Midwinter, Mountains, Music, and Minecraft

Wow, more than two months gone by! I don't have many notes from this period, so this will be a fairly skeletal sampling of what I can remember. It's been a busy time and a slow time, on different days and weeks.

An astonishing video, with music by Tchaikovsky, of a composite European city built in Minecraft.

Reading

• P has been reading a lot of graphic novels, since getting a good introduction from a friend (who gave her some Amulet books) and our local children's librarian (who pointed her at Akiko). She devours them solo and sometimes reads them out loud to T. She's anxiously awaiting her next Amulet installment!
• After reading Little House on the Prairie out loud, I searched for a book that would give a more balanced or positive view of Native Americans around the same time. I found Sign of the Beaver, which everyone enjoyed. It was a good information source and conversation starter about Indian woodlore, social structures in Indian and settler life, betrayals of Indians with bad treaties, and more.
• Then we read Farmer Boy, which was a lot of fun. I enjoyed thinking about the quantities of food being produced on the farm for the humans and livestock living there, and how they would translate to a smaller farm such as our family might someday have. The kids were very engaged as well, and asked many related questions while that book was in progress. T was especially interested in whether the characters in the books were real people. (Most of the major characters are; others are composites.)
• P has been playing Minecraft a lot, and she's learned to do her own research on the Minecraft wiki when she doesn't know how to craft something she wants to make. She surprises me frequently with things she's learned there; even T (through watching her use what she's learned) knows a lot about Minecraft! She and I, separately and together, have discovered amazing videos of other people's Minecraft constructions, including the London Bridge, Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water house, and a HUGE composite European imperial capital (see video linked above), showcasing architectural styles from various European cities.
• T has been asking a lot about what the signs on storefronts say; he seems to be on an active information-gathering expedition, working toward cracking the code.
• T got a hand-me-down cash register with play money, and he reads the numbers to sort the bills.
• At a recent game night at a friend's house, I found ten-sided dice for 4-digit numbers: one die was numbered from 0 to 9, one from 00 to 90, one from 000 to 900, and one from 0000 to 9000. Both kids, but especially T, enjoyed arranging the dice (sometimes removing one or more) and having me say what number the dice represented.
• We've started reading Savvy, a Newbery Honor Book by Ingrid Law, who lives not far from us, out loud. It's a funny book, with tween-friendly jokes and vivid writing. It centers on the coming-of-age of a girl in a family where most of the family members have special powers, called savvies. These appear on their thirteenth birthdays, and that's the day it is a few chapters into the story. P wasn't satisfied with eight chapters read aloud in one evening, so she took the book to bed to read more on her own.
• On a quick trip to the library to pick up Savvy, which was recommended by an unschooling friend, T wanted to play with trains, but he asked me to find him some books about cars and trucks. It took me a while to find the right section for those, and on the way I found an armload of books about things the kids have been asking about lately: boogers, kite making, origami, volcanoes, airships, and old fairy tales (P recently picked up a book of medieval tales I bought at a library sale a year or so ago, and she's been asking for bedtime stories from it and reading some on her own. We've also been enjoying a really colorful book of Aesop's fables discovered on another recent library visit.)

A gem of a book about boogers, belly buttons, tornadoes, and an astonishing number of things
the kids have already been asking about! P has already spent an evening with it.

Doing

• P just started an aerial dance class at our newly local gymnastics gym, and it's going well.
• T is getting back into gymnastics after a fall hiatus. He didn't initially want to take classes at the gym near our new house, but after a parents' night out there, playing with the equipment and the instructors, he was full of enthusiasm, and he's enjoying it.
• P took a class late last year about the physics of music, through our local university's science discovery program. She made instruments, learned some musical notation, and had a lot of fun. This month she'll start a class on the science of toys through the same organization.
• The kids are playing together for long stretches, getting along better and better. I try to be nearby, listening and sometimes offering information or suggestions when things get tense. Both kids are using thoughtful language about how they are getting along. P commented recently that she doesn't feel like herself when she acts mean toward T. T speculates out loud sometimes about why P is still mean sometimes, and what he or others might be able to do to make that happen less. We spent some time talking about P's idea, considering in what senses it might be true, and what might help keep the peace.
• We've gone swimming at our new local rec center, which we can walk to.
• P and I attended a presentation sponsored by the local historical society. An archaeologist living in town had excavated the historic privy in her backyard, finding hundreds of artifacts, and a group of students in archaeology at a nearby university had analyzed the glass and ceramic artifacts. They spoke about what they found and how it related to the history of the area. Perhaps the most intruiging aspect of this was that people tended to throw things in their privies that they didn't want others to know about. The privy was in use throughout prohibition, and there were patent medicine bottles thrown in during occupancy by middle-class folks (furnishers and preachers), and liquor bottles from the mining families' occupancy. They explained that patent medicines usually derived any actual benefit from their high alcohol or opioid content. Sometimes this had unfortunate results, such as children taking a cough syrup that stopped their coughing but left them addicted to opium. This led to an interesting talk with P afterward about the history of prohibition and patent medicines, and the nature of addiction. We talked about physical addiction, peer pressure, and how a lot of people start smoking or using other addictive substances in their teenage years, when their friends' opinions often seem more important than anything else; and how once you get through those years to young adulthood, it starts getting easier to know what you want for your own life, independent of what your friends think. I told P I wasn't sure if her teen years would look like this, given that unschooling is encouraging a much more cooperative and relaxed relationship between us than many kids have with their parents. It will be interesting to find out.

Making

• T continues to build lots of Lego creations, both from instructions and from his imagination (he calls it "building with my mind," which always reminds me of Richard Feynman fixing radios by thinking). At Christmas we bought a Lego Mindstorms set for the family, and UnschoolerDad, T, and I enjoyed building one of the models together and testing the sensor probes (touch, light/color, distance via ultrasound, and perhaps others I'm forgetting) and motors attached to its computer. T is already thinking about what kinds of things he wants to program the robots to do -- sneeze when they catch a green marble, for example, or turn in circles when they catch a red marble.
• P is slowly learning more about preparing the foods she enjoys. Sometimes she makes food because she wants to, and sometimes because I am busy with something else and not getting to it as fast as she'd like. 
• P happily builds things with many methods: origami, cut paper, glued craft sticks, cardboard, drawing, painting, and combinations of these and other creative methods. She makes settings and props for playing with small toys mostly, but sometimes other things as well. When T expresses a desire for a toy or costume piece he doesn't have, P often jumps in and makes a reasonable (to an imaginative mind, at least) facsimile from materials she can find around the house.

