coming up with some nice, simple stuff with no instruction needed or desired so far -- she knows I can help if she wants to know how to do something more elaborate.)

Being the gluer is a pretty good metaphor for at least one aspect of the primary role of an unschooling parent. The kids are the ones who decide (as much as I can give them the slack to do so) what they want to accomplish, from the many possibilities they can imagine or I can offer; I'm in an auxiliary role, helping them find the materials, information, or other resources they need to get it done, and sometimes doing part of the work/play along with them. I do sometimes layer my own desires for outcomes or bits of learning onto what they're doing: I'll insist on putting a final coat of Mod Podge on the picture frame to give it a bit of gloss and make the pieces stick together better, or I'll try to get P to do a relevant bit of arithmetic with me rather than just making the process of figuring something out invisible. The kids are mostly tolerant of this, but I'm not always sure it adds much to their learning or enjoyment. I try to strike a balance between their desires and needs and my own desires and needs, so we all get some autonomy and satisfaction out of what happens from day to day. Some of my desires involve a certain amount of keeping up with the concepts in the basic elementary school curriculum, both to ensure a satisfactory evaluation for P in third grade if we keep this up (which would allow us to continue unschooling), and to make a possible return to school less difficult should P choose that.

This past week was our time to decide whether P would start second grade at our local school, or continue unschooling with me. She'd been on the fence all summer, though I didn't ask about it often, not wanting that to be our main focus and not wanting her to cement a decision in place before she needed to. My sense was that starting second grade and then dropping back out would be easier than starting a school year partway through, should she change her mind; but even more so, I think that unschooling has great potential for us, some realized and some still to be worked out, and that P would be happier (and we would all be less stressed) unschooling than dealing with the time demands of school. I wanted the decision to be P's, though. So I took her through the best way I know to make such decisions: for about a week in late July, both of us tried to notice and say out loud things that we'd noticed would be different depending on which choice she made. Then, with a few days to go until the district deadline to declare our intention to homeschool, together we brainstormed lists of pros and cons to both possibilities (starting school or continuing to unschool). When we felt we had all the important stuff on the lists, we picked the list items that seemed most important and underlined them, so we wouldn't base a decision on sheer numbers of less-important or redundant items. When we'd finished our lists, I asked P to think about all this and decide with her head and her heart. She changed her mind three or four times between then and our deadline, finally deciding she wanted to continue unschooling. I think the last deciding factor was that she wanted to take classes in both gymnastics and pottery this fall, and she saw that fitting those in along with school and homework would leave little time for other, more spontaneously chosen activities. I'm feeling good about the choice. Instead of gearing up for school's early mornings and bedtimes -- always a challenge for all of us night owls -- I can gear up for supporting more of what P wants to do and learn this year. For one example, it's probably time for her to have more access to a computer than she can get by borrowing mine, so we have some buying decisions to make.

P will be in both gymnastics and pottery classes in the fall, and miraculously, we got T into a gymnastics class he wanted to take (it's hard to get new students into the crowded program at our local rec center, which is well taught and organized, and far less expensive than other nearby gymnastics centers). 

T is hitting some fun milestones. Through playing with the rest of us with letters on the fridge and in the tub, and by getting lots of stories read to him, he's learned most of the alphabet and many of the sounds the various letters make. He has some Brain Quest booklets of questions and answers left from when P was little. He asks for these instead of a bedtime story almost every night -- he really seems to enjoy being quizzed, and getting things explained patiently when he doesn't know the answers to the questions. Our three different sets are leveled for ages 3-4, 4-5, and 5-6 respectively. Having gone through the first two sets, he now prefers the 5-6 year old set, which spends a lot of time on letter sounds, rhyming, and numbers. He's also making great progress on using the potty, with many dry and clean days, and even some good series of them, in the last few weeks. One day, after he'd used the potty in the morning, I said he could wear big-kid underpants for a while; he finds them more comfortable, which is great, and we'll do that for a couple of hours before I start worrying about the couch and carpets. That evening I realized I'd forgotten to have him switch to a pullup, so he'd spent an entire successful day in big-kid underpants. Hooray! Both letter sounds and using the potty are things he was scarcely interested in a few months ago, so these developments give me confidence that he will actually learn these things and many others on his own initiative, in his own time, given the help he wants.

T has also had fun with a three-dimensional puzzle that UnschoolerDad brought back from a gathering of software developers. It goes together into a cube, and T carefully studied how to do this and learned two different solutions, with no prompting. He does love his spatial puzzles and challenges.

P's been going to a lot of birthday parties recently, so she writes birthday cards and gets more accurate with her spelling on that set of vocabulary. Today she floated the idea of making a movie, which I would film and narrate while she and T acted things out. I suggested she think about writing a script for it. We'll see where that goes.

This week we watched The Black Stallion. The kids didn't find the idea of the movie very appealing and were lobbying to watch something else, but I was tired of The Cat in the Hat and The Pink Panther, so I just started the movie and said they could watch it with me if they wanted. They were impatient with the first 20 minutes or so, but as soon as the ship fire and consequent emergencies began, they were riveted for an hour or more. The Black Stallion is a great movie to watch with inquisitive kids, as the middle hour or so (and much of the rest) have very little dialogue, so questions and answers can go on almost nonstop without losing any of the movie or needing to pause. We talked about what on a Mediterranean island might be edible for humans and horses, how wild horses can get used to humans, some of the methods of training horses, Alexander the Great and his horse Bucephalus, and a bit about horse racing rules, jockeys, and poker. After the movie ended, both kids volunteered that they liked it a lot.

This week was County Fair time, and the whole family went on Friday. We went just after lunch, not realizing the midway didn't open until 4:00. But that gave us lots of time to check out chickens of many breeds, goats, pigs, cows, bunnies, antique tractors, and the contest winners in fiber arts, baked goods, cake decorating, model making, and lots more. P had a good conversation with a beekeeper about her demonstration hive, wanting to know where those bees could get pollen or nectar (they couldn't, but wouldn't be there long and had stored honey and nectar).

When the midway opened, we measured P and found she was just barely tall enough to ride anything she wanted (first year of that!), so we sprung for ride-all-you-want armbands for P and me, and she was very daring. We both wanted to skip the very scariest ride, and I persuaded her not to ride the loop roller coaster after there was a power outage (a breaker tripped) and we got to thinking about being stuck upside down for an extended period. But otherwise she tried everything, and it was fun riding most of the rides with her. We got to talk a little about how some of the rides worked, particularly those where you go in a circle and get pinned to the outside of the circle by your body's tendency to go in a straight line while the ride forces you to go in a circle instead -- you know, the stuff that people usually call "centrifugal force." 

(Yes, the concept of centrifugal force is a real one, but it's singularly unhelpful in helping kids learn physics, in my experience. It describes without explaining, and it only makes sense with the other concepts of physics when you're working in a rotating reference frame; so I touch on it, but try to explain things in ways that will be more helpful. What I loved most about teaching physics, when that was my job, was seeing understanding bloom in response to good explanations and related experiential learning. It's still fun!)