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.)

Park Day and Potluck

Two days, so many things... here goes!

Yesterday P asked to watch Happy Feet, so we did. I hadn't seen it before, and found it a little distressing how much of the movie is about mating (this doesn't come across in the Commonsense review), with associated raunchiness. I mean, yes, animals spend a lot of energy on attracting mates, but the movie really played it up in anthopomorphic style, with macho guys bragging about how much the girls wanted them. But most of that seemed to blow right by P and T, and there was a lot of cuteness and some good messages about self-respect and valuing differences. The kids got their first exposures to elephant seals, an icebreaker ship, and the fact that there are penguins in South America. Since the icebreaker in the movie comes through in a confused blur, we looked up photos of real icebreakers afterward.

Later, P was busy and T was asleep, so I decided to watch an episode of Grey's Anatomy and fold laundry. Lots of laundry. P gravitated to the TV episode, which I should have predicted. In this particular episode, the sexual content was fortunately well-veiled, so instead P learned the definitions and some symptoms of stroke and heart attack, what a defibrillator is for, the location and function of the aorta, what a cardiopulmonary bypass machine is for in open-heart surgery, and what a surgeon has to do when she loses a patient (call the family and break the news). Most of this was brief first exposures (I stopped the show a few times to help her understand what was going on), but hey, everything needs a first exposure, right?

Later, the whole family went to the hardware store because we wanted to have a magnetic wall board that we could also write on. Magnetic white boards are expensive, so we looked at various DIY ideas before settling on buying a piece of sheet steel and painting it with chalkboard paint. My goal is to use this for magnetic poetry, with the option to write notes or additional poetry bits. Our fridge doors are more than fully committed already! While we were at the store, P found a trinket she wanted to buy for $2.75, but she didn't have her allowance money with her (she's decided against buying binoculars for now), so she got a loan from UnschoolerDad. This morning she paid him back. She gave him two dollars and went to get three quarters, but he suggested she give him another dollar and he give her one quarter back. P found that confusing, so we did some more money math, with a little hundreds-digit action and a first exposure to borrowing in subtraction. P was game. We also talked about why the dollar sign looks like it does. Apparently I got that wrong (there's what I learned while writing this post!). Ah, well -- more learning opportunities later, if we like.

Off to the grocery store this morning, where we learned what whole papayas look like. They didn't smell like fruit, though, so we didn't buy one to try this time. Anyone know how to choose a good papaya?

This afternoon we went to the weekly park day for a group of unschoolers in our county. T has gone with me twice before, but this was P's first time to be out of school for a park day. On the way there we slowly passed a freight train and I talked to P and T about shipping containers and what they're for. We read the labels on them to see if we could see where they originated. Tonight we looked up some of the companies; we saw lots of photos of container ships and online tracking systems for container numbers. Maybe next time we can write down a number or two and see where those containers go!

At Park Day T played mostly independently as usual -- he's a little young yet for really engaging with playmates, but he loves playgrounds. P was shy and played on her own until I facilitated a couple of introductions to other kids. She was still hanging back, so the three of us went down to take a look at the stream bordering the park. We fished out some trash and looked at how the grasses growing around the stream were holding up the stream bank, and how one tree, apparently quite healthy, was growing in a J shape from an overhanging edge of stream bank. Then we saw some other unschoolers making their way to a nearby footbridge and car bridge to play, and we joined them. They were trying, unsuccessfully as it happened, to capture a "gardener" snake (I'm guessing garter; I never saw it, though P caught a glimpse). Having given up on the snake, one of the boys started climbing up a storm-drain pipe that emptied into the stream. (Another adult and I checked for the origin to make sure there wouldn't be unexpected flow in the pipe.) Several others followed. P opted out of the tunnel crawl, but thoroughly enjoyed tracking their progress and looking and listening for them at the streetside origin of the drain. I was nervous about all the potential falls and other injuries, but I didn't see a lot of serious hazards, so I just kept watch for any more seriously foolhardy behavior. At school P usually played with girls, mostly doing less active forms of play, so I was glad to see her climbing around with a mixed group and getting a little dirty. My favorite place to play when I was her age was also a creek at a park near my house, where it went under a footbridge and a railroad bridge -- and the large pipes where it went under the neighboring road. This felt like sharing a happy piece of my childhood with P. T tromped around under the bridge a bit, too, with me helping him on the steep parts.

On the way home we talked a little about pagodas (we saw one near the park), car transport trucks (ditto), what happens when you run out of gas on the highway (didn't happen, but it came up when P guessed that was what the car transport truck was for), and the meanings of a couple of road-sign symbols.

And then we cooked amaranth for the first time, as part of dinner. It makes a nice porridge, which T is now enjoying, having awakened (after the rest of us ate) from the nap that started on the way home from the park. Everyone else liked it, too, so it was lucky there was enough left for T!

Could P have encountered all this in a couple of days while enrolled in school? Perhaps, if we'd had an active weekend and encountered some interesting playmates. But not likely. The park days help me move a little beyond my comfort zone. (My own upbringing did not include being allowed to play in storm drains, at least once my parents found out that's what I was doing!) Also, I'm being more liberal with access to video  than I was before. That's partly because there's more time in a day when most of it isn't filled with school, so using a couple of hours for a movie feels like less of a loss to family time and more active play. It's partly because I'm approaching video as a learning tool and not just entertainment or babysitting. And it's partly because I'm trying to let greater access deprive it of its privileged place in many kids' lives (here's a little bit by Pam Sorooshian on TV and the economic theory of marginal utility), so video can take what I see as its rightful place, as just one of many potentially interesting things a person can choose to do with her time.