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.

Spring Smorgasbord

Spring weather has finally arrived in our area, and our bodies and minds are all over the place. Except in the garden, where I'd like to be preparing the soil for planting; but the kids want to be playing inside today, and so I have time to write.

We've been getting outdoors a lot for letterboxing adventures, learning, and socialization. A non-comprehensive list of our outdoor play:

• We took our first hike of the season in the nearby mountain park, hoping to find a letterbox at the end of the hike. I was glad we had a goal in mind, because the uphill hike was tiring, and we considered turning around but persisted, thinking (correctly) that our goal was close at hand. On the hike we talked about circulation and surgery: P wanted to know why you can't feel your leg when its circulation gets cut off for a while, so we talked about nerve cells needing oxygen to work; then she wanted to know if you'd have to be asleep for a surgery in which blood flow to a part of the body needed to be stopped. We talked about various kinds of surgeries and which could be done awake or asleep. We saw and identified yucca, cactus, grasses, trees, magpies, and blue jays. We talked about moss, which we saw on some rocks in creeks. The kids enjoyed playing on the rocks across the creek in several places, and building tiny dams of pine needles, sticks, and moss. T is much steadier on his feet than I expected; he was able to cross creeks on rocks easily on his own. Both kids ran joyfully most of the way on the downhill return hike.
• T went with me for another letterbox while P was at her choir rehearsal nearby. He enjoyed playing with the compass and beginning to learn to use it. He was clear that if he faced north, south was behind him, and vice versa.
• We visited a nearby park, playing for as long as the kids wanted and then going to find two more letterboxes in the neighboring open space. On that walk the kids played in mud, experiencing different textures and kinds, including pull-your-shoes-off sticky mud. They played in a big puddle/small pond with sticks, stirring up the very fine sediment and noticing how the water looked cloudy, but the individual silt/clay particles were too fine to see. We talked about what kind of rock those sediments would form, given enough time and pressure. I was uptight about the mud at first, but before we went home I had relaxed into letting the kids get as messy as they wanted, knowing we'd be able to clean ourselves up. I was reminded of Ms. Frizzle's slogan from The Magic School Bus: "Take chances, make mistakes, get messy!" That might make a good unschooling motto!
• At an unschooling park day, P experienced some rejection when trying to join a game being played by several girls near her age, who've played together for months or years. As the afternoon went on, I made some suggestions about how to join their play (learn their names instead of calling them "guys," use questions and suggestions rather than demands, look for opportunities to expand on their game in fun ways, rather than trying to change it), and I came along to try to grease the skids a bit. She did eventually work her way in, providing a tornado shelter for the fairy house they were building, and she played for a long time with one of the girls after the others went home. T also wanted to be in on some of those games, and I worked with him on how to make his way in, too. He was carrying a big stick that one of the girls was worried about, so she was telling him to stay away; but once he put down the stick and came to help, he was more or less welcome.

Through these outings, I was working on my pace and how I handled transitions with the kids. I'm noticing that when I avoid making arbitrary demands (do this, do that, hurry up), the requests or demands that I do make, for real reasons, are met with greater cooperation. There's a "Duh!" element to this, of course, but it's sinking in more deeply for me that when I notice what the kids are enjoying at transition time, rather than focusing on how fast I can get them to do something else, they notice my consideration for them and react better when the time to move on has really (and it helps if it's for reasons they can understand) arrived. They light up when they can share their enjoyment with me and feel seen, along with all their pleasures and preferences about how life goes -- and that helps when their preferences don't work out on a particular occasion.

We had some interesting books from the library:

• Every Thing On It, a book of poems by Shel Silverstein. These are delightfully attuned to kids' interests, including gross and silly stuff as well as calmer fare. And the segmented nature of the poems lends itself well to bedtime reading, when I'm trying to keep an eye on approaching sleep and stop reading when it's time to doze off quietly. We had one delightful group nap on the big bed, on a day when I felt everyone could use one -- I grabbed a stack of interesting books and said I'd read them to anyone who came along. Everyone was listening within 2 minutes, and everyone was asleep in about half an hour, including me. Yum!
• Listen for the Bus: David's Story. Both kids liked this picture book about David, a boy who's blind and hard of hearing. The book talks about how kindergarten works for David, including braille and other tactile clues his teachers use to help him navigate his world; and about what David loves most in his life outside school (loud noises, big dogs, hammock swings, riding horses, and more). 

• To Everything There Is a Season. I was reading a Secular Homeschooling Magazine article about reading the Bible for cultural literacy, and this book came up there as a good start for kids still a little young for some of the Bible's more disturbing offerings. The illustrations are based on the content and style of pictures from a variety of cultures -- Japanese, ancient Egyptian, Aztec, Thai, Indian, and more -- and there is a key to the illustrations in the back of the book that briefly explains both the meaning of the verse from Ecclesiastes on that page, and a bit about the cultural context of the illustration used. P was very engaged in both the text and the illustration key. She did point out, in response the the verse used at the end (Ecclesiastes 1:4, "One generation passes away, and another generation comes; But the earth abides forever."), that the Earth would actually be engulfed in the sun in a few billion more years. We talked a little about how that compares to the time scale of human life.
• The Magic School Bus Hops Home: A Book About Animal Habitats. This was the book that started our group-nap reading. I like that it addresses both what animals need in real and artificial habitats, and how they might be better or worse off as pets than living in the wider world.

• Starry Messenger, a book about Galileo Galilei. P, who is already familiar with Galileo's going against church teachings based on his observations of the planets, liked this one. It has the basic story of Galileo's discoveries and his conflict with the church, and also handwritten quotes on every page from Galileo's notebooks, supporting his attitude that science is a better guide than scripture for humans trying to understand how their world works.
• Hattie Big Sky. We recently started reading this book about an orphaned 16-year-old girl in 1917 who inherits her uncle's unproved claim in Montana and goes to work it and finish proving up by herself. We talked about why damp hands would freeze to a pump handle, what banking a fire means, food and land prices during World War I, why people were suspicious of their German neighbors, rationing, knitting for soldiers at the front, and more.

