Worms, screen-free week, gardens, and more friends!

This blog covers a longer period than most, partly because we recently had a screen-free week. The kids were into the idea, and I joined them, though I did use email and recipe lookup sites. But not this one. :)  So here's a sampling of what we've been up to:

Reading

• One day, T realized that he could touch my phone screen in such a way as to highlight words on a web page. He loved highlighting different words and portions of words and having me read them. He did it over and over, breaking down different words, phrases, and parts of words, and he noticed with interest that when he highlighted the "hum" part of "human" I pronounced it differently than I did when the whole word was highlighted. He also liked highlighting spaces between words and asking me which words he'd just separated.
• P has been reading a novel called The Merlin Effect from the library, and other books from time to time. She's also been devouring comic-strip treasuries, including The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes. The Far Side books have been fun for exploring some of the cultural references the jokes rely on. 
• My sister sent several picture books for the kids' birthdays, about the civil rights struggle of the 1950s-1960s in the United States, and we've read those together and talked a little about what was going on then and how things are different now, though racism still happens in some ways. Before I even got to the books, P had read all but one.
• We did a lot of reading aloud during screen-free week, even more than at other times. Some reading was by candlelight. I liked turning off the lights in the evening and reading in the circle of candlelight with the kids. It's amazing how distractions recede when the circle of light in a room is small. We focused better on the story and each other, and had good conversations, at those times.

Doing

• We took a trip on an airplane, the first T can remember. He loved watching the control surfaces on the wing do their things, always pointing out when he saw them change. We talked a little, when we were at full flaps for landing, about how that mimics birds who cup their wings forward when landing, to maintain lift while slowing forward motion. P was amazed at how slowly we seemed to be moving when we were up high. We played with different ways of clearing our ears on ascent and descent. We speculated about where the stuff in the airplane toilet goes on flushing. Here's a good answer.
• We started an indoor worm bin, buying worms from a garden center. We put it together, and the kids like looking inside to see where the worms are, what they seem to like best to eat, and how the food scraps change over time.
• The kids also enjoyed helping me assemble the outdoor compost bin, and playing inside it until we took it out and started loading it up. 
• During screen-free week, we played a lot of cards. P learned to play Gin, Five Crowns, Spit, and War with me. War (the most boring card game ever?) was made more interesting by having T judge who won each comparison. He was quite accurate in his decisions, and seemed to enjoy the practice. I asked if he'd give us a dramatic decision ("Queen beats three!"), and found that he didn't know all the number names; but he was game, so he got some practice with them.
• While T was having his gymnastics class one day, P and I sat in the bleachers. There was pop music playing, and I heard P starting to hum in harmony with the music. I started tapping some body percussion and then humming another harmony along with her. It kept changing over a few songs, and it was a wonderful series of wordlessly collaborative improvisational moments.

A great hand-me-down gift from a neighbor a few years ago comes into its own.

Both kids have played a lot recently with a color-sorting toy that uses binary ideas. T traces routes physically, adjusting the controls on the left to let a ball go where it belongs. P was doing the same. Then I asked them if they'd figured out the number part -- that if you make the numbers with "1" next to them on the left add up to the number under the slot you're aiming for, the ball will go there. Both of them started paying more attention to that and practicing some addition as a result. I gave P an introduction to writing numbers in binary format, but I'm not sure it stuck.

Making

• T's birthday happened recently, and P made her presents for him. He's always wanting to take over the couch or a long table as a runway for his toy planes, so P made him a cardboard runway, complete with a slight upward slope, drawn-on lights, and directional arrows. She also made a sort of airport terminal with waiting area, complete with tiny scrolls for the people to read while they waited.
• One day while I was digging the garden, T and P worked together inside to build a zipline the right size for Polly Pocket dolls to use, plus hooks and harnesses they could ride in.

