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.

Worms, screen-free week, gardens, and more friends!

This blog covers a longer period than most, partly because we recently had a screen-free week. The kids were into the idea, and I joined them, though I did use email and recipe lookup sites. But not this one. :)  So here's a sampling of what we've been up to:

Reading

• One day, T realized that he could touch my phone screen in such a way as to highlight words on a web page. He loved highlighting different words and portions of words and having me read them. He did it over and over, breaking down different words, phrases, and parts of words, and he noticed with interest that when he highlighted the "hum" part of "human" I pronounced it differently than I did when the whole word was highlighted. He also liked highlighting spaces between words and asking me which words he'd just separated.
• P has been reading a novel called The Merlin Effect from the library, and other books from time to time. She's also been devouring comic-strip treasuries, including The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes. The Far Side books have been fun for exploring some of the cultural references the jokes rely on. 
• My sister sent several picture books for the kids' birthdays, about the civil rights struggle of the 1950s-1960s in the United States, and we've read those together and talked a little about what was going on then and how things are different now, though racism still happens in some ways. Before I even got to the books, P had read all but one.
• We did a lot of reading aloud during screen-free week, even more than at other times. Some reading was by candlelight. I liked turning off the lights in the evening and reading in the circle of candlelight with the kids. It's amazing how distractions recede when the circle of light in a room is small. We focused better on the story and each other, and had good conversations, at those times.

Doing

• We took a trip on an airplane, the first T can remember. He loved watching the control surfaces on the wing do their things, always pointing out when he saw them change. We talked a little, when we were at full flaps for landing, about how that mimics birds who cup their wings forward when landing, to maintain lift while slowing forward motion. P was amazed at how slowly we seemed to be moving when we were up high. We played with different ways of clearing our ears on ascent and descent. We speculated about where the stuff in the airplane toilet goes on flushing. Here's a good answer.
• We started an indoor worm bin, buying worms from a garden center. We put it together, and the kids like looking inside to see where the worms are, what they seem to like best to eat, and how the food scraps change over time.
• The kids also enjoyed helping me assemble the outdoor compost bin, and playing inside it until we took it out and started loading it up. 
• During screen-free week, we played a lot of cards. P learned to play Gin, Five Crowns, Spit, and War with me. War (the most boring card game ever?) was made more interesting by having T judge who won each comparison. He was quite accurate in his decisions, and seemed to enjoy the practice. I asked if he'd give us a dramatic decision ("Queen beats three!"), and found that he didn't know all the number names; but he was game, so he got some practice with them.
• While T was having his gymnastics class one day, P and I sat in the bleachers. There was pop music playing, and I heard P starting to hum in harmony with the music. I started tapping some body percussion and then humming another harmony along with her. It kept changing over a few songs, and it was a wonderful series of wordlessly collaborative improvisational moments.

A great hand-me-down gift from a neighbor a few years ago comes into its own.

Both kids have played a lot recently with a color-sorting toy that uses binary ideas. T traces routes physically, adjusting the controls on the left to let a ball go where it belongs. P was doing the same. Then I asked them if they'd figured out the number part -- that if you make the numbers with "1" next to them on the left add up to the number under the slot you're aiming for, the ball will go there. Both of them started paying more attention to that and practicing some addition as a result. I gave P an introduction to writing numbers in binary format, but I'm not sure it stuck.

Making

• T's birthday happened recently, and P made her presents for him. He's always wanting to take over the couch or a long table as a runway for his toy planes, so P made him a cardboard runway, complete with a slight upward slope, drawn-on lights, and directional arrows. She also made a sort of airport terminal with waiting area, complete with tiny scrolls for the people to read while they waited.
• One day while I was digging the garden, T and P worked together inside to build a zipline the right size for Polly Pocket dolls to use, plus hooks and harnesses they could ride in.

Writing

• P told me one morning recently, when everyone else got up rather late, that she'd been in her room since early, drawing and writing. She hasn't yet showed me what she did.
• One morning, I found T had arisen before me and was diligently writing letters in a book for that purpose. P told me he'd found the book the night before. T used it all day, asking for different kinds of help (more details early on, then less as he got the hang of it), and going through all the letters. The next week or two, he used a magnetic drawing tablet a lot to write different things. One morning he asked me to show him how to write his name, so I wrote an example for him on a nearby dry-erase board. He wrote it beautifully, then erased both versions and kept writing his name through the day. He's written his name before, but this was the first time he did it without a model right in front of him. He's not reading very much yet, though he is recognizing some words in context by their first letters. It seems he may be learning to write first. :)
• T and I worked together to compose a thank-you note for a birthday gift. He didn't know what to say (it's a new skill for him), so I talked about the sorts of things people often say, asked him what he liked about the gift, and made suggestions about what to write, writing down the ones he approved of.

Watching

• I read in a favorite mom's blog about her kids, who enjoy cooking, doing "Iron Chef Lunch" some weekends when she is fresh out of energy and lunch ideas. I thought that could be fun if we built up the right skills and knowledge, so we watched a couple of episodes of Iron Chef America. The kids didn't like it as much as I did, but they got the concept, and it was interesting, if a little creepy, watching the crayfish episode (all recipes starting with live crayfish). We talked about crayfish basically being big water-dwelling bugs, and about other instances of human eating bugs on purpose.

Listening

• We had the radio on more than usual during our screen-free week, usually to the public-radio talk station. We didn't talk a whole lot about what we heard, but I could tell that at times the kids were listening. Sometimes if I went to turn the radio off, P told me she was listening and wanted to finish the story.

Talking

• P and T invented and initiated their own game, in T which gives P a series of numbers, and she adds them one by one for a cumulative total. I just listened to her get to 47 without making a mistake, even when she was mentally adding two 2-digit numbers (16 and 21). They've been doing this when I wasn't listening, they say. It tickles me to listen to P improving her mental arithmetic while T improves his sense of numbers and how quickly or slowly they add up.