Other media encounters in the past two weeks:

• We discovered that new episodes of Phineas and Ferb are being produced and made available on Netflix. P recognized an allusion to the bridge in Monty Python and the Holy Grail in one of them, from my showing her the scene on YouTube months ago. The new episodes are even richer than usual in cultural and literary allusions, which I'm looking forward to unpacking with P.
• I remembered Paddle to the Sea, a short film I saw as a child, and showed it to P on YouTube. She watched it all the way through, and we talked a little about how the people who found the wooden Indian felt, and why they sent Paddle on his way instead of keeping him. After watching it, we tried making origami boats out of regular paper (which bogged down quickly as the water soaked through) and waxed paper (this floated for 3-4 days with very little change before we needed the space for something else). We talked a bit about water permeability and saw and felt the difference between the permeable and impermeable papers.
• With St. Patrick's Day coming up, I was thinking about the Blarney Stone, and we looked up the origins of the custom of kissing it, as well as images of how people kissed it before and after the iron railings for that purpose were added. The risk has been considerably reduced from the time when one had to be dangled by the ankles!
• P asked when Easter would be, and we looked up how it's figured (roughly speaking, it's the Sunday after the full moon that falls on or after March 21, unless you're talking about Orthodox Easter, which uses the Julian calendar, in which the equinox is figured around April 3...) and this year's date.
• A friend posted this marvelous web site about the scale of the universe, which all of perused at some length. It was interesting, after the pond adventure, to see the particle of silt, just below the size humans can see with the unaided eye. (Note: this site works much better in Chrome than in Firefox.) While I was writing this blog entry and went back to get the link for the site, P got interested again and I needed to give up the computer for a time so she could continue exploring! P discovered that you can click on objects on the site to learn more about them.
• T spent some time typing on a One-Laptop-Per-Child computer we've had for a long time, and which he sort of knows how to use. He asked how to spell my name so he could type it. He's figured out how to use Shift to get capital letters, and he knows all his capital letters, so he can hunt and peck to type what I say. P took a turn later and wrote some nicely spelled short messages!

The kids asked lots of cool questions. A few of them:

• "What are animals with pickles on their backs called?" That was T, who at age three doesn't say Rs yet. He was thinking of porcupines. He wanted to play porcupines with P, so he also wanted to know what porcupines ate. (Leaves, twigs, and other plants; in winter, inner bark/cambium. They smell like old sawdust.) We also learned that they turn their rumps to protect themselves from predators, that they cannot throw their quills but release them more easily when frightened, that they may slap with their tails, and that their common causes of death include predation, getting hit by cars, and falling out of trees.
• "If you looked in a mirror with x-ray glasses on, would you see behind the mirror or inside yourself?" P asked this. We talked a bit about why x-ray glasses wouldn't work so well (setting the depth of field is a problem), but then we looked it up. X rays reflect from mirrors only at grazing angles, so mostly you'd see behind the mirror. But they can "reflect" by Bragg diffraction (constructive interference between reflections from atoms in different layers of a crystal), which makes x-ray crystallography possible. at just the right angle, thus the possibility of x-ray crystallography.)
• "Why do our teeth curve backward instead of being in a straight line in front?" That was P. I explained it in terms of leverage: just as it's easier to cut near the pivot of scissors, our jaws are more powerful near the joint, so we can chew harder things with teeth that curve backward. So natural selection would favor animals whose jaws had that powerful construction. 

And there was much miscellany:

• T built some neat, non-tesselated tile designs with the pattern blocks. He also noticed that you could build up the shapes of some pattern blocks using others: three green triangles make a red trapezoid, two trapezoids make a yellow hexagon, etc.
• We went to a place with a lot of inflated, bouncy structures for one snowy park day. P went from lonely to buddied up (she has since played with those new friends at another park day), and T grew much more confident in his climbing as the hours wore on.
• P and I looked at photos of fishing flies and lures and talked about how and why they would be useful for catching fish.
• P was making triangles on a geoboard that happened to be isosceles triangles, so I commented on that and said it meant they had two sides the same. I wasn't sure she was listening, but she piped up, "And one side different." Nice to see comprehension when even attention wasn't a sure thing!
• P talked about having two and a half fourths of something. I said that I knew what she meant, and drew a circle divided into fourths, with 2.5 of them colored in. Then I redivided the circle into eighths with a different color of marker and showed her how 2.5 fourths was the same as five eighths. We did it with 3.5 fourths and 2.5 tenths as well. I showed her the "giant one" method for converting fractions that I used to teach to seventh graders. That may have been too much to sink in at this developmental stage, but I think P understood the pie charts. The next day P asked about how to divide 7 things equally between 2 people, and she followed the explanation well and reversed the calculations correctly herself.
• When UnschoolerDad came back from a business trip, we picked him up at the airport. It was a bit of a comedy of errors, trying to reach the right curb on the right level to pick him up; we circled the airport three times. While I drove, we talked about airport security and why we weren't allowed to park long enough for UD to walk to where we were.
• UD brought home gifts for the kids, including a model F-14 Tomcat fighter plane for T, who has been envious of P's model Blue Angel jet. The F-14's wings swivel back into a smaller, swept-back profile when it goes faster, and we talked a little about why different wing sizes would be desirable at different speeds, especially supersonic speeds (when a lot of vibration would be hard on wide wings, but swept-back wings can withstand it better).

Building: Patterns, Links, and Growth

The process of learning feels like a crystal growing, building itself from bits of stuff in the environment. Sometimes it grows in a regular pattern determined by its main constituents. Sometimes it encounters other minerals in its environment and incorporates them as inclusions, which can be very beautiful in their departures from regularity. Sometimes it sends off spiky shoots in new directions, where it can grow unimpeded, becoming more fully itself.

Quartz crystal with pyrite inclusions -- more here

Spiky white aragonite crystals -- more here

A lot of the visible patterns forming here this week are happening with our new set of pattern blocks. P and T use them pretty differently, but both are coming up with wonderful things, and their designs (and mine, when I join in) inform each other, so their creations evolve over time.