Writing

• P told me one morning recently, when everyone else got up rather late, that she'd been in her room since early, drawing and writing. She hasn't yet showed me what she did.
• One morning, I found T had arisen before me and was diligently writing letters in a book for that purpose. P told me he'd found the book the night before. T used it all day, asking for different kinds of help (more details early on, then less as he got the hang of it), and going through all the letters. The next week or two, he used a magnetic drawing tablet a lot to write different things. One morning he asked me to show him how to write his name, so I wrote an example for him on a nearby dry-erase board. He wrote it beautifully, then erased both versions and kept writing his name through the day. He's written his name before, but this was the first time he did it without a model right in front of him. He's not reading very much yet, though he is recognizing some words in context by their first letters. It seems he may be learning to write first. :)
• T and I worked together to compose a thank-you note for a birthday gift. He didn't know what to say (it's a new skill for him), so I talked about the sorts of things people often say, asked him what he liked about the gift, and made suggestions about what to write, writing down the ones he approved of.

Watching

• I read in a favorite mom's blog about her kids, who enjoy cooking, doing "Iron Chef Lunch" some weekends when she is fresh out of energy and lunch ideas. I thought that could be fun if we built up the right skills and knowledge, so we watched a couple of episodes of Iron Chef America. The kids didn't like it as much as I did, but they got the concept, and it was interesting, if a little creepy, watching the crayfish episode (all recipes starting with live crayfish). We talked about crayfish basically being big water-dwelling bugs, and about other instances of human eating bugs on purpose.

Listening

• We had the radio on more than usual during our screen-free week, usually to the public-radio talk station. We didn't talk a whole lot about what we heard, but I could tell that at times the kids were listening. Sometimes if I went to turn the radio off, P told me she was listening and wanted to finish the story.

Talking

• P and T invented and initiated their own game, in T which gives P a series of numbers, and she adds them one by one for a cumulative total. I just listened to her get to 47 without making a mistake, even when she was mentally adding two 2-digit numbers (16 and 21). They've been doing this when I wasn't listening, they say. It tickles me to listen to P improving her mental arithmetic while T improves his sense of numbers and how quickly or slowly they add up.

Visiting

• We went to the county recycling center to buy a good compost bin at a good price. They had a self-guided tour area from which we could see the sorting machines, the railroad spur that took the recyclables away, the wetlands that were helping with water purification, and lots of useful signs explaining the process of separating recyclables from each other and from contaminants. There was also a display that did a much better job than the pamphlets we get in the mail of explaining what can go in the curbside pickup, what can't, and why. Seeing how the machines worked made these rules make much more sense, too.
• I've been digging up a garden plot in the front yard, and that has helped with meeting neighbors. Recently a dad and two kids were ambling by, and I called T out to play (P was away at a musical with UnschoolerDad). We found out where they lived and visited them shortly afterward, seeing their garden and backyard and meeting their backyard chickens.
• I saw the next-door neighbor's child, a little older than mine, playing in the snow one day by herself. I asked if she'd like to play with my kids if they came out, and she said yes, so P and T dressed in a hurry and spent the rest of the afternoon playing outside with her. That was the start of a beautiful relationship -- she comes over often to play, and we are in good communication with her parents. This is the first time we've had a friend close enough for truly spontaneous visits and play, and we're loving it. P went to her house one day and played with her six pet rats.
• P went to an evening campfire at church with me. After we'd toasted our fill of marshmallows, I fell in with the music makers, and she played with several kids around the big yard. She told me afterward that she needed to come to the late service the next day, since she'd agreed with another kid to meet and check on the rabbits they'd found. Usually P and T don't come with me to church; I go to the early service and come back quickly so UD can do his own Sunday activity, and the kids prefer to stay home. That Sunday, though, they both went to church, and they both enjoyed it. I hope we're opening the way for them to enjoy church with me. They are both registered for a week-long day camp at church this summer, and with luck, they will build some friendships there that will make church even more fun for them.
• On our trip by plane, we visited friends, family, the beach in Alameda, and Chinatown in Oakland. On the beach we looked at birds, shells, erosion patterns, and how the tides went in and out. The kids built sandcastles. In Chinatown we tried new foods from a dim sum takeout stand, looked at traditional and American-influenced children's clothing for sale, looked at and bought a few beautiful things made of fabric and semi-precious stones. We also noticed how many more people were hanging around outdoors, without or without their families, and talked a little about the history of Chinese immigrants in the American West and how and why Chinatowns would have formed and persisted.

