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.

Embodied Learning

We've been learning a lot with and about bodies, including our own bodies, this week. One day I took P roller skating at a nearby rink. We got great exercise, and my skills from when I last roller skated 25 years ago came back pretty well. P didn't make it away from the wall on her own this time, but she determinedly worked her way around the edges, getting faster and faster, and when I took her hand to help her away from the wall and around obstacles, she got steadier each time. She loved it and would like to go back. The rink has a "pixie class" for 2-6 year olds on Thursday mornings (I wonder if they'd let P participate?), so we might get T into the act as well, if he's interested.

Then P and I were invited to Buddy Week at the martial arts dojo where P and T's cousin and his mom (my sister-in-law) train. P and I went to two classes. P had a blast and wants to join up right away. She's unfazed by the homework requirements (kids must do at-home chore lists, logged reading, and other things designed to improve their discipline at home, and most of all in school, in order to qualify for their next belt test), and even wanted to practice "Yes, sir/ma'am!" at home! I had fun and a couple of good workouts, but I have some misgivings about whether the dojo is a good match for our family's values or unschooling philosophy. While all dojos I've experienced require respect for those of greater rank and courtesy toward everyone, the "respect" at this dojo takes the form of a lot of "yes, sir/ma'am," which is expected immediately, without time to think or digest the information or instructions. I've heard from my sister-in-law about some great things that are happening with her son's confidence there, and P would love to take a class with her cousin -- but he's due for a belt promotion, and then they'd be in different classes for at least a few months, and probably longer. Plus the place is quite expensive, money is very tight for us now, and they require months of notice to get out of the monthly payments if you decide to quit. All this has me looking for other options. Our current plan is to try the introductory week at a dojo much closer to us, which is probably less expensive (finding mat fees on a dojo's web site is harder than getting car prices from a dealership over the phone!) and sounds more agreeable in general philosophy, based on their web page. There are so many variables! When is sparring required? How much does it cost? How easy will it be for us to get to classes? How do they handle the balance among fun, challenge, discipline, and safety? And so much more. We'll see where it all leads. We might still end up at the cousin's dojo (I won't let my philosophy stop me if P is still enjoying it after a 30-day free trial -- I know that people can learn to move among home and other places with different expectations, and benefit from the experience), but at least we'll have an idea of what another place is like first. T is still on the young side for local dojos, but he'll be four in a couple of months, and if we're still at it, maybe he'll want in.

One night this week, the kids wanted to sleep together on the fold-out couch in our living room. We made it up with bed linens and they bedded down willingly, excited about  a new thing to try. P ended up going back to her room after a couple of hours, though -- she learned that she is a light sleeper, and even though UnschoolerDad and I were holed up in other parts of the house, there were too many little noises in the house for her to get good sleep. (When she was about two, she was having trouble getting to sleep in our shared bedroom, and after she chose to move to her own room, she slept much more soundly.) T was surprised, but not upset, to wake up without P in the morning. There hasn't been another request for that sleeping arrangement, which is okay with me -- it's hard for us adults to stay out of the living/dining/kitchen space that is the core of our house after the kids are in bed. We did have a very productive evening focusing on our paid work, though!

This morning, I was trying to decide whether T was over his cold enough to go to church with me and not give all the other kids colds. I asked if I could look inside his nose, and it seemed pretty clear. Then he wanted to look in my nose. He said I had a lot of yucky stuff in there. I asked if it was liquidy and shiny, or solid and boogery, and he said, "It's a lot of hair." I told him he had hair in his nose, too, and that it was to keep us from breathing in things like sand or bugs. He promptly went to P and asked to look in her nose, extending his data set.

Besides those first-person body learnings, we did lots of learning about bodies this week. One day T and I were reading about the lymph system in the anatomy book we still have from the library. That evening I was alone with P, and how the body deals with infection came up in conversation. I asked if she wanted to know what I'd learned about the lymph system, and she listened with interest. She's encountered the idea of swollen lymph nodes before, when we were checking her out and deciding whether to treat an illness at home or see a doctor. A couple of days later she told UnschoolerDad something about white blood cells helping to clean out   invaders from the body, as they do in the lymph system and elsewhere.

We found a great Doring-Kindersley book on bugs at the library book sale (more on the sale below),and T has been asking for bedtime reading from it every night. It's too long to read in one sitting, but we covered most of it in a few evenings, and now we're going back to T's favorite parts. He's fascinated with the detailed photos and models, he has lots of questions, and he was troubled that several of the ladybugs in the mass of ladybugs on one page have no spots. Today we looked that up and found that while they may be a different species (one source called them Asian beetles, in contrast to native ladybugs), they eat aphids and other pest insects, so they have the same garden benefits as ladybugs. T is fascinated with cicadas and the noises they make (below is one of the YouTube videos we watched), and he learned to make the R-rolling sound, unvoiced, as the best way we could come up with of imitating them.

