Of Contour Maps, Candy, and Cargo Cults

Whew! We just came back from a two-week road trip as a family; I'll write about that in a different post. This material is from notes I made before we left, which preparations for the trip kept me too busy to write up.

I forgot to write before that when we were on our way back from our trip to see the elk bugling, we were driving down a winding mountain road that roughly followed a river. P asked "Why do you think this road is so curvy?" We got to talking about why it's good for roads not to be super-steep, and I said the designers of the road were trying to follow the elevation contours as closely as they could. Earlier that day we'd seen a map of the national park, with contours shown in relief. If you looked closely, you could see that the contours were built up with actual flat layers of material (or perhaps the map was made to look as if it had been built up that way) -- so the contour lines were obvious in the fine texture of the map. We looked at some contour maps online when we got home, relating the concept to places familiar to us.

Also on that trip, P asked whether it was hard to tell aspen apart from pine in the summer, when the aspen weren't gloriously gold as they were on that autumn day. We talked a little about the lighter shade of green, flatter texture, and tendency to flutter in the breeze as distinguishing qualities of aspen leaves.

In an unfortunate example of experiential learning, P accidentally swallowed a peppermint hard candy whole while we were coming home from a restaurant. She was quite miserable with that big, hard thing stuck in her esophagus. We had her drink sips of water. She reported that each sip hurt as it reached the candy, but then the pain level went back to normal. When we got home I gave her some warm water to sip, and she said that seemed to speed up the process of dissolving the candy. In a little while the candy slipped into her stomach and stopped hurting, though her esophagus was still sore when she ate or drank for the rest of the day. We talked a little about the process of dissolving, and why P wouldn't see the whole mint in her poop. The next time I went grocery shopping, I bought a bag of peppermints. Then, as we were finishing lunch one day, I set up three bowls of water -- cold with ice, room temperature, and hot -- the kids got very curious as I did this without explanation (I answered their questions rather than laying it all out) -- and put a mint into each. We stirred each about the same amount with a chopstick and watched what happened until the differences were clear: the one in hot water was dissolving a lot faster. There didn't seem to be much difference between the cool- and cold-water bowls. We ate the mints and drank the water from the bowls. P noticed that the mint flavor in the water tasted strong in the ice-cold water. We wondered whether the cool tongue feel of the menthol was intensified by the cold of the ice water.

One day, P was pretending that she lived in a pre-electric society, but that she had heard of electric lights and had made something that looked like a light fixture and stuck it on her bedroom ceiling. This reminded me of cargo cults, so I told her about them and pulled up some photos online of pre-industrial Pacific Islanders who, after WWII ended in the Pacific, had built control towers, runways, and (nonworking) radio gear out of locally available materials, hoping that doing so would bring back the airplanes and their useful cargo. We talked a little about how, when people don't understand a technology or phenomenon, they sometimes try to replicate it in an attempt to make it work for them anyway. Richard Feynman described "Cargo Cult Science" in one of his famous talks.

This playing may have been related to another recent event. There were some great rebates available for energy-efficiency home improvements, so we had our home checked out by an energy auditor. As a result we've made covers for the swamp cooler vents and had insulation added to the attic and some sealing of our home done. I explained what was going on to P, who was annoyed at all the racket in the house (though she and T loved coming up with games to play with the leftover mylar/plastic insulation from the vent covers). We talked about how getting our house better sealed and insulated should allow us to spend less on energy and have less of a detrimental effect on the environment. After thinking about this a bit, P asked if sometime soon we could go a week using no energy. We talked about what that would mean -- we wouldn't be able to heat the house, use our electronics, turn on lights, cook food, etc. She was still interested in a more limited version (no electronics/lights for a limited time), so we may try that soon.

