Learning happens at every age, no matter what we do. Kids who are encouraged and aided in pursuing their own interests can learn anything! One family's adventures in unschooling.
Once again we've been focused on our activities more than on writing about them. I think I detect a pattern! I'm very glad, this Election Night, to be done with the election and also past the hardest parts of moving to a new house in a new town (near enough our old one to keep our old friends). Now perhaps we can settle down into a new rhythm and explore a wider variety of interests. Here's a sampling of recent learning: Reading
We read Little House in the Big Woods recently, as bedtime reading, and started on Little House on the Prairie. T listened carefully to the details of Pa making bullets, scrutinized the pictures, and asked me about it again a couple of nights later. P was excited to hear about square dancing and wanted to know if people still knew how to do it (yes) and if I knew how to do it (yes, a little). Perhaps we'll seek out some square dancing or contra dancing locally so she can try it. T asked what "pebbles" meant when we read about pebbles on the share of Lake Pepin. He knew about gravel from playgrounds, but didn't remember hearing small rocks called pebbles before. We read about cheese making, maple sugaring, and much more. As we started running into parts that are derogatory toward Indians, I noticed several local homeschooling moms chatting online about what other books they've used to give a more accurate or balanced view of Native Americans in that time period. We have one well-liked book from that discussion on hold at the library now; more on that when/if we read it!
P checked out several graphic novels at the great library that is a short walk from our new house. She's especially enjoying Akiko (the children's librarian said a lot of girls especially like this series), and it's wonderful to hear her read aloud from it. She's very fluent and gets a lot of appropriate expression into her reading voice.
T continues his frequent readings with UnschoolerDad of The Sneetches and Other Stories. He likes to read some of the words on each page (mostly from memory, but there is some actual decoding starting to happen), and with almost every reading he wants to read more of the words. He's asking just the right kinds of questions for starting to decode; for example, he asked UD why there were little sixes everywhere -- that was how he saw lowercase a, as he's still learning some of the lowercase letters.
Doing
We parked a twenty-minute walk from P's choir rehearsal and walked there along a local bike path that followed a creek. P and T both really enjoyed the walk. I commented as we passed a Jewish temple, and P wanted to know how I could tell that was what it was (Star of David, Hebrew lettering on sign, transliterated Hebrew in name of congregation), and talked just a bit about Jewish theology.
P went with me to our Democratic headquarters to volunteer on the get-out-the-vote effort one day. They wouldn't put an 8-year-old on the phone (and she wouldn't have wanted to phone, though she would have been happy to stuff envelopes), but she did a bunch of voter-list shredding (for voter privacy) to save time for another volunteer to make calls.
Both kids did some leaf-raking in our extremely leafy yard, for fun and for pay at different times.
Both kids enjoyed trick-or-treating. I totally dropped the ball on costumes, between our recent move and election work; but they cheerfully decided on and pulled together costumes (a purple dog, again, and a cowgirl) from what we had on hand and could find. This was T's first year of feeling confident about trick-or-treating, and he had fun, remembered his thank-yous more than he forgot them, and got into some fun conversations with people at their doors.
Making
P made some very fetching little cards for Thanksgiving, using materials she's found so far as we unpack in our new house. Some of them tell loved ones that she is thankful for them. Others provide space to list things the recipient is thankful for.
Both kids are building a lot with Lego and wooden building blocks. P was very happy when she finally located her big box of Lego bricks that had been in storage during our move. She builds creatures, vehicles, and often creations that are cyborg-like combinations of the two.
P continues making her elaborate creations in Minecraft. She's learned to open and search the Minecraft wiki when she wants to know how to make an item.
Writing
P wrote on her Thanksgiving cards, and she's been playing Scribblenauts a lot and asking about spellings of harder words. She comes up with really cool ideas in Scribblenauts, like having her character fly very high on a griffin's back and then parachute down, or getting out of a too-deep-for-a-ladder hole by bouncing on a big trampoline (because just a trampoline didn't quite do the job).
Watching
I brought in a tiny snail I found in the backyard, so the kids could get their first up-close look at a live snail. We put it on a plastic mat in the kitchen and tried bringing different things (grass, some dandelion leaves from where I found it, a slice of turnip, etc.) to see if it would be interested in eating them. P also experimented with moisture on the board to see how the snail would react. We were considering keeping it around inside for a while (I thought it might freeze to death soon otherwise), but we looked up a bit about snails and found that they hibernate, so after we'd watched it a good long while, we put it back outside where I found it, so it could go about the business of finding a good hibernation spot. Another day, after I killed a yellowjacket that had gotten into the house, P and I took a good look at its body structure and texture. She remarked on how smooth it was, "almost like plastic," and on how much its wings resembled smaller dragonfly wings.