Writing

• P insists that she wants to write her thank-you notes for Christmas presents herself, in her own handwriting, "So people will know they really came from me" and so people who care about her could feel good about her writing skills. Only one has gotten done so far; we'll see how that goes! Her spelling continues to improve.
• P wrote down some measurements for me, so that we could cut the right size shelves for her closet, and in the process learned the abbreviation for inches (") and how to write a mixed number with a fraction (22 3/4).
• P occasionally works on her own comic book, inspired by the superhero genre. Sometimes she shows it to me to see if I can understand what's going on, and that has led to her learning a bit more about the conventions of comic books, such as using lines to indicate motion.

Watching

The 2012 election results, had our electoral laws stood as in 1920, when women could vote,
but racial minorities still faced significant obstacles (e.g., poll taxes) to voting.

• I shared with P a web page that analyzed election results by demographics and gave maps showing what the results would have been if, say, only men, or only whites, or only people over 21 had voted (corresponding to various phases of U.S. law regarding who had the vote, and who faced significant barriers to voting). It was an interesting walk through the history of democracy in the United States.
• After we read Farmer Boy, T asked for more Little House on the Prairie videos, so we checked out the next 4 episodes from the library, and he's been watching them.
• Both kids have watched the three seasons of Avatar: The Last Airbender, and a few episodes of Avatar: The Legend of Korra. They enjoy playing games inspired by these, and talk a lot about the four elements (earth/water/air/fire) around which the world of these series is based. P has been curious about what the real elements are, so we've had several short conversations, talking a little about them. At the science museum in Oklahoma City, the table numbers for the cafe were elements, with cards showing all the stuff you'd find in a standard periodic table of the elements. We talked a little about what those numbers and symbols meant. Sometimes I pull out our Elements coffee-table book when a picture seems to be in order.
• The kids enjoy looking up YouTube videos to watch together; so far they are mostly on Minecraft and funny cats :)
• The whole family watched A Child's Garden of Poetry, which is a lovely HBO special we have on DVD about poetry, with beautiful animations and reading by children, poets, actors, and musicians. Kids in the video also talked rather eloquently, and at least seemingly unscripted, about understanding and enjoying poetry, as well as what it's like to write poetry. Both our kids were rapt.

 Listening

• We bought a new car recently that came with a Sirius XM subscription. We discovered the channel called Book Radio ("Where the pictures are inside your head!"). P often finds the novel excerpts riveting and asks about checking out the books. We haven't done that yet -- there's so much we want to read that's written for young people and more enjoyable for T -- but I think it will happen before long. T is often engaged by the stories as well, but mostly not to the same degree as P.

Talking

• T asked, out of the blue, how you stop when you're riding a zipline. He also wanted to know whether people ever went uphill on ziplines, and if so, how. I told him what I knew, which was very little, and suggested we ask my mother, since she went ziplining on a vacation in Costa Rica last summer. We did so later, and she had some better answers. But in the moment, T asked if it would be possible for us to throw something far enough that it would hit Costa Rica. I said I didn't think we could throw anything that far. I loved his thinking -- he doesn't know much about units of length measure on that scale, so he handily placed the conversation in terms he could understand. We talked about how long it would take to drive to Costa Rica, compared to our recent driving trip to Texas. T often asks about where we are; he's working on wrapping his head around the ideas of city/state/country/continent/planet and how they are related.
• Other conversations have ended up in other sections. :)

Visiting

• On our trip to Texas, we visited Capulin Mountain, a dormant volcano in New Mexico. Before we got there, we noted the lava rocks scattered around the countryside for miles around and contemplated the force of an eruption that could throw so much weight so far. We drove up to the crater rim and walked down inside the crater, talking about the rocks there, how they formed, how fertile the soil was because of the minerals in the lava rocks and what plants predominated there, how long ago it had erupted (about 60,000 years ago) and whether it was likely to erupt again (no, according to what we read there). We speculated about whether a wall-like structure of lava rocks at the bottom of the crater was natural or human-made; we'd noticed several good places to get out of the weather among the jumbled rocks along the trail and thought that wall might make pretty good shelter too. While P and UnschoolerDad walked part way around the rim trail to see the view of several surrounding states (!), T sat on a bench near the trailhead and took a position for meditation. He couldn't remember the word meditation to tell me what he was doing, but he described it well enough that I could guess and supply the word. (I've been noticing that he's picking up multisyllabic words on one hearing and pronouncing them very precisely these days, though his Rs and Ls are still a little hard to distinguish; and although he shortens a lot of consonant clusters in words he's used for a long time, he says them well in new words; his once-problematic speech is cleaning itself up in a hurry, and he really enjoys being able to talk to almost everyone he runs into and be understood.) He was so peaceful, soaking up the sun on that chilly day.
• On the way back from Texas, we visited the science museum in Oklahoma City. T got to drive a Segway; we stood on moving plates simulating different kinds of ground motion from earthquakes; P and I spent some time in a hall full of optical illusions; both kids played a long time with jets of air and plastic balls, finding many things they could do with them; and I'm sure there was much more I'm forgetting. It's a great museum that we've visited before, and I'm sure we'll go again at some point.
• Also on the Texas trip, we visited the Prairie Museum of Art and History in Colby, Kansas. We looked around the collections of wedding dresses, military uniforms, dolls, fine china, and more rather quickly, since we got there close to closing time. The real fun started when we went outside to look at the other buildings. We visited a dugout house (and got to see exactly how the latch described in Little House on the Prairie worked, since it was the same type), where there were settler-style clothes to try on and cleaning tools we were welcomed to use to clean the place up (the kids were happy to do their part). We visited a one-room schoolhouse, looked through the readers and spellers, and thought about where the kids would sit based on their age and sex. We visited a church where we were encouraged to ring the bell in the bell tower (harder than we thought it would be) and got a look at hymn books and Sunday clothing, as well as the style of the building and its furnishings. But the highlight for me was visiting the huge barn, where a small stage has been added to the hayloft to use for weddings. Since we were the only ones there, P and I sang "Bright Morning Star" in  voices in full voice in the hayloft, enjoying the acoustics of the huge space. It felt like the right song for the place, and P knows it, since it's been one of our lullabies for years.
• On the Texas trip, we visited my family and met my parents' new bloodhound, a dog rescued last year from starvation and neglect at the hands of a breeder. The kids got to see how amazing a bloodhound's sense of smell could be when in the service of a total obsession with food. The dog was gentle and friendly when no food was available, though, and the kids loved her. They also enjoyed my sister's dog, a huge Great Pyrenees, totally unflappable and calmly friendly. T is losing his fear of big dogs, though he's still very wary about strange, off-leash dogs of any size. The kids liked seeing all the people, too, and I think they interacted pretty well with them, with reasonable manners and grace, from great-grandmother all the way through young cousins.
• After the holidays, we visited the Da Vinci Machines exhibit in Denver. This consisted chiefly of machines built based on Leonardo's drawings, from materials that would have been available to him. Many of these were okay to touch and play with, though T was sorely disappointed that Leonardo's idea for a tank was not one of them. He really wanted to try out moving the four independently driven wheels in different directions to see what movements the tank might have been capable of. He loved the bicycle chain, though, as well as the cam hammer, the compound pulleys (he spent a lot of time with these, with and without me, trying out ideas about how they worked), and pretty much everything else he could touch. P enjoyed these too, and also spent a while watching the 40-minute video running on a loop. She particularly liked the water pump based on the spiral of Archimedes (if memory serves, Leonardo figured out that if you made it from pipe wrapped around a cylinder and put the cylinder at a 45-degree angle, it could move water uphill). She asked me why it worked, and it was fun figuring out enough to answer her question accurately. We bought a kit to build a working model of Da Vinci's aerial screw, a failed but inspiring attempt at a helicopter.