A few times recently, P has asked me what I was doing when I was looking at online petitions, trying to decide whether to participate. Some recently have been very general online petitions, without enough detail about how the organizers wanted to achieve their goals. P was curious about what petitions were for, so we talked about online petitions, recall petitions, and other means for lots of ordinary people to try to effect change in things beyond their direct control. The particular petition that sparked her questions was about student loan forgiveness, and P wanted to know about student loans, so we talked about those and loans in general. P wanted to know why I wasn't sure about the petition, so I talked about my concerns about where the money would come from, and how current and future college students could plan. Would they expect their loans to be forgiven also? It might make more sense to increase government funding available for education in a way that would allow realistic financial planning for all involved.

P, T, and UnschoolerDad went to a fall festival at a local farm. Not much learning of any schooly subjects was reported to me, but the kids had a lot of fun climbing on stacks of giant tractor tires, driving pedal-powered race cars, and screening pails of mud for semiprecious stones. (Size, not density, was the screening method, so there wasn't a chance to relate this to panning for gold.)

But speaking of schooly subjects, P continues to read chapter books on her own, and the other day when we were doing a very rushed set of errands, she went through a pile of coupons as I drove, looking for the one for the store we were headed to. She found it on the first time through the coupons, so I'd say her reading speed is doing great. She's also been asking occasionally to "do math." I ask her what kind of math she wants to do, and then write some arithmetic problems to suit her desires. If they're challenging, we do some together, and I gradually pull back until she's doing them mostly or completely on her own. For stuff that's more familiar, she likes me to write down several problems and then sit nearby while she works them, checking her answers when she asks me to. Our most recent problem set was addition facts to 20, including doubles and problems with unknown addends (e.g., 3 + ___ = 11, or subtraction/algebra in disguise). She's done more advanced, multi-digit addition and subtraction, but she seems to be recognizing that stuff like that is easier if you have many of the more basic facts memorized, and she's actively working on them.

T is learning to add small numbers (up to five or so) and read 2-digit numbers. He asks frequently how to say a 2-digit number (such as the page number in a book being read) and how to write particular letters, and he's enjoying some Android phone games I've downloaded that let him practice some of these skills.

In a happy accident recently, T chose an early-generation Transformer toy on a thrift store trip with UnschoolerDad. He thought it was just a car, but when he showed it to me, something about it seemed to want to move, and I started the process of making it into a robot. We discovered its full range of moves over the next day or so. This is just about the perfect toy for T, who really enjoys figuring out how things work and then making them do their thing, over and over again.

P continues to spend her allowance on things she wants, mostly small toys. On that same rushed set of errands, though, we were at the fabric store, and I told her I'd buy her some small pieces of fabric for her sewing/crafting. She picked out a couple of holiday calico prints to make holiday dresses for her dolls.

Here are some highlights of learning from recent media, from the PBSKids iPad app and library DVDs:

• What a metal detector is and how to use it (Curious George)
• What "scrub the mission" means (Curious George; I paused it to check if they understood, and then I looked up and shared the origin of the term, from when lists of plane flights were made in pencil and could be erased or "scrubbed" when canceled)
• "Leaves of three, let it be" (Curious George; I added and explained, "But if it's hairy, then it's a berry")
• Dentists and what kinds of things they help with (Berenstain Bears; this was new material to T, who's been along for P's visits but hasn't yet been himself)
• Why people move house sometimes, and what's good and hard about the process (Berenstain Bears; P remembers a little bit about our last move, but not much; T was only 6 months old then)
• Snobbish/arrogant behavior and its effects on social relationships (Berenstain Bears)
• Ways of looking for different perspectives when things look bad (Berenstain Bears)

And finally: P wants fish. She's been asking for lots of different kinds of pets for a while now, most of them likely prey to our two cats. Fish, though, I think we could manage, with good precautions to keep an aquarium lid secure. P wanted fish NOW, before our road trip, but I said we could look at it seriously when we returned. P decided to make a fake fishbowl in a mason jar, with some rocks, tap water, and a fish made of aluminum foil. First she cut out the fish shape from the foil, but it just floated on the surface tension of the water. I suggested she try molding a 3-D fish from foil, and that floated because of trapped air inside. We tried squeezing it tightly, but it still floated until we poked some holes with a skewer to let out the bubbles. Then it sank to the bottom, but rested on its nose there, almost neutrally buoyant. The next morning, it was floating again, and we saw that there were tiny bubbles all over it. Shaking the jar dislodged those, so it went to the bottom again. During all this, P started showing some insight into buoyancy, and we talked about Archimedes' principle (a floating body displaces its own weight in water). We tried floating a small glass bowl in a larger bowl of water, which worked fine. We imagined crumpling up the glass bowl into a hunk of solid glass and decided it would sink, as indeed the bowl does when you put it into the water sideways. But if you put it in bottom first, it displaces more water, since the airspace inside that's below the water line also displaces water, so it floats. In a tie-in with her recent pottery lessons, P noted that a hunk of clay would sink in water, but if you made it into a pinch pot, it could float.