On Election Day, I had an electoral map updating on my computer starting when the polls closed on the East Coast. P saw it and wanted to know how it all worked. She was very anxious about the possibility of Romney winning the presidency, and glad to see the electoral votes piling up for Obama, but I don't think she really believed me that Obama was winning at first -- after all, there were those huge red swaths across middle America! She felt better after I showed her the electoral map and equivalent cartogram for the 2008 presidential election on Wikipedia (look down a bit, on the right side of the page, for these images), so she could see in the cartogram how all those red states didn't account for many people/electors compared to the blue states. UnschoolerDad and P had a short talk about the House still having a Republican majority, and why highly polarized partisan politics could still make it hard to get things done. I find, as I try to explain why we believe as we do on certain issues, that I need to make sure UD and I don't demonize the other side inordinately. A blogger I love put it well, quoting her son as asking, during the election eight years ago, "So, if George Bush were driving in his car, and he saw me, would he try to run me over?"
The scary, geographically correct electoral map for 2008
The reassuring (to Obama supporters), electorally correct cartogram for 2008
Listening
I heard P humming the tune to "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" in the car, so I sang the first verse. P asked where it was from, and I said it was a wartime song (couldn't remember which war, but thought it was the Civil War) about waiting for the young men to come safely back from the war. She asked about their ages, and I said there was probably a minimum age, but some boys lied about their age and went when they were younger. An interesting discussion ensued about why someone might WANT to go off to war (fighting for their ideals, a chance at excitement or a new life, desire for glory). Later, I looked it up, and we found out that "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" was a pro-war song from the Civil War era, set to an older Irish tune, "Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye," which was an anti-war song!
Talking
I don't remember how the conversation about adrenaline started, but P and I talked about "a rush of adrenaline" as what happens when you are angry, scared, or very excited. We talked about how adrenaline temporarily suppresses immune responses, so for example, if you have a cold and are singing in a concert, your stage fright will probably keep you from coughing or sniffling during the concert. We also talked about how, in a crisis situation, adrenaline might give you greater strength and/or endurance than you would have without the adrenaline surge.
P said, as she's said several times recently, that she wishes she could go back into the past -- the horse-drawn-wagon, washing-clothes-by-hand past of the Little House books, which we've been reading out loud recently. We've talked about the incessant nature of chores in that time compared to now, but also about some things that might be pleasantly different. She speculated about being able to introduce some labor-saving devices early, and wondered whether time travel might actually become possible in her lifetime. I told her about one of my favorite books, Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, and how in that story, time travel to the past results in the present ceasing to exist. I told her a little about the interventions decided upon in that book (giving smallpox immunity, better weapons, and some potentially protective religious ideas to some native American groups to place them in a more powerful position upon Columbus's arrival), to make changes around 1492, in hopes of correcting the disastrous route history had taken by our future/the book's present. I said I didn't know whether she'd enjoy the book yet, but she said, "Oh, I'm all about time travel," so I guess we'll give it a try when we find it. We just moved, so most of our books are still in boxes.
Listening to the radio one day, P asked what the electoral college was. Complicated discussion ensued as we talked about the E.C. vote versus the popular vote. We also got into apportionment of Congress members and Senators, since electors for a state are mostly equal to the sum of those two.
Visiting
Both kids are ecstatic to be living just two blocks from our new local library, since we moved last month. They love the kids-only computers in the children's section, and they love walking or riding their bikes to the library. Wait till they find out the local rec center's nearly as close in another direction!
Thinking, asking questions, planning...
P decided to spend some allowance on deeply discounted gymnastics clothing. T was considering also getting a fancy, shiny gymnastics shirt -- he tried it on and told me he wanted to buy it -- but as I almost always do for him, I reminded him that he'd been telling me he was saving up for a particular Lego set, and asked him to decide whether getting the shirt was more important than that goal. He thought for a few minutes and decided to save for the Legos. He doesn't always decide this way -- eraser pets recently won out over the savings goal -- but sometimes savings win out.