T came up with the central design; P added the border.

Besides building freeform, we've talked about the names of the shapes and how many names could apply to some of them (three different kinds of rhombuses, one cleverly disguised as a square...). P gravitates toward designs with reflective and rotational symmetry; I talked with her about those ideas, and she grasps them with ease. Both kids are building designs with translational symmetry. T builds mountain ranges while asking me questions about how real mountains form. T and I have built some collaborative designs that start off with high symmetry but break into more chaotic forms as we go on. P is discovering which angles combine for nice, solid walls and mosaics.

P's first mosaic. I asked if she wanted help moving it so she could finish it,
but she said the opening was intentional -- a door into the house.

The wall has fallen apart a bit, but the mountain lookout is complete.

Both kids have also built things to resemble real-life objects like houses, walls, or spaceships. An argument about what a spaceship should look like led to looking briefly at an update on the Voyager probes, as an example of a spacecraft that's not aerodynamic and has no landing gear, because it's never intended to enter an atmosphere or to land. T's very interested in landing gear. Every time we visit the science museum nearby, he watches the video that shows how the Mars rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) landed and went about their missions, and then asks questions about the replica rover in the museum.

P got out the Cuisenaire rods recently and wanted to do some number exploration with them. We tried using them to find factors, first of 10, then 12. P reasoned well about why various numbers would or would not divide 12 evenly; for example, 5 doesn't, because 5+5 is 10, and since 12 is only 10+2 (making 12 with Cuisenaire rods makes this obvious, but she knows it abstractly too), there's not room for another 5 in 12. After the math play, both kids built house layouts with the rods, and used the white unit cubes as people inhabiting the houses and driving around in their 9- and 10-rod limousines. The garages were bigger than the living quarters in these car-centric houses!

P embellished my star; parts got borrowed for other things;
change happens quickly with pattern blocks.

P's been drawing lots of house (and garage) plans on large paper and using them to play with T with dolls and toy cars. They've made and populated neighborhoods of row houses and played for hours with them, often making home improvements before the next iteration of the game. Since our toy budget has been limited a lot of late by limited cash flow, this is part of a larger theme of creatively making do with what we have to play in new ways. Recently both kids were walking around in homemade waterskis or snowshoes or ice skates (depending on when you asked) made from newspaper, egg cartons, and yarn. There have been pirate eyepatches and daggers with sheaths, superhero capes, cat ears and tails, and more, all made with materials at hand. The craft table and its contents are getting a lot of use.

T puts finishing touches on a design he and I made together

This morning, before I was even up, P got started building a scrapbook from photos she had lying around. I'm glad to see this for a number of reasons, including that these photos have been lying around for a long time with no real home, and it's good to see them safely stored and in use! She's using a binder full of notebook paper I gave her months ago, which has gotten no love until now. P's been telling me occasionally that she doesn't like writing, but she's writing captions for her photos with enthusiasm. There are some themes emerging, like her favorite toys from different Christmases, and she's borrowed my camera to take pictures of some toys that weren't in photos yet. I also love seeing how much she writes about playing with T and loving him. I told her about acid-free paper and archival glue, but she's happy with her notebook paper and giant glue stick for now. We can always upgrade if scrapbooking becomes a passion for her.

One of P's photos for her scrapbook

One evening this week I put on a DVD about the design of castles and the English occupation of Wales by means of castle fortifications. As often happens, though the kids didn't express interest in it beforehand, they were drawn into it quickly. Castles played some part in the floor plans and pattern-block constructions after that.

Also this week, we bought and broke out a kids' magnetic poetry kit. The main action it's seen so far is T lining up long sequences of words and asking me to read them to him. He enjoys it when I try to make phrases out of them, with appropriate inflection, rather than just reading them as lists of words. I tried to paint a piece of sheet metal with chalkboard paint so we could write words along with our magnetic poetry, but we all learned that despite the Lowe's salesman's assurances, we should have used a metal primer first. Soon we'll try it again on the other side, if we can find a metal primer that will support latex paint on top.

In related events, a few days ago when T was having me ask him questions from a Brain Quest kindergarten question pack (one of his favorite "stories" for bedtime), he read his first word! There was a question asking him to pick out, from several words in a picture, the one that matched a circled word. He found it correctly. I asked him if he knew what that word was, and he read it: "ON." He's seen that on many a radio-controlled or other electronic toy, and he's also alert to phonics, so there's no telling whether he sounded it out or recognized it as a sight word.

Other highlights from this week:

