Getting Closer to a Groove

It's been a busy time, and I've been remembering to write a lot of it down, so here goes with an unexpectedly-soon post!

I've been feeling like I'm settling into a better groove with the kids. Listening better to their questions, making sure my responses are as informative as I can manage, remembering to look it up later if I don't have a good answer, and following where the interests lead without judgment or wishing they were going somewhere else (or at least without acting on those wishes -- one step at a time!). I think I've had some success at directing less and collaborating more, at asking them for their thoughts when things get hard, and generally being present to them more. It's a good feeling.


Reading

• More in the library book on the human body. We've read about the structure of bones, osteomalacia and osteoporosis (after reading this  they asked for their vitamins to get their calcium and vitamin D supplements), the names of skeletal muscles (which one is this that's sore?), the male and female urinary and reproductive systems, what kidneys are for and some of what can go wrong with them (one of our cats is going through acute kidney failure, so this was of special interest). We continued with teeth, the anatomy of the mouth, and the parts of the digestive system and their functions. 
• P continues to read over my shoulder on the computer and during videos when there is text onscreen. 
• P reads kids' books to T pretty frequently.
• T played with Starfall.com for a while, enjoying the letter games and (with my help) the story pages.

Doing

• P went to a one-time class on mirrors at the local children's museum. I didn't go with her, so I don't know many details, but she excitedly showed me her drawing of the sunspots she'd observed through a solar telescope, and she made a triangular tube, mirrored on the inside, that gives nice kaleidoscopic effects when you look through it.
• Cleaning up -- mostly this is me, but P sometimes decides to dig in and get her room in better shape, with or without my help. And once recently, when I'd decided to spend half an hour tidying up at a run (while playing music) to get some aerobic exercise, T found the speed and liveliness contagious and helped me. We were so effective that before the half hour was up, there was very little stuff left to put away! P also dove willingly into cleaning her room more than has been usual recently when she got a book on CD from the library.
• Hooping (see below, under Making, for how we got started on this) -- P is working on hooping tricks in her own style, and she has some pretty original stuff going on. I've been working on it a lot, and I'm having fun hooping in the nearest shady spot when the kids are playing happily at a park.
• Swimming, with an emphasis on fun rather than specific skills. T, however, enjoys floating on his back with some support from me.

Making

• One mom in our unschooling park day group, after several people had fun learning some hula-hooping tricks from her, took orders with measurements and made custom-sized polyethylene-tubing hoops for everyone who wanted them -- 40 new hoopers! She brought appropriate tape for adding texture, weight, and decoration to the hoops, and each person decorated their own (or asked their mom to do it with their chosen colors!). P and I both got hoops. I can already see that I should have gotten one for T as well -- he loves trying to hoop with P's hoop, though it's too big for him to have extended success. P, armed with the right size hoop for her, has gone from frustrated to quite competent at hooping; and I'm having fun learning and inventing tricks to try. Hooping and hoop dancing are not as intense aerobically as running, but you can sure work up a sweat at them and strengthen some core muscles, as my sore body will attest!
• We bought T his first Lego Creator set -- it makes two kinds of rescue plane and one rescue boat. In the course of putting them together (he needed some support from me at first, but became increasingly independent after initial tries), he pays attention to numbers (step numbers on the page and counting bumps to find the right-size pieces), symmetry, angles, size, relative position, color, and whatever it looks like is taking shape (the nose of a plane, the engines, etc.). I was surprised, as we were going through the instructions for the first model plane, that he correctly and consistently identified the back end of the plane, although it took a while for it to be clear to me where the back was. It's a much richer experience than I had imagined.  T also did some improvising, adding waterskis to the bottom of the boat and such. P already has a couple of Lego Friends sets she got for her birthday this year, and the process of putting them together is similar, but she already had the number skills more firmly and put them together mostly by herself, so I didn't get as intimate a look at the process for her.