Thinking, asking questions, planning...

• P is torn about her room. Sometimes she says she likes it messy. We usually try to clean it up some (usually with my help) when someone is coming over to play. I've been trying not to put a lot of pressure on her about it, which is different from what I did before unschooling. Recently she said to me, "I don't often have the time and the will for this at the same time, but I really want my room to be neat, with a place for everything." I was privately very pleased that she could say that to me, and that instead of launching into possible solutions, I was able simply to ask whether there was anything I could do to support her in that goal. Thus we have measured for shelves in the closet, and I'm helping her with cleaning, organizing, and helping her think about what she's willing to give away, for short periods more frequently, rather than helping mainly with crisis cleaning.
• Recently, P saw a woman with dwarfism in a store where we were shopping. I think she was the first such person P has seen outside The Wizard of Oz (and I don't know whether we talked about it then, so P might have thought that was done with special effects). P looked very curious and made sure I saw the woman, too. I asked P not to point or stare, and as we moved on, I told her the basics about the most common form of dwarfism. P moved on to other things comfortably. Perhaps there will be more questions in time, or I can share the Wikipedia article with her, but for that moment, her curiosity was satisfied.
• T asked me one evening whether you would die if your arm got cut off. I said you might if no one helped you, because you could bleed too much to survive, but that if someone could keep you from bleeding too much, you might survive and have a stump left where your arm was. T wanted to see pictures, so we found a photo of a man who had lost limbs in a train accident, showing his healed stumps. T wanted to know if he could walk, and I said maybe not (he'd lost both legs above the knee as well as an arm), but maybe so if he could get good prosthetic limbs. There followed a long time of looking at pictures, reading descriptions, and then watching videos about various kinds of prostheses, including the C-leg and various prosthetic arms, hands, and fingers. We stopped a lot to talk about what wasn't being made explicit in the videos, such as how the people wearing the prosthetics controlled them. When T had had enough of prosthetics, he asked what else we could watch. He's been asking lots of questions about volcanoes, so we watched a video about the 1980 eruptions of Mount St. Helens, noting that several images from that video corresponded very closely to the volcano sequence in Fantasia 2000, in which a sleeping volcano awakes and erupts. (I've read that St. Helens was the model for the volcano in that sequence, set to Stravinsky's Firebird.) Then T saw links to videos about the space program, so we watched videos about Moon and Mars missions (including Spirit/Opportunity and Curiosity). It was a fruitful evening, and T asked lots of good questions, like, "Are the Mars rovers kind of like robot servants to help those people?" I asked which people he meant, and he said, "The people who want to know more about what it's like on Mars." I told him he was right on. We had already discussed how the rovers had to be able to do some things on their own, because it took so long for messages to travel between Earth and Mars, but that big decisions about what to do came as messages from the scientists on Earth.

I Spy...

We've been working hard on moving, searching for a new house, getting our old house ready to sell, etc., so I've been very spotty about keeping notes on our activities and learning; and the kids have been spending more time than usual learning on their own, without me. So this is just a tiny sample of what's actually happened, since it's what I saw and am now able to remember -- but it's what I can manage this time! Perhaps after our move things will settle down a bit and I'll be able to witness and record more of the learning.

Reading

• We finished reading The Black Cauldron out loud for bedtime reading.
• We read Land of Hope, a historical novel about immigrants coming to the U.S. via Ellis Island, with many pauses to talk about the history and why things happened as they did for the characters.
• We started Little House in the Big Woods. Both kids are enjoying it, looking at the pictures, and asking lots of questions.
• T is showing a new level of interest in words. UnschoolerDad started a tradition of reading the same book (The Sneetches and Other Stories by Dr. Seuss) to him every day. T likes to pick one word that appears often in each story and say that word when it comes up. He also likes to do a word search: I'll tell him a word that appears somewhere on the page we're reading, and he'll try to find the word on the page. The first time we tried this he seemed frustrated, but when I started to move on to more reading, he said he wanted to try it again. Not one to shrink from a challenge of his own choosing, this young one!
• We walked by a police car the other day, parked in a restaurant's dumpster area. We saw it from the back -- the lights on top were almost invisible, so the only sign it was a police car was the word POLICE written across the back of the trunk. T asked why the police car was parked by the trash. I answered him, then asked how he knew it was a police car. He said he saw the word "POLICE" on it. He was very proud of himself!
• P is enjoying the Amulet series of graphic novels. She reads and rereads them, to herself and to T, who also enjoys them.

Doing

• When we were getting ready to make an offer on a house to buy, P helped me do the arithmetic to figure price per square foot on some comparable homes sold in the area recently. I'd read her the prices and square footage of the homes, and she'd divide them out, tell me the result, and then multiply by the square footage of our desired home. This was the first time she'd dealt with place values up to the hundreds of thousands. I don't think it sank in all the way, but it was a good exposure, and she enjoyed the exercise.
• We went to a Heritage Event, a sort of living history event set in 1880 in the Colorado foothills. P enjoyed it and is considering becoming a volunteer next year, when she'll be old enough to do so as long as I'm volunteering too. We saw and/or tried metal bathtubs, chamber pots, hand tools for making buttons (we watched but didn't do it, as the line was very long!), butter churning, laundry with washboard and wringer, sausage making, a class in a multi-age schoolroom segregated by sex (though the teacher let P sit by T when she asked very politely if she could go and help him), and more.

