Camping Rocks!

This week we had our first camping trip as a family! I was pretty stressed about the preparations, but things worked out well. While we were at the camp, on day two, I finally had one of those moments when I realized all the necessary work had been done and that I could relax. (As you might imagine, these don't often happen at home; there's always something I could or should be doing!)

This was a group camping trip, and the kids had been enjoying playing with other kids, but it still seemed like they were missing the comforts of home (iPads, etc.) more than they were enjoying the camping trip. So I talked with a new friend who had grown to love camping as a child about what she had loved. And I remembered the good things about my camping trips as a Girl Scout. Having and helping build campfires was a big one. Being entrusted with a knife and learning to use it was another.

There was a campfire-building in the works for that evening, so I talked to the guy building it about bringing in interested kids on the experience, and he was game. We showed the kids (including P) how we were splitting cordwood into kindling and tinder with a hatchet. They didn't want to do that, but they enjoyed helping building the tinder/kindling structure of the fire. When it came time to light it, we gave each kid a thin wooden splint we'd split for the purpose, and then we lit the ends of their splints (none of them wanted to tackle cardboard matches this time, and I couldn't blame them, between the difficulty and the wind), and they lit the tinder and got the fire going. They all enjoyed that, and some stuck around to continue feeding the fire as it grew.

Also that afternoon, UnschoolerDad supervised as P used her pocket knife to strip the bark from a long, dead stick and smooth it, discovering the color variations beneath the bark and generally noticing about how the wood grew and what that meant for how it could be used. Some of P's friends came by the campsite and watched and talked. They were surprised that P had her own knife. I wonder if some other parents will be getting requests for sharp objects soon?

The kids' highlights from the trip had to do with sleeping out in a tent, being outside a lot, playing with friends, and having more attention from family and friends who were not as busy as usual. We also went on a modest hike, built fairy houses, and saw different ways people were cooking their food outdoors. We are considering one more trip before the winter sets in -- we'll see!

So, here's more about what we did and learned during the week:

Math and Spatial Learning

• Both kids did a lot of Lego building this week. Some of the instructions were a little challenging for T, but he worked through his difficulties with occasional help.
• The roller coaster building has continued in Minecraft, with variations including more powered tracks and powered mine carts (which burn coal to move on their own). The kids have also been watching Minecraft videos for inspiration, including a massive cube of TNT (decorated with other materials to make it look like the largest-ever single block of TNT) being built and detonated; a giant Earth globe; giant jet airplanes and sports cars, and probably more I didn't see at the time.
• I've overheard T a few times, counting out loud while building things in Minecraft. I think he was going for specific dimensions on something he was building.
• In a game of numeric one-upmanship on the way home from camping, both kids were using "infinity" as a number ("Mine is infinity times five!") We talked some about how infinity is more of an idea than a number. When T asks me if there's a number bigger than infinity, I reply that infinity is the idea that no matter how big a number you think of, there is a bigger one. But in the car, I couldn't resist getting into the game, so I said, "Mine is infinity to the fifth power!" Then I had to explain what I meant by that: an introduction to exponents. Now I'm hearing them crop up in the kids' conversations.

Social Studies (History, Geography, Civics, Economics)

• I read an online primer on the current situation in Syria to UnschoolerDad. P listened and asked a few questions.
• Around Labor Day, we watched a video about the origins of Labor Day as a holiday and what labor unions have done to improve working conditions for everyone. This comes up occasionally as we see updates on our local grocery store's attempts to organize, and on Wal-Mart's union-busting and other unfair labor practices.
• T read One Hen again, about microlending and its role in building small businesses and self-sufficiency.
• P asked for help finding Hawaii on the world map. She also asked about how to pronounce the names of several South American nations, wanted to know exactly what was meant by "America" on the map (we talked about a few different ways it's used), and wanted to know why world maps aren't round (we talked about what would be hard to see if a world map were simply a photo of one side of a globe). 
• As we drove back from camping, T wanted to know if we were back in our state yet. I explained that we hadn't left it; we'd only been in two counties, I think. When we got home we used Google Maps to look at our trip on various scales, from a map of the whole country, to a map of the state, to a map showing our route at full screen, to zooming in on our campsite and finding where we pitched our tent (and then doing the same for our house). I let him be in charge of the zoom level, because I know it's disorienting to me when someone else is zooming about faster than I can understand what I'm looking at.
• Also see Reading below: Theodosia is keeping us learning.