• After taking three beginner classes at a local mixed-martial-arts dojo (rooted in Tae Kwon Do), and watching a higher-level sparring class, P and I decided neither of us was very interested in pursuing martial arts if sparring was to be the high-level goal. Sparring is required starting at intermediate levels at that dojo, so it's time to move on. We have friends who take classes at a local aikido dojo, so we may go watch classes there soon. We're taking a break for the moment.
• We took a trip to the small museum of natural history at our local university, which is free and convenient by bus. Arriving after a nice lunch at a campus-area taqueria, we tried on a beekeeping veil, saw a model beehive, and touched honeycomb and a paper-wasp nest. We looked at the dwellings and tools of Pueblo Indians in this general area, from antiquity through current times. T liked looking at and hearing about the variety of houses; there were great dioramas of pit houses, row houses, and cliff houses. We compared the teeth of carnivorous and herbivorous dinosaurs. We touched bison bones, a skunk's tail, a cow hoof, and assorted fossils. P bought a coloring book of Mexican folk art in the gift shop; T chose some crystals in a little pouch. I bought some sun-print paper for us to try when things warm up a bit.
• Today we did an extended problem-solving session about sharing of toys and rooms. We came up with some possible solutions, including sharing space and toys differently, using timers to limit sharing time so there's a clear time boundary, and other possibilities. They're trying one of P's ideas as I write this bit: They trade rooms for a limited time, with a timer set, and can play with each other's stuff during that time. When the timer rings, they'll both help clean up both rooms, unless they agree to set the timer for additional time before cleanup. [Note later: More work needed here. UnschoolerDad says he thinks the answer is to make T's room cooler than it is. I think he may be at least partly right.]
• We played with gelatin, dissolving gelatin capsules to release the spongy animal shapes inside and also making Jell-O, so we got to see the creation and dissolution processes.
• One day when we pulled our car alongside a semi, T wanted to know how to hitch and unhitch the trailer. I had guesses, but really didn't know, so we found some YouTube videos from truck-driving schools showing the process -- not in great detail, but enough for now. Both kids are psyched about the prospect of having a video chat with a friend of mine who is a long-haul trucker; I'm working on setting it up with him, which is tricky since he usually doesn't know in advance when he'll have down time (waiting for a load or unload) with a good internet connection available.
• We finished reading The Friendship Doll out loud. P and I linked the phrase "chewing the fat" to an Inuit story we read months ago, in which a special kind of fat was saved for sharing while talking with visitors. We looked up the phrase origins and found related and unrelated, likely and apocryphal possibilities. We also read about car tires that could be repaired as bike tires can be now, the dust bowl, the shoddy welcome given Okies arriving in California, the hundreds of thousands of letters people wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt during the depression, and more. After finishing the story, we read online about the real 58 Japanese friendship dolls, and we found out one of them is in a museum near us. Perhaps we'll visit soon!
• We started reading Hattie Big Sky, also by Kirby Lawson, who wrote The Friendship Doll. P is totally intrigued by this story of a 16-year-old girl, orphaned at 5 and bounced around from one distant relative to another, who inherits a 320-acre claim of dubious value from an uncle in Montana and tries to prove up the claim on her own.
• We finished reading The Hobbit out loud. P wants to see the Lord of the Rings movies. We'll see; they're so graphic in their violence that they give me nightmares. We might try the books first, though those didn't hold my attention until I was in my teens.
• P told me she doesn't want to read any more of the slim chapter books in the Rainbow Magic Fairies series; she has outgrown them. She's still game for the bigger "special edition" books in that series, but she says that mostly she wants to read "bigger stories," like The Hobbit or Hattie Big Sky. Perhaps she's ready for Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series, or The Chronicles of Narnia, or Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain. 
• P has been enjoying reading newpaper comics, and she devoured her first Garfield book checked out from the library. She read some of it aloud to T, who enjoyed it as well.

To close, here's a different bit from Marge Piercy's poem, "The Seven of Pentacles," which I've quoted here before. I can imagine, from her underground roots and brambles, sudden explosions of upward growth when conditions encourage it.

          Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
          Live a life you can endure; Make love that is loving.
          Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
          a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
          interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Cabin Fever and Its Fruits

Another week and though I'm improving slowly, I'm still sick. I guess I need more sleep. But unschooling carries on, albeit at a somewhat slower pace and with a measure of cabin fever.

In the world of ideas about school: Two different people pointed me to a Washington Post article about a school board member, a very successful businessman, who pledged to take the high-stakes tests students in his district were required to pass for graduation, and to publish his results. Of 60 math questions (to take just one section), he knew the answers to none but was able to guess correctly at 10. This experience raised huge questions for him about who writes these tests, who decides what should be on them, and how the results should be used -- he would have been required to take a remedial reading course based on his results. I recommend the article heartily.

Here's a simple, mama-needs-sleep-soon list of highlights for us this week:

• We set up and decorated our large artificial Christmas tree. P is now strong and dexterous enough to get the branches into place on the trunk, and T can now read letters reliably, so my role has been reduced to fluffing up the branches, mediating minor squabbles, and doing things too high for either child to reach. It was a good exercise in cooperation among the three of us, and we did pretty well. Our biggest wrangle was over playing with ornaments (delicate) as if they were toys (stronger). After gluing several broken ornaments back together, I ended up hanging the precious things high and giving up on protecting things that weren't of great sentimental value to any of us. The subsequent decrease in interest in the ornaments has me wondering whether my reaction wasn't one of the fun parts of playing with them. In any case, one of the things I'm working on is decreasing my attachment to particular objects and ways of doing things, especially where that attachment conflicts with my kids' desires for learning and interesting experiences.
• We rolled, cut, and baked dough ornaments. Decorating them is waiting on a trip to the craft store for acrylic paints. As we measured the flour for the dough, we found it infested with some kind of maggots. We looked them up and found they were probably Indian Meal Moths, common worldwide. We looked at photos of them, read a bit about their life cycle and methods for controlling them, and then proceeded to sift them out of the flour and make our ornaments. At least one was alive and wiggling. Having lived in Northern California, where similar (identical?) critters called orchard moths are everywhere, we already keep most of our vulnerable foodstuffs in airtight containers, but our crafts-only white flour was unprotected.
• We roasted some chestnuts, after looking up different ways to cook them and settling on the method used by New York street vendors, which is to boil them until tender and then just toast them a bit for nice looks. Along the way we looked at photos of chestnut trees, chestnut lumber, and the furry green casings in which the nuts grow. We talked a bit about chestnut blight and how its has almost completely wiped out American chestnut trees, so we're eating chestnuts from Asian chestnut trees, which coevolved with the blight. After speculating a bit about the etymology of chestnut, we looked it up and found it has nothing to do with chests, but is most likely what some English speaker heard when someone said Castanea, the genus name and original name of the tree in many places, across language groups.
• P got out an origami-per-day calendar I gave her a while back and wanted to learn to fold things from it. I'm helping her learn to read the instructions and diagrams and do the various techniques. She gets very frustrated sometimes. This week she was fuming loudly in the spectators' area during T's gymnastics lesson, and I said if she couldn't handle her frustration without bothering the people around us, she should wait until we got home to work on the origami. I was pleased to see that she was able to to quiet down and still work through her frustration to a satisfactory result. Learning something you're interested in is always satisfying generally, but not always fun in the moment!
• I'd been noticing that lots of P's pretend play was about being poor, so on one car ride, I suggested we brainstorm the minimum possessions a family living in very limited conditions (no running water or electricity) would need. P took me up on it. She played along as we thought about things like one cooking pot and a fire ring or some kind of stove to use it on; but she really lit up when we started thinking about toys and books. She thought they'd have a few, but when I told her that many poor families have no toys or books at all, she thought long and hard about what kinds of things the kids would play with, or how they might learn to read if they had the opportunity. We got another angle on poverty on a more typical United-States level when I told her a story I'd just read about a family, living on a very tight budget, who had decided to give each other only one gift each, with a $5 spending limit -- and how that Christmas was the best they'd ever had. We have been burning through savings this year and doing less discretionary spending than usual because we're waiting to see the first income from an independent software project to be released very soon, and I can see from her play that money is very much on P's mind. I'm trying to strike a balance in talking with her about money and poverty, not romanticizing poverty, but also letting P know that not having lots of money doesn't mean a family can't have a good life. The kids and I had planned to sign up to help sort gifts at the Share-a-Gift "store," where families who can't afford Christmas presents can pick out donated toys and books to give their kids; but while I was ill and delaying new commitments, volunteer registration filled up. We'll still sort through what we have to donate some gently-used toys to the program.
• After last week's bullying in gymnastics, P and I talked about what might happen if we spoke to the hair-pulling girls and their parents (with possibilities ranging from the situation being resolved to the girls really having it in for her). Today in class, P made a connection with one of the girls and got her to stop; the other girl wasn't in class. Here's hoping this episode of P's education in dealing with bullies is over.
• After reading a thread about art on my favorite unschooling email list (AlwaysLearning), I decided to increase the kids' independent access to art supplies. We took our arts/crafts basket down from the counter and put it on the train table, which never gets used for trains anyway since the floor is so much nicer for big track layouts. P and I sorted supplies and found containers to make them easy to find and use, and I put just a few things up high so T can't decorate too many walls in an unsupervised moment. There's more ongoing art happening now. P has been writing in pretend Chinese characters -- she loves the concept of ideograms for words. I dug up a postcard from my adventures on PostCrossing.com on which my correspondent had illustrated the steps for writing "hi" (Ni Hao) in Chinese, and put them into a form P can use more readily when she's ready for some real characters. Besides art supplies, we started a container of bits and bobs that could be incorporated into creations. P enjoyed taking apart and reassembling some older, less-efficient sink aerators we recently replaced, asking about what they were for, and then transforming them into buildings in a town, with scrap-yarn roads and an inexplicably tall dentist's office building. P's appetite for making creations has been whetted; now she wants lots of yarn she can use to make giant spiderwebs. It's on the shopping list!