Making

• We've been making cookies. T especially likes to help measure in the ingredients and lick the spoon. P picks up a new cooking term or technique from time to time.
• Both kids have been painting and drawing a lot.
• T is enjoying stamping with rubber stamps, including carefully cleaning the stamps between colors of ink.
• P is making amazing creations in Minecraft. She builds elaborate castles, farms, security systems, arenas, zoos, signs to be viewed from high in the sky, and more, and she's lighting them up with electric lamps controlled by redstone circuits, and then sometimes enjoying blowing them up with TNT and/or drowning them in lava when she's ready to move on. She watches YouTube videos other Minecraft enthusiasts have made to get ideas. I showed her how to access the Minecraft Wiki online to learn how to craft or use items in Minecraft, which is leading to a fair amount of reading, spelling, and online search activity. 
• T is building like mad with Lego. He has several Lego kits, and we've bought, organized, and labeled two big fishing-lure boxes to hold them in an accessible way by sorting them by size and shape. T enjoys the building and the sorting, and he likes sharing his creations with other kids and adults.

Writing

• T liked writing numbers on a slate at the living-history class. His numbers bear some resemblance to the usual forms. He reads numbers very well because of his extensive work with Lego building instructions. He also likes writing his name on things, though he still asks how to make some of the letters.
• P wrote a fairy story to put in a book in her Minecraft library. She's learning her way around a computer keyboard, so typing is becoming less frustrated.

Watching

• We watched the first three Star Wars movies (Episodes IV, V, VI) on DVD. T is starting to be more okay with tense moments in movies, though sometimes he leaves and plays with something else for a while. 
• Minecraft videos
• Opera scenes on YouTube -- I heard some great opera arias on a public radio pledge drive one day, and I wanted to share them with whoever was interested, so I looked them up on YouTube and played some. (I also made a pledge that will get us a 6-CD set of 100 opera arias sometime soon.) T was very interested in the costumes and the facial expressions and body language. Sometimes he asked what they were saying, and I supplied the best translations I could come up with for the Italian or German.

Listening

• Both kids are more attentive than they look at times, catching odd bits of my conversations with UnschoolerDad or of stories on the radio and asking questions about them. Examples of that are in some other sections.

Talking

• After a little bit of stargazing in new-moon dark skies recently, P started asking questions: Why do the planets go around the Sun instead of around some other star? (We talked about relative strengths of gravitational attraction based on distance, about measuring distance in light years and light minutes, and about how everything in our galaxy orbits the galactic core.) T wanted to know what planets were in our solar system (P was able to come up with most of them, and I supplied the rest). P wanted to know why the band of stars across the sky was called the Milky Way, when that's the galaxy we're in (We talked about spiral arms and the general shape of the galaxy). We talked about the lengths of years for different planets at different distances from the Sun. There was more along those lines, but that's what I remember.
• T asked UnschoolerDad how fast a car would have to go to keep up with the sun (really with the earth's rotation, keeping the sun always in the sky). UD asked me, and I said it would depend on latitude, but at the equator, you'd have to go a little over 1000 miles per hour. We talked about why a car wouldn't be able to do that. UD mentioned that in space, without air resistance, the space shuttle could orbit in a matter of hours, going MUCH faster than the car at the equator and passing quickly from day to night and back again. T was intrigued.
• P asked why the sky is blue even though the sun is yellow. We talked about atmospheric scattering of blue light, and why these two observations are partly due to the same phenomenon.
• I took the kids out to dinner recently, and one of the straws that came with their milk drinks had some liquid in it inside the wrapper. We washed it out thoroughly, and a conversation about various kinds of food contamination (deliberate and accidental) ensued. We talked about how one poisoning incident with medicines when I was a child had led to just about everything having safety seals on it. We talked about pop-up lids on goods in jars, and why they work the way they do (UD returned a jar of something recently after discovering its lid had popped up before we opened it, and the kids noticed that and wanted to know about it). We talked about swollen cans or jar lids and the connection with botulism, about safe opening and disposal of contaminated goods, and more. P connected the pressure in botulism-infected cans with the pressure of fizzy drinks when you open them, so we talked about carbonation. We also talked a little about Botox injections and how the botulinum toxin in them paralyzes facial muscles, and wondered together why people getting Botox injections don't get botulism illness.

Visiting

• Both kids have enjoyed looking at new houses we were considering buying. They love the one we chose. They've been back to the old house with me many times, doing various things to get it ready for sale or get our stuff out of it. They watched as UD and I hauled some heavy tools up a steep ramp from the workshop to the garage (whence the movers can take over), using a block and tackle so I could pull the 400-lb tools up fairly easily while UD supported and steered them up the ramp.

Thinking, asking questions, planning...

• I've been reading The Black Cauldron to the kids at bedtime. One night we reached the part apart the Marshes of Morva, and the book mentioned that the marshes reeked. I explained that reeking meant stinking, and talked a bit about aerobic and anaerobic bacteria, and how anaerobes' products of decomposition make marshes stinky, just as they do compost piles that don't get enough turning or aeration; but that decomposition by aerobic bacteria doesn't create nearly such a foul odor. P wanted to know what sorts of dead things would be decomposing, and we talked a little about the plant and animal possibilities.
• P wants to write a thank-you note to our realtor for helping us find such a cool new house. She really likes him and says he's great with kids. I told her the best time to give a note like that would be at closing, since then we'd know we really were moving into that cool house. She thought about how much she'd like to write and started mentally working out how many sentences she could write if she did two per day for a week. (She got an incorrect answer, but when I used her same method to show her the correct answer, she immediately recognized what her mistake had been. As a former math teacher, I wish all my students had been so willing and able to seek and find their mistakes!)

A Reeeally Long Bullet List

Here's a partial summary of what we've been up to for the past month or two. I'm borrowing this format from Pam Sorooshian, who unschooled her three children, now grown. It's a fun way to keep track of what we've been doing, and less daunting than putting together cogent paragraphs and essays. If it's less fun to read, you have my apologies, my faithful one or two readers! :)

Reading...