Visiting

• We went to the county recycling center to buy a good compost bin at a good price. They had a self-guided tour area from which we could see the sorting machines, the railroad spur that took the recyclables away, the wetlands that were helping with water purification, and lots of useful signs explaining the process of separating recyclables from each other and from contaminants. There was also a display that did a much better job than the pamphlets we get in the mail of explaining what can go in the curbside pickup, what can't, and why. Seeing how the machines worked made these rules make much more sense, too.
• I've been digging up a garden plot in the front yard, and that has helped with meeting neighbors. Recently a dad and two kids were ambling by, and I called T out to play (P was away at a musical with UnschoolerDad). We found out where they lived and visited them shortly afterward, seeing their garden and backyard and meeting their backyard chickens.
• I saw the next-door neighbor's child, a little older than mine, playing in the snow one day by herself. I asked if she'd like to play with my kids if they came out, and she said yes, so P and T dressed in a hurry and spent the rest of the afternoon playing outside with her. That was the start of a beautiful relationship -- she comes over often to play, and we are in good communication with her parents. This is the first time we've had a friend close enough for truly spontaneous visits and play, and we're loving it. P went to her house one day and played with her six pet rats.
• P went to an evening campfire at church with me. After we'd toasted our fill of marshmallows, I fell in with the music makers, and she played with several kids around the big yard. She told me afterward that she needed to come to the late service the next day, since she'd agreed with another kid to meet and check on the rabbits they'd found. Usually P and T don't come with me to church; I go to the early service and come back quickly so UD can do his own Sunday activity, and the kids prefer to stay home. That Sunday, though, they both went to church, and they both enjoyed it. I hope we're opening the way for them to enjoy church with me. They are both registered for a week-long day camp at church this summer, and with luck, they will build some friendships there that will make church even more fun for them.
• On our trip by plane, we visited friends, family, the beach in Alameda, and Chinatown in Oakland. On the beach we looked at birds, shells, erosion patterns, and how the tides went in and out. The kids built sandcastles. In Chinatown we tried new foods from a dim sum takeout stand, looked at traditional and American-influenced children's clothing for sale, looked at and bought a few beautiful things made of fabric and semi-precious stones. We also noticed how many more people were hanging around outdoors, without or without their families, and talked a little about the history of Chinese immigrants in the American West and how and why Chinatowns would have formed and persisted.

Thinking, Asking Questions, Planning...

• In the car one day, we were listening to a story on NPR about the foster care system. The interviewer mentioned that the guest had been a foster mom for more than a quarter century. I kept listening for a couple of minutes, and then P said this: "A quarter century would be 25 years. Because I know half of 100 is 50. And the sound on my computer goes up to 50, and when it's exactly halfway up it's on 25. [She told me later she knew it was exactly halfway because she could see it on two different scales, one showing 50 out of 100 and one showing 25 out of 50.] And half of 5 is two and a half, and if you imagine each of those ones is a ten, then the half is five, and that makes 25." I was tickled to hear all this -- it's not how I would have taught it (except maybe the last part), and she connected it all together on her own. I asked her later how she knew half of five was two and a half. Her answer: "Well, it wouldn't be fair if one person got three and the other got two, so each should get two and a half." Spoken like a big sister who needs to know these things!
• Again in the car, P asked about the GPS display (miles to next turn):
  - That three point four there, how do you say that?
  - I'm not sure what you mean. I'd say three point four.
  - Yes, but what does it mean?
  - Oh, it means 3 and four tenths. If there were another number, like three point four five, that would be hundredths: three and 45 hundredths.
  I say a little about how UnschoolerDad and I sometimes talk about short times in milliseconds, which are like three decimal places. 100 milliseconds is one tenth of a second.
  P is quiet a moment, then says:
  - I just realized something. One in ten is the same as ten in a hundred is the same as a hundred in a thousand.
  - Yep, that's right. (I went on a bit more about equivalent fractions, but she had moved on, so I let it go.)

Learning and Moving in Election Season

Once again we've been focused on our activities more than on writing about them. I think I detect a pattern! I'm very glad, this Election Night, to be done with the election and also past the hardest parts of moving to a new house in a new town (near enough our old one to keep our old friends). Now perhaps we can settle down into a new rhythm and explore a wider variety of interests. Here's a sampling of recent learning:

Reading

• We read Little House in the Big Woods recently, as bedtime reading, and started on Little House on the Prairie. T listened carefully to  the details of Pa making bullets, scrutinized the pictures, and asked me about it again a couple of nights later. P was excited to hear about square dancing and wanted to know if people still knew how to do it (yes) and if I knew how to do it (yes, a little). Perhaps we'll seek out some square dancing or contra dancing locally so she can try it. T asked what "pebbles" meant when we read about pebbles on the share of Lake Pepin. He knew about gravel from playgrounds, but didn't remember hearing small rocks called pebbles before. We read about cheese making, maple sugaring, and much more. As we started running into parts that are derogatory toward Indians, I noticed several local homeschooling moms chatting online about what other books they've used to give a more accurate or balanced view of Native Americans in that time period. We have one well-liked book from that discussion on hold at the library now; more on that when/if we read it!
• P checked out several graphic novels at the great library that is a short walk from our new house. She's especially enjoying Akiko (the children's librarian said a lot of girls especially like this series), and it's wonderful to hear her read aloud from it. She's very fluent and gets a lot of appropriate expression into her reading voice.
• T continues his frequent readings with UnschoolerDad of The Sneetches and Other Stories.  He likes to read some of the words on each page (mostly from memory, but there is some actual decoding starting to happen), and with almost every reading he wants to read more of the words. He's asking just the right kinds of questions for starting to decode; for example, he asked UD why there were little sixes everywhere -- that was how he saw lowercase a, as he's still learning some of the lowercase letters.

Doing

• We parked a twenty-minute walk from P's choir rehearsal and walked there along a local bike path that followed a creek. P and T both really enjoyed the walk. I commented as we passed a Jewish temple, and P wanted to know how I could tell that was what it was (Star of David, Hebrew lettering on sign, transliterated Hebrew in name of congregation), and talked just a bit about Jewish theology.
• P went with me to our Democratic headquarters to volunteer on the get-out-the-vote effort one day. They wouldn't put an 8-year-old on the phone (and she wouldn't have wanted to phone, though she would have been happy to stuff envelopes), but she did a bunch of voter-list shredding (for voter privacy) to save time for another volunteer to make calls.
• Both kids did some leaf-raking in our extremely leafy yard, for fun and for pay at different times. 
• Both kids enjoyed trick-or-treating. I totally dropped the ball on costumes, between our recent move and election work; but they cheerfully decided on and pulled together costumes  (a purple dog, again, and a cowgirl) from what we had on hand and could find. This was T's first year of feeling confident about trick-or-treating, and he had fun, remembered his thank-yous more than he forgot them, and got into some fun conversations with people at their doors.

Making

• P made some very fetching little cards for Thanksgiving, using materials she's found so far as we unpack in our new house. Some of them tell loved ones that she is thankful for them. Others provide space to list things the recipient is thankful for. 
• Both kids are building a lot with Lego and wooden building blocks. P was very happy when she finally located her big box of Lego bricks that had been in storage during our move. She builds creatures, vehicles, and often creations that are cyborg-like combinations of the two.
• P continues making her elaborate creations in Minecraft. She's learned to open and search the Minecraft wiki when she wants to know how to make an item.

Writing

• P wrote on her Thanksgiving cards, and she's been playing Scribblenauts a lot and asking about spellings of harder words. She comes up with really cool ideas in Scribblenauts, like having her character fly very high on a griffin's back and then parachute down, or getting out of a too-deep-for-a-ladder hole by bouncing on a big trampoline (because just a trampoline didn't quite do the job).