T asked how you send papers -- he wanted to know how mail works, so I explained about addresses, stamps, mail carriers, sorting at the post office, and planes and trucks to get the mail to the right delivery area. I wrote a letter to my parents from him, using his words/ideas (he signed his name), so he could send some mail. And shortly afterward, he got some back!
We drive pretty often by a Catholic church that, at the moment, has 3000+ crosses planted in its front yard, with signs about abortion. P asked what the crosses were all about, so I gave her the basics of what abortion is and the opposing viewpoints about it. Hard topic! We also talked some about contraception, which to my mind should be the best thing for both sides, since it minimizes the demand for abortions -- but I can't claim to speak for Catholics. Then, the next day, P asked me to read aloud to her from a book I bought a long time ago at a library sale, thinking P might be ready for it one of these years: Catherine, Called Birdy. It's a humorous teen novel set in 1290, voiced as the diary of a 13-year-old young woman. She's the daughter of a country knight with modest holdings for a noble, and she hates her life and writing about it, but her mother has made a deal that if she writes a daily account for her brother (an aspiring monk who is trying to make sure she gets at least a little education), she need not spin. Spinning is worse than writing, so the game's afoot. Just about every paragraph requires some kind of explanation of a vocabulary word (e.g., betrothal), a social structure (e.g., dowries, or feudalism and the tenant farmer system, including payment of rents in goods rather than currency), a historical phenomenon (e.g., the Crusades), if not several of these. Very rich, thick going. But P gets most of the humor, and she asks good questions about the explanations. How did the Church get to be in charge of so much? That one took a while, but fortunately we'd watched some videos about the Roman Empire, so she had some background for it.
T and I watched several episodes of Little House on the Prairie on DVD while he was sick one day. He asked me several times whether this was real life. I think he was trying to get the hang of live action vs. animated video (he's seen lots of animation in a variety of styles), and also whether this was filmed close to the present day or in the older times it portrays. I think we got that worked out: I told him these were real people and animals doing things in real places, but that they were people filmed pretty recently, when I was a little girl (I realize that juxtaposition may be confusing for him!), pretending to be people who lived much longer ago.
It's been a very long time since I wrote. This blog might be getting less frequent in general. I'm finding that, as I really pay attention to what the kids are doing and learning, and as I do more with them, things flow in a way that's harder to write about because we go SO many places in such a short time sometimes. For my next blog entry I'll try a different format for a change. But here's the entry that would have come in late April, based on the notes I made then -- words like "today" and "yesterday," of course, have a very different meaning now!
There's been some developing body awareness: the kids' awareness of their own needs, and my awareness of how to support them in meeting the needs. T has been moving toward giving up his naps, so early in these last few weeks I stopped trying to help him get down for them, except when he's really dead on his feet. A few times in that first week, he went to bed and took a nap on his own initiative, asking us to close his curtains so his room could be dark. After the first week, he napped less, but sometimes fell asleep on the couch just before or after dinner after a big day. UnschoolerDad and I still need a somewhat regular sleep schedule to keep up with work and the kids, so we still encourage a bedtime, trying to keep it pleasant and loving. Sometimes T really doesn't want to go to bed, and other times he goes down easily. P usually goes to bed without much protest, but I'm sure it helps that she can read in bed if she wants.
A recent outing to a Russian festival on the nearby college campus brought unexpected learning opportunities, in addition to the chance to hear Balkan music and try some Russian cookies. We rode the bus to the festival to avoid parking difficulties near campus, and P spent a long time reading the route map and learning how to use it. (P and T have also been playing a lot lately with a United States map that goes with their Tag reader, getting more familiar with where things are in our home country.) When the festival didn't hold the kids' attention (it wasn't geared as much to young people as we thought it might be), we wandered down to a nearby pond, where P noticed the way the pond drain was built and we talked about how that would keep the pond at a constant water level. We checked out the turtles resting on a log in the pond and thought about why they would choose that spot for warming sun, available moisture, and sufficient distance from likely predators. Someone was trying out his thrift-store radio-controlled boat on the pond, and he let each of the kids steer it for a little while, which they loved. We met a few other homeschoolers, broadening our local network a bit.