Thinking, Asking Questions, Planning...

• In the car one day, we were listening to a story on NPR about the foster care system. The interviewer mentioned that the guest had been a foster mom for more than a quarter century. I kept listening for a couple of minutes, and then P said this: "A quarter century would be 25 years. Because I know half of 100 is 50. And the sound on my computer goes up to 50, and when it's exactly halfway up it's on 25. [She told me later she knew it was exactly halfway because she could see it on two different scales, one showing 50 out of 100 and one showing 25 out of 50.] And half of 5 is two and a half, and if you imagine each of those ones is a ten, then the half is five, and that makes 25." I was tickled to hear all this -- it's not how I would have taught it (except maybe the last part), and she connected it all together on her own. I asked her later how she knew half of five was two and a half. Her answer: "Well, it wouldn't be fair if one person got three and the other got two, so each should get two and a half." Spoken like a big sister who needs to know these things!
• Again in the car, P asked about the GPS display (miles to next turn):
  - That three point four there, how do you say that?
  - I'm not sure what you mean. I'd say three point four.
  - Yes, but what does it mean?
  - Oh, it means 3 and four tenths. If there were another number, like three point four five, that would be hundredths: three and 45 hundredths.
  I say a little about how UnschoolerDad and I sometimes talk about short times in milliseconds, which are like three decimal places. 100 milliseconds is one tenth of a second.
  P is quiet a moment, then says:
  - I just realized something. One in ten is the same as ten in a hundred is the same as a hundred in a thousand.
  - Yep, that's right. (I went on a bit more about equivalent fractions, but she had moved on, so I let it go.)

Through the (Now Much Longer) Long Gap: Part II

It's been a very long time since I wrote. This blog might be getting less frequent in general. I'm finding that, as I really pay attention to what the kids are doing and learning, and as I do more with them, things flow in a way that's harder to write about because we go SO many places in such a short time sometimes. For my next blog entry I'll try a different format for a change. But here's the entry that would have come in late April, based on the notes I made then -- words like "today" and "yesterday," of course, have a very different meaning now!

There's been some developing body awareness: the kids' awareness of their own needs, and my awareness of  how to support them in meeting the needs. T has been moving toward giving up his naps, so early in these last few weeks I stopped trying to help him get down for them, except when he's really dead on his feet. A few times in that first week, he went to bed and took a nap on his own initiative, asking us to close his curtains so his room could be dark. After the first week, he napped less, but sometimes fell asleep on the couch just before or after dinner after a big day. UnschoolerDad and I still need a somewhat regular sleep schedule to keep up with work and the kids, so we still encourage a bedtime, trying to keep it pleasant and loving. Sometimes T really doesn't want to go to bed, and other times he goes down easily. P usually goes to bed without much protest, but I'm sure it helps that she can read in bed if she wants.

A recent outing to a Russian festival on the nearby college campus brought unexpected learning opportunities, in addition to the chance to hear Balkan music and try some Russian cookies. We rode the bus to the festival to avoid parking difficulties near campus, and P spent a long time reading the route map and learning how to use it. (P and T have also been playing a lot lately with a United States map that goes with their Tag reader, getting more familiar with where things are in our home country.) When the festival didn't hold the kids' attention (it wasn't geared as much to young people as we thought it might be), we wandered down to a nearby pond, where P noticed the way the pond drain was built and we talked about how that would keep the pond at a constant water level. We checked out the turtles resting on a log in the pond and thought about why they would choose that spot for warming sun, available moisture, and sufficient distance from likely predators. Someone was trying out his thrift-store radio-controlled boat on the pond, and he let each of the kids steer it for a little while, which they loved. We met a few other homeschoolers, broadening our local network a bit.

In the food department, T has a typically narrow diet for a four-year-old, but not too much so (lots of bread, tortillas, cheese, and peanut butter and jelly, with some fruits and vegetables and a few beans, other grains, etc.), though he's growing a bit more willing to taste new things; I hope our not forcing the issue will help him continue getting more adventurous and finding more things he enjoys. [Note from June: He has continued to be more willing to taste things.] P is enjoying more variety, sometimes choosing to make herself salads with custom ingredients (a favorite recipe follows) rather than eat the old lunch standbys. She's told me she wants to learn to prepare more of the foods she eats, and maybe go for a week making all her own food and some of T's. So far she's gone a day, but then wanted help, which is fine with me. She sometimes asks to help when I'm cooking, too.