Both kids have been watching a Magic School Bus video on the human body a lot this week. They love the episodes, which cover the digestive system, immune response, and the musculoskeletal system. They've seen them before, but they get new things out of them each time. As I write, they're watching a sports-themed Magic School Bus DVD, learning about friction.

We made it to our local library's annual children's book sale this week, and it was wonderful. We walked out with 19 books for $4, and some of them are large volumes that would cost $30 or more new. Some are encyclopedic volumes on countries in different regions of the world, that should be fun to browse or perhaps reference. Some are volumes of fables, medieval tales, and tales of mythical creatures (one of P's strong interests). There's a book with photos and stories about kids during the Great Depression -- we browsed the photos and found one of a California tent camp for migrant fruit-pickers that could have been where my maternal grandparents spent parts of their childhoods. There's a book of first-person stories from young people living with physical disabilities. We found a book on string games (P and I have tried a few), The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes, the bug book that T's been enjoying, a book on world religions that P wanted, plus some picture books the kids picked out and more. Now a bookshelf for the living room is on our wish list; I'm looking forward to having these easily available for anyone to enjoy.

The Great Depression has been an ongoing theme. P doesn't want to hear The Friendship Doll, which I really thought she'd enjoy, but after we looked at the photos from the Depression, she started some more pretend play about that time. She's absorbed enough information that she could tell us our pretend family was somewhat rich before the Depression, but most of our money was in the stock market, so our circumstances changed a lot after the  market crashed. She tried to put together an outfit from her closet that might fit the game, and it was interesting to talk about how things are different when you have only a few things to wear (if you're lucky enough to have more than one set of clothes) and they are mostly made, or at least washed and repaired, entirely by hand. Her things are also made from fabrics and yarns that would have been difficult or impossible to find 80 years ago -- cotton/synthetic blends, space-dyed knitting yarns, etc. -- so it was a tough dress-up challenge.

Other highlights from this week:

• P's been listening to UnschoolerDad read The Hobbit most nights, enjoying the story and learning lots of new and archaic words.
• We watched an old favorite movie, My Neighbor Totoro, again, and together noticed elements of life in the country near Tokyo, including large family baths, tatami mats and their shoe-related customs, rolling out futons to sleep instead of having separate bedrooms, rice-planting days off from school, getting around without cars, the abundance of small shrines around the countryside, and more.
• P and T were building things with an Erector set, and P noticed that one of their creations looked like a chariot, though she needed help remembering that word. Once we figured out what she was talking about, she wanted to know more about chariots, We found lots of images online that helped us pick out the common features of chariots and see how they were drawn and driven. P asked to use one line drawing we found as a coloring page, and she put a lot of thought into what materials it might have been made of as she chose her colors.
• P learned a little about the term "baker's dozen" from an adult she spoke with at UnschoolerDad's badminton gym. She told me about it, and we looked it up in the encyclopedia of phrase origins we have checked out from the library and learned even more. Apparently the penalties for selling underweight loaves have been so draconian in some places and times (in Ancient Egypt, a baker caught short-weighting his customers would be nailed to his shop door by the ear!), and it could be so difficult to make sure loaves met the expected sizes, that bakers included an extra loaf in each order of a dozen to make sure their customers received their due.
• Today P brought me an iguana grabber toy of T's and told me she'd figured out how it worked. She was right on target. 

The iguana in question

• On a recent trip to the bank, both kids wanted to know more about what banks are for and how they work. We talked about how ATMs work (and all the money that has to change hands electronically when you use an ATM that isn't at your own bank!) and what savings and checking accounts are for.
• P used subtraction and division out loud to figure out how many apple pieces she'd eaten based on how many she started with and how many were left, and then to decide how many more she could have without eating T's share. She did some more division out loud, thinking about how to divide eight pieces of apple fairly among two or four people.
• Since P had enjoyed reading Sideways Stories from the Wayside School, I grabbed its two sequels and another book called Sideways Arithmetic from the Wayside School on this week's library stop. I read a problem from the latter to P -- about eleven kids deciding whether they wanted to play basketball or freeze tag at recess, based on how many people each kid thought would make each game fun. P's intuition that they would all play freeze tag turned out to be correct, and we had fun with follow-up problems about how things would change if one kid changes his or her mind. We read some other problems, but P found them contrived, and I agreed.