• Lots of text in World of Warcraft game (P, to herself)
• 39 Clues series of books (P reads to herself and we read them out loud to P or both kids)
• Susan Cooper's Over Sea and Under Stone (UnschoolerDad reads out loud to P or both kids)
• Text on the Internet, when we look things up (P reads over my shoulder)
• Houses and Homes, a library book about how homes have been built in various places and times. T especially loves this one, looking at the detailed pictures and asking about them. As we looked at a big picture of Sargon's Palace, he asked how the people shown on the roof of the palace got up there. We searched and searched and found only one or two potential access points. I like how this boy thinks!
• American Girl books and a mystery book, scored from a garage sale (P, to herself)
• More fairy chapter books from the library (P finds these whenever new ones come to our branch)
• Instructions for Mind-Blowing Science Kit (more on this below -- P was reading ahead for what activities she wanted to try out)
• Subtitles and title/narrative text in films, cartoons, etc. (P reads these out loud to T so he'll understand what's going on)
• Why Do We Need to Brush Our Teeth? from the Ask Isaac Asimov series (I read out loud to both kids. T keeps asking for it. P has also read it to herself.)
• The big library book on the Human Body, which we've checked out again. P and T requested the pages on broken bones and on the parts of the heart recently. I read these to them, and we went on to learn about myocardial infarction, atherosclerosis, and some of the ways these are treated.
• P frequently reads picture books to T when they are playing together.

Doing...

• P went to a week-long Nature Camp at church and learned about the earth through scientific, experiential, and spiritual avenues.
• P sang in the final concerts of her choir season. That will start up again in the fall. The last concert included songs in many languages, and the choirs were joined by drum-and-marimba concert groups from a nearby Zimbabwean music school.
• P and T have both helped a little in our vegetable garden, digging, weeding, breaking up clumps to prepare beds, and helping plant seeds.
• P and T continue weekly gymnastics classes.
• P has done some walking and running with me. Sometimes when the family has gone out to dinner, she and I get dropped off a mile or so from home and walk the rest of the way for some exercise and one-on-one time, as well as a chance to notice nature and people's creations in our neighborhood.
• P and I completed P's first Bolder Boulder 10K race, along with a friend of mine who was visiting us from out of town. We mostly walked, with a little jogging to maintain a pace that would allow us to finish the course before it was cleared for the elite racers. We finished in 2:07, including one rather long bathroom stop. The few times that P wanted to stop, one of us would carry her piggyback for a bit to give her a little rest. P has seemed much more aware of her stamina since then. A few times she's made comments like, "If I walk six miles, I can do this!" I love to hear that.
• We've been swimming a lot. Both kids are gaining confidence and skill. P is pretty much safe in the "deep" end (she can still touch there, but also swims) and loves the waterslides now. T is making progress, enjoying learning to float and get around by kicking and scooping with his arms.
• P got a "Mind-Blowing Science Kit" for her birthday, and we've enjoyed the first few activities from that, mostly involving changing the color of a cabbage-indicator solution by adding citric acid or baking soda. The kids played for hours with their solutions, combining and recombining them gradually. We're looking forward to making the underwater volcano and color-changing volcanoes, as well as other creations from this kit.
• P's been playing a computer game called Botanicula -- a cute game that draws on spatial skills and cause-and-effect thinking to solve puzzles.

Making...

• I've been making play clothes for both kids from thrifted T-shirts. The kids are enjoying choosing colors, seeing how things take shape, and sometimes helping out. So far this effort has produced three dresses for P, two pairs of pants for T, and a shirt and two skirts for me, from a total outlay of less than $20; and we still have two shirts left to cannibalize.
• P has made some beaded backpack charms from a kit she received for her birthday.
• P helped me decorate a dreamcatcher as a gift for a friend.
• P has been making lots of paper dolls and Dressy Cats for herself and T, and the kids play with them a lot.
• Both kids have been painting, drawing, and making things with Sculpey to bake. T's drawings are representational now sometimes -- usually cars. P still likes to draw house plans -- she calls them ladybug houses -- and T gives her exacting specifications to draw them for him. She's also been making a book of Halloween costumes. Each page has a picture of what you're dressing as, and then a set of pictures of the parts the costume requires.
• P makes, and helps T make, finger puppets for their pretend games.
• P sews doll clothes by hand from her collection of fabric scraps and thread.
• T got some architectural building blocks (just like P's, which she didn't share enough for his pleasure), and he's been making some impressive buildings with them.
• Both kids like to build things with T's erector set.
• Recently I started a timeline in the hall, with post-its for events of interest. I put on the date for the Declaration of Independence's adoption, since we'd just watched a TV episode about that on the 4th of July. The next day P specified other dates to add. We have birthdates for family, adoption dates for pets, the Civil War, WWII, Colorado becoming a U.S. state, the extinction of the dinosaurs, and the date of the earliest remains of modern humans that have been discovered. We'll add other things as they become interesting. So far, I've been writing the post-its, and P has been finding their proper place on the timeline, so she's learning to read dates and put them in order, including concurrent events (such as my parents' birthdates, which both were during WWII). We've talked about, but not yet implemented, a scale for the timeline. We're considering a logarithmic scale, on which each tick as you go to the left as twice as long ago as the previous tick. We figure about 33 ticks to get to the age of the Earth.

Writing...

• P has done thank-you notes, using a mixture of dictating to me and doing her own writing.
• P has written a letter or two to friends.
• T wrote a couple of words in a crossword, with me showing him what letters went where and how to write those letters. He also wrote his name and can recognize it now. 
• P writes down pieces of stories and song lyrics she wants to remember, labels maps and house plans, makes mockups of cell phones and other electronics for pretend play, and occasionally embarks on a book project with writing and pictures. Her latest undertaking is writing up her pretend game with T, which they call "Dark Land Castle." Each is choosing characters and thinking out what they should look like. P is making sketches for the pictures.

Watching...

• Phineas and Ferb (new episodes and repeats)
• Sabrina cartoons and other cartoons discovered on Netflix
• Wild Kratts (we found a store of new-to-us episodes on Hulu Plus when I got a two-week free trial, and the kids powered through them while I did a weaving project, learning lots of new things about various animals and ecological concepts such as food webs)
• Chuggington DVD ("Chuggers on Safari") -- we get this occasionally from the library. T loves it.
• YouTube videos about augurs, pile drivers, parkour, extreme rock climbing, fetal face formation, and more (most of these were with T)
• Liberty's Kids, a series about American history around the time of the American Revolution -- we streamed one episode on July 4th so we could find out why it's a holiday, and both kids liked it, so we bought the whole series to watch at our leisure)
• A PBS documentary about the building and retrofitting of the Golden Gate Bridge (both kids liked it, but P was the most engrossed)
• Breaking Pointe, a reality show/documentary about a professional ballet company in the six weeks leading up to their performance season. (P and me)
• David Macaulay's Roman City DVD -- both kids watched this all the way through. It covered how Romans conquered territory and built Roman-style cities all over their Empire, how they dealt with the local peoples (everything from gruesome to granting Roman citizenship), baths, aqueducts, arches, concrete, theaters and amphitheaters and what went on there (on hearing about gladiators, public executions, and the like, P exclaimed, "I'd rather read the most boring book ever than watch that!").