The kids have spent a lot of time on Netflix and at other iPad pastimes while I've been sick. I get glimpses:

• P writing "I Love You" with alphabet-soup letters in the Morris Lessmore app
• Both kids transforming Morris Lessmore characters into characters from famous books and related movies. One was the Bride of Frankenstein, which reminded us of a friend's photo I'd recently shown P on Facebook, of her post-op "Frankenfoot," all gussied up with neck bolts and such to go with the stitches, and accompanied by "Bride of Frankenfoot," her other foot, with the classic tall, gray-templed hairdo -- everything really does relate to everything else somewhere! P was curious, so I told her the basics of the story of the creation of Frankenstein's monster.
• P asking today, out of the blue, what a shrine is. She's been watching Phineas and Ferb, a Disney cartoon series she discovered on her own, and one character built a shrine for another who'd been sucked into another dimension. P described the shrine to me in great detail. I told her a little about shrines on different scales, from a tabletop to a building, and we talked a little about what they're for (reminders of loved ones or religious figures; places to focus, pray, and/or meditate). Thank goodness there's something to be learned from P&F, and P's willing to ask the key questions.

P and I also watched a bit more of Cosmos together. One episode, "Heaven and Hell," covered some ground we've seen before, about asteroid impacts, the Tunguska event, etc., as well as vividly describing the hot, corrosive atmosphere of Venus. I stopped to clarify things, including why the planets' appearances and their distances from each other couldn't easily be shown in the same scale, and how the solar-system model used in the series obscures the fact that an asteroid or comet, zooming through our solar system, has a negligible chance of hitting any planet. The word negligible made for an interesting discussion -- I explained it as "so small you could basically ignore it," which led back to more talk about scale -- how small is that? So small relative to what? We also wrestled a bit with helping P understand Kepler's Second Law of Planetary Motion (planets in orbit sweep out equal areas in equal times) -- we'll have to find some better ways of exploring the concept of area, but I think P got the basic idea.

The other big vocabulary-builder recently has been Dragonsinger, which UnschoolerDad finished reading to P tonight. P asks about unfamiliar words, and when UD isn't sure, he calls me in for my knowledge and my willingness to look words up. Just tonight I gave them definitions of querulous and sinecure, as well as a couple more I've already forgotten. Bless Anne McCaffrey; from beyond the grave she's enriching my daughter's vocabulary along with her imagination.

Sick Days

It's been a slow week. I got sick last Tuesday, and I'm still in the throes of a nasty cold-trying-to-turn-sinus-infection. This has meant a slowing of strewing and outings with the kids, so a bit less to write about. But here we go...

The day I got sick, we had a science museum day. P was acting emotionally fragile in the morning, and after trying to help her with the underlying issue and giving her several chances to clean up her whining and opposition to every step of preparation to leave, I decided to take only T to the museum. The kids are a handful when I'm the only adult with them at the museum, since they usually want to do different things, and I was already feeling a little puny, so I decided not to risk a really hard day for all of us. P was upset, but she had the quiet day at home (with UnschoolerDad working at home and available to help her) that I think she really needed, and she was in good spirits when we got home. T was anxious to see the "T Rex Encounter" exhibit -- he wanted to know what Buddy from Dinosaur Train would really have looked like -- and the dinosaur part of the museum's permanent collection. We recognized two Stygimolochs in a diorama. They had been there on our previous visits, but this time we knew what they were from watching Dinosaur Train. It's one of the kids' current favorite shows, and there's always a bit of real paleontology at the end of each episode, related to what happened in the episode.