Writing

• P wrote out a recipe. She would ask how to spell things, and I'd encourage (but not require) her to take a guess and then let her know how she was doing. Most of her guesses were correct this time. Her spelling is gradually improving. I'm hoping her confidence will follow.
• Both kids signed their names to a note I sent along with a birthday present to their cousin. This was a big deal for T, who's only written his name 2 or 3 times before. Not so much for P, though she enjoyed writing her name in cursive.

Watching

• Fairly Legal, a TV series about a mediator working within a large law firm. The show takes the usual dramatic liberties with what mediators or lawyers would actually do, but it's neat to see how the different perspectives of lawyers and mediators work out in resolving conflicts, and of course it's nice for siblings to see how hard the mediator will work to find a win-win solution.
• Martha Speaks, the show about the talking dog, uses new vocabulary in ways that help it stick nicely.

Listening

• Me singing: UU hymns, chants, rounds (occasionally P learns them and we sing them in canon), patriotic songs, peace anthems, folk and country songs my dad sang to me when I was little, and whatever else pops into my mind along with enough of its lyrics at bedtime. 
• Lively music on the radio, when someone wants it.
• P checked out Book 5 of the 39 Clues series (The Black Circle) on CD and polished it off in just two days. This one is set in Russia, and I think it's related to the killings of the royal family at the time of the Revolution, though I wasn't listening closely enough to be sure.
• We went to an outdoor concert at a favorite park, but the amplified music was too loud for both kids. We tried moving way back away from the speakers, but they still weren't having a good time, so we ended up leaving. Maybe earplugs, or cotton to stuff in sensitive ears, should be in our car!

Talking

• When T was putting together his Lego set, P really wanted him to be playing with her instead. She wove and acted out an intense narrative right nearby, with eraser-pet animals and vehicles built of her own Lego. He was sucked in several times, though he kept coming back to his building. Often when they start off playing together, P weaves a tale, but conflict arises when T wants to do something in a different way (contribute his own thinking to the the game). In this case, she had to focus on creating a tale that would draw him in as much as possible, without direct feedback from him aside from what got him to come away from his building to look.
• Overheard between the kids: P was telling T about how, when T was a baby, he would pull P's hair really hard. T said, "Oh, is that why you boss me around so much?" P assured him she hardly remembered the hair pulling. T asked, "Then why do you do it?" and after a pause added, "I would like you to stop." This is clearer than he's been on this issue in the past. It seems to be much on his mind. I think it will be interesting to think with P about why she does act bossy so much and what might help change that dynamic. Her first thought in the conversation with T was that maybe she should stop hanging around a particular friend so much, since she is "the queen of the bossy people." P has mixed feelings about this friend, whom she sees at a particular gathering she attends often. She's glad to have someone to play with, but often P ends up in tears before the gathering is over.

Visiting

• We've spent some time at a local children's museum. Both kids love dressing up in costumes and sometimes using them to put on plays. They saw Earth's motions of rotation and revolution on a model where they could sit and spin in place or roll on a track around the sun. P saw why we have seasons using a model of the Sun and Earth that included the tilted axis, the north star, rotation and revolution, and a volunteer with laser tools to demonstrate everything. T played with model trains (electric and Thomas-type) for loooong stretches of time and dug in the sandbox. Both kids played with play money, play train tickets, and a whooshing vacuum system for delivering those little drive-thru bank canisters back and forth. They made huge bubble walls around themselves. They experimented with swinging an LED-lit pendulum over a rotating disk on which the light left tracks, and we saw some of the awesome possibilities of periodic motion. They tried rolling balls down tracks and seeing what shape tracks the balls could complete vs. those they would roll backward on. They learned about pirate flags and their uses in communication with other ships. They built with Lincoln Logs and similar but larger, big-enough-to-walk-inside-the-finished-house, modular building pieces. They held prisms and diffraction gratings (aka CDs) in sunlight and played with rainbows. They held their hands up in front of red, green, and blue lights and saw the multitude of colored shadows created by blocking some lights and not others. They shared toys, ideas, and pretend play with other kids, including friends and strangers, and made friends with the children of a friend of mine who just moved to town. At one point my friend observed, "The girls have traded little brothers, and I think they both like the change!"