I'm still trying to decide whether to bring up the real fish again, or wait until P mentions it.

When Does This Ruckus Die Down?

Yesterday I spoke with a parent of another child in P's choir, and she mentioned going recently to nearby Rocky Mountain National Park to see the aspen in their fall colors, to see the elk in rut, and to hear them bugling. We didn't have anything scheduled today, so this morning I proposed a day trip and the kids agreed. After lunch we took our warm clothes, snacks, water, and a take-out dinner, and headed up to the park.

On the way, we talked about other things: Why kids can't have credit cards of their own (because they can't legally sign contracts promising to pay on time). How interest on credit cards works. These came up because of an Arthur clip the kids watched on the iPad shortly before we left. Then, as we got out of town, P asked what the difference was between mountains and foothills, and we played around with that, talking about possible ways of making the distinction. Then we talked about National Parks -- why they exist, and how their rules are different from those of city parks (for instance, that those who run the parks leave things closer to their natural state, and that guests aren't supposed to take things away from National Parks), and that there are usually park rangers who live in the National Parks.

Then we reached the visitors' center just outside the park, and the fun gained momentum. We briefly checked out the displays on seasons in the park and saw stuffed local fauna: weasels and ptarmigan in their winter coats/plumage, a badger (P asked if it was related to a skunk because of its stripy markings; we agreed to look it up later), a chickaree, a marten (cute!), and others. We looked through a Discovery Room with local clothing and artifacts from three eras: When the Utes and Arapahoes were the humans living here, the early period of white settlement, and the present. P tried on a sunbonnet and realized why Laura Ingalls always wanted to pull hers off to get her peripheral vision back. We petted pelts from elk, beaver, and squirrel. We smelled beaver castorium (yuck! But it must smell good to beavers), used to bait beaver traps during the settlement era. We felt replica spear heads and arrowheads and saw an atlatl. We checked out a raised-relief map of the park showing alpine tundra, subalpine forest, montane forest, and riparian biomes. We talked about treeline and how it marks the boundary between the first two.

Then we drove into the park and found a good place to watch an elk harem or two do their mating-season thing. I don't think we actually saw any mating take place, though it wasn't for lack of anyone trying. The alpha bull was too busy chasing away satellite bulls to get busy with the cows, most of whom were probably already pregnant anyway, since the mating season is almost over. One bystander said that alpha bulls lose a lot of weight during the six-week mating season, since they have very little time to rest or eat, especially if they have large harems. The one we were watching most was trying to keep upwards of 30 cows to himself, and he had his work cut out for him! I got to listen in on a naturalist speaking to a group of people he'd brought in, and I passed along interesting tidbits to P about:

• Harem size (from a few cows to the larger group we saw): in larger harems, more cows are mated by non-alpha males, which increases the genetic diversity of the herd
• Dominance (alpha male tries to pass on his own genes; other males sneak in to mate if they can get away with it)
• Scent marking of females by males (the males pee on their own front legs, and then mount for the sole purpose of rubbing those legs on the females' flanks. This would explain some of the smelly reputation elk have, I guess!)
• Cows get to decide whether to allow an approaching male to mate them; most cows try to get pregnant early in the season so their calves will be born earlier in the year and size up better before the next winter.