Watching

• I brought in a tiny snail I found in the backyard, so the kids could get their first up-close look at a live snail. We put it on a plastic mat in the kitchen and tried bringing different things (grass, some dandelion leaves from where I found it, a slice of turnip, etc.) to see if it would be interested in eating them. P also experimented with moisture on the board to see how the snail would react. We were considering keeping it around inside for a while (I thought it might freeze to death soon otherwise), but we looked up a bit about snails and found that they hibernate, so after we'd watched it a good long while, we put it back outside where I found it, so it could go about the business of finding a good hibernation spot. Another day, after I killed a yellowjacket that had gotten into the house, P and I took a good look at its body structure and texture. She remarked on how smooth it was, "almost like plastic," and on how much its wings resembled smaller dragonfly wings.
• On Election Day, I had an electoral map updating on my computer starting when the polls closed on the East Coast. P saw it and wanted to know how it all worked. She was very anxious about the possibility of Romney winning the presidency, and glad to see the electoral votes piling up for Obama, but I don't think she really believed me that Obama was winning at first -- after all, there were those huge red swaths across middle America! She felt better after I showed her the electoral map and equivalent cartogram for the 2008 presidential election on Wikipedia (look down a bit, on the right side of the page, for these images), so she could see in the cartogram how all those red states didn't account for many people/electors compared to the blue states. UnschoolerDad and P had a short talk about the House still having a Republican majority, and why highly polarized partisan politics could still make it hard to get things done. I find, as I try to explain why we believe as we do on certain issues, that I need to make sure UD and I don't demonize the other side inordinately. A blogger I love put it well, quoting her son as asking, during the election eight years ago, "So, if George Bush were driving in his car, and he saw me, would he try to run me over?"

The scary, geographically correct electoral map for 2008

The reassuring (to Obama supporters), electorally correct cartogram for 2008

Listening

• I heard P humming the tune to "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" in the car, so I sang the first verse. P asked where it was from, and I said it was a wartime song (couldn't remember which war, but thought it was the Civil War) about waiting for the young men to come safely back from the war. She asked about their ages, and I said there was probably a minimum age, but some boys lied about their age and went when they were younger. An interesting discussion ensued about why someone might WANT to go off to war (fighting for their ideals, a chance at excitement or a new life, desire for glory). Later, I looked it up, and we found out that "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" was a pro-war song from the Civil War era, set to an older Irish tune, "Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye," which was an anti-war song!

Talking

• I don't remember how the conversation about adrenaline started, but P and I talked about "a rush of adrenaline" as what happens when you are angry, scared, or very excited. We talked about how adrenaline temporarily suppresses immune responses, so for example, if you have a cold and are singing in a concert, your stage fright will probably keep you from coughing or sniffling during the concert. We also talked about how, in a crisis situation, adrenaline might give you greater strength and/or endurance than you would have without the adrenaline surge.
• P said, as she's said several times recently, that she wishes she could go back into the past -- the horse-drawn-wagon, washing-clothes-by-hand past of the Little House books, which we've been reading out loud recently. We've talked about the incessant nature of chores in that time compared to now, but also about some things that might be pleasantly different. She speculated about being able to introduce some labor-saving devices early, and wondered whether time travel might actually become possible in her lifetime. I told her about one of my favorite books, Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, and how in that story, time travel to the past results in the present ceasing to exist. I told her a little about the interventions decided upon in that book (giving smallpox immunity, better weapons, and some potentially protective religious ideas to some native American groups to place them in a more powerful position upon Columbus's arrival), to make changes around 1492, in hopes of correcting the disastrous route history had taken by our future/the book's present. I said I didn't know whether she'd enjoy the book yet, but she said, "Oh, I'm all about time travel," so I guess we'll give it a try when we find it. We just moved, so most of our books are still in boxes.
• Listening to the radio one day, P asked what the electoral college was. Complicated discussion ensued as we talked about the E.C. vote versus the popular vote. We also got into apportionment of Congress members and Senators, since electors for a state are mostly equal to the sum of those two.

Visiting

• Both kids are ecstatic to be living just two blocks from our new local library, since we moved last month. They love the kids-only computers in the children's section, and they love walking or riding their bikes to the library. Wait till they find out the local rec center's nearly as close in another direction!

Thinking, asking questions, planning...

• P decided to spend some allowance on deeply discounted gymnastics clothing. T was considering also getting a fancy, shiny gymnastics shirt -- he tried it on and told me he wanted to buy it -- but as I almost always do for him, I reminded him that he'd been telling me he was saving up for a particular Lego set, and asked him to decide whether getting the shirt was more important than that goal. He thought for a few minutes and decided to save for the Legos. He doesn't always decide this way -- eraser pets recently won out over the savings goal -- but sometimes savings win out.
• T asked how you send papers -- he wanted to know how mail works, so I explained about addresses, stamps, mail carriers, sorting at the post office, and planes and trucks to get the mail to the right delivery area. I wrote a letter to my parents from him, using his words/ideas (he signed his name), so he could send some mail. And shortly afterward, he got some back!
• We drive pretty often by a Catholic church that, at the moment, has 3000+ crosses planted in its front yard, with signs about abortion. P asked what the crosses were all about, so I gave her the basics of what abortion is and the opposing viewpoints about it. Hard topic! We also talked some about contraception, which to my mind should be the best thing for both sides, since it minimizes the demand for abortions -- but I can't claim to speak for Catholics. Then, the next day, P asked me to read aloud to her from a book I bought a long time ago at a library sale, thinking P might be ready for it one of these years: Catherine, Called Birdy. It's a humorous teen novel set in 1290, voiced as the diary of a 13-year-old young woman. She's the daughter of a country knight with modest holdings for a noble, and she hates her life and writing about it, but her mother has made a deal that if she writes a daily account for her brother (an aspiring monk who is trying to make sure she gets at least a little education), she need not spin. Spinning is worse than writing, so the game's afoot. Just about every paragraph requires some kind of explanation of a vocabulary word (e.g., betrothal), a social structure (e.g., dowries, or feudalism and the tenant farmer system, including payment of rents in goods rather than currency), a historical phenomenon (e.g., the Crusades), if not several of these. Very rich, thick going. But P gets most of the humor, and she asks good questions about the explanations. How did the Church get to be in charge of so much? That one took a while, but fortunately we'd watched some videos about the Roman Empire, so she had some background for it.
• T and I watched several episodes of Little House on the Prairie on DVD while he was sick one day. He asked me several times whether this was real life. I think he was trying to get the hang of live action vs. animated video (he's seen lots of animation in a variety of styles), and also whether this was filmed close to the present day or in the older times it portrays. I think we got that worked out: I told him these were real people and animals doing things in real places, but that they were people filmed pretty recently, when I was a little girl (I realize that juxtaposition may be confusing for him!), pretending to be people who lived much longer ago.

I Spy...

We've been working hard on moving, searching for a new house, getting our old house ready to sell, etc., so I've been very spotty about keeping notes on our activities and learning; and the kids have been spending more time than usual learning on their own, without me. So this is just a tiny sample of what's actually happened, since it's what I saw and am now able to remember -- but it's what I can manage this time! Perhaps after our move things will settle down a bit and I'll be able to witness and record more of the learning.