Thinking, asking questions, planning...

• P asked whether Tasmanian devils were close relatives of dogs or cats. We looked them up and found they were marsupials. We talked about mammals including all three animals, and then about the major divisions of mammals (placental mammals, marsupials, and monotremes) and the key differences among them. P was very amused by the short-beaked echidna pictured on the Wikipedia page on monotremes. Even though her favorite TV show, Phineas and Ferb, includes a platypus character, Perry (he has his own theme song, similar to "Secret Agent Man," which starts off, "He's a semiaquatic, egg-laying mammal of action!"), beaked mammals were a funny idea. I think that speaks to a pretty good concept of mammals in general, monotremes excepted!

Short-beaked echidna

• P asked me, as we were in the car, about to turn onto the residential through street near our house, whether it was a one-way street. I said no, they were all two-way around here, so she asked, "Then why do we drive right down the middle of it?" I pointed out we were slightly to the right and talked about what my driver ed teacher told me -- that when you're driving on a street without lane markings, you have to position yourself between actual and likely hazards. We talked about what those were for that road -- oncoming traffic (none at the moment), car doors opening or people or animals walking out between parked cars (always possible), and P understood that was why we would drive out toward the middle rather than hugging the parked cars on the right. We also talked about how drivers always need to be scanning ahead for possible hazards, like children playing in yards, dogs walking off leash, cars backing out of driveways, and other beings who might dart out into the road without thinking or without seeing us in time to avoid a collision without our vigilance.
• P asked why the police tell people to come out (of buildings, cars, etc.) with their hands up. We talked about the possibility of concealed weapons and the police needing to know that people aren't about to use them.
• P asked why people learn to fly on gliders rather than small powered planes. We talked about the pros and cons: it would be nice to have the option of aborting a landing and going around again if you miss the runway, for example, but in a glider there would be fewer controls to learn to handle simultaneously. We also talked about instructors with dual controls providing a safeguard against serious errors by new pilots.
• P asked whether you need to get a permit when you move from one state to another. I told her that wasn't necessary within the United States, but that you did need a visa to move to another country. We also talked about what you do have to do when you change states, like getting a driver's license in your new state, re-registering your car, re-registering to vote, etc.
• P asked why some horses whose paddocks we were driving by had hoods on that covered their eyes. We wondered whether they were skittish and could relax better when blindfolded. We looked it up after we got home and found out those were fly masks. Flies like to drink the liquid that comes from a horse's eyes, and this is very annoying to the horse. The fly masks are made of a fabric that the horses can see through, because it's so close to their eyes. One site we found said that horses are almost never blindfolded, unless it's an emergency situation like a fire, when the handler needs to lead a horse quickly without it being distracted by scary things around it.
• T asked whether there were real rescue planes like the one he was building with his Lego set. We looked up rescue seaplanes and found some interesting Wikipedia pages, like this one, about particular flying boats.

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.

Summer Smorgasbord

It gets harder, after a while, to pick out the learning opportunities from the rest of life. Partly this is because P has become such a strong reader that I am often unaware of what she's taking in, especially when it's in magazines like Highlights that she snaps up and reads voraciously to herself instead of asking me for help. (One example: We were out letterboxing one day, and a clue called for finding the face of Shakespeare. P was the first to recognize it on a sign. It turned out she'd learned it from a Magic Tree House book.) Partly it's because I'm relaxing a bit about the whole keeping-track thing. And partly it's because we've been slacking for the early summer and not getting out on lots of trips with high learning-new-things potential of the easily recognizable kind. The inescapability of learning, however, keeps popping up.

