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.

Holiday Hodgepodge

It's been a long time since I wrote. The last few weeks have had the feeling of being on holiday here in some ways -- we've slowed way down and not done as much on as many days. This is partly the summer heat and inertia slowing us down, partly a visit from family, and partly my having some health issues that have made it hard to get far from home for several days. But at any rate, we've been taking it slow and easy, and I took the week of the family visit off from writing. So here we go with some serious hodgepodge....

P had her birthday party in early June. She got several nice presents from friends and family, and thank-you notes seemed in order, particularly for family living far away. In the past, P has written thank-you notes with some reluctance and difficulty; we've done 2-3 per day until they were done, with me helping her figure out what to say, and her doing most of the actual writing.

Well, now that P's had a taste of freedom from being told what to do every hour of every day in school, she was really digging in her heels after a few notes. I started to write a message to my favorite unschooling listserve, asking how people dealt with giving their kids more freedom and still meeting the expectations of extended family regarding social niceties. This list really picks messages apart (often in a helpful way), so I was being careful to describe what we'd already tried, and I realized what I hadn't tried yet was separating the composition of the notes from the physical pushing of the pencil or computer keys (including spelling). I figured that while relatives might appreciate seeing how P's handwriting is coming along, more important was hearing her gratitude in her own words, and receiving something created by her hands. So I offered P another way: she could dictate the words, I would type them out, we would print them out, and P would glue them into cards, sign her name, and create stamped or drawn designs on the cards for a personal touch of beauty. She accepted, and we completed the task with relish and in record time. P said some things in composing the messages that were unmistakably in her own unique voice, and I preserved her wording as best I could, while offering a little guidance for etiquette and clarity. P does enough writing for her own reasons (notes to family and friends, writing stories, etc.) that she has lots of chances to practice handwriting and spelling in contexts where she's self-motivated, so I think this is an excellent step toward keeping writing an ongoing pleasure rather than a dreaded chore.

Postcards have started coming in from other countries via our postcrossing.com exchange. On our profile page, I ask for postcards that show something beautiful from the place the sender lives, and for recommendations of books (for children or adults) that tell the truth in some way about the speaker's country. We've found out about some fun books we've been able to get on interlibrary loan in English translation. So far most of the books haven't been about the home countries, but the illustrations and parts of the text have given clues to traditions of those countries. For example, a Finnish correspondent recommended Santa and His Elves, and we saw Christmas decorations and traditions from northern Europe in the background of the story. It's a fun way to pick up some of the flavor of different countries. A Thai writer told us a bit about how many Thai children go to Buddhist temples for a few months to learn Buddhist teachings, and the postcard showed one such temple. It's fun to see what people send and write, and to think about what to tell them about our area that they might not already know. We've also put up the wonderful, huge world map P got for her birthday on an equally huge corkboard in the hall, and we put the postcards near the countries they came from. Both kids check and/or ask about things on the map pretty frequently.

P seems finally to be formulating a more complete understanding of cash and how it works for buying things. She's just about gotten beyond what seems to be a notion that she needs correct change (sometimes it's hard to be sure I understand her thinking) and realizing that as long as she has more money than an item costs, a store will make change. We continue to count out cash together when it's relevant, and P's getting better at thinking of piles of coins in mixed denominations as representing a single amount of money in dollars. She relishes spending, and sometimes saving, her allowance; when our next-door neighbors had a garage sale recently, she made about 12 trips to the sale and spent her last $5 or so, triumphantly announcing each purchase and choosing several things for T as well as herself. Garage sale items, incidentally, are fun in that they are low-stakes for potentially destructive disassembly; when T wants the 5-cent snowman doll not to have a hat, P can clip the threads holding the hat on and find out how he's put together, and nobody will get mad if it turns out there's no top to his head. (We were happy his head did have a top, though!)