Listening...

• UnschoolerDad playing piano music
• Me playing guitar and singing
• CDs on the stereo (T likes to start them himself)
• Stories from UD and each other
• A segment from Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me! in which Bill Clinton was quizzed about My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, a TV series both kids have watched pretty much all the way through
• Radio news when I have it on in the car. Sometimes they tune it out, but sometimes they ask me questions about it. This goes for political ads as well.

Talking...

• Telling each other stories and playing elaborate pretend games with cars and dolls in P's room or on T's town-map play rug. Sometimes these are collaboratively created, and sometimes P is mostly instructing T in how things are going to be. We're working on increasing the collaboration! There is sometimes debate about how things should be.
• Telling me about their creative play (mostly P, but sometimies T, too)
• T likes to talk about hypothetical situations. Today he was speculating about what life would be like if cars, trucks, etc. ran on railroad tracks instead of roads. ("There would be lots of turntables!") We talked about how life would be different if that were the case. He also loves hypotheticals involving pee and poop; e.g., "What if there were two cars that ran on pee and poop and also put out pee and poop from their exhaust pipes, and they could run on each other's pee and poop?" I'm still looking for ways to get into energy loss and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics with him. There will be time. :)

Visiting...

• Aside from swimming, we haven't been getting out to attractions much recently. We had a sleepover at UD's sister's house when our neighborhood was threatened by fire! Both kids are taking some one-off classes at a local children's museum starting this week. The first one was not impressive, either in its planning or the kids' response to it; we may see if we can cancel some of the remaining ones. We have a freeform visit to the same museum planned with friends later this week, and I think that will be more fun.
• We went to the toy store and spent hours looking at things. Each kid had a budget to spend separately or combine if they wished, so we spent a lot of time looking at prices and thinking about numbers that way.

Thinking...

• P and I have been thinking together about how to plan a game night at our house, and how to make it fun for adults and kids both. (P initiated this idea.)
• P helped plan her birthday party, including a treasure hunt and other activities.
• P and T have put together some impromptu percussion bands, and P is thinking about names, instruments, and repertoire for a possible band involving the whole family. We haven't gotten far with this one yet, because T hasn't been interested in trying it. But his moods change quickly.
• We thought together about what to take along if we needed to evacuate ahead of the wildfire a couple of weeks ago. The kids thought about what was most important to them to bring. I packed according to my emergency plan, and we talked about why I was doing things the way I was (boarding the cats far from danger, filling the bathtub with water against the worst-case, trapped-in-the-house scenario, packing bags and putting them in the car before we needed to leave, parking the cars facing out in the driveway, etc.)

Accretion Happens

Wow, it's been a week! And a busy week at that. It feels like a mishmash, but themes emerge -- that's how learning works, after all. We take the mental models of the world that we already have, and we add things onto them or modify them somewhat as new information becomes available through observation, media, or other sources. That's constructivism, the theory from Lev Vygotsky and others that I learned on the way to my teaching credential back in the day. But today I am thinking of it in terms of accretion: Our body of knowledge gets bumped into by new things, and mostly they stick somewhere that they seem to belong, sometimes bringing new materials to the party, and sometimes just enriching the mix. Read on for some highlights.

P and T have been getting along really well. I started noticing it on last week's park day, when they woke up laughing and were sweet with each other all day. They still have their abrasive moments, but they seem to be learning to get along much better, and to be motivated to keep things fun and peaceful. I try to stay in the helping-them-figure-out-how-to-have-a-great-relationship space and out of the can't-you-kids-just-get-along-and-make-MY-life-easier space. It's not always easy, but when I can do it, things go better. They accumulate (accrete!) skills for cooperation, play that's fun for both of them, and peaceful coexistence in a house with several humans, each with his/her own needs. Unschooling has given me more time and breathing space to figure out my role in that and play it more effectively.

P has even slept in T's room for several nights running, with both of them wanting and enjoying that. Tonight things were a little rough getting to bedtime for various reasons, so I asked them to sleep in their own rooms to try to maximize the actual sleeping, but it's been sweet for all, and I won't be surprised if the room-sharing continues. P even gets herself down for a nap sometimes, if she can do it during T's nap and in his room.

We joined postcrossing.org, a web site that allows you to send and receive postcards back and forth with random folks in other countries. We're doing it under my name thus far, to avoid giving out names and physical addresses together for the kids. Our first round of five postcards has been traveling four days, en route to various parts of Canada, Belarus, and Russia. It's fun to see where all the countries are on the map, and I'm looking forward to receiving some postcards and finding out about the places they come from, once our postcards arrive at their destinations. Perhaps we'll get a pen-pal or e-mail exchange going with a kindred spirit or a few. I would love to put up a really large world map and pin postcards all around it; we'll see what the budget will allow. A mural would be fun and low-budget, but less rich in data than a printed map.

We watched Heidi (the 1993 TV miniseries with Jason Robards). It offers an unschooly look at how learning to read can occur, contrasting the tutor's ultra-drill-and-kill penmanship and phonics lessons, which leave Heidi feeling hopeless about ever learning to read, with Clara's grandmother reading her stories and awakening her understanding of letters/sounds forming words, then sentences, then stories, so that Heidi learns to read rather quickly, almost in spite of what the tutor has been trying to teach her. We stopped to discuss some bits of historical and social context -- some ways that orphans can be cared for, child labor, what asthma is and how it was treated before pocket inhalers, differences in daily routine and manners between the city and the country and between a rich house with servants and a homesteader's house without.

We went to open gym, where P is working a little on arm strength, with my encouragement. She's getting close to being able to do her first pullup. Go, P!

We played with an Android game called X Construction. Both kids enjoyed trying to build trestle-type railroad bridges and test them with virtual trains, getting a start on the triangles-make-things-stiff-and-strong concept of engineering. T had a hard time with it (though he still enjoyed trying), but P got it pretty well. I had thought she might enjoy it, since a couple of weeks ago she independently came up with the project of building a swingset for her dollhouse dolls. That's still unfinished, but it's also benefiting from the stiff-triangles idea, which we worked out with some preliminary experiments.

