How the World Works

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

How the World Works (Science)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How the World Works (History, Civics, Geography)

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

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

Other Things About How the World Works

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

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.

Midwinter, Mountains, Music, and Minecraft

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

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

Reading

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

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

Doing

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

Making

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

Writing

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

Watching

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

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

 Listening

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

Talking

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

Visiting

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

Thinking, asking questions, planning...

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

Not Back to School!

In July, when we were coming up to the deadline to give our notice of intent to homeschool for this school year, P started saying she'd like to go back to school, "just for one more year." We talked some about why. It lit a fire under me to look for ways to make things more interesting and satisfying for her, as well as doing more active strewing so she doesn't spend so much of her day on the computer. (P has told me that, although the computer interests her a lot and can occupy her for hours on end, she feels dissatisfied when she spends too long using it without doing other things.) We had good conversations about what she wanted that school might provide, and how we might get those same benefits and more without school. She wanted to be able to walk some places and do some things on her own, so we settled on a first experiment: having her take the bus to the library to turn in a DVD, with me tailing her at a distance so she could fall back if she needed me. I told her I'd be all right with her doing that sort of thing without a tail, once she was comfortable with all the steps -- she was most uncertain about how she'd know when to get off the bus. We ended up getting rained out on that errand, but not before P had had a taste of doing something on her own. P also wanted to see more of friends, so we planned more play dates. Most of all, she said she wanted more one-on-one time with me. (School wouldn't have helped with this, but it was something she said would make her life better, so we started having fairly regular "date nights" when P and I would do something, just the two of us.) But P still said she wanted to go to school.

She expressed some apprehension about being asked to do things at school that she wouldn't know how to do, and asked me if I thought that would happen. I said I thought she'd be very strong in reading, would probably need to work on her spelling (but that seemed doable to both of us), and might be confused about some of the math notation. She's been working with a lot of math concepts, but not in a schoolish way; e.g., she knows what division is about and can do it in her head to a reasonable extent for a 2nd/3rd grader, but she didn't know what a division sign looked like. The math part gave her the most concern, so I pointed out that long ago she'd picked up a 2nd-grade workbook at a book sale, and that by working through that, she could make sure she'd seen most or all of the same stuff as her peers. She wanted to do that, so we worked out that at 15 pages per day, she could finish the workbook before school started, spending less time per day on it than she'd spend doing desk work at school.

P set out on that course, but after a few days of doing worksheets on skills that, while useful, were out of the richer context she's grown accustomed to having with her learning, she was souring on the idea of school, and decided she wanted to stick with unschooling after all -- though she did exact my promise that we could continue with play dates (subject to the desired friends' availability, which we knew would be a lot less once school started), with increasing independence for her, and with date nights.

I sighed with relief, my feelings far less mixed than they were when P initially left school. I've grown to enjoy this way of life and the improved relationship I have with both kids, without school dictating our sleep schedule and shaping most of our daytime activities. I'd been trying to prepare myself, mentally and emotionally, for supporting her in returning to school. I knew I could let her come home again if she changed her mind. What I expected to be hard was letting P's relationship with school be her own, not stepping in and ruthlessly enforcing the demands of school. I was a very dedicated student when I was in school, and then I was a schoolteacher for four years, and it's really hard for me to imagine supporting a student who is in school by choice in not toeing the line on homework, attendance, etc. I was working on figuring it out, and someday that time may still come. But for now I'm glad we're still out of school!

Sandra Dodd wrote a very thought-provoking essay, "Public School on Your Own Terms," that was helpful to me in thinking about the possibilities for different relationships between me and my kid's school. I am uncomfortable with the idea of lying to school authorities about absences -- I really dislike outright dishonesty and avoid it whenever I can -- but the rest of it makes a lot of sense to me.

So, all that aside, a lot has been going on since I last posted. In the past six weeks we've been in overdrive on housing changes. UnschoolerDad and I decided we were spending too much money on housing for our one-earner lifestyle to be sustainable, so we moved out of our house into a small apartment, prepared our house for sale, put it on the market, got into contract to sell it, searched for a new house, and got into contract to buy one two towns over, about the same size as before but MUCH less expensive. Hopefully both sales will go through! We held off on the decision until we knew P would not be returning to school this year, so we wouldn't be yanking her away from school if she chose it. Both kids have been helpful with the transition. They are sad to leave our home, but they have been excited about hunting for a new one, and they both love the one we've chosen. They are sharing a room in our transitional apartment, which has led to some additional conflict, but also to much more opportunity for me to be with both of them at bedtime, and not only with T. (On good nights, we've had one parent with each child, but UnschoolerDad's schedule and mine sometimes mean there's only one parent at bedtime.) P has gotten clearer as a result that in our new house, she wants her room near T's so bedtimes can still be shared, and not on another floor as she previously thought. That helped with our choices in house hunting! We're moving to an area where the schools, should our kids want them, are still good, though not as highly rated as those we're leaving. My belief is that if a child is in school by choice, he or she will be much more able to suck the marrow out of school, regardless of what school s/he attends. I remember my parents saying something like that to me when I was college hunting -- that it would be helpful to find a college that would be a good match for my style, but that because I was so active in pursuing learning, I would be able to get a good education almost no matter where I went. So here's hoping it's true.