The Beat Goes On

It's been a busy couple of weeks -- I've been getting out less with the kids than I like, but I've been able to put in some productive time on UnschoolerDad's current programming project. Not being a software engineer myself, usually I'm confined to bookkeeping and helping to wrote ticklish emails; but this project has some stuff I can sink my teeth into. This the longer break between blog entries. Oh, and Blogger eating some of my notes didn't help. :(  Nonetheless, learning continues... as if I could stop it if I tried!

The Bob the Builder spree has died down, but one of the last episodes the kids watched was about a dinosaur dig. I took that opportunity to get out the plastic dinosaur we long ago buried in plaster and let the kids continue digging it out. We put it away, back then, because sharing tools became too contentious. This time we talked about some ways of sharing, and things went much better -- particularly after we discovered that craft sticks, of which we have plenty, made the best tools for getting the plaster off. We exposed enough to figure out we were digging out a biped (P thought she remembered it was a stegosaurus); I'm sure we'll get it the rest of the way out at some point. The kids enjoyed the feel of the plaster dust, and figuring out ways to handle it so we wouldn't inhale a bunch of it. They also explored the use of gentler tools and techniques as we began exposing the buried dinosaur.

Learning to share more peacefully has been a theme:

• There's been some lovely cooperative play with the wooden train tracks and our many trains, as various combinations of family members have built track layouts together, modified them, played with trains on them, and improvised shelters and garages for the trains and their friends, the cars and trucks. T's really getting into social pretend play with the wheeled beings, much as P did at his age. 
• The kids made and baked some things from Sculpey clay, including a bunch of play coins; it turned out this was so P would have some play money she'd be willing to share with T, as she felt her existing play money set was "too special." It's true that T mostly still loses things with many small parts, so I can understand. They had fun painting their play money with acrylic paints after it was baked.
• One morning when UnschoolerDad and I were on a phone call for the software project, the kids made a museum in their rooms, with multiple exhibits of different objects of interest from their collections. P helped T put together an exhibit of some of his favorite toys (dinosaurs, cars, trucks, transformers, and airplanes), and she made exhibits of musical instruments, sewing accoutrements, and stuffed animals, as well as a please-touch exhibit with fun tactile stuff for T to play with. T didn't get the memo; he enjoyed the sewing exhibit the most. But it was delightful to come out of our phone meeting, for which we'd equipped the kids with snacks and technological toys, and find the time had instead been spent in pure creativity and cooperation!

After the kids made their own museum, we spent an afternoon at our local museum of nature and science, which has a new exhibit of snakes and lizards, including dozens of live animals and several hands-on activities. The kids were engaged by a little stage show about snakes' sensory abilities; several times P mentioned she'd learned about various things in the show from watching Wild Kratts. Both kids loved seeing the snakes and lizards up close and making links between what we saw there, what they'd learned before, and the kinds of toy snakes they had at home. They shopped for snake and lizard toys (P did some money math to decide what she could afford), and played snakes and lizards with both toys and their bodies after we got home. P saw a picture at the museum of an Indian Cobra and recognized the markings on its back as matching one of her toy snakes, which she showed me when we got home.

There's been lots of fun with books. T has continued bringing me the anatomy book from the library for questions and general exploration, and P's been drawn in a few times. Once, T was looking through the book on his own, when he excitedly called out to me, "Mama! I found the baby page!" He'd found the sequence on fetal development. We looked through it together, talking about how the baby developed and how similar the baby in the book was to T when he was inside me. Then we looked at the pages on birth, infant development, and puberty, talking about how kids' bodies and abilities change as they grow. Both kids were rapt, though P was more interested than T in the puberty information. T correctly pointed out that the baby in all the fetal development drawings was a boy, but that some of the babies and kids shown later on were girls.

On another day, T asked lots of questions about the circulatory system pages. Arteries and veins have been catching his attention in all the diagrams, so now he learned about the chambers and valves of the heart, capillaries and how they bleed slowly when he gets scraped up, balloon angioplasty (this seemed intriguing and somewhat confusing), and more. He asked what the red blood cells were, and we talked briefly about the roles of red and white blood cells in the body. The next day, he brought me the book again, and I asked what he wanted to look at. He asked, "How do I pee?" So we found the pages on the urinary tract in boys, and I showed him the path urine takes from kidneys to bladder to penis and out. He traced over that path a few times with the superball he'd been playing with. Then he traced it backwards and asked, "What happens if the pee goes this way?" I said that if it brought any germs from the outside with it, the germs might get into the bladder and cause an infection. Without missing a beat, he said, "And then the white blood cells would fight the infection." Hooray for connections!