We ran across some money pages in a 2nd-grade workbook P chose a while back. I think that, when we tried them together, P finally got the values of American coins down. It was another good little bit of arithmetic, and I think we'll use some coin-related puzzles on our birthday letterbox clues. P has been play-testing some clues I've come up with, as well as contributing ideas of her own. She also used some money math when buying a trinket at a local craft fair with allowance money, and interrogated me at length about the similarities and differences between her toy cash register, a calculator, and a real cash register -- a little microelectronics/practical computing accreting onto her arithmetic/money/commerce structure.

I'd been saving The King's Speech for several days to watch on my own, but "on my own" just doesn't happen as much these days, so P and I watched a good deal of it together while T napped one day. We had a good time looking at customs surrounding British royalty, a bit of the history leading up to Britain's entry into WWII, some older media forms (MovieTone newsreels, radio addresses), and wartime technology like barrage balloons. T had awakened and joined us by the time the war was happening in the movie, and he wanted to know "more and more and more about garage balloons" afterward. Three is such a fun age for language development, totally aside from the history/technology!

Today we hung out at the zoo, enjoying the beautiful weather, walking a lot, and checking out the various baby animals and how quickly they grew and started participating in life. (I'm glad my kids weren't 10 feet tall at nine months of age, like the baby giraffe!) Back home, we rested and then had a veggie-rich dinner in front of a documentary about how the planets formed. I don't make a practice of videos during meals much, but on a day when there's been a lot of good shared activity already, if we can do physical and mental nutrition at the same time, I'm on board. We stopped the video a lot to clarify the physics (the accretion-disk theory of planet formation) and also the historical context for the documentary: the German bombing of London during WWII, and then the cold war and the space race with Russia. It hadn't occurred to me that there would be so many links between watching The King's Speech and watching an astronomy documentary, but hey, accretion happens. :)

Faith in the Process: Conversations and Continuity

Sometimes with this unschooly approach to learning, it feels like a huge assortment of stuff gets presented, or discussed, or looked at once or twice, but it's hard to tell what's sinking in. It reminds me of the anti-drug ad that shows a teen's face looking exactly the same before and after her parents talk to her about drugs. OK, P's not that opaque at 6. But still, sometimes it seems information goes in one ear and out the other.

And then it doesn't, and I see the links among bits of knowledge forming and getting used, and interest returning to related themes again and again, and my faith in this process of interest-driven learning returns.

A recent example: P has probably finished a sentence about a scientific or historical subject three times for me today, using knowledge I didn't know she had. How did she learn all this stuff? From Magic Tree House and, even more so, Magic School Bus chapter books. She has been rereading her moderately large collection at two books per day this week, which at first made me feel guilty for not finding her more good chapter books yet. But I'm noticing that the ones she's been rereading are providing a lot of the knowledge that gets mapped into other situations. So I will get her more (or put them on her birthday list for others), but I won't be in such a rush!

By the way, her reading skill is coming along beautifully. She wanted to read to me the other day from a Magic Tree House book about dinosaurs, and while she stumbled over Cretaceous and Pteranodon, her oral fluency with the more ordinary vocabulary was almost as good as mine -- which, I think can honestly say, is saying something! She's also getting much more accurate than she was a month ago at using punctuation clues to read dialogue with correct expression and intonation. I love watching her soar.

Saturday evening I took P to a friend's choral concert. On the way to the concert (a 45-minute drive), while waiting for it to begin (it was held in a Congregational church; we are Unitarian-Universalist), and on the way home, we talked about at least the following, and probably more that I don't remember:

• Some possible reasons cats may be linked with witches in popular lore (One of my guesses: cats have been considered good luck at births because they give birth with apparent ease compared to human mothers; female healers, who would have assisted with births and who were later painted as witches when men started trying to take over medicine, may thus, or for other similar reasons, become associated with cats. I don't know whether this is the case, but cats-birth and women healers-witches are definitely associations that have been drawn at various places and times.)
• Where it's safest to be in a lightning storm; lightning rods and how they can protect buildings and their occupants
• How people get red hair; recessive genes; children get half their genes from each parent
• Ways of ending up with a child without having it yourself (adoption, foster care)
• What it means to be gay or lesbian (the chorus had a large number of GLBT members, and the friends who invited us are a gay couple with a child who came to them through the foster-to-adoption process)
• Why there were bibles in the pew racks
• What the little round holes in the pew racks are for (individual communion cups, which led to the story of the Last Supper and how Christian churches of various stripes practice communion, and why some non-Christian churches, like ours, have communion as well)
• Other stuff in the pew racks: prayer request cards, envelopes for cash offerings... only the envelopes and the hymnals have close analogues at our church, so this was all fascinating stuff
• Speed limits: why they exist, why they are enforced, why people exceeding them slightly don't generally get ticketed
• Why infants ride in backward-facing car seats, why we don't all ride facing backwards

Today I showed P a photo one of my friends, who is a midwife, posted on Facebook, showing her tending to a newborn baby. P asked, "Did she bring a cat?" We talked about the likely answer (probably not, though she probably would have no problem with the family's cat being there for a home birth), but I loved the continuity of ideas, considering that I didn't even mention the word midwife in the earlier conversation. P remembered it because three years ago, when T was born, a nurse-midwife at the hospital was our main caregiver during pregnancy, labor and birth. Also today, P said something about blue jeans and then noted aloud that jeans is a homonym. I asked her other meaning she knew, and she talked about the genes that come from both parents to make a baby. Hooray!

Also this week, we listened to Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes on tape. We've been talking a little about nuclear weapons and radiation in the context of the current nuclear troubles in Japan, so this was a natural extension. Sadako's leukemia also tied back to our recent conversations about cancer.

And today, we found our first letterbox! (Look here for a short description and lots of links about letterboxing.) We hiked about a mile round-trip on rocky trails near the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Before setting out, we visited the NCAR lobby, which has lots of displays, some of them interactive, about atmospheric science and the tools it uses. Along the way, we identified some plants (yucca, juniper) and talked about their defenses against getting eaten. On the way back, we stopped and read several signs on the NCAR weather trail about floods, droughts, fires (one of the sentences P finished for me was about fire suppression leading to more intense forest fires, whereas allowing fires to burn and just protecting structures can lead to healthier forests), lightning, and erosion. We examined the anemometers and wind vanes atop the NCAR roof and talked about what they measured and how, and whether any of those other things up there were lightning rods. We read signs about trails that were closed, some for revegetation and others to protect nesting raptors and breeding bats. We marveled at the view from the NCAR terrace, where we ate part of our picnic lunch. It was a beautiful hike and a rich learning experience, and the kids loved the "secret mission" feel of finding and re-hiding the letterbox. That the 1-mile hike took us an hour and a quarter may give you an idea of the walking:learning ratio.