In the food department, T has a typically narrow diet for a four-year-old, but not too much so (lots of bread, tortillas, cheese, and peanut butter and jelly, with some fruits and vegetables and a few beans, other grains, etc.), though he's growing a bit more willing to taste new things; I hope our not forcing the issue will help him continue getting more adventurous and finding more things he enjoys. [Note from June: He has continued to be more willing to taste things.] P is enjoying more variety, sometimes choosing to make herself salads with custom ingredients (a favorite recipe follows) rather than eat the old lunch standbys. She's told me she wants to learn to prepare more of the foods she eats, and maybe go for a week making all her own food and some of T's. So far she's gone a day, but then wanted help, which is fine with me. She sometimes asks to help when I'm cooking, too.
Rockin' Salad - P's invention 1 apple, cut up in chunks 1 green onion, chopped 12 or so green olives 1-2 ounces of cheese, preferably pepper jack, in chunks No dressing required. Side dish of sardines can be nice.
P wrote the list of ingredients for her salad, and the beginning of a story she's writing and illustrating. I showed her how to use Word's spell checker when she's not sure how to spell something -- for every misspelled word we entered into it, she picked the correct alternative from the list of suggestions, so I think she's learning to identify correct spellings by sight for familiar words, even if she can't produce the correct spelling on the first try herself. I've heard that other unschoolers have learned to spell in a similar way. I'm trying to support P using the computer to find what she wants (log in to a game, or Netflix, or look up something on the internet if she's willing), so keyboarding is becoming motivated for her. I still do stuff for her if she asks me, but she's more and more willing to do it herself. I need to think about which of my online passwords I'm willing for her to have! Fortunately they're all different, so we can pick and choose. She's starting to learn to navigate what actions might cause problems (being charged money unintentionally, going to a web site that might put malware on our computer, etc.), but she still has a lot to learn. Mostly I stay close by when she's using the computer, so we can check out unfamiliar situations together. I'll have her read me dialog boxes rather than just looking and clicking through myself, so she learns what they say and how to respond, and when possible I try to explain why I choose the action I do.
In other writing fun, P used the phrase "big cat allergies" to mean severe allergies to cats. I giggled about the possible alternate meaning (allergies to lions, cheetahs, etc.), and she wanted to know what was funny, so I showed her how punctuation could make the difference between "big cat allergies" and "big-cat allergies."
P recently received a Lego Friends set, with hundreds of itty-bitty pieces to assemble into a cafe scene. She meticulously followed the instructions, which had no words but required close attention to detail over a long period, and successfully assembled the cafe. I was interested to see that she built a mirror image of what the instructions showed, so I asked her about it. She had noticed that several steps in, and thought hard about how to reverse each subsequent step.
One day P and I had a great conversation about economics. P started it by remarking that, since Luna bars seemed to be getting more popular, she thought their makers might raise the prices since the demand would be higher. (We had talked once before about low supply and high demand leading to higher prices.) I said they might do that, but because it would make some customers unhappy and prompt them to look for cheaper brands, perhaps they'd increase their profits in other ways, like running the machines that make the bars for extra shifts and hiring more workers. We talked and thought together about economies of scale -- even though the extra power and worker hours would cost more, Luna might not need more machines; or if they did, they might be able to fit them in existing factory space; and so on, allowing the product to get cheaper as production and sales increased. We also talked about how, if Luna needed to increase prices to cover their costs, they might bring out new flavors that would cost more, and later bring other prices up to match if the new flavors were popular enough; or possibly they'd make some product improvement they could tout on the packaging and increase the price at the same time. And we went backwards in time, thinking about how a person selling their first-ever snack bars, baked at home, at a farmer's market say, might have to charge a lot more per bar to start off (no wholesale deals on ingredients, no economies of scale in production) -- but how some people might be willing to pay those prices for an interesting new product, or because they could meet the producer and find out a lot about the product. And then that person might ramp up production by leasing a commercial kitchen and hiring workers to help, if the demand was growing and a local store wanted to carry the bars. Some of these concepts have come up in other conversations since.
P thinks a lot about ways to make money. We watched a video together about Caine's Arcade -- it's really worth seeing and is linked below. P asked if I thought she could do something similar, and we talked about the advantages Caine had -- one of the biggest being the use of a storefront, since his dad's auto parts business had mostly gone online. (Of course Caine had only one customer until the flash mob -- we haven't gone there explicitly yet, but I think P understood.)
Not long after watching this, P built a supermarket for fairies out of paper and cardboard. It included shelves for the goods being sold, signs, and an elevator so the tiny fairies could get from one level to another.