We also talked about aspen, since we could see some beautiful stands of them, some still with their golden foliage: How they are fast growers but individually not very long-lived; but how this doesn't matter much, since they send out runners and spread so successfully that an individual aspen organism can have hundreds of trunks. Some of our neighbors have aspens in their front yards; we'll check next time we walk by for nearby volunteers. We talked about pine bark beetles, about which there were many informational displays in the park, and about how we may have to remove our Ponderosa pine this winter, since it appears to have become infested (we should be able to tell for sure and get it removed before the next generation of beetles flies and endangers neighbors' trees). The ranger on hand talked to us for a while. I asked her if there was an hour when the elks' ruckus tended to die down. She said nope, she lives in the park, and those guys bugle all night long.

Oh, the bugling. It's quite an eerie noise. My mamma mind kept switching between enjoying its strangeness, filtering it out as if it were the sound of kids playing a rowdy game in the distance, and being startled at the apparent sound of someone getting mauled by a bear! Last night when I was hatching my day-trip plan, I searched for YouTube videos posted in the last week of elk at Rocky Mountain National Park and found one posted just two days earlier. When I played it, after the kids were asleep, UnschoolerDad was nearby but not watching my screen. He just about panicked, wondering who was screaming bloody murder in our house and why.

On the way home, after a joyful time browsing the gift shop, we discussed high-beams and the etiquette of using them, as well as the uses and geometry of reflectors. We stopped at a dark pullout to check out the sky, and we saw the Milky Way, which we can't see in town. Aaaahhhhhh.

This was definitely our densest day of learning this week, but there have been several other highlights. Here are some:

• P went through a couple of days of scanning maps, finding places she wanted to know something about, and asking me questions to research online: "How many pyramids are there in Egypt? What can you tell me about the Congo? What kinds of animals live in South Africa? What kinds of houses do people live in in Australia?" We found pretty good answers to those, though she moved on quickly to other questions. Another map examination was punctuated with, "Hey, did you know there are two Russias on this map?" (Like most world maps, it wraps at the International Dateline, so there's a bit of Eastern Russia up there by Alaska.)
• P is sewing up a storm, crafting odd little things with lots of buttons to satisfy T's button mania, and making plans for bigger and more complicated things every day. She wants to sew by hand, not machine, and rejects many of my suggestions, but she's making very interesting progress without much guidance. Halloween costumes are in the bag with pretty much no input from me, which is a nice change!
• P is interested in helping T finish learning his letters; he's a highly motivated learner right now, as he starts to recognize and/or sound out the occasional word. This is prompting a certain amount of regularizing of her own writing, as I gently point out places where she's substituting a capital for a lowercase letter, writing something backwards, etc. P went through a period of not wanting her writing to be governed by outside rules, but she understands why I'd want T to be exposed to a less eccentric version of writing. I enjoy the fact that real-life considerations are motivating her to change where my earlier exhortations could not.
• At pottery class this week, the teacher gave T a lump of clay to play with on the way home when we picked P up from class. P enjoyed showing T some of what she's been learning and wants to get some play-dough going at home again so they can try it all out together. T loved the feel of the clay, and the difference the next day when it had dried and hardened, and getting to play with some of the fired items P's been bringing home.
• T checked out more than half the books on trucks, airplanes, and cars from the kids' section of our branch library this week. He has me read him the steps of the diesel-engine cycle over and over. I think there's something he's missing that he keeps trying to find there: he keeps telling me, "No! Read the whole thing!" even when I've read every word, and sometimes provided additional explanation where it seemed helpful. Perhaps we can find or build a model of an engine (or at least a cylinder and piston) we can play with, or barring that, an animation we can run and stop and talk about as much as he likes.
• P had two good play dates this week with friends from her former school, which was good, since we decided to skip Park Day because of a potty-training snag. Fortunately, things are getting better again with T's potty use. Knock wood!
• Both kids enjoyed a Magic School Bus DVD from the library. It included nice episodes on athletic performance (the relationships between oxygen, lactic acid, muscle performance, and the jobs of the heart and lungs); forces (types of forces, friction, and what life would be like without friction); and archaeology (how archaeologists use available information to form hypotheses about artifacts and then test their hypotheses using logical deduction and additional information).
• The kids discovered another show to love on the PBSKids iPad app. It's called Wild Kratts, and it's a fun exploration of lots of animals and their special "powers." The imaginative play between the kids has taken a turn toward the spandex-clad and superhero-themed recently, and now animal powers have been added to that mix.
• Both kids are enjoying shadow play with flashlights and hand shadows. T is finally starting to get the hang of tracking down the origins of scary-looking shadows in his room at night, as the concept of shadows-as-areas-of-blocked-light gets more solid for him.