I think letterboxing, pursued at a leisurely pace and with lots of side trips, is going to be a great way for us to get out and see new places and things. And P wants her 7th birthday party, which will happen next month, to be a letterboxing party. Now that's a party I can have fun helping prepare! We'll hide boxes with hand-carved stamps and logbooks around our yard and possibly in cooperative neighbors' yards. We'll help each guest create his or her own unique signature stamp. We'll prepare puzzle clues so each child can play a part in working out where to find the boxes. It's a win-win-win: we make a fancy treasure hunt with a low budget and a theme that may introduce other families to a cool new hobby, P and I will get to create puzzles together, and I'll get to practice my stamp carving!

Even more stuff: P and I watched the last of the Jim Henson: Storyteller Greek myth episodes, which was the story of Perseus and the Gorgon. I think the most interesting discussion we had about that was about Acrisius' attempt to prevent Perseus from killing him, as the Oracle predicted. He imprisoned Danae, and then after she bore Zeus's child anyway, he had mother and son locked in a treasure chest and thrown into the sea. They lived, and Acrisius was eventually killed in an accident, by a discus Perseus threw in a competition Acrisius attended, before the two could become reacquainted. The theme of fate being inevitable, of disaster avoided on one path returning by another (cf. Oedipus the King), is so clear here.

Oh, and never fear, T is learning too! He can talk about more things and show more of what he knows all the time. Today we found a Brain Quest deck of questions and answers for 3-4 year olds (T recently turned 3, but these were from when P was little), and he and I had fun going through it and seeing how much knowledge and cognitive skill he has picked up in his short and late-to-speak life. There's no shortage of candlepower there. But I write more about P -- partly because no school district yet has the right to ask me to account for T's learning, but they could do so for P -- and partly because P just talks so much more about, well, almost everything except helicopters, motorcycles, and construction machinery.

Spring, Space, and Spicy Language

Our last few days have been quite a mixed bag. But then, isn't life, generally speaking? Unschooling looks a lot like life in so many ways.

There's been reading. P did a bunch of reading to T during one of their more peaceful periods, including a Berenstain Bears book. I read another chapter or two of Sing Down the Moon to P. P listened to a couple of Magic Tree House books on CD, again while cleaning her room. Audiobooks truly make room cleaning painless and are fun and sometimes educational to boot. Why didn't I think of this sooner?

There's been outdoor time. Saturday P and I tried going for a jog together. Her stamina was low, but we did make it to her former elementary school, where we discovered she'd left her coat and mittens on her last day of school. We were able to find and retrieve them because the building was open for construction activities.

Yesterday P and I went on a spring nature hike for kids at a nearby park. It was a very steep trail, and she got tired quickly -- it looks like we need to get out on foot more often to replace our daily walks to and from school -- so we ended up leaving the group hike and going at our own pace for a while. P got her first relaxed aerial view of our whole town from the high hill we climbed, and we talked about what we could see and how P knew those places. Maps may make more sense after that experience. I wish I'd thought to suggest making a drawing while we were up there or taking a photo -- but it wouldn't hurt us to go again! We saw a bark-beetle-killed pine tree and took a look at what that kind of damage looks like. I showed P the difference between ponderosa and piñon pines. She asked a lot of questions about why the trail was designed the way it was, so we talked about erosion and how trail builders try to minimize it. And when our hike ended because of a need to get to a restroom, we talked about how backcountry hikers would handle their potty needs.

Today T and I took a walk around the neighborhood after dropping P off for a play date at a friend's house. With spring just beginning to bring out the buds on the deciduous trees, I showed him the difference between evergreens and other plants. We looked at buds, some just appearing and others beginning to open into flowers and leaves. We checked on the construction progress at the school, where some portables were torn down last week, leaving big holes in the ground. I wish we'd been around to watch that! We saw a police officer stop a speeder and talked about how speeding tickets work. We saw some birds' nests, left from last year, examined the shape and construction of one within my reach, and talked about why birds would build nests in the shapes they do. Finally, we compared needles and cones from spruce, fir, and pine trees. T was engaged and asking about things all along; it was a fun walk for both of us.

When we weren't outside, usually the kids were reading or playing elaborate pretend games together. They play well for a while, and then opportunities arise to help them find ways to play that they both enjoy, and to problem-solve when there is conflict. While there's more of this peacemaking to do now with P home all day, I also think we may be making more rapid progress, since we have so much time to practice!

And then there's video. Yesterday P and T watched the last Magic School Bus DVD from the library, learning about the water cycle, erosion, and buoyancy, while I got some work done on the video game we're trying to get out the door.

Today all of us together watched the first half of Apollo 13, which is one great opportunity after another to stop the movie and answer the kids' questions about interesting things. There was the obvious material about the space program: the basics of rocket propulsion, rocket stages (P was very concerned that the first Saturn V rocket stage was allowed to fall into the ocean, but agreed that it was probably better than letting it fall on land), lunar and command modules, pressure suits, and the roles of mission control staff and telemetry equipment in manned space travel. Then there were the health aspects: the importance of peak physical health for astronauts, the fact that having had measles is protective against getting it again (we talked about vaccines too), the use of electrodes to monitor heart rate, and why astronauts don't smoke. (P, born in the age of widespread smoking bans, wondered where all the smoke in mission control was coming from, and she was a little shocked to realize that so many people did smoke in 1969.) We got a look at the emotions that astronauts and their families experience before and during a mission. And the language! The movie includes a sprinkling of adult language, certainly not shocking by today's standards, but stronger than most of what my kids have heard before. I love the fact that, when one of the astronauts realizes he's been cursing on an open mic, he is deeply and genuinely embarrassed. There's a great lesson there about there being a time and a place for everything, and what happens when behavior is out of its appropriate time and place.

While writing this post, I read up on gimbal lock and the part it played in the Apollo 11 mission. We didn't talk about it during the movie, partly because I didn't know enough about it to explain it. I still think it would be a tough concept for a 6-year-old without a gimbal model on hand, but I'm glad to know why the mission control folks were so concerned about it, and if it comes up again, at least I'll know where to start.