Reading

• We finished reading The Black Cauldron out loud for bedtime reading.
• We read Land of Hope, a historical novel about immigrants coming to the U.S. via Ellis Island, with many pauses to talk about the history and why things happened as they did for the characters.
• We started Little House in the Big Woods. Both kids are enjoying it, looking at the pictures, and asking lots of questions.
• T is showing a new level of interest in words. UnschoolerDad started a tradition of reading the same book (The Sneetches and Other Stories by Dr. Seuss) to him every day. T likes to pick one word that appears often in each story and say that word when it comes up. He also likes to do a word search: I'll tell him a word that appears somewhere on the page we're reading, and he'll try to find the word on the page. The first time we tried this he seemed frustrated, but when I started to move on to more reading, he said he wanted to try it again. Not one to shrink from a challenge of his own choosing, this young one!
• We walked by a police car the other day, parked in a restaurant's dumpster area. We saw it from the back -- the lights on top were almost invisible, so the only sign it was a police car was the word POLICE written across the back of the trunk. T asked why the police car was parked by the trash. I answered him, then asked how he knew it was a police car. He said he saw the word "POLICE" on it. He was very proud of himself!
• P is enjoying the Amulet series of graphic novels. She reads and rereads them, to herself and to T, who also enjoys them.

Doing

• When we were getting ready to make an offer on a house to buy, P helped me do the arithmetic to figure price per square foot on some comparable homes sold in the area recently. I'd read her the prices and square footage of the homes, and she'd divide them out, tell me the result, and then multiply by the square footage of our desired home. This was the first time she'd dealt with place values up to the hundreds of thousands. I don't think it sank in all the way, but it was a good exposure, and she enjoyed the exercise.
• We went to a Heritage Event, a sort of living history event set in 1880 in the Colorado foothills. P enjoyed it and is considering becoming a volunteer next year, when she'll be old enough to do so as long as I'm volunteering too. We saw and/or tried metal bathtubs, chamber pots, hand tools for making buttons (we watched but didn't do it, as the line was very long!), butter churning, laundry with washboard and wringer, sausage making, a class in a multi-age schoolroom segregated by sex (though the teacher let P sit by T when she asked very politely if she could go and help him), and more.

Making

• We've been making cookies. T especially likes to help measure in the ingredients and lick the spoon. P picks up a new cooking term or technique from time to time.
• Both kids have been painting and drawing a lot.
• T is enjoying stamping with rubber stamps, including carefully cleaning the stamps between colors of ink.
• P is making amazing creations in Minecraft. She builds elaborate castles, farms, security systems, arenas, zoos, signs to be viewed from high in the sky, and more, and she's lighting them up with electric lamps controlled by redstone circuits, and then sometimes enjoying blowing them up with TNT and/or drowning them in lava when she's ready to move on. She watches YouTube videos other Minecraft enthusiasts have made to get ideas. I showed her how to access the Minecraft Wiki online to learn how to craft or use items in Minecraft, which is leading to a fair amount of reading, spelling, and online search activity. 
• T is building like mad with Lego. He has several Lego kits, and we've bought, organized, and labeled two big fishing-lure boxes to hold them in an accessible way by sorting them by size and shape. T enjoys the building and the sorting, and he likes sharing his creations with other kids and adults.

Writing

• T liked writing numbers on a slate at the living-history class. His numbers bear some resemblance to the usual forms. He reads numbers very well because of his extensive work with Lego building instructions. He also likes writing his name on things, though he still asks how to make some of the letters.
• P wrote a fairy story to put in a book in her Minecraft library. She's learning her way around a computer keyboard, so typing is becoming less frustrated.

Watching

• We watched the first three Star Wars movies (Episodes IV, V, VI) on DVD. T is starting to be more okay with tense moments in movies, though sometimes he leaves and plays with something else for a while. 
• Minecraft videos
• Opera scenes on YouTube -- I heard some great opera arias on a public radio pledge drive one day, and I wanted to share them with whoever was interested, so I looked them up on YouTube and played some. (I also made a pledge that will get us a 6-CD set of 100 opera arias sometime soon.) T was very interested in the costumes and the facial expressions and body language. Sometimes he asked what they were saying, and I supplied the best translations I could come up with for the Italian or German.

Listening

• Both kids are more attentive than they look at times, catching odd bits of my conversations with UnschoolerDad or of stories on the radio and asking questions about them. Examples of that are in some other sections.

Talking

• After a little bit of stargazing in new-moon dark skies recently, P started asking questions: Why do the planets go around the Sun instead of around some other star? (We talked about relative strengths of gravitational attraction based on distance, about measuring distance in light years and light minutes, and about how everything in our galaxy orbits the galactic core.) T wanted to know what planets were in our solar system (P was able to come up with most of them, and I supplied the rest). P wanted to know why the band of stars across the sky was called the Milky Way, when that's the galaxy we're in (We talked about spiral arms and the general shape of the galaxy). We talked about the lengths of years for different planets at different distances from the Sun. There was more along those lines, but that's what I remember.
• T asked UnschoolerDad how fast a car would have to go to keep up with the sun (really with the earth's rotation, keeping the sun always in the sky). UD asked me, and I said it would depend on latitude, but at the equator, you'd have to go a little over 1000 miles per hour. We talked about why a car wouldn't be able to do that. UD mentioned that in space, without air resistance, the space shuttle could orbit in a matter of hours, going MUCH faster than the car at the equator and passing quickly from day to night and back again. T was intrigued.
• P asked why the sky is blue even though the sun is yellow. We talked about atmospheric scattering of blue light, and why these two observations are partly due to the same phenomenon.
• I took the kids out to dinner recently, and one of the straws that came with their milk drinks had some liquid in it inside the wrapper. We washed it out thoroughly, and a conversation about various kinds of food contamination (deliberate and accidental) ensued. We talked about how one poisoning incident with medicines when I was a child had led to just about everything having safety seals on it. We talked about pop-up lids on goods in jars, and why they work the way they do (UD returned a jar of something recently after discovering its lid had popped up before we opened it, and the kids noticed that and wanted to know about it). We talked about swollen cans or jar lids and the connection with botulism, about safe opening and disposal of contaminated goods, and more. P connected the pressure in botulism-infected cans with the pressure of fizzy drinks when you open them, so we talked about carbonation. We also talked a little about Botox injections and how the botulinum toxin in them paralyzes facial muscles, and wondered together why people getting Botox injections don't get botulism illness.

Visiting

• Both kids have enjoyed looking at new houses we were considering buying. They love the one we chose. They've been back to the old house with me many times, doing various things to get it ready for sale or get our stuff out of it. They watched as UD and I hauled some heavy tools up a steep ramp from the workshop to the garage (whence the movers can take over), using a block and tackle so I could pull the 400-lb tools up fairly easily while UD supported and steered them up the ramp.

Thinking, asking questions, planning...