P asks almost every day what something means -- something she's heard on the radio, or read in a story, or seen in a TV program. Today, as we ate dinner and she watched a baseball game being played silently on the TVs in the restaurant bar, she asked what the goal of a baseball game was. Yesterday she clarified the meanings of increase and decrease. Today we followed up with what "in decline" meant when said of a person or animal.
Both kids got cameras of their own this month, so UnschoolerDad and I can worry less about ours getting wet, dropped, lost, etc. The kids noticed odd blurs in some of their images and turned it into a ghost hunt! We also experimented with taking photos of moving objects, or scenes with large disparity in lighting, and trying to create some of those mysterious blurs in those ways.
A quick math/numbers roundup:
T made his first paper-model cell phone -- the kids play with these a lot, but in the past P has made them all. T wanted to write the numbers on his phone, and P helped by writing sample numbers he could copy.
P came and offered to show me how to divide a pizza into 3 equal parts, using a drawing. The pattern blocks were out, so I duplicated her picture using a yellow hexagon with 3 blue rhombuses arranged to cover it, so the same angles showed up in the middle. She watched, then said in an odd, sing-song way, "That's science." So I sang back, "Or math, or geometry, or life." She smiled.
P was setting up an easter-egg hunt for both kids. She had 16 eggs, and unasked, she worked out that they could find 8 eggs apiece. Thinking about it a bit, she then exclamed, "I did that right!" and explained her reasoning: half 10 (5) plus half 6 (3) is eight.
I'm finding I have less energy to write about stuff now than I did in the winter -- probably because we're more active and spending more time outside than we were in the winter. So I'm sorry if the reading is less entertaining these days. I'll push on; the other purpose of this blog is to document the rough outlines of P's learning in case we get an inquiry from the school district, so I don't want to drop it. And then, there's the idea that writing more is one of the necessary parts of becoming a better writer. So, on I go.
UnschoolerDad replaced his work laptop a couple of weeks ago, and he recently finished transferring everything he needed off the old one, which has now been reformatted for the kids to use. P is thrilled. We've signed her up for an email account, which hasn't seen much use yet, but I think it is likely to. I've offered to type for her, but she's learning her way around a keyboard, so I'm not sure what kind of help she'll want. Spelling, perhaps. It will be interesting to see how she interacts with a computer spell checker. She's already learned some of what goes into inventing a secure password.
Most of P's time on the new computer in its first several days has been spent playing World of Warcraft (WoW, a massively multiplayer online adventure game) with me; we have compatible characters on the same server, so we can adventure together. This means lots of map use (we use compass directions and the in-game map to direct each other to things in the WoW world: "Look just at the south end of that lavender patch on the map for the quest giver, and then you can find me to the east"), reading (quests and how to accomplish them, as well as game interface tips), spelling (typing her passwords, which are combinations of real words, and typing commands such as "/dance" into the chat interface), math (handling money, budgeting for equipment and training, buying and selling items in the game, subtracting to figure out how many more of a particular kind of monster she needs to defeat), and other fun stuff like comparing two items to choose which one should be her quest reward (usually this is about which has the most positive effect on her character's stats, though sometimes it's so close that the choice is aesthetic). We get other random stuff from WoW as well. We talked about the suffix "-oid," as in "humanoid monster," and what it means. We've also talked about the meanings of "good guy" and "bad guy," since one of the characters I play is part of the Horde faction, a group of somewhat creepy characters aligned against the human-led Alliance. P's and my characters who adventure together are Alliance. So when my Horde character fights a monster, is the monster a bad guy? It definitely gets away from the binary, Disneyfied idea of good and bad guys. And as in real life, sometimes WoW characters form unexpected alliances -- a Horde member with a human, say -- just as in real life, enemies can reconcile and alliances can shift (U.S., Germany, and Japan, say, or U.S. and Russia going from allies to enemies back to allies, if uneasy ones).
Before she got the replaced laptop, P was spending some time playing Minecraft on my computer. I should install it on hers. The open-ended, sandbox-style play in Minecraft is so different from the linear, quest-oriented play in WoW, and she enjoys both. P built a house in her Minecraft world, and she gave me a tour of it on video, which I'll share with you here.