Reading and Writing

• We finished Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos. This included some bits of early-20th-century culture in both Egypt and England. We read about open-air markets, beggars calling for baksheesh (alms), and about how archaeologists from colonial powers like Great Britain were accustomed to finding artifacts in other countries and taking them back to their home countries for display. We also talked a little about how some countries, more recently, have begun trying to get back their historical treasures that have been appropriated in this way. 
• P and UnschoolerDad finished The Burning Bridge, the second book in the Ranger's Apprentice series. 
• T enjoyed the rest of a Magic School Bus book about electrical storms.
• On the camping trip, we started a Magic Tree House book about early explorers of the ocean on the HMS Challenger.
• P wrote a short story to put in a book in Minecraft. She asked for spelling help when she needed it. She seems to care more about standardizing her spelling than she used to.
• T and P both played with Scribblenauts, asking for spellings when they needed them. P is able to help T with some words. Both kids continue learning their way around a keyboard in this way, too.
• T asked me about several words from Minecraft and what they really mean. These included ghast, blaze, and creeper. I was surprised that ghast is actually an English word (a transitive verb), albeit not commonly used.
• We saw an old Schoolhouse Rock video about verbs. We tied it into a song I often sing to the kids at night: "Sing When the Spirit Says Sing." T likes to substitute action verbs (especially build) into this song. That gave us many more examples of verbs.

Science

• In the Magic School Bus book on electrical storms, T learned about how lightning forms, what thunder is, how to count the distance to a lightning strike, lightning safety, and lightning rods, as well as a bit about atomic structure and electrons. (P's familiar with these from reading the same book before and from other experiences.)
• A hummingbird hawk moth showed up in our front yard recently, enjoying some flowers. UnschoolerDad and I had never seen one, but it stuck around long enough for us and P to get a good look. We looked it up and found it was probably a white-lined sphinx moth, and that it was an example of convergent evolution with hummingbirds and some other groups of birds.
• Several science videos were interesting this week: the Moon Illusion (covering many theories about the moon illusion, but not my favorite, so I explained that one too), first-ever footage of a deep-sea squid, how a pin-tumbler lock works, how bodies adapt to microgravity (and how that makes life hard upon returning to Earth gravity), and envisioning the age of the earth (compared to a calendar year, or to the life of a child from birth to the first day of high school).
• While we were camping, the kids enjoyed finding different kinds of rocks and pounding some of them to powder, getting different colors of powder out of different rocks. They also learned why we shouldn't scrape or otherwise damage tree bark (the trees have a hard enough time with the elk scraping them). We speculated about why trees in thickets have more snapped-off branches, higher up their trunks, than trees standing alone or at the edge of the woods (trees may shed their lower branches when other trees are blocking sunlight reaching them, and focus their energy on the higher branches, which can get sunlight and produce food for the tree). We saw many kinds of mushrooms and talked about the need to know a lot more than we do about mushrooms before considering tasting any of them. We saw chipmunks harvesting, nibbling, and carrying off some of the mushrooms and not others, and wondered whether humans and chipmunks could eat the same kinds of mushrooms (and whether any harm would befall those chipmunks from experimentation, or whether they already knew their way around the local mushrooms). We saw and talked about how campfires start and burn, including the need for plenty of air (but not too strong a wind in the beginning) and smaller fuels to start with. We also covered campfire safety, including keeping fuels and ourselves clear of the fire and keeping a big bucket of water nearby. The kids had gone to bed by the time we were extinguishing the fire, but they've seen that on previous campfire occasions at church.
• On the way home from camping, T spotted some kind of factory by the side of the road. He remembered a video we'd watched about how charcoal briquets are made and said the factory looked like it could be a charcoal factory. I had to agree that looked like a possibility based on the materials and machines we saw -- the kid has a good eye!