     Rockin' Salad - P's invention
          1 apple, cut up in chunks
          1 green onion, chopped
          12 or so green olives
          1-2 ounces of cheese, preferably pepper jack, in chunks
          No dressing required. Side dish of sardines can be nice. 


P wrote the list of ingredients for her salad, and the beginning of a story she's writing and illustrating. I showed her how to use Word's spell checker when she's not sure how to spell something -- for every misspelled word we entered into it, she picked the correct alternative from the list of suggestions, so I think she's learning to identify correct spellings by sight for familiar words, even if she can't produce the correct spelling on the first try herself. I've heard that other unschoolers have learned to spell in a similar way. I'm trying to support P using the computer to find what she wants (log in to a game, or Netflix, or look up something on the internet if she's willing), so keyboarding is becoming motivated for her. I still do stuff for her if she asks me, but she's more and more willing to do it herself. I need to think about which of my online passwords I'm willing for her to have! Fortunately they're all different, so we can pick and choose. She's starting to learn to navigate what actions might cause problems (being charged money unintentionally, going to a web site that might put malware on our computer, etc.), but she still has a lot to learn. Mostly I stay close by when she's using the computer, so we can check out unfamiliar situations together. I'll have her read me dialog boxes rather than just looking and clicking through myself, so she learns what they say and how to respond, and when possible I try to explain why I choose the action I do.

In other writing fun, P used the phrase "big cat allergies" to mean severe allergies to cats. I giggled about the possible alternate meaning (allergies to lions, cheetahs, etc.), and she wanted to know what was funny, so I showed her how punctuation could make the difference between "big cat allergies" and "big-cat allergies."

P recently received a Lego Friends set, with hundreds of itty-bitty pieces to assemble into a cafe scene. She meticulously followed the instructions, which had no words but required close attention to detail over a long period, and successfully assembled the cafe. I was interested to see that she built a mirror image of what the instructions showed, so I asked her about it. She had noticed that several steps in, and thought hard about how to reverse each subsequent step.

One day P and I had a great conversation about economics. P started it by remarking that, since Luna bars seemed to be getting more popular, she thought their makers might raise the prices since the demand would be higher. (We had talked once before about low supply and high demand leading to higher prices.) I said they might do that, but because it would make some customers unhappy and prompt them to look for cheaper brands, perhaps they'd increase their profits in other ways, like running the machines that make the bars for extra shifts and hiring more workers. We talked and thought together about economies of scale -- even though the extra power and worker hours would cost more, Luna might not need more machines; or if they did, they might be able to fit them in existing factory space; and so on, allowing the product to get cheaper as production and sales increased. We also talked about how, if Luna needed to increase prices to cover their costs, they might bring out new flavors that would cost more, and later bring other prices up to match if the new flavors were popular enough; or possibly they'd make some product improvement they could tout on the packaging and increase the price at the same time. And we went backwards in time, thinking about how a person selling their first-ever snack bars, baked at home, at a farmer's market say, might have to charge a lot more per bar to start off (no wholesale deals on ingredients, no economies of scale in production)  -- but how some people might be willing to pay those prices for an interesting new product, or because they could meet the producer and find out a lot about the product. And then that person might ramp up production by leasing a commercial kitchen and hiring workers to help, if the demand was growing and a local store wanted to carry the bars. Some of these concepts have come up in other conversations since.

P thinks a lot about ways to make money. We watched a video together about Caine's Arcade -- it's really worth seeing and is linked below. P asked if I thought she could do something similar, and we talked about the advantages Caine had -- one of the biggest being the use of a storefront, since his dad's auto parts business had mostly gone online. (Of course Caine had only one customer until the flash mob -- we haven't gone there explicitly yet, but I think P understood.)

Not long after watching this, P built a supermarket for fairies out of paper and cardboard. It included shelves for the goods being sold, signs, and an elevator so the tiny fairies could get from one level to another.