The weather has been beautiful for playing outside here, so we've been outside a lot. At a recent unschooling-group park day, we took the kids' bikes, and P finally learned to ride her two-wheeled pedal bike, after a couple of years using a smaller bike (from which we'd removed the pedals) as a running bike. She had the balance down already, so she just needed some practice on getting going with the pedals. After I helped her with several starts, she proudly rode three times around the quarter-mile paved path at the park, getting steadier with each launch and looking like she'd been doing this all her life. I'm looking forward to giving her some more protected opportunities to build her physical skills on the bike, and then getting out on the roads and bike paths in town with her to learn about bike safety around traffic.
On another outing with UnschoolerDad, P learned how to play disc golf and got some good exercise following him around. She also chose to take the bus home from a family dinner with him (he'd met us there on his bike), running most of the half mile home from the bus stop as UD rode his bike. Between running, riding, and open gyms at a couple of local gymnastics gyms, P is getting stronger and improving her stamina. It's great to watch as she gets more of a sense of her own physical power. T is enjoying similar things, and their energy is infectious, getting me running with them when their enthusiasm picks up their pace.
Books have been fun recently. We spent some time reading in a library book about how fashions have changed over time and why -- for reasons related to politics, the roles of women in society, and other interesting things to learn along the way. We read part of a book about daytime raptors, and I hope to read more in it before it's due back at the library. And just in the last few days, we've started Book One of The 39 Clues, The Maze of Bones. This immediately caught everyone's interest as I read it out loud. Tonight I read a few chapters and then said I thought it was time to head for bed after a big day. P really wanted to read more, so I said she could read herself to sleep if she wanted. P's not been reading novels on her own for a while, saying that she isn't interested in reading anymore. I haven't been pushing it; I think nothing is likely to destroy her interest in reading faster than being forced to read when she'd rather be doing something else, and it's one of the issues over which we decided to leave school. Twenty minutes of reading homework per night was becoming an unpleasant forced march and having the wrong effect on P's interest in reading! Well, as I write this, late at night, P is powering on through The Maze of Bones and enjoying it thoroughly. I am reminded of the time, when I was 8 years old, when I got The Chronicles of Narnia for Christmas and read far into the night, finishing The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in a single stretch of reading. I'm so glad my parents ignored bedtime that night, if they saw my light under the bedroom door so long after bedtime! I was reading before that, but I date my love affair with novels and their rich stories from that night. And as it turns out, P didn't want to read alone in her bed, so she's on the couch next to me, enjoying the book and the company at the same time. I'm sure she'll head to bed when fatigue overtakes the pursuit of the story. I think I'd better put Book Two on hold at the library...done.
As we move toward the kids making more of their own decisions in more areas of their lives, how we handle food continues to change. T is still eating a lot of peanut butter and jelly, but after one day recently when we decided to give him as much PB&J as he asked for (and that was quite a lot!), he now rarely asks for it more than once in a day. I have a large container with various hard candies and lollipops on the counter, and I usually keep some kind of gummy something or other around too. They have a few pieces a day, sometimes more, but they also willingly eat other foods, including fruits and vegetables. Recently P was heard to say, when T was getting a piece of candy and offered to get one for P, "No thanks, I have had all the sweets I need for today!" And when the kids decided to try some Coca-Cola with their kids' meals at a restaurant recently, they both said it was too sweet after a few sips and asked for water instead. It's gratifying to see that, given more freedom of choice with food, their bodies still do seek a balance, or at least accept it most days when it's offered. I do have to stay on top of offering healthy snacks and not fall into serving only easy foods. They'll ask for fruits or veggies eventually, but they'll eat them earlier and more often if I offer them when hunger is likely but before it's expressed, and especially if I bring the food where the kids are rather than asking them to interrupt their activity, whatever it is. Yummy is good, too; dips help.
We're enjoying the process of doing a makeover on T's bedroom. It's much smaller than P's, and there's starting to be frequent conflict between the kids when T wants to play in P's room and P would rather be alone. A makeover was on our to-do list, but given the conflict, I accelerated the process. Now the kids have experienced Ikea: how this huge, mostly self-service store works, measuring things to see if they'll work together and fit where we need them to, and helping make decisions about what will work well in their rooms. T helped me assemble his new dresser, cinching the cams and helping tap in the nails holding on the back panel. Today we bought some painting supplies, since none of our bedroom walls are painted yet; and I expect we'll tackle the painting of T's room together in the coming days. When I was about six, my mom put up wallpaper with garish cartoon flowers -- my choice, if memory serves -- in my bedroom, and the trim and doors were painted robin's-egg blue. Mom let me help paint a door, though she did the trickier bits of baseboards and such. I will have to let go of some perfectionist tendencies to let the kids help with the painting, as my mother did, but I hereby resolve to do so!