Odds and Ends

• We enjoyed a bike ride one evening.
• One day when I was practicing guitar, playing a song but not singing it, I heard P humming along with the right tune and even some good harmonies.
• Both kids loved a video of Rowan Atkinson in a live performance with an invisible drum set. A linked video of Jerry Lewis using an invisible typewriter fell flat, even after an explanation of how old typewriters worked. Atkinson showed much more attention to detail and variety in his performance. I had to agree he was funnier than Lewis.

Road Trip!

Here we go with some things we learned and experienced on our family road trip! I made zero notes during the trip, so this is sure to be missing things, but here, at least, are some highlights.

We started off with a lot of driving, since we were headed through some very sparsely populated areas of New Mexico with not much to stop and see. On the way, both kids were interested in looking at maps of where we were going, which our road atlas provided. We brought out some electronic toys we'd bought for our last road trip two years ago, which played games for learning letters, shapes, phonics, and a little spelling. T didn't remember them, and they fed his current interest in letters, the sounds they make, and how words he knows are spelled (he'll look at a stop sign and ask, "How you spell stop?"), as well as a general interest in gadgets. Though P's already learned most of their lessons, she liked playing with them and helping T learn to use them.

And honestly, they fought over them quite a bit at first. Road trips are crucibles for dealing with squabbling and conflict in general, and the first full day on the road (we got away mid-afternoon the first day) was pretty rotten. One thing we learned was to put the toys away in the morning, when the kids were fresh -- interestingly, this brought no objections from the kids -- and look out the windows and talk together, or occasionally listen to a book on CD together. In the afternoon, when the kids started to wilt, we'd have some quiet time so T could take a nap (P would read, doze, look out the window, or write a note to a friend at home), and then if we were still driving after the nap, we'd get out the electronic toys -- with an agreement about how to share them -- or a video both kids could watch. We loaded up the iPad with episodes of the kids' favorite PBS Kids shows, and the ones that got the most love on the trip were Martha Speaks (lots of fun vocabulary development and storylines the kids enjoyed), Wild Kratts (an adventure show about animals and their "creature powers," which has led to some very detailed pretend play about being draco lizards, monarch butterflies, bats, etc.), and Dinosaur Train (which mixes time-traveling fantasy and family-oriented stories with lots of real information about dinosaurs, including some that's new to me).

Besides shaping the day to the kids' energy levels, the best thing I figured out to do was to ask the kids to think, in the morning, about what kind of day they wanted to have. (This was particularly fruitful after that first rotten day!) I'd remind them that what we all did would set the tone for the day, and encourage them to think about what they could do that would help make the kind of day they wanted to have. That, plus an occasional reminder that we all could affect how the day went, made a big difference toward compromise, peaceful conflict resolution, and general not-yelling-at-each-other. Other good developments in getting along: P got a little better at remembering she's not the only one in the family with desires and needs and trying to think of or agree to win-win or at least compromise solutions. For one specific example: Before the trip, P said she didn't want to share a bed with T at all, even though we might be getting some two-queen rooms for the whole family in order to pay for one room and not two. So we brought a sleeping pad she (or T, if she could convince him) could use to sleep on the floor. When it came down to it, she decided to try sharing the bed, and both kids ended up enjoying the night and morning cuddling and the waking up happy together. Fortunately their needs for nighttime sleep are very compatible right now! After the trip she told me she'd like to share a big bed with T some more at home, and T has asked P to help him get down for his nap twice.