There are the conversations that come seemingly out of nowhere and lead to new understandings. P found an advertisement for her in the mail recently that said she must "Send your card back TODAY to take advantage of this special offer!" She told me about it a day or two later, figuring that she'd missed her chance since she hadn't returned the card, and we had an interesting little talk about how advertisers like to create an artificial sense of urgency, because if you don't do it now, you'll probably either forget about it or realize you don't really want or need what they're pushing, and they won't get any of your money. (She already has a good grip on the fact that the main purpose of advertisement is to get you to want what you don't need, and might not even want if you just saw the thing instead of the flashy advertisement.) I told her a story about when I was about 7 or 8 and my sister, two years younger, saw one of those "Call NOW!" advertisements on TV when we were watching -- so she picked up the phone and started dialing. The fact was, of course, that if she really wanted (and could pay for) the thing being sold, she could call anytime. P and I also talked about how rarely "free," in advertisements, really means free.

Another little economics lesson came after we bought some ice cream at the grocery store to take home, and T wanted to stop at the outdoor restaurant tables between the grocery store and our car (we had parked at the hardware store a block away for another errand) and eat it there. Aside from our having no spoons, the restaurant was open and busy, so we talked about why they wouldn't want us eating our ice cream there. We talked about what kinds of flowers were planted in the shopping center's planters and why those were good choices. Recently T and I have talked about why traffic lights work the way they do and why it's important to obey them (an adult version of taking turns!).

P and T both have a lot of questions about the world. I've noticed that many adults view these incessant questions as an annoyance -- as if the kids were asking them just to see how much we could take before we deflect or explode or run away to get some peace. But it's come home to me more than ever in recent months that these questions are very real for them. The questions are the kids' way of using the nearest available resource (me) to sort out how the world works, and why. If I want them to keep learning and keep showing me their curiosity, I'd better give them answers that make sense to them, and I'd better have a good attitude about it!

Humor helps with getting things across and keeping it light. Today P asked me how long until it was time to leave for her first slumber party, tonight. I figured I'd probably hear this question a lot, so I asked P to bring out her toy clock so we could talk about it. She worked with me for a few minutes, learning the basics of telling time beyond just the hours. When she started getting just a touch impatient, I launched into a totally singsong recitation of the quarter-hours between the current time and the end of the slumber party tomorrow, throwing in some landmarks like dinner, movie, various people's bedtimes, and so on. She was giggling the whole time. We'll see if it sticks -- but at least I think we took some of the "learning is dreary work" edge off that particular bit. She's come to me for help with telling time a couple of times since then, whereas previously she avoided it. I've also noticed an increase in my ability to use humor to defuse an emotionally fraught situation, without making anyone feel bad. I've never felt very good at that kind of gentle humor, so it's good to discover I can still learn, too!

Some good opportunities for P's social learning have come with several play dates with friends. P really likes playing with T, and part of the reason seems to be that T, four years younger, will put up with a certain amount of dictatorial behavior from his sister and idol. P is learning from her friends, though, that most of the people she wants to play with will not put up with the bossiness that her adoring little brother will. P said something peremptory and unkind to a friend who was visiting a few days ago, and he replied, "I don't like it when you say that to me. It hurts my feelings." I was awed by how articulate and composed he was (I made sure to tell his mom when she picked him up), and I'm looking forward to more opportunities to play with that family, so P and T can learn from the kids and I can pick up some tips from their mom on how to encourage such emotionally intelligent behavior. I've been through Nonviolent Communication training, but helping children learn such emotional skills is, so far, a humbling endeavor for me. We are making some progress, however, and when I am patient and can model the appropriate behavior myself, of course that helps.

P has been continuing her gymnastics lessons, and when I can get the kids both to agree, we go on walks, short hikes, or bike rides together. We also visit new and familiar parks most weeks. For this past week P went to a gymnastics day camp every weekday afternoon, and she'll go to a gymnastics-themed birthday party this afternoon. She's been having a lot of fun and making some good progress with her gymnastics skills. She's also champing at the bit to learn to ride a two-wheeled bike with pedals (she is quite adept now on her pedal-less two-wheeler, and most of her friends ride regular bikes now), so there's some cycling in our near future. We've taken a couple of short bike rides with me helping her balance on the two-wheeler, and she's soooo close!