With all those boxes from Ikea and some grocery boxes from Amazon (to get foods harder to find locally, like nori snacks and chia seeds), the kids have been doing a lot of imaginative play with boxes. They are beds, cars, trains, homes, boats, and more, and a roll of masking tape and skein of yarn add to the possibilities. After a while I get fed up with bumping into boxes everywhere and we recycle whichever ones the kids don't want to save in their rooms; but that just makes the next phase of box play, when it comes, that much more fun.
One weekend, we went as a family to a show given at our local library by a clown -- storytelling, puppetry, juggling, and lots of physical humor. We all enjoyed it. And now, since someone hit our car in the parking lot while we were at the performance (she did tell us, thankfully!), there is more learning happening, about body shops and what they do, how cars are put together to absorb the impact in accidents, and soon, I expect, about insurance and what it's for. T enjoyed the antique barber's chair in the body shop office, investigating everything he could about which of its parts moved and why.
After we got our estimate at the body shop, we washed the car at a self-service car wash, something I do far more rarely than most car owners, judging by how our car usually looks. The kids didn't get to do much there, because I was still learning how to use the equipment myself; but I want to take them back another time and let them experience the high-pressure nozzle and how it feels to wield it. It's a dollar per minute, but I think that experience is more than worth a buck or two per kid. Today they helped with the low-pressure foam brush, scrubbing the dirty residue of winter's slush from the bottom part of the doors and fenders, and noticing the many nicks and scratches that were hidden under the dirt.
A few nights ago, we were having some fun with a metal Slinky, and UnschoolerDad showed the kids how if you hold it near your ear (with someone else holding the other end stretched out) and send longitudinal waves along the Slinky, it sounds like the laser guns in Star Wars. (Pew, pew!) Then I pulled out a trick I learned when I was teaching physics -- tie strings to two corners of a metal oven rack, wrap the strings around your index fingers, stick them in your ears so the rack hangs down in front of you, have someone else strike the rack gently with different materials (skin, wood, metal, etc.) and see what unexpected noises you hear.
The kids are often curious about sound. Today they asked what sounds chipmunks make, so we found some sound files online and found out. Then T wanted to know what sounds whales make, so we found a long YouTube video with enough sound from one whale that we could start to make out some repeated phrases. That led to watching videos of lava flows; of people playing with lava flows in Hawaii (and how very, very hot the lava is -- people roast marshmallows next to it and catch the soles of their shoes on fire if they touch it!); of quicksand, how people get stuck in it, and how to get out of it; and then a couple of SciShow videos. One of these covered "mindreading" (specifically, how researchers have used fMRI to record brain activity as subjects watch videos, and then to work backwards, reconstructing what people are seeing from their brain activity), and the other was about epigenetics (P and I stopped the video a lot to clarify things like what it means for a gene to be expressed or not expressed). After P moved on to other things, I enjoyed another video about what the Higgs boson is, having wondered exactly that a few days ago.
Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
-Marge Piercy, from "The Seven of Pentacles"
Today as I began cooking dinner, I needed to double a recipe for cooking millet. I just started talking out loud about it to P, who was hanging out nearby. "I want to make a double recipe of millet. One recipe calls for three-quarters of a cup."
I didn't really expect her to try the math, but she did: "Then you need six quarters!"
So I asked, "How many cups is six quarters of a cup?" She said she didn't know. So I asked, "If you had six quarters, how many dollars would that be?"
She came back pretty quickly, "One dollar and fifty cents!" Before I could ask what that would mean for the recipe, she called out, "So you need one and a half cups!" I couldn't have been more pleased.
As I was jotting notes for this blog entry, I said to her, "I remember you learning something interesting today, but I can't remember what it was. Do you remember?"
She responded, "I used money math to double your recipe!"
Good stuff.