• I've been reading The Black Cauldron to the kids at bedtime. One night we reached the part apart the Marshes of Morva, and the book mentioned that the marshes reeked. I explained that reeking meant stinking, and talked a bit about aerobic and anaerobic bacteria, and how anaerobes' products of decomposition make marshes stinky, just as they do compost piles that don't get enough turning or aeration; but that decomposition by aerobic bacteria doesn't create nearly such a foul odor. P wanted to know what sorts of dead things would be decomposing, and we talked a little about the plant and animal possibilities.
• P wants to write a thank-you note to our realtor for helping us find such a cool new house. She really likes him and says he's great with kids. I told her the best time to give a note like that would be at closing, since then we'd know we really were moving into that cool house. She thought about how much she'd like to write and started mentally working out how many sentences she could write if she did two per day for a week. (She got an incorrect answer, but when I used her same method to show her the correct answer, she immediately recognized what her mistake had been. As a former math teacher, I wish all my students had been so willing and able to seek and find their mistakes!)

A Reeeally Long Bullet List

Here's a partial summary of what we've been up to for the past month or two. I'm borrowing this format from Pam Sorooshian, who unschooled her three children, now grown. It's a fun way to keep track of what we've been doing, and less daunting than putting together cogent paragraphs and essays. If it's less fun to read, you have my apologies, my faithful one or two readers! :)

Reading...

• Lots of text in World of Warcraft game (P, to herself)
• 39 Clues series of books (P reads to herself and we read them out loud to P or both kids)
• Susan Cooper's Over Sea and Under Stone (UnschoolerDad reads out loud to P or both kids)
• Text on the Internet, when we look things up (P reads over my shoulder)
• Houses and Homes, a library book about how homes have been built in various places and times. T especially loves this one, looking at the detailed pictures and asking about them. As we looked at a big picture of Sargon's Palace, he asked how the people shown on the roof of the palace got up there. We searched and searched and found only one or two potential access points. I like how this boy thinks!
• American Girl books and a mystery book, scored from a garage sale (P, to herself)
• More fairy chapter books from the library (P finds these whenever new ones come to our branch)
• Instructions for Mind-Blowing Science Kit (more on this below -- P was reading ahead for what activities she wanted to try out)
• Subtitles and title/narrative text in films, cartoons, etc. (P reads these out loud to T so he'll understand what's going on)
• Why Do We Need to Brush Our Teeth? from the Ask Isaac Asimov series (I read out loud to both kids. T keeps asking for it. P has also read it to herself.)
• The big library book on the Human Body, which we've checked out again. P and T requested the pages on broken bones and on the parts of the heart recently. I read these to them, and we went on to learn about myocardial infarction, atherosclerosis, and some of the ways these are treated.
• P frequently reads picture books to T when they are playing together.

Doing...

• P went to a week-long Nature Camp at church and learned about the earth through scientific, experiential, and spiritual avenues.
• P sang in the final concerts of her choir season. That will start up again in the fall. The last concert included songs in many languages, and the choirs were joined by drum-and-marimba concert groups from a nearby Zimbabwean music school.
• P and T have both helped a little in our vegetable garden, digging, weeding, breaking up clumps to prepare beds, and helping plant seeds.
• P and T continue weekly gymnastics classes.
• P has done some walking and running with me. Sometimes when the family has gone out to dinner, she and I get dropped off a mile or so from home and walk the rest of the way for some exercise and one-on-one time, as well as a chance to notice nature and people's creations in our neighborhood.
• P and I completed P's first Bolder Boulder 10K race, along with a friend of mine who was visiting us from out of town. We mostly walked, with a little jogging to maintain a pace that would allow us to finish the course before it was cleared for the elite racers. We finished in 2:07, including one rather long bathroom stop. The few times that P wanted to stop, one of us would carry her piggyback for a bit to give her a little rest. P has seemed much more aware of her stamina since then. A few times she's made comments like, "If I walk six miles, I can do this!" I love to hear that.
• We've been swimming a lot. Both kids are gaining confidence and skill. P is pretty much safe in the "deep" end (she can still touch there, but also swims) and loves the waterslides now. T is making progress, enjoying learning to float and get around by kicking and scooping with his arms.
• P got a "Mind-Blowing Science Kit" for her birthday, and we've enjoyed the first few activities from that, mostly involving changing the color of a cabbage-indicator solution by adding citric acid or baking soda. The kids played for hours with their solutions, combining and recombining them gradually. We're looking forward to making the underwater volcano and color-changing volcanoes, as well as other creations from this kit.
• P's been playing a computer game called Botanicula -- a cute game that draws on spatial skills and cause-and-effect thinking to solve puzzles.

Making...

• I've been making play clothes for both kids from thrifted T-shirts. The kids are enjoying choosing colors, seeing how things take shape, and sometimes helping out. So far this effort has produced three dresses for P, two pairs of pants for T, and a shirt and two skirts for me, from a total outlay of less than $20; and we still have two shirts left to cannibalize.
• P has made some beaded backpack charms from a kit she received for her birthday.
• P helped me decorate a dreamcatcher as a gift for a friend.
• P has been making lots of paper dolls and Dressy Cats for herself and T, and the kids play with them a lot.
• Both kids have been painting, drawing, and making things with Sculpey to bake. T's drawings are representational now sometimes -- usually cars. P still likes to draw house plans -- she calls them ladybug houses -- and T gives her exacting specifications to draw them for him. She's also been making a book of Halloween costumes. Each page has a picture of what you're dressing as, and then a set of pictures of the parts the costume requires.
• P makes, and helps T make, finger puppets for their pretend games.
• P sews doll clothes by hand from her collection of fabric scraps and thread.
• T got some architectural building blocks (just like P's, which she didn't share enough for his pleasure), and he's been making some impressive buildings with them.
• Both kids like to build things with T's erector set.
• Recently I started a timeline in the hall, with post-its for events of interest. I put on the date for the Declaration of Independence's adoption, since we'd just watched a TV episode about that on the 4th of July. The next day P specified other dates to add. We have birthdates for family, adoption dates for pets, the Civil War, WWII, Colorado becoming a U.S. state, the extinction of the dinosaurs, and the date of the earliest remains of modern humans that have been discovered. We'll add other things as they become interesting. So far, I've been writing the post-its, and P has been finding their proper place on the timeline, so she's learning to read dates and put them in order, including concurrent events (such as my parents' birthdates, which both were during WWII). We've talked about, but not yet implemented, a scale for the timeline. We're considering a logarithmic scale, on which each tick as you go to the left as twice as long ago as the previous tick. We figure about 33 ticks to get to the age of the Earth.

Writing...

• P has done thank-you notes, using a mixture of dictating to me and doing her own writing.
• P has written a letter or two to friends.
• T wrote a couple of words in a crossword, with me showing him what letters went where and how to write those letters. He also wrote his name and can recognize it now. 
• P writes down pieces of stories and song lyrics she wants to remember, labels maps and house plans, makes mockups of cell phones and other electronics for pretend play, and occasionally embarks on a book project with writing and pictures. Her latest undertaking is writing up her pretend game with T, which they call "Dark Land Castle." Each is choosing characters and thinking out what they should look like. P is making sketches for the pictures.

Watching...