T, who has a pretty good command of the alphabet and numerals now, enjoyed pushing the appropriate elevator buttons and looking at some signs while I read them to him, repeating the occasional word and pointing to it himself. He's really working on cracking the code of written language, and he makes visible progress just about every week. I opened up the Starfall website for him after seeing a reference to it on a homeschooling email list. I found it disappointing, in that it's strictly phonics-based and almost as boring as any phonics stuff I've seen before (it has some cute animations with the stories that make it a little more fun); but T enjoyed playing with it for a while, and we'll see if he's interested in going back. After most activities there, there's a question, "Did you like this movie (game, book, etc.)?" and the child can mouse over faces with spoken cues (frown = "Not really," flat = "Kind of," and smiling = "Yes!") and choose a response. T chose "Yes!" each time. The web site is set up well to not require much parental coaching; T figured out the interface quickly. He is a digital native, as they say -- he figured out how to use Netflix on the iPad to find the program he wanted, after watching me do it just a few times. He talked through it out loud, with UnschoolerDad listening from across the room. "I want to watch the first Dora episode. I think it's here.... How do I get to the next episode? Maybe I can click this."

This week I learned P was short on books to read independently, so we went to the downtown library and found some good candidates. She asked for recommendations, and I suggested several based on my familiarity with them, or just their jacket-flap descriptions and a quick assessment of their reading level. She rejected the first couple with barely a look, but when I pointed out that she wasn't going to find many books by asking for recommendations and then not even considering them, she started accepting more and getting excited about some of the possibilities.

Another fun use of reading this week happened later in my illness, when talking without coughing became impossible for stretches of the day, and I'd type on my computer for my end of a conversation. P would occasionally have trouble with a word with counter-intuitive spelling, but she figured them all out quickly using contextual clues. P wrote some notes to friends this week, and I noticed again that her handwriting and spelling are improving steadily, even though she doesn't write much -- much that I see, anyway. Sometimes, when I help her clean her room, I find lists or stories that I didn't know she'd written.

There are two read-aloud books going for P's bedtime these days (T still chooses short picture books for bedtime). UnschoolerDad is reading her Dragonsinger (the second book in the Harper Hall trilogy, which they started after finishing the Song of the Lioness series), by the recently-deceased Anne McCaffrey. P likes me to read her short stories from Fearless Girls, Wise Women, and Beloved Sisters: Heroines in Folktales from Around the World. This book was a birthday gift from a wise friend who had mother-daughter story time in mind, and P loves it. We stop to talk about unfamiliar words and situations, and sometimes we talk about the stories after we finish them, thinking about the heroines' actions from our perspective and trying to put them in context for the cultures the stories come from. A new concept this week, in stories from the American Pacific Northwest, was the idea of a village shaman as healer and spiritual guide for the community. Mouse Woman also appeared in two different stories. She's an interesting character: tiny, but powerful because she always knows and does the correct thing for the situation, defeating less-benign actors through sheer cultural and personal integrity.

P and I watched a couple of episodes of Cosmos on Hulu this week. I wasn't expecting her to be that interested; I just turned it on while I was folding laundry, to see if anyone would be drawn to it. P was pretty riveted, as it turned out. Carl Sagan's explanations aren't exactly aimed at a seven-year-old, but his presentation held her attention, and we stopped sometimes to clarify things. What we watched covered the concept of a light year (and thus why it would take so long to travel to other planetary systems), the "cosmic calendar" (looking at the time since the universe began as if it were one year, and placing events on Earth in that perspective), the name and structure of our galaxy (P: "Our galaxy is just the Milky Way?"), how Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth (we also checked out a picture book about this, The Librarian Who Measured the Earth, which we read together today) how natural selection works, the role of sexual reproduction in driving evolution faster, DNA as the instructions for life, and how life may have arisen in the first place (the experiment with running a current through a gas matching the atmosphere of the early Earth, and thus creating the building blocks of proteins and nucleic acids). This last question was one P had asked recently, before we started watching Cosmos. She had also asked, in a voice dripping with skepticism, whether we knew for sure that evolution was how humans had come to exist. Sagan addressed this directly, explaining the mechanisms of natural and artificial selection and giving enough examples of evolution in action that I think P believed him when he said, "Evolution is a fact, not a theory. It really happened." I have discussed with P how scienctists should always be open to new evidence that might refine or revise existing theories, so she has that perspective already, and it might be where her skeptical question came from. It's all good!

In other science-related stuff, both kids have been trying out a demo version of the game World of Goo, which came recommended by other homeschoolers. It's a physics/construction game with a kid-friendly user interface and delightful graphics. The game dynamics quickly get across the principles of making structures strong while conserving building materials. And unlike similar games we've seen elsewhere, this ones uses materials that are flexible and bouncy. Sure, steel beams may be closer to fully rigid than they are to World-of-Goo flexibility, but it's nice to see a game acknowledge and build on (groan!) the fact that even steel beams are flexible and can bend, buckle, and break, so good engineering must take this into account.

Just as I was writing this bit, P asked me, "Five times two, plus two, is twelve, right?" I said yes, and she cried out, "Then six times two is twelve!" I never know when she's going to bring up math, but I like the thinking she shows when she does.

We took a few steps down the path toward starting an aquarium a bit this week, by buying a water test kit and testing the pH and hardness of our water, to find out what kinds of fish would do well with it. We also priced aquarium setups and checked out some fish species at the local pet store; I think we'll buy our fish elsewhere, after seeing how many dead fish were floating in their tanks. We're considering whether we should buy a used aquarium to save money, when we won't really be able to see if it works until we get it home, and we'd need to clean it thoroughly. When P and I made a list, the day before Thanksgiving, of things we were thankful for, "Getting fish soon" was one of P's additions to the list.

One night when I was helping P clean her room, I was thinking about her nametag at church. Each kid can add a bead to the shoelace their nametag hangs on each time they attend, but P has always chosen not to do so. It occurred to me that this might be because P didn't know any knots that were easy to tie and release. So I showed her how to tie and release a square knot, using a shoelace I had handy. She got excited about this. I showed her a lark's head knot too, and it turned out she had figured that one out on her own. I also demonstrated a couple of other knots with different purposes, though we didn't pursue those that night. The next day I showed her how to use well-placed half-hitches in embroidery floss to make a friendship bracelet, the way I learned when I was in high school. She learned that easily and has been adding a few rows per day to a simple bracelet I helped her start. I made a slightly more complex one for her, and she's been wearing it and talking about it happily.