After lunch on the second full day out, we arrived at Carlsbad Caverns, our first big destination. We did the self-tour of the Big Room with the kids' version of the audio guide, since T was too young for the ranger-guided tours. The audio guide was more information than the kids wanted to digest, so I'd listen to it and give them the highlights. We learned about how the cavern developed in the first place, how its many decorations were formed, and the history of its exploration, including the first explorer (who began at age 16) and the first female explorers (teenage daughters of other expedition members). It was T's naptime, so we ended up carrying his slumbering body through the second half of the 1.5-mile hike -- quite a workout in 95% humidity, and we were profoundly glad for the occasional bench. The things that stuck with me the most about the caverns were P's awe and wonder at a still-forming feature (this was near the end of the walk, and she already knew enough to understand what she was looking at and marvel at how those tiny drops of water were creating such massive forms), and the fact that some 4500-year-old bat guano was probably the youngest natural feature of the Big Room.

We had a wonderful time in the Carlsbad Caverns bookstore, which fortunately we found before the gift shop. T found a deck of photos of animals that he enjoyed playing with in the car. P got a couple of picture books about the desert to peruse. And best of all, we bought a field guide to cacti and other arid-lands plants. For the next day and a half, as we drove through West Texas, this helped us learn new plants and find out a lot about them, as UnschoolerDad, P, and I read sections of the book aloud. Saguaros and other giant cacti, which we didn't see but read a lot about, are particularly amazing in their details. (Oddly, I found that twice the right name for a plant occurred to me, even though I didn't think I knew the plant's name, and since I was driving for this whole stretch, I hadn't opened the field guide. The plants were staghorn cholla and mesquite trees. I am 100% certain I didn't learn those in school! A friend guessed that I'd read enough about the Southwest, especially in Barbara Kingsolver books, that I'd stored the names away then without realizing it.) As we drove through burned and unburned areas near Carlsbad, it was interesting to see the differences: which plants survived the burning, and how things were re-establishing themselves in that dry and rocky land.

We spent a long day driving across more of West Texas, watching the slow change in vegetation from yucca and cactus to mesquite and cactus, with more and more live oaks as we approached Austin. At a rest stop, I got out a ball to kick around. P wanted to play catch, saying, "I don't know anything about soccer." I said we didn't need to play soccer, and that kicking a ball around could be a lot like playing catch, only with your feet, so she gave it a try. Soon we were defending trees and picnic grills as goals and dribbling the ball around with great glee, which was a good prelude to a nap!

In Austin, we visited with family and spent a lot of time outside in the beautiful weather. We took a sunset cruise one night to see the bats leave their roosts under the Congress Avenue Bridge. The guide shared lots of interesting information about the river, the bridge, and the bats. The bridge was redone in the 1980s to make it better for the bats. Whereas before it was inhabited by a motley crew of male bats, now its deep expansion-joint recesses are so attractive that the pregnant mama bats have kicked out the guys and made it their summer nursery, housing nearly 2 million bats. The bats like having room to drop, which they need to do to get flying -- bats rarely land during an evening of flying and feeding. We saw some of them drop, but the most amazing thing was their agility in flying around tight corners. These creatures weigh about the same as a nickel. The evolutionary engineering to get something so slight to achieve and endure such tight cornering boggles the mind. We also enjoyed hearing the audible portions of their vocalizations as we passed under the bridge, though some of the babies on the boat with us seemed pretty distressed, possibly by higher frequencies only they could hear.