• Phineas and Ferb (new episodes and repeats)
• Sabrina cartoons and other cartoons discovered on Netflix
• Wild Kratts (we found a store of new-to-us episodes on Hulu Plus when I got a two-week free trial, and the kids powered through them while I did a weaving project, learning lots of new things about various animals and ecological concepts such as food webs)
• Chuggington DVD ("Chuggers on Safari") -- we get this occasionally from the library. T loves it.
• YouTube videos about augurs, pile drivers, parkour, extreme rock climbing, fetal face formation, and more (most of these were with T)
• Liberty's Kids, a series about American history around the time of the American Revolution -- we streamed one episode on July 4th so we could find out why it's a holiday, and both kids liked it, so we bought the whole series to watch at our leisure)
• A PBS documentary about the building and retrofitting of the Golden Gate Bridge (both kids liked it, but P was the most engrossed)
• Breaking Pointe, a reality show/documentary about a professional ballet company in the six weeks leading up to their performance season. (P and me)
• David Macaulay's Roman City DVD -- both kids watched this all the way through. It covered how Romans conquered territory and built Roman-style cities all over their Empire, how they dealt with the local peoples (everything from gruesome to granting Roman citizenship), baths, aqueducts, arches, concrete, theaters and amphitheaters and what went on there (on hearing about gladiators, public executions, and the like, P exclaimed, "I'd rather read the most boring book ever than watch that!").

Listening...

• UnschoolerDad playing piano music
• Me playing guitar and singing
• CDs on the stereo (T likes to start them himself)
• Stories from UD and each other
• A segment from Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me! in which Bill Clinton was quizzed about My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, a TV series both kids have watched pretty much all the way through
• Radio news when I have it on in the car. Sometimes they tune it out, but sometimes they ask me questions about it. This goes for political ads as well.

Talking...

• Telling each other stories and playing elaborate pretend games with cars and dolls in P's room or on T's town-map play rug. Sometimes these are collaboratively created, and sometimes P is mostly instructing T in how things are going to be. We're working on increasing the collaboration! There is sometimes debate about how things should be.
• Telling me about their creative play (mostly P, but sometimies T, too)
• T likes to talk about hypothetical situations. Today he was speculating about what life would be like if cars, trucks, etc. ran on railroad tracks instead of roads. ("There would be lots of turntables!") We talked about how life would be different if that were the case. He also loves hypotheticals involving pee and poop; e.g., "What if there were two cars that ran on pee and poop and also put out pee and poop from their exhaust pipes, and they could run on each other's pee and poop?" I'm still looking for ways to get into energy loss and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics with him. There will be time. :)

Visiting...

• Aside from swimming, we haven't been getting out to attractions much recently. We had a sleepover at UD's sister's house when our neighborhood was threatened by fire! Both kids are taking some one-off classes at a local children's museum starting this week. The first one was not impressive, either in its planning or the kids' response to it; we may see if we can cancel some of the remaining ones. We have a freeform visit to the same museum planned with friends later this week, and I think that will be more fun.
• We went to the toy store and spent hours looking at things. Each kid had a budget to spend separately or combine if they wished, so we spent a lot of time looking at prices and thinking about numbers that way.

Thinking...

• P and I have been thinking together about how to plan a game night at our house, and how to make it fun for adults and kids both. (P initiated this idea.)
• P helped plan her birthday party, including a treasure hunt and other activities.
• P and T have put together some impromptu percussion bands, and P is thinking about names, instruments, and repertoire for a possible band involving the whole family. We haven't gotten far with this one yet, because T hasn't been interested in trying it. But his moods change quickly.
• We thought together about what to take along if we needed to evacuate ahead of the wildfire a couple of weeks ago. The kids thought about what was most important to them to bring. I packed according to my emergency plan, and we talked about why I was doing things the way I was (boarding the cats far from danger, filling the bathtub with water against the worst-case, trapped-in-the-house scenario, packing bags and putting them in the car before we needed to leave, parking the cars facing out in the driveway, etc.)

Through the (Now Much Longer) Long Gap: Part II

It's been a very long time since I wrote. This blog might be getting less frequent in general. I'm finding that, as I really pay attention to what the kids are doing and learning, and as I do more with them, things flow in a way that's harder to write about because we go SO many places in such a short time sometimes. For my next blog entry I'll try a different format for a change. But here's the entry that would have come in late April, based on the notes I made then -- words like "today" and "yesterday," of course, have a very different meaning now!

There's been some developing body awareness: the kids' awareness of their own needs, and my awareness of  how to support them in meeting the needs. T has been moving toward giving up his naps, so early in these last few weeks I stopped trying to help him get down for them, except when he's really dead on his feet. A few times in that first week, he went to bed and took a nap on his own initiative, asking us to close his curtains so his room could be dark. After the first week, he napped less, but sometimes fell asleep on the couch just before or after dinner after a big day. UnschoolerDad and I still need a somewhat regular sleep schedule to keep up with work and the kids, so we still encourage a bedtime, trying to keep it pleasant and loving. Sometimes T really doesn't want to go to bed, and other times he goes down easily. P usually goes to bed without much protest, but I'm sure it helps that she can read in bed if she wants.

A recent outing to a Russian festival on the nearby college campus brought unexpected learning opportunities, in addition to the chance to hear Balkan music and try some Russian cookies. We rode the bus to the festival to avoid parking difficulties near campus, and P spent a long time reading the route map and learning how to use it. (P and T have also been playing a lot lately with a United States map that goes with their Tag reader, getting more familiar with where things are in our home country.) When the festival didn't hold the kids' attention (it wasn't geared as much to young people as we thought it might be), we wandered down to a nearby pond, where P noticed the way the pond drain was built and we talked about how that would keep the pond at a constant water level. We checked out the turtles resting on a log in the pond and thought about why they would choose that spot for warming sun, available moisture, and sufficient distance from likely predators. Someone was trying out his thrift-store radio-controlled boat on the pond, and he let each of the kids steer it for a little while, which they loved. We met a few other homeschoolers, broadening our local network a bit.

In the food department, T has a typically narrow diet for a four-year-old, but not too much so (lots of bread, tortillas, cheese, and peanut butter and jelly, with some fruits and vegetables and a few beans, other grains, etc.), though he's growing a bit more willing to taste new things; I hope our not forcing the issue will help him continue getting more adventurous and finding more things he enjoys. [Note from June: He has continued to be more willing to taste things.] P is enjoying more variety, sometimes choosing to make herself salads with custom ingredients (a favorite recipe follows) rather than eat the old lunch standbys. She's told me she wants to learn to prepare more of the foods she eats, and maybe go for a week making all her own food and some of T's. So far she's gone a day, but then wanted help, which is fine with me. She sometimes asks to help when I'm cooking, too.

     Rockin' Salad - P's invention
          1 apple, cut up in chunks
          1 green onion, chopped
          12 or so green olives
          1-2 ounces of cheese, preferably pepper jack, in chunks
          No dressing required. Side dish of sardines can be nice. 