P asks almost every day what something means -- something she's heard on the radio, or read in a story, or seen in a TV program. Today, as we ate dinner and she watched a baseball game being played silently on the TVs in the restaurant bar, she asked what the goal of a baseball game was. Yesterday she clarified the meanings of increase and decrease. Today we followed up with what "in decline" meant when said of a person or animal.

Both kids got cameras of their own this month, so UnschoolerDad and I can worry less about ours getting wet, dropped, lost, etc. The kids noticed odd blurs in some of their images and turned it into a ghost hunt! We also experimented with taking photos of moving objects, or scenes with large disparity in lighting, and trying to create some of those mysterious blurs in those ways.

A quick math/numbers roundup:

• T made his first paper-model cell phone -- the kids play with these a lot, but in the past P has made them all. T wanted to write the numbers on his phone, and P helped by writing sample numbers he could copy.
• P came and offered to show me how to divide a pizza into 3 equal parts, using a drawing. The pattern blocks were out, so I duplicated her picture using a yellow hexagon with 3 blue rhombuses arranged to cover it, so the same angles showed up in the middle. She watched, then said in an odd, sing-song way, "That's science." So I sang back, "Or math, or geometry, or life." She smiled.
• P was setting up an easter-egg hunt for both kids. She had 16 eggs, and unasked, she worked out that they could find 8 eggs apiece. Thinking about it a bit, she then exclamed, "I did that right!" and explained her reasoning: half 10 (5) plus half 6 (3) is eight.

Titles Fail Me

I'm finding I have less energy to write about stuff now than I did in the winter -- probably because we're more active and spending more time outside than we were in the winter. So I'm sorry if the reading is less entertaining these days. I'll push on; the other purpose of this blog is to document the rough outlines of P's learning in case we get an inquiry from the school district, so I don't want to drop it. And then, there's the idea that writing more is one of the necessary parts of becoming a better writer. So, on I go.

UnschoolerDad replaced his work laptop a couple of weeks ago, and he recently finished transferring everything he needed off the old one, which has now been reformatted for the kids to use. P is thrilled. We've signed her up for an email account, which hasn't seen much use yet, but I think it is likely to. I've offered to type for her, but she's learning her way around a keyboard, so I'm not sure what kind of help she'll want. Spelling, perhaps. It will be interesting to see how she interacts with a computer spell checker. She's already learned some of what goes into inventing a secure password.

Most of P's time on the new computer in its first several days has been spent playing World of Warcraft (WoW, a massively multiplayer online adventure game) with me; we have compatible characters on the same server, so we can adventure together. This means lots of map use (we use compass directions and the in-game map to direct each other to things in the WoW world: "Look just at the south end of that lavender patch on the map for the quest giver, and then you can find me to the east"), reading (quests and how to accomplish them, as well as game interface tips), spelling (typing her passwords, which are combinations of real words, and typing commands such as "/dance" into the chat interface), math (handling money, budgeting for equipment and training, buying and selling items in the game, subtracting to figure out how many more of a particular kind of monster she needs to defeat), and other fun stuff like comparing two items to choose which one should be her quest reward (usually this is about which has the most positive effect on her character's stats, though sometimes it's so close that the choice is aesthetic). We get other random stuff from WoW as well. We talked about the suffix "-oid," as in "humanoid monster," and what it means. We've also talked about the meanings of "good guy" and "bad guy," since one of the characters I play is part of the Horde faction, a group of somewhat creepy characters aligned against the human-led Alliance. P's and my characters who adventure together are Alliance. So when my Horde character fights a monster, is the monster a bad guy? It definitely gets away from the binary, Disneyfied idea of good and bad guys. And as in real life, sometimes WoW characters form unexpected alliances -- a Horde member with a human, say -- just as in real life, enemies can reconcile and alliances can shift (U.S., Germany, and Japan, say, or U.S. and Russia going from allies to enemies back to allies, if uneasy ones).

Before she got the replaced laptop, P was spending some time playing Minecraft on my computer. I should install it on hers. The open-ended, sandbox-style play in Minecraft is so different from the linear, quest-oriented play in WoW, and she enjoys both. P built a house in her Minecraft world, and she gave me a tour of it on video, which I'll share with you here.