I'm beginning to think this ruckus is never going to die down. And that's fine with me!

P.S. I ran across this blog post, which does a nice job of gathering together thoughts on why one might decide to unschool, what it's like, and why we might reasonably expect it to successful and way more fun than school. Also, this other post is a great explanation of why "child-led learning" is a misleading characterization of unschooling. Going to hear elk bugling today was not my kids' idea. It took a little selling to make the trip sound attractive enough that they wanted to go. But everyone was glad to have gone, and so (I hope!) my stock as a suggester of cool experiences, rich in learning opportunities, goes up.

Agriculture, Economics, and Iwo Jima

Our biggest outing recently was yesterday morning: we went to an Agricultural Heritage Center in a nearby town. The place was a homestead starting in the 1870s, and several subsequent buildings and improvements were made before the land was given to the county as a museum. The farm still keeps some animals and has a small garden, but no big field crops. They have added an area of hands-on, museum-type exhibits in one of the barns. One of my favorites, which the kids also liked, was a wooden birthday cake divided up into 8 wedges that you could pull out and examine. Each wedge had a picture of a typical cake ingredient (butter, eggs, honey, flour, etc.) on one flat face, and a picture of where that ingredient came from (cows, chickens, beehives, wheat fields, etc.) on the other. There were higher-tech exhibits, but that one just tied things together so nicely in a way that isn't obvious to young kids raised in the city.

The exhibit-area experience was a little loud and overwhelming because we were sharing the area with two first-grade classes on a field trip. Much more relaxed and enjoyable were our self-guided tour of the farmhouse, outbuildings, and grounds, and some opportunities to ask questions of a friendly volunteer. After the school groups left, the volunteers let the chickens out, and we hung out with the chickens and watched them hunt grasshoppers; judging by the mad dashes the chickens made to try to catch the grasshoppers, they really like to eat them! P has been around chickens before, but this was T's first opportunity. He was tickled pink. One chicken nipped curiously at the sleeve of P's dress but did no harm; she was tickled as well once she got over her surprise. We saw bunnies that lived in a woodpile, checked out the crops in the war garden (noticing the striking similarities between the chard and beets, which are different varieties of the same species) and the damage that had been done to them by various pests, and reflected on the meaning of "loafing shed," as one building was described on the map we had.

Some of the things P and T got a chance to learn about or try were:

• Tools and implements from the early 1900s or so, including lariats, lots of tack and farm implements,  water pumps, windmills, iceboxes (the pre-refrigeration type that used blocks of ice), wood-burning heating and cooking stoves (including air inlet for controlling temperature), corn sheller, grain grinder, older stone grinding setup for grain, and some initially mysterious things like calf weaners. 
• Other stuff related to lower-tech ways of living, like outhouses (there was an old wooden one on the site, plus a newer, better-ventilated one for actual use); milking areas with stanchions for hand milking of cows; and a wooden yoke for draft animals that we could take apart and reassemble.
• Bits of history, especially war gardens/victory gardens and why they were important.
• Changes in building technology, and adaptations to the weather here: The old barn was built with unusual mortise-and-tenon joints that allowed it to flex in the high winds rather than breaking down as so many old barns in this area have. The silo at the farm was built of concrete staves with a tongue-and-groove shape, encircled by metal hoops to hold it all together; this was a new technology around 1900. (P noticed another concrete-stave silo on the way home and remarked on it.)