I haven't been tracking the kids' activities here during the whole move process. But here are some things I've noticed and remembered about what they've been doing.

Reading

• On a visit to the library, P picked out LOTS of chapter books and some picture books. She and I had just been talking, in the context of our school-or-unschool conversation about third grade, about the fact that in school she'd be exposed to lots of stories she might not otherwise think to read. I pointed out that, since she'll be in contact with her schooled friends, she can ask them about what they're reading and check it out if it seems intriguing. I also offered to read some of the same books she's reading and discuss them with her, or help her follow up on doing or learning more about subjects in which they pique her interest. Perhaps that inspired her to be more adventurous about trying new series and authors, in addition to picking up Book Two in the How to Train Your Dragon series, the next 39 Clues book, and another book by the same author as the Fairy Realm books she's been enjoying. On another visit, I picked up a bunch of things I thought she might like. She's enjoying some mystery books, and I'm reading The Chronicles of Prydain out loud to both kids for bedtime reading.
• P continues to read to herself and out loud, to me and to T. She's really quite fluent, and she usually asks about words she doesn't know, if I'm listening.
• More in the anatomy book: the digestive system, appendicitis. 
• I've been reading Parent/Teen Breakthrough: The Relationship Approach: The New Program to End Battles With Your Pre-Teens and Teens, which gets a lot of recommendations from parents of grown unschoolers, even though it's clearly written with schooled adolescents in mind. When I started to read it, I was thinking in terms of things I might need in a few years, but I'm recognizing some of the preteen/teen relationship patterns from my current relationship with P. It's already been helpful to put the book's main advice into practice: Rather than trying to control your adolescent as you may have when they were younger, put lots of energy into building a strong, warm relationship with your child, because once they hit adolescence and their main mission in life becomes individuation and independence, a solid relationship is the best way to have a good influence in their lives. At this stage in P's life, a certain amount of direct control is still possible, but I already see her starting to resist in places, and I know I don't want to go down the path of ever-more-draconian measures to keep her in line -- that's a losing battle all the way around, especially as she gets older. So this book is becoming helpful in steering my thinking away from battling for control and toward building warm relationship and positive influence, including real dialogue with the kids about what's going to help make our lives as individuals and as a family go well -- not just me and UnschoolerDad figuring it out and announcing our decisions.
• I read Roald Dahl's The BFG to both kids. They enjoy the nonsensical, yet intelligible, talk of the giant. Every once in a while P asks me what something means. Usually it's a coined, nonsensical word, but what she really wants to know is, what is the giant trying to say, and what does that mean?