Another day, P pulled out the children's dictionaries we have and took a fun exploratory trip through hers, which has more interesting pictures and sidebars. For an hour or more, she excitedly pointed out her finds to me and T. She found pictures of the Earth's structure and linked this to lots of recent talk about volcanoes, including questions about calderas, volcanic chimneys, what colors lava can be, and so on. That same afternoon I found myself humming a theme from Beethoven's 6th symphony. T wanted to know what it was, and P recognized it as coming from Fantasia but misidentified it as the "forest spirit music" (Stravinsky's Firebird Suite), so I played both on YouTube so she could hear the difference. The Firebird clip I chose was the forest-spirit sequence from Fantasia, and as P watched it, she realized for the first time that part of that sequence takes place in the caldera of a volcano. We made the connections, including the super-fertile soil that comes from the breakdown of volcanic rock (the volcano in the Fantasia sequence gets covered with rich vegetation after its eruption,albeit with magical speed) and proceeded to listen to a bunch more great music as I finished making dinner.

Though P looked at pictures more than words on her dictionary expedition, she's definitely using text to make sense of her world. She frequently points things out to me or asks questions based on what she's read in her environment. And a few times recently, she's read aloud to T, which both of them enjoy immensely -- me, too! T is enjoying hearing short chapter books read aloud. Most recently I read him the Magic Tree House book Buffalo Before Breakfast, in which Jack and Annie visit a Lakota encampment before the destruction of the buffalo herds. Later, T told P, "Holding up two fingers means you're a friend."

Some other recent highlights:

• I helped P get her room really clean. She did a lot of the initial work, and I came in to help with the later, more difficult stages. I've been helping her clean a lot in the evenings, which can get frustrating for me, since it seems like we're picking up the same things day after day, and it seems no cleaning is happening during the days between activities. So I've started trying to help out during the day, when a minute or two of tidying up can save several times that effort later on. Trying to get things clean with minimal stress is still a work in progress, but P is pleased with how her room looks, and we actually had space to play in her room during T's nap today.
• During some alone time with me, T asked, "Why do babies have to stay in hospital long day?" (He meant, for a long time.) He was in the NICU for a week after he was born with several issues -- thankfully the NICU here lets moms stay with the babies 24/7, so it was a lot less scary than it could have been -- and we talked about how some babies (not all) need to stay for a while to help them get healthy so they can go home. He asked why he was sick, and I replied truthfully that we never really knew what caused his problems. He said, "I think maybe something went down the wrong way and I got sick." That's close to one of the possibilities, which is that he aspirated some meconium, leading to pneumonia. I wonder how much he remembers about any of that; I have some vague memories of very early events, and I've talked to others who have earlier and clearer memories than I do. It's good to be able to help him think through it.
• P and I, on our date night at a restaurant alone together, talked some about calories. UnschoolerDad and I have both been trying to shed a little extra weight, and P had gotten the idea that excess calories could be problematic. I kicked myself a bit for discussing it in front of her without giving her useful context, and proceeded to give it -- that calories are how we measure energy from food, that we all need them, and that gaining weight is good at her age, since she's growing quickly. She says she doesn't want to gain weight because she really likes her current car seat and knows she'll outgrow it at 65 pounds. I assured her we could find her another good one, and also assured her that growing kids who eat a good variety of healthy foods and eat only when they're hungry will stay healthy and grow as fast as they should. We also talked about how sweets give quick energy that goes away quickly, while other foods give longer-lasting energy, which is why I encourage the kids to eat something non-sweet first when they are hungry. Food and sweets lost some of their tension after that conversation.
• We watched Bambi together for a family movie night. We'd previously thought T might be too scared by it, but he requested it. He was a little sad about Bambi's mother dying, but relieved that he still had his dad. He had lots of questions afterward about fire, and why the animals would be safe on an island while the forest burned.
• There's been some good physical activity. Both kids went to gymnastics classes and to an open gym. They had fun playing in the snow one very snowy day, and taking advantage of its freshness to eat as much snow as they could hold. I also had chances to take each one swimming without the other, so they could do what they wanted. (Since neither was swimming strongly yet, they had to go where the other wanted to be a lot, so I could be with both of them.) P, who quit swimming lessons a while back, has been continuing to experiment on her own. I challenged her to swim across the deepest part (where she can still touch) without touching the bottom, and though her methods were highly unorthodox, she managed it! That was enough to let her go down the waterslide, so I offered that, but she was having fun and wanted to practice swimming more. This is a great milestone, since her being safer in the water means there will be more chances for both kids to swim. T, in his swim time with me, wore water wings and spent almost the whole time in the deep end, enjoying the sensation of floating and perfecting his kicking for propulsion. I think they'll both become swimmers yet!