Here's the media roundup, from the library, Netflix, and the Internet:

• Magic School Bus DVD on the mechanics of flight and comets/meteors/asteroids
• Tractor Adventures DVD, with lots of information on different jobs tractors do and also how milking machines work
• Donald in Mathmagic Land: not a lot of depth to this, but it had a nice video intro to conic sections.
• A DVD on Monet (I can't find a link to it, but it's a very kid-friendly, humorous production with lots of good information) and his impressionist contemporaries and how they influenced art in their time
• A Little Princess: a bit of Indian myth, how boarding schools and pauperism worked in early 1900s England (We read a plot summary of the Francis Hodgson Burnett book afterward, and the movie took some huge liberties with the plot.)
• Awesome Animal Builders DVD: How several kinds of animals (spiders, caterpillars, termites) build using their own bodily secretions; naked mole rat burrows and their adaptations for digging; beaver dams and lodges; weaverbird nests and their function in mate selection; migrations of wildebeest, tundra swans, and some others; animals (e.g., rattlesnakes) that move into houses built by others. This one was a lot of fun for both kids. P recognized a trapdoor spider based on previous learning (this time a Magic School Bus book). We also got some books about beavers from the library recently, so we are looking at beavers from several angles.
• We watched several videos online of Atlantis's final liftoff, from cameras attached to the solid rocket boosters. For half an hour of video with no sound, this was riveting. We talked about how the SRBs and the big fuel tank help the shuttle get into orbit. We saw how the color of the sky changed as the rockets left the lower atmosphere, and then as they re-entered after separating from the shuttle. We saw the view tumble between the earth and space (and sometimes the sun) as the SRBs fell to earth. We saw parachutes deploying as the SRBs neared the ocean, and how this slowed and steadied their motion. It was a beautiful way to point out and answer questions about both the physics of the situation and the history of the space program -- previous disasters having motivated the use of those SRB cameras! After the liftoff videos, we watched a short piece about the NASA food lab and how they prepare ordinary and special foods for the astronauts' use in space.
• P's been reading Magic Tree House books, Fairy Realm books, and a book called Ida B, given to us by friends, which is about an unschooled child and how things change in her life when her mother becomes seriously ill. We've discovered that grocery shopping trips are much easier when I get a double cart so the kids can sit next to each other, and P reads a book aloud to T. They read most of Lions at Lunchtime this way during our last major grocery shopping trip.

P told me a week ago that she wants to go back to school, because all her friends say they want her to come back when she sees them on playdates. What I think is important is what she wants, but I'll support her if she wants to go back, and I told her so. We've given ourselves until August 1 to make a decision, since until that point we can still either enroll her or give the district our notice to homeschool. (I started to write, "to make a final decision," but of course either course of action is alterable.) Now she says she doesn't want to go back. We'll see where she comes down in another week. I bring it up occasionally, to get a reading on where she is, and to provide a chance to talk about it if it seems useful. I have mixed feelings myself. Though I still think that unschooling works better for us, on balance, because of the freedom to pursue our own schedule and interests, school does provide the feeling of a safety net. The cost of that net is high, though, if by pushing P through the list of standards, school blunts her interest in learning. She's had enough of a taste of it to know that going through curriculum at the class's pace is sometimes fun but often, really, not something she enjoys.

World Religions, Wild Birds, Wooly Animals, and more

It's been a very scheduled week, for us. P went to a day camp focused on world religions at our church this past week, so we had a school-day schedule, but with a longer commute. P had a lot of fun at the day camp and made some friends she can see again at church or for play dates. On various days the camp activities focused on Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Earth-centered religions, and Unitarian Universalism. They heard stories, sang songs, learned dances, and visited some nearby places of worship for different faiths and spoke with ministers or educators there. Each day there was time for play, meditation, journaling, and art as well. Getting up early and getting places on time was a little hard, but it was nice that no one would get in trouble for being a little late, and it helped that P was anxious to go, so there was little foot-dragging in the morning.