Speaking of taking cheap things apart: this evening when P was going to bed, I remembered that her bedside lamp switch wasn't working well. She was early getting to bed, so we decided to try to take it apart and see if we could fix it. It turned out not to be repairable without some pretty major replacement parts, and it's an $11 lamp, so we just stripped the whole thing down to parts, and P got to see why it failed -- turning the switch the wrong way had chewed up parts of the switch mechanism. We learned all we could about how the switch and lamp socket work(ed). Then I gave her a quick lesson on an identical lamp in feeling which way is the right way to turn a twisty switch -- the sort of thing that has to be learned by doing, and sometimes with destructive testing -- but the sort of thing, I've found, that greatly increases confidence and facility in fixing things and figuring out how to use things.

Coal mining continued as a theme. I was driving P somewhere without T recently, and as I thought about all we'd learned recently about the local history of coal mining, I remembered Merle Travis's song "Dark as a Dungeon," (this version has a verse I didn't know, the one about getting buried alive) which I learned from my dad when I was a teenager. I sang it to P, who (uncharacteristically) listened willingly and attentively to this unsolicited musical offering. It got a conversation going about why people might be drawn to mining or to continuing to mine, and why it's so dangerous (both accidents and illnesses). I told her about the rescue of the Chilean miners who were trapped for more than two months and then rescued last year, and about the technology that got them out as well as the mutual support and leadership that helped them survive the ordeal. She was intrigued.

On the social side, we had a good park day one week recently. There was a paved path around the playground, and we took both kids' bikes. T enjoyed practicing his gliding over and over and over again, much as a baby practices walking, but with considerably fewer falls. P also biked, and I appreciated the level of care she exercised in playing with T, keeping track of him, and letting me know if he needed my help, if I hadn't already noticed. Her caring behavior toward him can drift too far toward policing sometimes (I like to keep the policing of behavior for safety as a mainly parental job, when it's necessary, so P and T can have a relationship based more in the bonds of love and friendship than in the exercise of authority), but we're finding our way to a balancing point with enough monitoring and gentle guidance, but not too much bossiness.

P's also having play dates with friends from school, making friends at church (World Religions day camp helped a lot with that, as I'd hoped it would), and seeing other kids at badminton when she goes there with UnschoolerDad. T is getting good at interacting with other kids, but if he's ready to make lasting friendships (P wasn't quite there yet at his age), we haven't yet discovered the right way to foster that. There are some hints of it in the way he remembers and talks about his interactions with younger siblings included in some of P's play dates. We'll keep watching for opportunities for him. Church is one place where he sees the same kids often from week to week, and that may be the natural place to start, with noticing who he's enjoying and making more connections with them where we can.

Here's a roundup of some of our recent media enjoyment and learning:

• P's still reading a fair amount, with A to Z Mysteries heaving in the mix lately. She's also enjoying How to Train Your Dragon and various chapter books from the library, especially those about fairies.
• We watched The King and I, which spawned some interesting discussions about slavery and the history of arranged marriages and polygamy vs. romantic, monogamous pairing. 
• P and I watched The Secret of Kells, an animated film with some decent historical grounding and some charming fiction about the creation of the Book of Kells, and also about Viking raiders. Afterward, we looked up images from the Book of Kells and were pleasantly surprised to see that the images in the movie were based closely on real illuminations. We learned a bit about the traditions of illumination, the tendency of local documents like land deeds to get incorporated in the same tomes with religious manuscripts, and how the latter has helped clarify the history of the former. The Northmen in the film were represented in such a distorted way that P thought they were meant to be monsters rather than humans, so we also read up a bit on who the Vikings were and where they had raided and/or settled. P wondered aloud about the map we found of this, "Why did they only go along the coasts?" We talked about how some groups in history have gotten especially good at travel by sea (building boats, navigation, etc.), while others have done better with land travel (horsemanship, caravan routes, good carts or sleds, etc.), and that the Vikings clearly were boat people!

It Never Rains But It Pours

After a couple of largely uneventful weeks, we are having a doozy. We started with preparing for and hosting P's seventh birthday party this weekend. It was a letterboxing party, with clue puzzles to solve and follow to specially-planted letterboxes in our yard and some willing neighbors' yards. There was a mix of strong readers and still-emerging readers among the guests, and they worked well together, each doing what they could, and also enjoyed creating and using their own signature stamps. Everyone had a good time, but especially the strong readers, who relished the reading of clues and the use of logbooks.