Doing

• P did a Young Inventors workshop at the local children's museum. She took apart an analog clock and built a lizard-grabber thing from craft sticks, egg cartons, tape, yarn, and paper clips. She was very pleased with it.
• The next day, P did a Dinosaurs workshop at the same place. She found a plastic stegosaurus in a digging activity, but another girl really, really wanted the stegosaurus, so P gave it to her and settled for a brachiosaurus. ("Of course she wanted the stegosaurus. It is our state fossil, so everyone wants it!") P had lots of questions about brachiosaurus -- how did it defend itself from predators? Were predators even interested in taking on something so much larger than themselves? Did brachiosaurus swim all the way underwater? P also exclaimed to me that there was a dinosaur (spinosaurus) that looked just like the spiny animals my character was hunting in World of Warcraft. I pointed out that the WoW creatures had two spiny fans rather than one, and P said yes, they could get twice as much heating or cooling that way, and wasn't it cool how WoW was based partly on science?! In the workshop, they also compared the sizes of parts of their hands, feet, and fingers with dinosaur tracks of different sizes, and P remarked that some of the dinosaurs were pretty small! I came across a fact the other day, that on a linear time scale, Triceratops lived closer to humans than it did to Stegosaurus, and P was as surprised as I was to hear that, but the facts bear out. We have a long way to go until the dinosaurs will have been extinct for as long as they ruled the earth.
• Both kids and I did an ice-cream-making workshop at the same place. We had fun making a really basic vanilla ice cream in nested ziploc bags. P and I talked a little about ice crystal formation and the role of stirring in making ice cream with a good texture.
• The kids have started "keep-trading" toys with each other. I warned P, when this started, that T, like many four-year-olds, didn't have a very good sense of permanance of trades, and that she needed to be ready to trade back if he asked her to. At first she was called on to trade back a lot. Now T seems to be gaining more of a lasting sense of what trading means, but P is still good-natured about it when he occasionally wants to trade back. And sometimes P wants to trade back, and T is good about that, too.
• As the garden starts to grow in earnest, we've been doing things like eating green onions and beet green thinnings together, straight from the ground. I talked a little with P about how beet greens have the vitamins and minerals of spinach, but without the oxalic acid to prevent calcium absorption. T enjoyed tasting beet greens for the first time, which he was remarkable non-reluctant to do. We pretended to be caterpillars. T is also showing me which squash to harvest, based on their size, and enjoying looking for squash of various sizes and stages as they grow. P and I are looking forward to our fermented (traditional pickle-crock) dill pickles being ready. Today I showed her the bubbles that are rising in the crock as the fermentation process really gets going. Periodically we cut off a piece of pickle and taste it to see how things are changing.
• T and P played a complicated board game, Lords of Waterdeep, with UnschoolerDad, who simplified the rules a bit to make it friendlier for not-yet-reading T. After a while T lost interest, so UD and P played with the full rules. P is very enthusiastic about playing complicated strategy games. She went to a mostly-adult game night with UD and played the game there, to both their great satisfaction. I know UD will be glad to have someone in the house more interested in the really complicated games than I am! Fluxx is about my speed, and UD, P, and I played that together once or twice.

Making

• P has been drawing and labeling even more house plans for the cars, eraser pets, and other tiny toys both kids have. They're getting better thought out, with more relevant furnishings, room for doors to open, and more.
• P and T are building elaborate block structures using both their sets of blocks, now that they're in the same room.
• T has become a Lego fiend. He has several "Creator" sets (these are great because you can use the same set of blocks to build 3 or 4 different models), and he plays with them every day for long stretches, both building from the instructions and improvising his own designs. He needed a little support with the instructions at first, but he figured them out very quickly and now can build completely independently with the age 7-12 Creator sets. He does frequently need my help getting blocks apart, which is a nice chance for us to reconnect. Sometimes I help by finding the blocks he needs as he builds, or by organizing his blocks to make particular kinds easier to locate.

Writing

• I've found a few things in P's room that seem to be either price lists for a store game or game rules -- not enough context to tell.
• P wrote in her workbook when she was considering school.
• P wrote a gift tag, very neatly, for her cousin's birthday gift.
• P has written some stories in books in Minecraft, and she's getting faster at keyboarding. She's also written and illustrated some stories in paper booklets she puts together.

Watching

• A "Disney Connections" DVD about the Colonial (English colonies in America) period and pirates, and how moviemakers portrayed them. I was disappointed because I thought it would be more history and less Disney-movie pseudohistory. The kids probably would have enjoyed it more if they had seen Pocahontas or Pirates of the Caribbean.
• P and I watched The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. T still doesn't like movies that get this scary, so he watched other things and hung out with UnschoolerDad while we watched. It's interesting to me, as a non-Christian who knows the stories of Jesus's life quite well, to see the close parallels between Aslan's sacrifice and Jesus's crucifixion that I missed when I read the books as a child, before I knew C.S. Lewis was a Christian theologian. I think P is likely to have some similar, interesting revelations at some point. I don't know whether we'll talk about it explicitly. P is interested in comparative religions already, so she may get to it sooner than I did.
• P and I watched a video from the library about puberty for girls. The information went by really fast, so we stopped it a lot to talk about it. She learned some of the essentials she'll need in the next few years about body changes, periods, mood changes, and more. It was a good opportunity to talk a little about how our relationship is evolving as she starts to think a little more about her future as an adult and wants to move toward more independence, but still has a lot to learn that I can help her with.
• P and T often watch shows together. Recent  hits include My Little Pony, Horseland, and old favorite Phineas and Ferb, which is still releasing new episodes.
• P watched some of the second season of Downton Abbey with me. It didn't suck her in as it did me, but she asked questions about the social conventions depicted and we discussed the relevant history (mostly battlefield tactics and conscription practices circa WWI) a bit.

Listening

• P and T are having to get better at listening to each other, as we live in close quarters and need to share the space, and as they share a lot of play together. I've been trying to support each in hearing what the other is saying, and thinking about what kinds of responses will contribute to a happier relationship and to their getting their needs met.
• P has been paying more attention to the radio, when I have it on in the car, and asking questions about what she hears. We've talked at some length about presidential politics as we've heard snippets from the Republican and Democratic conventions.