P wrote the list of ingredients for her salad, and the beginning of a story she's writing and illustrating. I showed her how to use Word's spell checker when she's not sure how to spell something -- for every misspelled word we entered into it, she picked the correct alternative from the list of suggestions, so I think she's learning to identify correct spellings by sight for familiar words, even if she can't produce the correct spelling on the first try herself. I've heard that other unschoolers have learned to spell in a similar way. I'm trying to support P using the computer to find what she wants (log in to a game, or Netflix, or look up something on the internet if she's willing), so keyboarding is becoming motivated for her. I still do stuff for her if she asks me, but she's more and more willing to do it herself. I need to think about which of my online passwords I'm willing for her to have! Fortunately they're all different, so we can pick and choose. She's starting to learn to navigate what actions might cause problems (being charged money unintentionally, going to a web site that might put malware on our computer, etc.), but she still has a lot to learn. Mostly I stay close by when she's using the computer, so we can check out unfamiliar situations together. I'll have her read me dialog boxes rather than just looking and clicking through myself, so she learns what they say and how to respond, and when possible I try to explain why I choose the action I do.

In other writing fun, P used the phrase "big cat allergies" to mean severe allergies to cats. I giggled about the possible alternate meaning (allergies to lions, cheetahs, etc.), and she wanted to know what was funny, so I showed her how punctuation could make the difference between "big cat allergies" and "big-cat allergies."

P recently received a Lego Friends set, with hundreds of itty-bitty pieces to assemble into a cafe scene. She meticulously followed the instructions, which had no words but required close attention to detail over a long period, and successfully assembled the cafe. I was interested to see that she built a mirror image of what the instructions showed, so I asked her about it. She had noticed that several steps in, and thought hard about how to reverse each subsequent step.

One day P and I had a great conversation about economics. P started it by remarking that, since Luna bars seemed to be getting more popular, she thought their makers might raise the prices since the demand would be higher. (We had talked once before about low supply and high demand leading to higher prices.) I said they might do that, but because it would make some customers unhappy and prompt them to look for cheaper brands, perhaps they'd increase their profits in other ways, like running the machines that make the bars for extra shifts and hiring more workers. We talked and thought together about economies of scale -- even though the extra power and worker hours would cost more, Luna might not need more machines; or if they did, they might be able to fit them in existing factory space; and so on, allowing the product to get cheaper as production and sales increased. We also talked about how, if Luna needed to increase prices to cover their costs, they might bring out new flavors that would cost more, and later bring other prices up to match if the new flavors were popular enough; or possibly they'd make some product improvement they could tout on the packaging and increase the price at the same time. And we went backwards in time, thinking about how a person selling their first-ever snack bars, baked at home, at a farmer's market say, might have to charge a lot more per bar to start off (no wholesale deals on ingredients, no economies of scale in production)  -- but how some people might be willing to pay those prices for an interesting new product, or because they could meet the producer and find out a lot about the product. And then that person might ramp up production by leasing a commercial kitchen and hiring workers to help, if the demand was growing and a local store wanted to carry the bars. Some of these concepts have come up in other conversations since.

P thinks a lot about ways to make money. We watched a video together about Caine's Arcade -- it's really worth seeing and is linked below. P asked if I thought she could do something similar, and we talked about the advantages Caine had -- one of the biggest being the use of a storefront, since his dad's auto parts business had mostly gone online. (Of course Caine had only one customer until the flash mob -- we haven't gone there explicitly yet, but I think P understood.)

Not long after watching this, P built a supermarket for fairies out of paper and cardboard. It included shelves for the goods being sold, signs, and an elevator so the tiny fairies could get from one level to another.

P asks almost every day what something means -- something she's heard on the radio, or read in a story, or seen in a TV program. Today, as we ate dinner and she watched a baseball game being played silently on the TVs in the restaurant bar, she asked what the goal of a baseball game was. Yesterday she clarified the meanings of increase and decrease. Today we followed up with what "in decline" meant when said of a person or animal.

Both kids got cameras of their own this month, so UnschoolerDad and I can worry less about ours getting wet, dropped, lost, etc. The kids noticed odd blurs in some of their images and turned it into a ghost hunt! We also experimented with taking photos of moving objects, or scenes with large disparity in lighting, and trying to create some of those mysterious blurs in those ways.

A quick math/numbers roundup:

• T made his first paper-model cell phone -- the kids play with these a lot, but in the past P has made them all. T wanted to write the numbers on his phone, and P helped by writing sample numbers he could copy.
• P came and offered to show me how to divide a pizza into 3 equal parts, using a drawing. The pattern blocks were out, so I duplicated her picture using a yellow hexagon with 3 blue rhombuses arranged to cover it, so the same angles showed up in the middle. She watched, then said in an odd, sing-song way, "That's science." So I sang back, "Or math, or geometry, or life." She smiled.
• P was setting up an easter-egg hunt for both kids. She had 16 eggs, and unasked, she worked out that they could find 8 eggs apiece. Thinking about it a bit, she then exclamed, "I did that right!" and explained her reasoning: half 10 (5) plus half 6 (3) is eight.

Building: Patterns, Links, and Growth

The process of learning feels like a crystal growing, building itself from bits of stuff in the environment. Sometimes it grows in a regular pattern determined by its main constituents. Sometimes it encounters other minerals in its environment and incorporates them as inclusions, which can be very beautiful in their departures from regularity. Sometimes it sends off spiky shoots in new directions, where it can grow unimpeded, becoming more fully itself.

Quartz crystal with pyrite inclusions -- more here

Spiky white aragonite crystals -- more here

A lot of the visible patterns forming here this week are happening with our new set of pattern blocks. P and T use them pretty differently, but both are coming up with wonderful things, and their designs (and mine, when I join in) inform each other, so their creations evolve over time.

T came up with the central design; P added the border.

Besides building freeform, we've talked about the names of the shapes and how many names could apply to some of them (three different kinds of rhombuses, one cleverly disguised as a square...). P gravitates toward designs with reflective and rotational symmetry; I talked with her about those ideas, and she grasps them with ease. Both kids are building designs with translational symmetry. T builds mountain ranges while asking me questions about how real mountains form. T and I have built some collaborative designs that start off with high symmetry but break into more chaotic forms as we go on. P is discovering which angles combine for nice, solid walls and mosaics.

P's first mosaic. I asked if she wanted help moving it so she could finish it,
but she said the opening was intentional -- a door into the house.

The wall has fallen apart a bit, but the mountain lookout is complete.

Both kids have also built things to resemble real-life objects like houses, walls, or spaceships. An argument about what a spaceship should look like led to looking briefly at an update on the Voyager probes, as an example of a spacecraft that's not aerodynamic and has no landing gear, because it's never intended to enter an atmosphere or to land. T's very interested in landing gear. Every time we visit the science museum nearby, he watches the video that shows how the Mars rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) landed and went about their missions, and then asks questions about the replica rover in the museum.

P got out the Cuisenaire rods recently and wanted to do some number exploration with them. We tried using them to find factors, first of 10, then 12. P reasoned well about why various numbers would or would not divide 12 evenly; for example, 5 doesn't, because 5+5 is 10, and since 12 is only 10+2 (making 12 with Cuisenaire rods makes this obvious, but she knows it abstractly too), there's not room for another 5 in 12. After the math play, both kids built house layouts with the rods, and used the white unit cubes as people inhabiting the houses and driving around in their 9- and 10-rod limousines. The garages were bigger than the living quarters in these car-centric houses!