T and I spent camp times letterboxing, playing outside, reading stories, running errands, and having naps. T is becoming a good hiker for short distances. He loves walking a pretty trail, seeing a new bird (he was the first to see a spotted towhee on one hike), and checking out creeks, boulders, and interesting plants along the way. One day we saw -- actually, we heard its piercing calls first -- a killdeer and were treated to a virtuoso broken-wing display (though which wing was broken was debatable!) as it tried to lure us away from its nest. We took a peek back at the nest to see the beautiful spotted egg, and then left the amazing bird alone. I wouldn't know most of these birds myself, but we're carrying our Colorado bird guide everywhere these days.

In the afternoons after camp, often we'd head someplace with a letterbox and a fun place to play, and take advantage of both. On Thursday afternoon we visited a little mining museum, which a local historical society opens two afternoons per week. We saw a diorama of a nearby coal mine, mining tools, textiles from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and implements for cooking, farming, blacksmithing, sewing, and more, all from around the same period. A volunteer docent answered most of our questions; the most mysterious thing we saw turned out to be a cream separator. P, closely examining a rail car formerly used in the coal mines, decided (correctly, I think) that a funny-shaped piece of wood sitting on top of the wheels was a brake for the car.

This weekend there was a wool market in Estes Park, and P and I went on Saturday afternoon. P liked it so much that we went back on Sunday, taking T with us. At the wool market we saw llamas, alpacas, paco-vicuñas, angora bunnies, sheep, and goats on display, as well as fiber from all of them, and got to interact with some of the animals. We watched demonstrations of sheep shearing and sheepdog training, and saw the sheep-to-shawl teams hard at work spinning and weaving their contest entries. In the children's tent, we saw people spinning and weaving on three different kinds of looms (jack, rigid heddle, and inkle), and both P and T tried their hands at inkle-loom weaving. P, who is still getting clear on how buying things with cash works, chose several small things to buy with allowance and birthday money, and she got some real-life math lessons along the way. I find that cashiers and shopkeepers will often take a few moments to provide some consumer education when a child is making a purchase, and I've been pleased with how pleasant and informative they have been.

On the way to and from the wool market, we had great opportunities to talk about a lot of things:

• Jerky and smoked meats and their use for winter or traveling provisions (we stopped at a place where these were sold and tried some)
• Water wheels (the place we bought the jerky had one) and how they have been used
• Windmills and why they are called that (as opposed to wind engines or wind turbines) -- historic connection to grinding of grains
• Local geology -- There are a couple of hard sandstone layers in the local rock column, and depending on how much they've tilted, you can see mesas and hogbacks that have formed. P definitely got this -- she remarked on some such features when we drove back over the same route on Sunday. We also talked about the Front Range's past as a seashore area, and this connected up with some large fish fossils P saw a couple of years ago on a driving trip through Kansas (the erstwhile inland sea).
• Driving etiquette on mountain roads, including the use of pullouts to let faster drivers pass

In addition to our hiking and outdoor play, P recently said she wants to learn to skateboard. I haven't really tried it since I was her age, and I never got the hang of it then. We have a neighbor with a child a little younger than P, and he skateboards, so perhaps he can help out with P learning. I don't think T would be far behind; he was fascinated when we stopped to watch kids playing at a local skate park. I do think, though, that I'll encourage P to finish learning to ride a two-wheeled bike before taking on a skateboard. She's so close, I think another outing or two might get her off and running, and she's excited at the prospect. (Our local topography is so hilly that beginning bike-riding practice requires an outing with a parent to flatter ground, or I'm sure she'd have it down already.) The risk-averse side of me hopes she'll stick with biking and forget about skateboarding, but I think if she wants to do it, I can buy her the appropriate safety gear, find someone to teach her, and give her my blessing. Heck, my coordination and balance have improved since I was seven -- maybe I'll try to learn, too.

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.