It hadn't occurred to me before that silo and silage are probably related by more than sound! I'd encountered both, but not previously encountered the one being used to store the other. P got to hear about silage (partially fermented grains and/or grasses -- it stinks to high heaven, but if it's made right, the cows love it!). She also learned where mules come from and that they generally can't reproduce. (We're not sure whether the animal we were watching was a donkey or a mule, but it was still a good conversation.)

On the way home we talked about a silent-auction school fundraiser we were attending that evening. P had never heard of an auction, so I described how a live auction works, and then how a silent auction accomplishes the same thing without the noise and more quickly. I hope she'll be willing to talk more about it -- I can show her a silent auction bidding sheet, since we won one item -- and how it ties in with her recent yearnings to sell things. She's been wanting to sell her outgrown and unwanted stuff for money, and begging to go out and set up in the driveway to try to sell it garage-sale style. The problems with this have been that 1) she gets this notion at odd times, like a chilly 6 p.m. on a Thursday night, and wants to do it right then, and 2) we live on a street that gets very little non-resident traffic, since it doesn't follow a useful path for anyone else. I've tried explaining how essential advertising and location are (not to mention having desirable goods) for a sale, but she says she doesn't care and just wants to go do it. The deal I made with her was that she could do it on a Saturday morning when we could plan to hang around and wait for people (and maybe run an ad on craigslist the day before); or I would help her try to sell stuff on eBay if she wants. Maybe having the auction as a bit of background will help with the eBay idea, which seems to me like her best bet at actually selling her stuff, albeit not for much money.

P is getting more confident and effective at interacting with people in the world at large. Lately she's been very willing to ask adult strangers questions or make requests of them when it's appropriate. Sometimes I suggest she do it (asking for something she wants in a restaurant, for example, or asking if she could play with the pump at the Agricultural Heritage Center), and sometimes she takes the initiative herself (asking her choir director if her sparkly black shoes would be okay for her concert uniform). She used to do this only reluctantly or with a lot of coaching, but now she's pretty good at deciding to do it and using an appropriate tone and level of politeness for the situation. This is the sort of thing we get more opportunities to try because of unschooling, since she sees a wider variety of people in different situations than if she were in school all day most days.

Here are a slew of other recent bits of learning:

• We've been seeing a particular ad a lot, one promoting Obama's jobs bill with an excerpt of his speech to Congress. P knew who was speaking -- she remembers Obama being elected, as it was something we cared about and worked on a lot. In the speech, he mentions "the people who hired us to work for them," and I asked if she knew who he was talking about. She didn't, so I explained it was people like us, who voted for Obama and the members of Congress he was addressing, since they wouldn't have their jobs without winning those votes.
• P and I took a wrong turn on the way home from her pottery class the first time and ended up driving through a cemetery, so we got a chance to talk about how cemeteries work and some of the alternatives (cremation, for example, and different things people do with the ashes, including entombing them in a columbarium). P liked going there and wants to go back, so we may have more chances to talk about the end of life and the many aspects of the "what happens afterward" question.
• We talked a little about the portrayal of Indian language in the Peter Pan musical we'd watched recently -- almost the entire song was made up of "Ug-a-wug" kind of noises. I told her at the time that this was a gross mischaracterization, but more recently I was reminded of the Navajo code talkers who provided rapid transmission of undecipherable messages during World War II, with particular value in the Battle of Iwo Jima -- Navajo was chosen because it has a highly complex grammar and because it was mutually unintelligible with even its close linguistic relatives. P was interested to hear about that. This led into a discussion of war in broader terms. We talked about the international effort to stop "ethnic cleansing" in Yugoslavia as a war many people consider justified. P is of the firm opinion that war is stupid and people should talk about their problems and work them out. On a certain level, I couldn't agree more. We talked a little bit about how diplomacy works (ambassadors from countries to other countries, with the job of communicating between governments).
• We've been continuing to read the Song of the Lioness books to P, and she hasn't been shy about asking the meanings of unfamiliar words we run across there. She's more forthcoming with such questions than she was when in school, maybe because we just tell her the meanings as straightforwardly as we can, without launching into a lecture (unless she's interested in the topic) or handing her a dictionary. 
• On another reading level, T is starting to ask what some words in books say, and sometimes sounds them out after I tell him. Exciting stuff!
• Adventures continue with sewing and cloth. P has been making things with buttons on them for T, who is still in love with buttoning and unbuttoning his clothes, and starting to branch out into zippers and snaps. P and I investigated one of her dresses with a magnifying glass to determine whether it was woven or knit -- I thought it was knit because of its stretchiness, but P didn't believe it until she saw the stitches up close, at which point she recognized it clearly as a knit fabric. P and T have also done some counting and sorting of buttons from a big bag of inexpensive buttons we had from the fabric store. I think more button acquisitions are in our near future.
• Recently P mentioned a "thousand million billion" of something, so I asked if she know how many zeros were in a thousand. She knew that a hundred had two zeros, and we talked about a thousand having three and a million having six. Then I started asking questions like, "How many zeros in ten thousand?" She did pretty well at using that concept, especially considering we were in the car and had no visual reference. It's still an emerging concept for her, but it was a good start.
• A week or so ago, P and I were talking about how mountain lions are naturally nocturnal, but how some of the lions around here have adapted to their prey, as house cats adapt to their human caretakers, and are hunting during the day. Then just a couple of days ago, I overheard P telling T, "When we got them, our cats were probably nocturnal. Do you know what that means? It means they mostly like to sleep during the day and be awake at night. But they like to get lovies and food from us, so they wake up during the day. But they still sleep a lot." I added that cats, big and little, sleep a lot more than us (16 hours per day or more).
• P has not been wanting to talk about choir. It's been seeming like she wasn't having much fun. But when I told her I had really enjoyed singing in choirs and missed the chance to do it now, she perked up and taught me a couple of the songs she's been learning. I'm hoping the sharing of the music will increase the fun for her. We'll see. She still wants to stick with it through the first concert, so we've ordered her uniform, which fortunately was on deep discount.
• Last time I wrote that after hours of a sore leg, P still said she preferred the flu shot to the nasal mist. The next day, though, she told me unsolicited that two days of soreness was too much, and next time she'd choose the mist.

And one more nice thing happened. P told me out of the blue a few days ago, "I don't resist when you want me to help clean up. It's not my favorite thing, but I do it when you ask me to." This was news to me! I do a lot of the cleaning myself or with occasional volunteer help, but I ask for help for 15 minutes or so every few days in the living room, which gets strewn with toys. The next day I asked for help, and P helped cheerfully. She did ask to change from the CD I was playing to one of her own, and since we both know the songs on that CD, we danced and sang our way to a beautiful living room, ready for play dates. It was actually fun, and I don't normally enjoy cleaning up (I know, that's part of the problem -- I'm working on making it look and be more fun so maybe I won't pass that attitude along). I'm looking forward to the next time! 

A Week a Weaver Could Love

Many strands of learning are active these days. Thinking about how the strands pick up, leave off, and resume at different times, and how they twist and weave together in our lives, reminds me of Norse and so many other myths about spinners and weavers of fate, and of playful weavers of my own acquaintance.

There are fine motor skills: After several previous attempts at knitting in which P needed me to be hands-on on a continual basis, this week she picked it up and owned it. She still loses track sometimes of where she is in the four stages of making a stitch, but she's getting better at figuring that out, too. I used a rhyme I learned from another knitter, long after I learned myself: "In through the front door, dance around the back, out through the window, and off jumps Jack." P is amazingly happy to be knitting without constant supervision and exclaims often about how incredibly good at it she is. I imagine that her knitting self-image will ride a few roller coaster hills before it settles down. For now, I just let her know I'm really pleased, too, and I knit with her whenever I get a chance, occasionally showing her something in my own knitting that she may want to use when garter-stitch rectangles get old.

There are gross motor and strength skills: T is working on doing headstands with support and has somersaults down cold (except for the part about making sure you have room to complete the somersault without falling off something or running into something!), and P continues her handstand pushups and other strengthening exercises. We still don't have a bar for pullups, but we've discovered that she can do pullups on my forearm, as long as she's careful when letting go -- since otherwise I whack myself in the face. We'll figure it out.