Talking

• Both kids have been wanting to tell their dreams. It's interesting seeing how they listen, respond, and often fail to listen to each other, interrupting with corrections, of all things! It's a good chance to work on listening skills, and on my own patience with dream retellings that loop back on themselves and are full of contradictions.
• P took a one-hour job at the company that makes the Rosetta Stone language software, repeating 200 sentences in English or Spanish to give them data to improve the way the software works with children's voices in native and non-native languages. She earned a $25 Visa gift card for her work. T and I built Lego models very quietly in the corner of the room while P worked. 
• T and P are both working up some enthusiasm for learning Spanish, especially as the town we are moving to has a larger Latino population than the one we are leaving. They're noticing people speaking Spanish in public and wanting to be able to communicate more with them.

Visiting

• Both kids went to a birthday party at their cousin's martial-arts dojo. T was the youngest child present and didn't think at first that he would participate, and he did sit on the sidelines taking pictures for part of the time; but when the obstacle courses got started, T was fully and joyfully in on the action. When he wasn't participating, he was using UnschoolerDad's spare camera to document the action.
• The kids and I visited a local history museum we hadn't seen before, one day after looking at some houses we were considering. They enjoyed it and we didn't see everything, so we'll probably go back soon. We played a lot with a water table where you could open and close gates, directing water to farm fields, cities, recreational river activities, and more. They enjoyed the challenges offered on the museum display for the water table.

Thinking, asking questions, planning...

• P is noticing more things that she'd like to film. I've enlisted UnschoolerDad's help to gather together our video-recording technology.
• At a park recently, T was playing on an odd playground feature shaped like a hippo, with major hippo organs (including at least three stomachs) portrayed on the playing floor. T remarked, correctly, "Oh, these must be the kidneys." Further conversation revealed that he wasn't reading the labels on the organs, but identifying them by their shape and position, based on our reading in the last couple of weeks about kidneys and the urinary system. We traced through the respiratory and digestive systems on the hippo diagram, much to T's delight.
• T showed me recently how he could make "a part of your heart" with pattern blocks. He arranged three blue rhombuses into a hexagon, and then he made thump-bump sounds with his mouth while moving the pieces apart and back together. I saw immediately what he was doing -- it was a tricuspid valve, which he remembered from previous readings in our library anatomy book. I was impressed and told him so. P happened along then and said she'd actually thought of it and showed T. Still pretty cool!
• P wanted to know why we were picking up a vaccination form at the doctor's office, so I told her we were signing her up for a homeschooling umbrella school, which would change our day-to-day life not at all but would mean she wouldn't have to take standardized tests unless she wants to. She said sometimes taking tests was fun and that she would like to try it, and I told her I'd look for a test we could do and grade at home so she could give it a try. She said she thought she could do pretty well on a 3rd-grade test, and I said one thing that might be on it that she hadn't done much was multiplication. She said she already knew some multiplication, and told me some multiplication facts that were true. I said sometimes people used multiplication tables to learn more about multiplication and the patterns that go with it, and she asked if I would make her one. I made the grid and filled in the numbers along the side and top, and then I started filling in the grid with her input. She noticed the 2's row was like counting by twos. We kept going, using mental arithmetic tricks she knows to fill things in (e.g., four sixes is the same as two twelves, and she knows how to add two-digit numbers, so we did that to come up with 24). The more patterns she noticed, the giddier she became! I recognized the feeling from when I started learning about multiplication, and shared my memory of that pleasure with her. I told her that when I looked down our growing columns of sixes and sevens, they looked like old friends. "Oh, hello, sixes! Good to see you again!"  We kept going, and she started physically rolling around on the floor with excitement. I recognized this behavior from a much earlier time when I tried to help her figure out some math stuff on a worksheet, at her request if I recall correctly -- I can't remember if it was before or after we started unschooling. That other time, though, I thought I saw a lot of tension and unpleasant feeling, perhaps frustration or fear, going along with the giddiness I saw today. It was good this time to see the pleasure of figuring things out unalloyed with anxiety! She kept begging me to go on. Finally I called a halt since it had gotten quite late and we had plans the next day. By the time we stopped, we had visited place value into the billions, why commas are used in really long numbers, different symbols people use to show multiplication (x, dot, parentheses), a little bit of order of operations, diagrams to show multiplication with tiny squares forming larger rectangles or squares, what multiplication of multiple-digit numbers looks like, and how to show inequalities with < and > symbols, with a lot of fun along the way.

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.)