The weather has been beautiful for playing outside here, so we've been outside a lot. At a recent unschooling-group park day, we took the kids' bikes, and P finally learned to ride her two-wheeled pedal bike, after a couple of years using a smaller bike (from which we'd removed the pedals) as a running bike. She had the balance down already, so she just needed some practice on getting going with the pedals. After I helped her with several starts, she proudly rode three times around the quarter-mile paved path at the park, getting steadier with each launch and looking like she'd been doing this all her life. I'm looking forward to giving her some more protected opportunities to build her physical skills on the bike, and then getting out on the roads and bike paths in town with her to learn about bike safety around traffic.

On another outing with UnschoolerDad, P learned how to play disc golf and got some good exercise following him around. She also chose to take the bus home from a family dinner with him (he'd met us there on his bike), running most of the half mile home from the bus stop as UD rode his bike. Between running, riding, and open gyms at a couple of local gymnastics gyms, P is getting stronger and improving her stamina. It's great to watch as she gets more of a sense of her own physical power. T is enjoying similar things, and their energy is infectious, getting me running with them when their enthusiasm picks up their pace.

Books have been fun recently. We spent some time reading in a library book about how fashions have changed over time and why -- for reasons related to politics, the roles of women in society, and other interesting things to learn along the way. We read part of a book about daytime raptors, and I hope to read more in it before it's due back at the library. And just in the last few days, we've started Book One of The 39 Clues, The Maze of Bones. This immediately caught everyone's interest as I read it out loud. Tonight I read a few chapters and then said I thought it was time to head for bed after a big day. P really wanted to read more, so I said she could read herself to sleep if she wanted. P's not been reading novels on her own for a while, saying that she isn't interested in reading anymore. I haven't been pushing it; I think nothing is likely to destroy her interest in reading faster than being forced to read when she'd rather be doing something else, and it's one of the issues over which we decided to leave school. Twenty minutes of reading homework per night was becoming an unpleasant forced march and having the wrong effect on P's interest in reading! Well, as I write this, late at night, P is powering on through The Maze of Bones and enjoying it thoroughly. I am reminded of the time, when I was 8 years old, when I got The Chronicles of Narnia for Christmas and read far into the night, finishing The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in a single stretch of reading. I'm so glad my parents ignored bedtime that night, if they saw my light under the bedroom door so long after bedtime! I was reading before that, but I date my love affair with novels and their rich stories from that night. And as it turns out, P didn't want to read alone in her bed, so she's on the couch next to me, enjoying the book and the company at the same time. I'm sure she'll head to bed when fatigue overtakes the pursuit of the story. I think I'd better put Book Two on hold at the library...done.

As we move toward the kids making more of their own decisions in more areas of their lives, how we handle food continues to change. T is still eating a lot of peanut butter and jelly, but after one day recently when we decided to give him as much PB&J as he asked for (and that was quite a lot!), he now rarely asks for it more than once in a day. I have a large container with various hard candies and lollipops on the counter, and I usually keep some kind of gummy something or other around too. They have a few pieces a day, sometimes more, but they also willingly eat other foods, including fruits and vegetables. Recently P was heard to say, when T was getting a piece of candy and offered to get one for P, "No thanks, I have had all the sweets I need for today!" And when the kids decided to try some Coca-Cola with their kids' meals at a restaurant recently, they both said it was too sweet after a few sips and asked for water instead. It's gratifying to see that, given more freedom of choice with food, their bodies still do seek a balance, or at least accept it most days when it's offered. I do have to stay on top of offering healthy snacks and not fall into serving only easy foods. They'll ask for fruits or veggies eventually, but they'll eat them earlier and more often if I offer them when hunger is likely but before it's expressed, and especially if I bring the food where the kids are rather than asking them to interrupt their activity, whatever it is. Yummy is good, too; dips help.