There's Helen Keller. We watched The Miracle Worker recently, but we were disappointed that the story stopped so early in Helen's process of learning to connect with the world. On our next trip to the library, we found a book about the friendship between Helen Keller and Alexander Graham Bell that covers both their early lives in some detail, and I've begun reading that out loud to P. It's a nice little look at telephone technology so far, and I imagine we'll touch on several communication modes for deaf and blind people as well.

There are the last few chapters of Genesis. After we returned The Miracle Worker, our next Netflix movie was Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I hadn't seen it before, and I found it quite odd. We paused for plot clarification a lot, since the all-songs structure of the movie didn't make things very plain for a six-year-old. I was curious about how closely the movie hewed to the original story, so we read it afterward. I looked up the most accessible translation I could find, and we read from Chapter 37 to the end of Genesis, glossing over or summarizing passages where the plot wandered or the text became repetitive. P listened indifferently at first, but when I paused, she asked me to keep going. I hadn't realized that the end of Joseph's story wove so smoothly into the beginning of the Israelites' captivity in Egypt and thence to the Passover story (which P learned during this past Passover). When I last read Genesis and Exodus straight through, I was about 11 years old, and it was the King James translation, with predictable results for my understanding and recall.

There's World War II. As I wrote before, this started with The King's Speech and continued through the documentary on the discovery of the planets. Today, as it happened, there was a free concert at the library by a group called Reveille 3, which does an Andrews-Sisters-style concert (complete with costumes and choreography), interspersed with touching, entertaining readings of letters to and from the front, which I believe were based on real letters from WWII. This morning I played P a couple of the Andrews Sisters' songs. On the bus on the way to the concert and while we waited for it to start, I talked with P about the basics of enlistment, the draft, food rationing, scrap drives, war bonds, the USO, "loose lips sink ships" (and the fact that the Allies also had spies in Europe) and some of the social issues for families and lovers separated by the war. The concert went a little long for the kids, but they both enjoyed it, and it was at a good level for P to understand a lot of what was going on. T just had me sing "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree" about five times in a row and still wanted more, so I think he's enjoying it on some level as well.

Before we left the library, we checked out Number the Stars for reading aloud. I think that focusing first on Denmark, where the Jews were mostly hidden from the German occupiers by Gentile friends and neighbors, or smuggled to safety in Sweden, will be a good path into the Holocaust part of WWII for a young child. So many approaches to the Holocaust are fraught with despair; Anne Frank has her place (a little later, I think), but I want to make sure P learns about brave, successful resistance as well, and hears of situations where Gentiles saw Jews as inextricably linked to themselves, not as "others" or dispensable from society. I'm looking forward to playing Fred Small's song, "Denmark 1943,"  for P once we've read Number the Stars. (A free sample and a paid download are available at that link, and I don't get anything out of it; it's simply one of my favorite true-story songs.)

We also talked about the involvement in WWII of three of my relatives who were in the U.S. military (one of my grandfathers was killed in action; two others survived their service). I briefly described the internment camps where Japanese-Americans were imprisoned. And at some point we'll talk about UnschoolerDad's side of the family for another perspective -- his family's town was in German-occupied western Poland during the war and then Communist-ruled Poland afterward.

There's reading in general: P is reading chapter books, especially Magic Tree House books, as fast as she can get her hands on them. I'm trying to intersperse some high-quality books by other authors as read-alouds so she won't feel too bereaved when she finishes all the available MTH books.

And there's some physics: P noticed today that her reflection in the inside of her spoon was upside down and asked why. I dredged up my memories from learning and later teaching optics, and the diagrams I was able to draw seemed to make sense to her. We talked about flat mirrors first, and equal angles of incidence and reflection. Since light reflects just like balls bounce (disregarding rotation of the balls), that's not hard stuff. After we talked about reflections in calm lakes, P generalized nicely to how reflections in ripply lakes are distorted and look ripply themselves. Then we took on curved mirrors. I love it when kids get engaged with physics before anyone at school would have bothered teaching it.