I learned, in the runup to the party, that P seemed to think that the fact it was "her party" meant she didn't need to help prepare, clean, or extend any special courtesy to her guests. We had some good talks about that (though I'll admit some of them were at high volume!) and she ended up realizing that the sole automatic privilege of being the guest of honor at a birthday party is being the one to blow out the candles and open the presents. She helped a reasonable amount with preparations and was a reasonably gracious hostess, and she really enjoyed seeing several friends she hasn't had play dates with since leaving school. We have gone a couple of times to be at school when kids got out, so she could play with friends on the playground after school, and we've had play dates with some friends, but still, it was a welcome gathering. Now that we've introduced her friends to letterboxing -- and some of them have really caught on with joy -- we have a new possibility for play dates!

A few people gave P books for her birthday, which is starting to help her out of her rut concerning what books to read. She's enjoying Sideways Stories from the Wayside School, and she's gotten a start on How To Train Your Dragon. Before her birthday, she was adamant that she only wanted to read her usual series, but after a brief complaint (beyond her guests' hearing) that the gift books were not the books she wanted, and a brief reassurance that these books were surely chosen because other kids her age loved them, she's picked them up without any further urging from us.

P is still enjoying her Magic Tree House and Magic School Bus fixes. She discovered the MTH web site, where kids can play games related to the books. She's read enough of the books now that most of the content is familiar, and she had a good time with it. That said, she hasn't asked about using the web site again since the first time. I don't think I'll bring it up; it was mostly quizzes and didn't seem to add much to the stories themselves. She's also watched MSB videos on sound, bats, spiders, recycling, desert life, and ecosystem interdependence in the context of the rainforest.

Other media have provided some nice connections. We watched Microcosmos on DVD from the library. It was awesome, of course. Both kids were riveted and had a nearly unending stream of questions about what was going on. It provided some real-life footage to tie in with the MSB video on spiders, and the discussions of what was going on tied in with some of our real-life experiences with insects and other creepy-crawlies. We also listened to an audio CD from the library called Vivaldi's Ring of Mystery, a Tale of Venice and and Violins. The kids have thoroughly enjoyed this series of classical-music CDs, which have storylines involving a famous composer as a character, with background and plot-related music from that composer (Vivaldi is our third such CD, after Bach and Beethoven). This was no different, except that when it became clear the story took place in Venice during carnival, P burst out delightedly that this was in the Magic Tree House book she is now reading, Carnival at Candlelight.

I've been doing a fair amount of letterbox-hunting with one or both kids. Recently we found a letterbox commemorating the history of coal mining in Colorado's Front Range. I read the historical information from the clue to P and T, and P, surprised, asked why coal came from underground. This led to a brief discussion of what "fossil fuels" means and why they are limited resources, at least at the rate they are currently being used. We've visited a number of interesting, fun, and/or beautiful places while letterboxing; this is one of my favorite things about the hobby. P learned a bit about how a reference desk works at a library, because we had to visit one to claim one letterbox. At that and other times recently, I've been noticing her becoming more willing to interact with strangers in the world to get things she wants. It's a great way to watch her blossom, and it will serve her well if she continues as an unschooler -- parents can't provide the desired information on every topic without recourse to outside experts, and if the child can interact directly with the experts (in a safe way), so much the better.

And finally, P is going to a day camp this week, with a theme of World Religions. I'll write more about that later, when I have a bigger picture of what it was like. In two days, campers have walked to two nearby places of worship and talked with staff members there about their respective religions. P agreed to be signed up for this camp months ago, and I'm not sure she realized what she was agreeing to at the time; but she does seem to be enjoying it quite a bit. I feel exhausted, being back on the school-like schedule for the week, but it's getting us all out of the house a lot more, which has been fun for a change -- especially after our stick-in-the-mud weeks!