We're enjoying the process of doing a makeover on T's bedroom. It's much smaller than P's, and there's starting to be frequent conflict between the kids when T wants to play in P's room and P would rather be alone. A makeover was on our to-do list, but given the conflict, I accelerated the process. Now the kids have experienced Ikea: how this huge, mostly self-service store works, measuring things to see if they'll work together and fit where we need them to, and helping make decisions about what will work well in their rooms. T helped me assemble his new dresser, cinching the cams and helping tap in the nails holding on the back panel. Today we bought some painting supplies, since none of our bedroom walls are painted yet; and I expect we'll tackle the painting of T's room together in the coming days. When I was about six, my mom put up wallpaper with garish cartoon flowers -- my choice, if memory serves -- in my bedroom, and the trim and doors were painted robin's-egg blue. Mom let me help paint a door, though she did the trickier bits of baseboards and such. I will have to let go of some perfectionist tendencies to let the kids help with the painting, as my mother did, but I hereby resolve to do so!

With all those boxes from Ikea and some grocery boxes from Amazon (to get foods harder to find locally, like nori snacks and chia seeds), the kids have been doing a lot of imaginative play with boxes. They are beds, cars, trains, homes, boats, and more, and a roll of masking tape and skein of yarn add to the possibilities. After a while I get fed up with bumping into boxes everywhere and we recycle whichever ones the kids don't want to save in their rooms; but that just makes the next phase of box play, when it comes, that much more fun.

One weekend, we went as a family to a show given at our local library by a clown -- storytelling, puppetry, juggling, and lots of physical humor. We all enjoyed it. And now, since someone hit our car in the parking lot while we were at the performance (she did tell us, thankfully!), there is more learning happening, about body shops and what they do, how cars are put together to absorb the impact in accidents, and soon, I expect, about insurance and what it's for. T enjoyed the antique barber's chair in the body shop office, investigating everything he could about which of its parts moved and why.

After we got our estimate at the body shop, we washed the car at a self-service car wash, something I do far more rarely than most car owners, judging by how our car usually looks. The kids didn't get to do much there, because I was still learning how to use the equipment myself; but I want to take them back another time and let them experience the high-pressure nozzle and how it feels to wield it. It's a dollar per minute, but I think that experience is more than worth a buck or two per kid. Today they helped with the low-pressure foam brush, scrubbing the dirty residue of winter's slush from the bottom part of the doors and fenders, and noticing the many nicks and scratches that were hidden under the dirt.

A few nights ago, we were having some fun with a metal Slinky, and UnschoolerDad showed the kids how if you hold it near your ear (with someone else holding the other end stretched out) and send longitudinal waves along the Slinky, it sounds like the laser guns in Star Wars. (Pew, pew!) Then I pulled out a trick I learned when I was teaching physics -- tie strings to two corners of a metal oven rack, wrap the strings around your index fingers, stick them in your ears so the rack hangs down in front of you, have someone else strike the rack gently with different materials (skin, wood, metal, etc.) and see what unexpected noises you hear.

The kids are often curious about sound. Today they asked what sounds chipmunks make, so we found some sound files online and found out. Then T wanted to know what sounds whales make, so we found a long YouTube video with enough sound from one whale that we could start to make out some repeated phrases. That led to watching videos of lava flows; of people playing with lava flows in Hawaii (and how very, very hot the lava is -- people roast marshmallows next to it and catch the soles of their shoes on fire if they touch it!); of quicksand, how people get stuck in it, and how to get out of it; and then a couple of SciShow videos. One of these covered "mindreading" (specifically, how researchers have used fMRI to record brain activity as subjects watch videos, and then to work backwards, reconstructing what people are seeing from their brain activity), and the other was about epigenetics (P and I stopped the video a lot to clarify things like what it means for a gene to be expressed or not expressed). After P moved on to other things, I enjoyed another video about what the Higgs boson is, having wondered exactly that a few days ago.

And on we go!

Birding! Also, map clues, melons, metastasis, and motivation.

This week P, T, and I went on a nature hike led by volunteer naturalists at a local park rich in birds and other small wildlife. I was a little disappointed that, in carrying out the "I Spy" theme of the walk, the volunteers had planted a number of artificial surprises along the walk -- things like stuffed and mounted wild animals, pelts, bones, and (for our first clue) a fresh pile of live night crawlers. All right, I liked the night crawlers. But I've been in that area before, and it's so rich in real things to see. The walk was aimed at preschoolers, who might have had a hard time finding or appreciating some of them, and T did seem to enjoy it. When the group moved on to an arts and crafts activity that was below P's level and above T's, we decided to go do some birdwatching on our own. There was a flock of American White Pelicans, which could have been migrating or summering here. I saw my first one while the hike was still going on -- a huge (9-foot wingspan), soaring white bird with black wingtips. We saw perhaps 50 of them at the pond. Then they moved on, leaving us to describe them to disappointed birders who showed up later.