While we were in Austin, P's uncle, a Half Price Books fanatic, chased down a copy of the third book in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, so P could continue reading the series to herself as we drove. She chose several other books while she was at the bookstore. After we got home, P told me one evening that she was ready to give away her Magic School Bus books (as she's already done with most of her Magic Tree House books). When I asked why, she said that she'd already read them, and that they were now below her reading level. When I asked what she wanted to be reading now, she answered, "You know, longer books with smaller letters." She's caught on to the industry indicators of intended reading level, all right! In the same evening of conversation, she told me offhandedly that she was reading Little House in the Big Woods to T. Did you hear that sound of my heart singing a little at the initiative and the sibling harmony, not to mention the advance in reading level? And she still begs some nights to stay up late and read. (We still draw a line, albeit a blurry one sometimes, on bedtime, since T wakes up early no matter when he goes to bed, and more sleep makes better days. P, who can sleep in after a late night, gets a little more leeway.)

Our time in Dallas brought more family visits and some interesting experiences and potential future experiences. The kids learned that my parents' dog was failing quickly from a recently-discovered, aggressive cancer. He had some good days while we were there, but had to be put down shortly after we got back home. This went right by T, who doesn't show any understanding of the concept of death yet. P was very solicitous with the dog while we visited, and had a very dark day the day he was put down. She remembers a cat we put down a few years ago -- an early start to her real-world experiences with death. She does, in fact, still want to keep fish -- I broached the subject, and she kept us researching for most of an evening about the kinds of fish we might start with. I have the feeling there will be further experiences with death along that path, but also a wealth of learning about small ecosystems, water chemistry, predation, life cycles, and more.

We also visited my only living grandparent, my dad's mom, who gave me my choice of a wealth of genealogical records and photo albums to bring home. (She would have given me all of them, but space in the car was limited!) I tried to choose some that would provide many stories I could share with her and with the kids, so there should be some fun glimpses of history to be had there. P has enjoyed stories I've told her so far from family history gleaned on my mom's side of the family.

T and I had a quick adventure one afternoon in Dallas, riding the newish light rail system. One-on-one time with the kids is a blessing when it comes; T has so many more questions when I'm alone with him than at other times, and I like being able to go at his pace more of the time.

On the way back from Dallas, we stopped in Wichita Falls and checked out the River Bend Nature Center. It was a slow morning there, and the kids got a lot of attention from a volunteer, who took out several snakes for them to see and touch and told them what she knew about these particular snakes. There was a milk snake (a species often confused with coral snakes), and we learned the rule that if red touches black, that's a nonvenomous milk snake, but if red touches yellow, that's a coral snake and deadly. There was also a snake in for rehab who was not being handled, so we talked about the different reasons an animal might be in a nature center, and why different reasons would mean different treatment for the animal. We played outside on some covered wagons, noticing the springs under the seats and how they worked and relating this to the lack of shock absorption in the wheels and axles. There was a sandbox with lots of real bones buried in it; these seemed to be mostly horse bones. We dug up one or two dozen bones, noticing the shapes of the jaw bones, the porous and networked texture of all the bones, the shapes of the molars, and how some of the shapes made good digging tools. We talked about what sorts of tools people might have made from bones like these. We articulated a femur and pelvis that seemed to belong together, checking out the ball-and-socket joint with hands on and envisioning the ligaments that would hold the joint together in a live animal. We also went over our experiences with bones, trying to figure out what color bones would be in a live animal, since the ones we were looking at were all sunbleached. And we talked about the phrases "long in the tooth" and "look a gift horse in the mouth" as they relate to horses' molars continuing to grow well into adulthood. Finally, we stopped by the pond and checked out the structures of lily pads, with their sturdy stems and clinging roots.

At the Nature Center store we bought a couple of books of Mad Libs, which were new to our kids. Within fifteen minutes back in the car, P had the more common parts of speech (nouns, plural nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) sorted out and was enjoying the random hilarity as we filled in the Mad Libs together and read them out.

We took a rest day in Amarillo, getting some down time hanging around the hotel room and then checking out the Kwahadi Museum of the American Indian in town. There we saw arrow and spear points made from stone; different kinds of flutes and shakers; animal pelts of various species, including faces and feet; different kinds of beads and beadwork; people in the process of designing beadwork and weaving on inkle looms; and youth practicing theatrical versions of ceremonial dances. All the people were part of a scouting program, and none were Native Americans of any description. (One of the scout leaders told us this; it wasn't just our assumption based on appearance.) That felt odd to me, and made us wonder how faithfully things there were interpreted; but it was an interesting time nonetheless.