A few days ago, I signed on the the effort to finish the casual video game UnschoolerDad is developing for smart phones. His original producer had to leave the project for health reasons, and he hasn't found someone ready to step into her shoes yet. I've been developing specifications for sound effects. Tonight the kids wanted to see how the game is coming, so I played some levels in the test build I have on my computer, and they watched. I noticed issues with the game, so I started an email to UnschoolerDad detailing these possible bugs for when he's ready to address them. P followed along, reading some of what I typed. She asked why I was writing, and I explained that Daddy would want to know about these problems we were seeing, since he was the one who would fix them, and that I needed to describe them with good details so he would know just what I was talking about. She helped me watch certain details in the game so we could describe their behavior better. Once in a while she'd ask the meaning of a word or abbreviation I used in the bug reports. It was nice to see her interest and curiosity, and she got to see something I suspect not many kids see: one of the way-behind-the-scenes parts of developing a piece of software. And next time we do this, she'll get even more, since tonight UnschoolerDad taught me how I can fix some of the issues I'd noticed, right in the Lua code files where they originate. So she'll get to see not just QA tasks -- the entry-level grunt work of game development -- but a bit of programming as well.
P took a bath this afternoon while T took a nap. This is significant because she usually puts up a fight. Today she started to get that surly look on her face, and I explained that I know she likes to have company during her bath, and that T's nap would be my only chance to stay with her today, since UnschoolerDad would be out after work this evening. Usually this would just be the beginning of a longer argument or the prelude to my forcing the issue. But today, she said she'd come when she finished the story she was listening to on tape. Yesss! I noticed this as a theme today -- I let her finish things, or get to a good stopping point, before insisting that she switch gears to something else. And given that bit of extra slack, she cooperated. (I'd feel more like cooperating with someone else, too, if they let me choose when to stop my current activity first!) During dinner she was downright solicitous. It feels like she's starting to notice and respond to my efforts to be more of a partner to her and less of a mule driver. It sounds awful to say it that way, but it's how I often felt while enforcing school-related schedules and routines.
The relaxation in our pace the last few days has been delicious. I would have a hard time stating with a straight face that we were having four contact hours of learning time, which is the requirement for home schoolers in our state, 172 days per year. But the schools are on spring break right now, and we have all spring and summer to get in the hours remaining in this school year's requirement. This period, right after leaving school, is what unschoolers often call "deschooling." It's a time to leave behind the trappings of school as much as possible. A time to avoid tight schedules and anything that's structured as a class or looks like school, unless the child really wants to go to it. A time to take a vacation, whether away or right at home. Some unschooling parents state, as a rough guideline, that it will take about a month of deschooling for every year a young person has spent in school, before they're ready to engage actively in driving their own learning processes and get the best that unschooling has to offer.
I already see P jumping on some opportunities for learning, and, creature of the educational system that I am, I relax. Her leaps remind me once again that learning is inescapable -- it happens all the time, on purpose, by accident, in the interstices of life as much as at the pinnacles of peak experiences. And to that I say, Amen.
This afternoon P and I were looking at descriptions of books on the Scholastic web site, which we may be able to order from as home schoolers. That led to looking for some of the books on the library web site, which led to reading a description of Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator on Amazon.com, which led to a question about what the "space race" meant. I talked about Sputnik and the Apollo program. We watched some video snippets from Apollo 11 on YouTube, which led to photo montages from Apollo 11 and Apollo 12. From there P spotted a video called "Cosmic Journeys: The Asteroid that Flattened Mars," which turned out to be 20 minutes about why Mars may be the way it is now, even though it was probably more Earthlike in the past. I stopped it at a few points to fill P in on things that had gone by very quickly. P and T were both riveted. There was lots of footage, both actual and artists' renditions, of various Mars missions. Then UnschoolerDad came upstairs from his office and said he'd just seen a graphic of all missions to Mars, including a large number of failed missions. The Internet is an amazing phenomenon.
I look forward to more of this kind of journey as we have more time. My guess is that next time P sees a book or movie about the space program or Mars, it will be more interesting than it would otherwise have been. And maybe next time we're in California, we can visit the USS Hornet in Alameda and check out the replica Apollo 11 vessel there. (I can't remember whether it's the lander or the part of the orbiter that splashed down.) I just queued up Apollo 13 in case we feel like a true-story riveting space drama sometime soon. It has some adult language, but I think P can handle it.
By the way, I refer often to Commonsense Media, which reviews many movies and other media that kids might be interested in. The site gives details about things that tend to concern parents, like language, drugs, sex, violence, the quality of the messages the film puts across, and things parents might want to discuss with kids who are watching a given film. If you haven't seen the site, I encourage you to check it out. They err on the side of prudishness, but I'd rather have more information than less, and parent reviews on the site often add additional perspective. Commonsense calls Apollo 13 "on" for kids 12 and up.