It's signup time for classes at the local recreation centers, and P needs to decide whether to be in gymnastics for the next session. She's been getting scared and/or frustrated with some of the things she's being asked to do in Group 2. I spoke with her instructor after a recent lesson, and she suggested P might like to go back to Group 1 to build her confidence a bit more on the basics. I asked P about this, and she said she'd like to try it. Today I sent her with a note asking to make that change, and it was made. A couple of girls in P's new group pulled her hair repeatedly (Grrrr!), which upset P, but we talked about how she might deal with it if it happens again, and by this evening she was saying she did want to sign up for the new session. P and I have also talked about what kinds of things it would help for her to practice, and we continue working on them together in open gym sessions, with happy results. The rec center where she takes gymnastics has just started doing open gym times, which P is looking forward to trying out.

The slowness of the week, and my need to rest a lot, has borne some interesting fruit. P has been volunteering to put T down for his naps by reading to him, as I used to do. They both seem to like it, and it gives me a break to rest more or get chores done earlier in the day, before I'm too tired. P has also been looking for ways to help on days when I'm really dragging, such as picking up clutter on the floor when my sinuses are too clogged for me to bend over without pain. Her ability to empathize and act compassionately, in short, is showing more than it has in the past. The compassionate behavior comes and goes, but it's good to see it; and it's been lovely to have a daughter who is sweet to me, at least some of the time, while I've been sick. I don't know whether it's the fruit of my recent efforts to be kinder and gentler with the kids as I work toward a more mindful parenting style, or a new developmental stage, or both, but it warms my heart either way.

...Aaaand then it got rich again.

We go along and have these lazy days and weeks, and then things take off again. Here we go!

The kids and I watched a couple of TED talks online together this week. One was about flowers and the tricks they've evolved to play on their pollinators. P, who is beginning to understand the role sex plays in reproduction with humans and animals, was ready to enjoy this and has mentioned it to me unprompted since then; she remembered the flowers that smell like carrion, enticing blowflies to come in and lay their eggs there, meanwhile getting coated with pollen for other such plants. The other was about a new ultralight robot that flies like a bird, flapping its wings. That had the whole family grinning from ear to ear, probably all for different reasons, but it was delightful and memorable nonetheless.

P and I also watched some old TV together online. We watched the first few episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which has always been my favorite Trek series (though the first season is a little hard to take!). P referred to some of the technology in the show (e.g., transporters) as magic, so we talked about the nature of science/speculative fiction as the creator's idea of where science and technology could go in the future, and how that might change the world and the ways people interact. Of course it also reminded me of the Arthur C. Clarke quote, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," and I shared that idea with P as well. 

A library book, Twelve Snails to One Lizard, was a fun story about the nature of measurement and why measurement tools are so useful; and it repeated some key numbers for the English system and some arithmetic enough to let them sink in a bit.

We watched The Secret Garden on DVD and talked a bit about the British empire (the movie is set near the time of its greatest extent and begins in colonial India, and a map puzzle the children assemble in the movie provides a great visual for that). A day later, P asked me if it was a real story. I said no, I thought it came from a novel. She asked me how you could make a movie that wasn't a real story. In hindsight, maybe she thought that true-story movies were actually filmed in real time -- I'll have to ask her. But it led to a great exploration on YouTube of making-of videos, particularly for a Transformers movie that we haven't seen, but that was beautifully documented on YouTube. We saw an outdoor set, complete with beautiful building facades and plain-as-dirt, unfilmed backsides with security guards keeping folks off the street during takes. We saw cameras on cranes, cameras on go-karts, and cameras on trucks outfitted with cages to protect them from flying cars in chase scenes. We learned how a scene in which a giant robot ripped a bus in two was filmed -- not in miniature, but with exploding bolts and air cannons to blow the bus apart, and CGI robots inserted later. We saw gas flames turn on near destroyed cars just before "Action!" in a street scene. We also saw some stop-motion videos that Transformers fans had made themselves. Maybe we'll talk more another time about screenwriting, acting, directing, editing, and more. Maybe we'll go to Universal Studios sometime. It was a lovely trip behind the curtain today, though.

In the car on the way to the science museum today (more on that below), P started writing a get-well-soon card to a relative. I've explained that this relative may have a harder time than most folks with unconventional spelling or messy (or overly fancy) handwriting, so P was careful to check her spellings with me.

And the museum. I could write pages and pages just about the 5.5 hours we spent there today. Here are some highlights:

• A "Real Pirates" exhibit documented the history of the Whydah, discovered off Cape Cod after a maiden voyage as a slave ship and, following her capture, a short career as flagship of Sam Bellamy's pirate fleet. We learned about the trans-Atlantic trades in slaves, gold, coffee, sugar, tobacco, ivory, etc., and how those markets depended on each other, as well as a bit about what life was like for African captives in slave forts, on the Middle Passage, and on Caribbean plantations. We learned why sailors wanted to become pirates -- greed played a part, yes, but what I hadn't known was that pirate crews were so democratic. Sailors who had experienced the duress of navy or merchant service, often having been press-ganged into it, could trade that for an equal share of the booty and an equal vote on a pirate crew, regardless of their race or social station, if they didn't mind the danger of battle or the death penalty for piracy following possible capture. Big "if," yes. But still. P recognized scurvy and its cure from a Magic Tree House book. We learned that Vitamin C gets its scientific name, ascorbic acid, from Greek and Latin words meaning "no scurvy." And to cap it off, P got to figure out how many fake doubloons she could buy at $1.49 a pop with her $5 cash on hand. (I think I need to be more patient with P's incessant shopping and desire to spend ALL her money when she hits a great shop. She gets so much good math/money/value education by figuring out whether she can afford this? Or this? Or this? Even if I sometimes want just to cut her short with, "No, you can't afford that, either!" or "No, it's really not necessary for you to find something to spend that last dollar on!" She still hears enough from me to know that I value spending money on things you actually want or need as opposed to whatever in the store is cheap enough, and maybe she'll soak that up someday. But in the meantime, I think it's valuable that she learn arithmetic and the value of money herself through using her own money according to her own choices.)
• From an exhibit on mummies, we learned the story of Osiris, which is why mummies got made. We scrutinized a model of the temple of Ramses II, including tiny depictions of animal sacrifice. We learned about how CT scans of mummies can be used to reconstruct the appearance of the person in life; this came up with concretions discovered on the Whydah as well.
• In the Prehistoric Journey exhibit, which is a perennial favorite, today the take-aways were about how bone ridges facilitate the reconstruction from fossils of animals' appearance and behavior; the emergence of camel-like mammals in the Americas, and how they evolved into llamas, alpacas, and the like in South America; the differences between mammoths (ate grass and had finely ridged teeth) and mastodons (ate branches and had coarsely ridged teeth); the movement of continents and where the inland sea was in North America compared to Colorado; P noticing the similarities (general shape) and differences (size and proportions) of the vertebrae in different parts of a sauropod skeleton; and early humans' appearance and adaptations compared to other primates. I'm probably missing a lot here. This is an incredibly rich exhibit.
• In the little kids' area, both kids danced and jumped around a lot in an area intended and well designed for just that. T got to play with magnets, attraction and repulsion. P, while playing with some magnet blocks, got to make sense of the different-shaped triangles on their faces (scalene right, isosceles right, and isosceles acute; matching the same shapes made the blocks stick together better). P and T both decided to give their cardboard souvenir pirate hats to two younger boys who hadn't gotten to go to the Real Pirates exhibit. T got to brush "dirt" off "fossils" in a nice little excavation-play-pit. Both kids had fun with funny-shaped mirrors, noticing how things looked different in them. It was one of the best kid-friendly museum areas I have experienced.
• And we didn't even enter the exhibits on Space, or Gems and Minerals, or natural history sections. We'll be back!

Play Dough, Park Day, and Passover

It's been a pretty fun few days. Tuesday morning we made homemade play dough. P and T each got to choose the color for half the recipe and help cook it. They played happily for a while. I tried making some snakes all the same length and making them into different shapes. P and I compared the areas of the different same-perimeter shapes and found the circle "held the most space." Then I laid several circles next to each other and asked P what she thought of dividing up land that way -- what would happen with the little spaces in between the circles? Now, I meant to head for a little bit about tesselations, but P's answer was so cool I didn't have the heart. She gently took the circles and overlapped them so there were no spaces between but small shared areas. She said, "Those are where they get together for parties and dances and meetings. These [the unshared areas] are where they go when they want to be alone."

We'll find another way to do tesselations! It'll make a fun collage project sometime.

P's overlapping circles reminded me of Venn diagrams, so I drew some overlapping circles and labeled them girls, people with brown hair, and children. We proceeded to put a bunch of people we know in their proper areas on the diagram. Then I asked what set would include everything we'd written, and P came up with People We Know, and then wanted to enclose that within Things We Know About. She had a ball brainstorming things to put in that outer set, and when I got tired of writing them down, she picked up the pencil and wrote another dozen or two. When she showed them to me, I pronounced them as they appeared, which led to some spelling corrections with good humor.

The play dough play continued with experimentation with different building and shaping techniques, and addition of a garlic press spiced things up some more.

Wednesday morning, UnschoolerDad and I needed to do some work together, so the kids watched a video P found at the library called Shalom Sesame, a Sesame-Street gloss on Passover. I didn't see much of it, but heard a familiar song or two.

That afternoon we went to our local unschooling Park Day, which was good fun. I helped P and T get to know a couple of dogs that are usually there; T in particular is pretty scared of big dogs, but he came away willing to be licked a bit rather than crying and wanting to be picked up whenever he saw the dogs. P learned from experience (with the dog owner's blessing) that while dogs can get very excited about kids tossing them sticks and twigs to chew up, they eventually learn that nothing tasty is coming and get less interested.

At the park we were at this week, there was a curious slide, with no way that I could see of approaching the top without climbing over fences. I finally saw some other kids climbing the artificial rock face next to the slide and realized it was designed to be climbed. After trying it myself, I encouraged P to climb up. She was very anxious the first time, but then she climbed a few more times on her own and enjoyed the accomplishment. Then, to my astonishment, T (he's not quite three yet!) not only wanted to climb too, but accomplished it with no physical help from me (though I did spot him in case of mishap). He was totally unfazed by the height (8 or 9 feet), the need to find finger- and toe-holds, and so on. The kid's a natural. Now to find places where a three-year-old can climb! I'm a rank beginner myself, but rock climbing is really popular around here, and I'll bet I can find some good spots to try.

On the way home from Park Day, the napless T passed out immediately in his car seat. I asked P how she liked the Passover video. We got to talking about the Passover story: what the elements of the story are, the gratitude expressed in the Seder and the song Daiyeinu, how a person who doesn't take the story literally might understand things like the ten plagues, and how Passover is celebrated by modern Jews. I am a Unitarian Universalist (a non-creedal religion that draws on many sources of inspiration but does not see any one religious text as paramount in understanding the world or the right way to live), and so it's important to me that my kids learn the basics of the key beliefs and celebrations of major world religions. P has enjoyed learning some of this already from a kids' book on world religions that I bought her last year. She often brings it out and asks to be read parts of it.

P wanted to play Set with me last night. Last time we played she got frustrated and burned out on it, but this time she had a good time with it. It's fun to stretch those mental muscles.

Something I've learned this week: That the missing 7 tons or so of oxygen in Biosphere 2 were absorbed by the concrete of which the enclosure was built. I watched a great TED talk by Jane Poynter, one of the scientists who lived in Biosphere 2 for "two years and twenty minutes." P is starting to recognize the sound of a TED talk and come over to look when I play one on my computer. Good stuff.