We all took turns with the binoculars, staying nearly two hours more. I was most engaged of the three of us in identifying birds, but P was interested as well. Mostly she just wanted to look and to play quietly with T at the water's edge, but at one point she was giving me a detailed bird description as she looked through the binoculars and I looked at the field guide, and a birder standing nearby said, "She's good!" Other species we saw:

• Western painted turtles (which became Colorado's state reptile a few years ago)
• Great blue herons
• Coots
• Mallard ducks
• Cinnamon teals
• Canada geese, some of which may have been nesting on islands in the pond
• Red-winged blackbirds
• An odd, short-billed, dark, diving, ducklike bird that may have been a pied-billed grebe
• A white-billed duck that may have been a ring-necked duck or a lesser scaup
• Common raven
• Unidentified sparrows
• And on the way home, a magnificent soaring raptor. I only got a brief glimpse, but searching the bird book later, I think it may have been a Swainson's Hawk, one of the dominant summer hawks in Colorado. It was definitely not a turkey vulture (by its coloring), but it had a similar, slightly wobbly flight pattern.

Yesterday a message on an unschooling email list piqued our interest in geocaching, and we started talking about giving it a try. Today a followup mentioned letterboxing, and I looked that up. It's an older tradition, lower-tech, and it seems kid-friendly and appealing to P. Letterboxes contain a logbook and a unique, usually handmade, rubber stamp.  If you find one, you stamp your personal log book with the box's stamp, and you stamp the box's log book with your own personal stamp. We bought some artgum erasers today to try carving our own stamps. There are dozens of letterboxes hidden within day-trip range for us; we hope to start looking for them soon. P is working on her stamp design in the meantime.

On a trip to the grocery store, P noticed a bizarre-looking fruit that turned out to be horned melon, also known as kiwano. We bought one to try. Imagine our surprise when we sliced it open and saw this:

Not a fruit I would have described as a melon. And it was okay, but a lot of work to eat! (You eat the green parts, but I found the seeds not chewable, and each sac of green sweetness has a seed in it.) Not every experiment leads to a new love.

On the way to a gymnastics open gym today, P and I started talking about cancer, because a long-term survivor of Hodgkin's disease who is a friend of mine came up in conversation. P was interested in how cancer treatment works (we discussed various forms of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation), in why the cures are not that great yet for many cancers, and in details of treatment logistics, such as isolation during radioactive iodine treatment. Talking about that treatment led to discussing metastasis and the case of a beloved neighbor who died of metastatic melanoma, and also linked up with the nuclear spill in Japan, which we've talked about before.

Open gym was fun. P was working hard on some tricks that call for more upper body strength than she can currently draw upon easily. I've noticed her struggling for strength reasons in her gymnastics class, and I'm sure that doing some pushup/pullup-type exercises at home would increase her ability and enjoyment in gymnastics. She's a hard sell on the idea, so I'm debating offering her a chance to earn something she wants (like another gymnastics outfit) by achieving a reasonable number of pushups and pullups. The thing is, though, that part of the point of unschooling for me is following and feeding my kids' natural motivations, rather than using external incentives or threats to drive learning or performance. It's a tough call, since P doesn't see the benefit of the conditioning, but I think she would once her strength started improving. Maybe she and I could talk with her gymnastics instructors about what they think would make things go better and be more fun for her.

P started a project all on her own recently: she wants to build a swingset for her dollhouse dolls and Polly pockets. She drew her design; I suggested an addition for greater stability, and she lit up, remembering that the swingsets at the school playground have the part I suggested. We started making parts from craft sticks and white glue, and today we bought some quick-set epoxy for the joints that are not flush enough for wood glue. Perhaps we'll have a photo to post soon!