P embellished my star; parts got borrowed for other things;
change happens quickly with pattern blocks.

P's been drawing lots of house (and garage) plans on large paper and using them to play with T with dolls and toy cars. They've made and populated neighborhoods of row houses and played for hours with them, often making home improvements before the next iteration of the game. Since our toy budget has been limited a lot of late by limited cash flow, this is part of a larger theme of creatively making do with what we have to play in new ways. Recently both kids were walking around in homemade waterskis or snowshoes or ice skates (depending on when you asked) made from newspaper, egg cartons, and yarn. There have been pirate eyepatches and daggers with sheaths, superhero capes, cat ears and tails, and more, all made with materials at hand. The craft table and its contents are getting a lot of use.

T puts finishing touches on a design he and I made together

This morning, before I was even up, P got started building a scrapbook from photos she had lying around. I'm glad to see this for a number of reasons, including that these photos have been lying around for a long time with no real home, and it's good to see them safely stored and in use! She's using a binder full of notebook paper I gave her months ago, which has gotten no love until now. P's been telling me occasionally that she doesn't like writing, but she's writing captions for her photos with enthusiasm. There are some themes emerging, like her favorite toys from different Christmases, and she's borrowed my camera to take pictures of some toys that weren't in photos yet. I also love seeing how much she writes about playing with T and loving him. I told her about acid-free paper and archival glue, but she's happy with her notebook paper and giant glue stick for now. We can always upgrade if scrapbooking becomes a passion for her.

One of P's photos for her scrapbook

One evening this week I put on a DVD about the design of castles and the English occupation of Wales by means of castle fortifications. As often happens, though the kids didn't express interest in it beforehand, they were drawn into it quickly. Castles played some part in the floor plans and pattern-block constructions after that.

Also this week, we bought and broke out a kids' magnetic poetry kit. The main action it's seen so far is T lining up long sequences of words and asking me to read them to him. He enjoys it when I try to make phrases out of them, with appropriate inflection, rather than just reading them as lists of words. I tried to paint a piece of sheet metal with chalkboard paint so we could write words along with our magnetic poetry, but we all learned that despite the Lowe's salesman's assurances, we should have used a metal primer first. Soon we'll try it again on the other side, if we can find a metal primer that will support latex paint on top.

In related events, a few days ago when T was having me ask him questions from a Brain Quest kindergarten question pack (one of his favorite "stories" for bedtime), he read his first word! There was a question asking him to pick out, from several words in a picture, the one that matched a circled word. He found it correctly. I asked him if he knew what that word was, and he read it: "ON." He's seen that on many a radio-controlled or other electronic toy, and he's also alert to phonics, so there's no telling whether he sounded it out or recognized it as a sight word.

Other highlights from this week:

• After taking three beginner classes at a local mixed-martial-arts dojo (rooted in Tae Kwon Do), and watching a higher-level sparring class, P and I decided neither of us was very interested in pursuing martial arts if sparring was to be the high-level goal. Sparring is required starting at intermediate levels at that dojo, so it's time to move on. We have friends who take classes at a local aikido dojo, so we may go watch classes there soon. We're taking a break for the moment.
• We took a trip to the small museum of natural history at our local university, which is free and convenient by bus. Arriving after a nice lunch at a campus-area taqueria, we tried on a beekeeping veil, saw a model beehive, and touched honeycomb and a paper-wasp nest. We looked at the dwellings and tools of Pueblo Indians in this general area, from antiquity through current times. T liked looking at and hearing about the variety of houses; there were great dioramas of pit houses, row houses, and cliff houses. We compared the teeth of carnivorous and herbivorous dinosaurs. We touched bison bones, a skunk's tail, a cow hoof, and assorted fossils. P bought a coloring book of Mexican folk art in the gift shop; T chose some crystals in a little pouch. I bought some sun-print paper for us to try when things warm up a bit.
• Today we did an extended problem-solving session about sharing of toys and rooms. We came up with some possible solutions, including sharing space and toys differently, using timers to limit sharing time so there's a clear time boundary, and other possibilities. They're trying one of P's ideas as I write this bit: They trade rooms for a limited time, with a timer set, and can play with each other's stuff during that time. When the timer rings, they'll both help clean up both rooms, unless they agree to set the timer for additional time before cleanup. [Note later: More work needed here. UnschoolerDad says he thinks the answer is to make T's room cooler than it is. I think he may be at least partly right.]
• We played with gelatin, dissolving gelatin capsules to release the spongy animal shapes inside and also making Jell-O, so we got to see the creation and dissolution processes.
• One day when we pulled our car alongside a semi, T wanted to know how to hitch and unhitch the trailer. I had guesses, but really didn't know, so we found some YouTube videos from truck-driving schools showing the process -- not in great detail, but enough for now. Both kids are psyched about the prospect of having a video chat with a friend of mine who is a long-haul trucker; I'm working on setting it up with him, which is tricky since he usually doesn't know in advance when he'll have down time (waiting for a load or unload) with a good internet connection available.
• We finished reading The Friendship Doll out loud. P and I linked the phrase "chewing the fat" to an Inuit story we read months ago, in which a special kind of fat was saved for sharing while talking with visitors. We looked up the phrase origins and found related and unrelated, likely and apocryphal possibilities. We also read about car tires that could be repaired as bike tires can be now, the dust bowl, the shoddy welcome given Okies arriving in California, the hundreds of thousands of letters people wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt during the depression, and more. After finishing the story, we read online about the real 58 Japanese friendship dolls, and we found out one of them is in a museum near us. Perhaps we'll visit soon!
• We started reading Hattie Big Sky, also by Kirby Lawson, who wrote The Friendship Doll. P is totally intrigued by this story of a 16-year-old girl, orphaned at 5 and bounced around from one distant relative to another, who inherits a 320-acre claim of dubious value from an uncle in Montana and tries to prove up the claim on her own.
• We finished reading The Hobbit out loud. P wants to see the Lord of the Rings movies. We'll see; they're so graphic in their violence that they give me nightmares. We might try the books first, though those didn't hold my attention until I was in my teens.
• P told me she doesn't want to read any more of the slim chapter books in the Rainbow Magic Fairies series; she has outgrown them. She's still game for the bigger "special edition" books in that series, but she says that mostly she wants to read "bigger stories," like The Hobbit or Hattie Big Sky. Perhaps she's ready for Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series, or The Chronicles of Narnia, or Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain. 
• P has been enjoying reading newpaper comics, and she devoured her first Garfield book checked out from the library. She read some of it aloud to T, who enjoyed it as well.

To close, here's a different bit from Marge Piercy's poem, "The Seven of Pentacles," which I've quoted here before. I can imagine, from her underground roots and brambles, sudden explosions of upward growth when conditions encourage it.

          Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
          Live a life you can endure; Make love that is loving.
          Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
          a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
          interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.