The rest of our trip home was very unscheduled and ad hoc, which was delightful. We stopped when something looked interesting and when it seemed a stop might be nice. An unassuming little museum in Dumas, TX, turned out to be a gold mine of artifacts from 100 years ago, give or take a decade or two. It was set up in many small areas, each focused on a different area of life or a different trade or business. We saw and talked about an old phone switchboard (we discussed how calls were connected then and now), a check cancelling machine from a bank (how checks work), a dry-goods store display with fabric and trims for clothing (similarities to modern fabric stores and the limited selection long ago), a doctor's office with herbal remedies as well as early pharmaceuticals and an ether-based anesthesia machine, a Victrola (P saw a vinyl record and asked, "What's this?" and we talked about what it was and how it worked, and I felt old!), a set of McGuffey readers (we discussed how few books an early schoolhouse would have had, and how students learned many subjects by reading and memorizing in these readers), a wall of post office boxes, a huge collection of toy and real tractors and other farm implements, and a shelf of court docket books, among a great many other things. I bought a pocketknife for P, who I think is ready for one -- I was reminded by Gever Tulley's TED Talk, "Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do," that I was already whittling at P's age, and didn't quite manage to put out my own eye doing so. Later that day I showed it to her, and we started on some verbal safety lessons about where and how to use it safely, including an account of my near-blinding experience. The hands-on lessons haven't begun yet, but she's eager to start, so we will soon.

We stopped in a few places in southeastern Colorado. One was a ranger station for the Comanche National Grasslands, where T and P scored a lot of free goodies from the friendly ranger staffing the counter. The best: a field guide to prairie birds, which P has spent a lot of time with since then. Sometimes she's reading it or incorporating it into pretend play ("This is a packet showing all the birds I sighted this morning on my birdwatching expedition!"), and sometimes she's relating it to birds she has seen. Another stop was a railroad depot in Kit Carson, where the museum was closed, but the kids still enjoyed climbing on a real caboose parked by the parking lot. The scale of a real train car is hard to fathom until you stand right next to it, and they finally had that opportunity.

And then there were things that happened all along, or didn't depend much on where we were:

• We kept track of the numbers of engines and cars in each train we saw, if someone was available to count them at the time, and we worked out the ratio of cars to engines for each, using mental arithmetic and sharing a few estimation tricks with P. All the ratios came out between 30 and 35, regardless of the type of train or whether its cars were loaded or empty, except for one train that was stopped and looked like it might be in the process of being reconfigured. 
• We watched The Weather Channel and Animal Planet several evenings in hotels, since it seemed to hold the kids' interest better than other available fare. We saw lots of riveting stories about tornadoes, floods, venomous snakes and lizards, invasive foreign animal species, and more, but even these lost their shine after a while. This was one of the first experiences our kids have had with broadcast TV and the idea that "what's on" is limited and often not that interesting. This almost feels like a history lesson, given all that's available on demand now!
• We talked a little about caffeine as both a common stimulant and an addiction. When I explained once that we were stopping so UnschoolerDad could get some iced tea, P asked why he wanted it, and I  explained that he had been using it enough that he was getting some withdrawal headaches without it. P immediately asked the right question (to my mind): Why did he start using it in the first place? He had some good reasons, but P came away with what seems to me like a healthy suspicion that using habit-forming substances may not always be worth the short-term pleasures or benefits.

After we got back, P volunteered one day, "Sometimes I think I might want to go back to school, but then I think about it." I asked, "What thought stops you from leaning that way?" She replied, "I like being able to go places and learn about stuff I'm interested in."

And mama smiled.